Mixed Signals

By now just about everyone knows there will be a conference in Iraq on March 10th at which all the "neighbours" will sit down and begin to talk. It is also becoming obvious that, just as importantly as talk about reconstructing Iraq as some kind of viable venture, what Iran and the US may have to say and how that might develop into further dialogue between the two nations is going to be a much-watched matter. It's both an opportunity and a moment of danger - handled badly and things could look far worse by Summer, handled well and the outlook for peace in the Middle East gets brighter. But many are confused about the mixed signals coming from Washington.

One day the Bush Administration is bashing Iran, pushing U.N. Security Council sanctions, cutting off its credit, arresting its nationals and sending more warships into the Persian Gulf. Then, practically the next day it seems, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is announcing plans for U.S. and Iranian diplomats to meet in Baghdad to discuss cooperating to quell the carnage in Iraq.

Mixed messages? For sure. But that's not by accident. It's just a new take on the classic carrot-and-stick diplomatic strategy, in which contradictions are at the core of the U.S. Iran strategy.

"It is a message of pressure and possibility," says a senior U.S. official. "We're trying to keep up the pressure but also hold open the possibility of constructive dialogue, if they meet the conditions."

So what possibilities are open? Maybe a move towards a resolution of the trouble over Iran's nuclear program? Nope.

officials say Rice doesn't anticipate breaking away into a one-on-one session with the Iranian delegate. Nor, they say, does she intend to allow the discussion to veer off into the issue of Iran's nuclear activities now before the U.N. Security Council. (On Thursday, in a conference call with his counterparts from the other Perm-Five nations, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, Rice's point man for Iran's nukes, hopes to reach agreement on terms for the next round of sanctions.)

During the April meeting in Baghdad, says a U.S. official, Rice "is not going to hide in the corner. If she has a chance to bring up EFPs [explosively formed penetrators], she will," referring to U.S. assertions that Iran has been sending these vicious high-tech bombs to Shi'ite militias in Iraq.

That doesn't sound good, to me. More isolation and heated accusations on flimsy evidence which Iran can easily counter with accusations of its own, with the very real danger that such a feud would derail the Iraqi reconstruction talks themselves. But at least one analyst is convinced some thing else entirely is what is really going on:

"My reading is, Rice is ready to cave, meaning she's ready to negotiate without preconditions, and she's looking for a venue to do it," says Ray Takeyh, author of Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic. If Rice doesn't want to lay the groundwork for talking to the Iranians and Syrians, says Takeyh, why bother to attend the Baghdad conference? "The Americans don't need a conference to talk to the others," he says.

Certainly the mixed-signals strategy has generated a good deal of confusion. On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack contended that U.S. Iran policy was not, as various news reports portrayed it, "going wobbly, shift, turnabout, change." "There's no change in our policy," he insisted. "There's no change in our policy."

But like many others, Takeyh is more confused than convinced. "For the first time in this melodrama," he says, "the Iranians are easier to understand than the Americans. I don't get it."

It has truly become the age of Kremlin Watch D.C. - where even the experts can only hope to figure out what's going on by tiny clues and reading between the lines because the Bush administration's obsession with secrecy and untransparency makes it impossible to know what the government is really thinking. We all clearly remember, for instance, the speed with which declarations that there were no plans to attack Saddam's Iraq turned into falling bombs.

Even so both nations, their allies, possible injured bystanders and interested observers will be busy from now until March 10th making sure their own agendas get heard and that there's lots to talk about. There's going to be a lot of it, but in the run-up to the conference I'm going to try to make readers aware of as much as possible and mark up those I think will become important factors.

Here's a first helping to think about:

The massive failure of drug eradication and control measures in Afghanistan have a huge knock-on effect in the entire region. Not only does the multi-billion industry fund arms traffic and extremist groups, the nations along the trafficking routes suffer proportionately higher drug addiction problems. Iran, for instance, is estimated to have 1.2 million opiate abusers, while Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are also hard hit. Iraq itself is a point where drugs and weapons traffic meet. Those central Asian nations so afflicted will understandably look towards the US and NATO as being to blame as part of the wider spillover of the War on Terror and may demand aid or action as part of a deal for Iraqi co-operation.

Iran may well demand action on cross-border raiding groups such as the PJAK and MeK - which it says are funded and directed by the US in any case. It has threatened to cross into Iraq in hot pursuit of these groups - and it's clear that the US own preventive invasion of Iraq is being seen as the precedent. Even so, it's unlikely they would be happy to see British or US troops chase arms smugglers across the border in the other direction. Turkey has the same problems with Kurdish terrorists using Iraq as a safe haven for attacks.

Countries like Georgia, Armenia and Iraq are worried by the prospect of an Iran/US war, which would certainly spillover into those nations with devastating effect. Other nations including the Russian led Collective Security Treaty Organization (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan - notice how many have large Muslim populations.) see the prospect of such a war as a threat to their national security and are making belligerent noises. They are all going to be pressuring the US to make diplomacy work.

Meanwhile US neocons like Michael Ledeen don't think negotiations will work and don't want them to work even if they could. Which leaves them in an odd position - they've been at pains recently to say they don't support an attack on Iran and also say that they don't think sanctions will work. What's left? Ledeen in a pair of ruby-red spike heels saying "there's no place like home?" Well no, what the neocons have really wanted all along is "regime change", which given the deluded terrorists they have to work with as an armed opposition to Iran's mullahs is code for "war, but not yet". They'll be doing their best to ensure any US/Iran detante is stillborn.

Ahmadinejad looks like he will be doing his level best to shoot his own nation in the foot with careless rhetoric. He'll be joined by the neocons as noted above and by Israel, who will gleefully snipe from the sidelines and promising to "do something" about Iran even if no-one else will.

However, Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric isn't so much madness as blatant playing to the peanut gallery. He didn't reach his current position without being politically savvy and so Iran is likely to try to introduce the question of Iran's nuclear program into the talks whether the US likes it or not. At that point, the US representative can either join the discussion or walk out, looking like an intransigent tyrant in the process. Expect Iran to talk up the bright side of the IAEA's reports - that Iran has not contravened the original NPT, just the additional voluntary protocol, and that the inspectors have found no evidence of a weapons program despite intensive searching.

Related to the above, and the probable purpose of Ahmadinejad's visit to Saudi Arabia, would be an effort to link any deal on Iran's nuclear program to Israel's own nukes. Its an angle that would gain widespread Arabic support at the negotiating table and has some prestigious voices (like Hans Blix) behind it as being one of the prerequisites of peace throughout the region.

Watching all the smoke signals and smoke screens is going to be...interesting.