Obama’s Iranian charm offensive

President Obama's television address to the people of Iran on 20th March, on the occasion of the Iranian new year, was a neat bit of drama. For the sizeable (if unquantifiable) minority of Iranians who watched, via illegal satellites installed on their roofs, it was an exhilarating departure from the alternately menacing and schoolmasterly approach of George W Bush. Even those reading the mostly sceptical commentary in the closely controlled Iranian press must have taken a small thrill from the American president's "happy holiday" in Persian, or his quote from the Iranian poet Sa'di. By inviting the "Islamic Republic of Iran" to "take its rightful place in the community of nations," Obama reversed Bush's policy of not referring to Iran by its chosen name. He also abandoned his predecessor's distinction between Iran's people (good) and its leaders (bad). Finally, by committing himself to diplomacy, he effectively disowned the option, which Bush kept in view, of attacking Iran's nuclear infrastructure and even of regime change. The question for those watching remained: what, if anything, would Obama's overture deliver?

In Iran's forthcoming presidential election on 12th June the incumbent, incendiary populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, faces two moderate rivals and a lesser candidate from his own conservative camp. Obama's March address marked the end of America's blind ideological hostility towards Iran and the beginning of a tentative rapprochement. But a new "partnership" with Iran is still perilously difficult—no matter who wins the election—and much rides on its success, including the resolution of a dispute over its nuclear ambitions and its influence in Iraq and Afghanistan. To forge this deal, Obama has a new team of Iran experts in the state department and the national security council, some of Iranian origin. The team is being co-ordinated by Dennis Ross, a respected senior diplomat who is distrusted by many Muslims for an apparently pro-Israel tilt during the Clinton years. Ross recognises that the Iranians have genuine grievances, and interests, and supports Obama's promise to negotiate without preconditions. Both are a move forward from the Bush-era policy, which was often to impoverish the state department's Iran desk and to belt out hostile messages through a megaphone.

To find out about this new approach and its likelihood of success, I went to Washington in April. There I found Ross's team operating under a new brief: to craft overtures and carefully decipher the messages coming back. "We don't want to miss anything when the Iranians are talking to us," one official told me, "for too long, the US and Iran have been like ships passing each other in the night." But I also found officials fretting about their ability to "read" a country so different, so alien. Some wondered privately how Obama's call for a new partnership, while obliquely warning Iranians not to make nuclear bombs or help terrorists, would be received. I was handed numerous policy papers stuffed with theories on the beliefs, fears and ambitions of the Islamic Republic. One, Reading Khamenei, seemed to be on every desk, and started with: "There is perhaps no leader in the world more important to current affairs but less known and understood that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran."



The biggest spur to the administration's efforts is also the greatest obstacle to its success: Iran's progress towards nuclear self-sufficiency, and the possibility that its ostensibly civilian programme might be converted to military use. Iran disclaims such an ambition, and no one except the Iranians really knows what they are up to. But many western policymakers believe Iran wants a bomb, and that its attainment of a nuclear weapons capability would trigger a regional arms race involving Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others. The longer this issue is unresolved, the more vulnerable Obama will be to charges that he is recklessly allowing Iran to go nuclear, and exposing Israel to mortal danger. For did not Ahmadinejad observe in 2005 that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and Khamenei, a couple of weeks before Obama's address, call it a "phony state"? With such high stakes, the new offer of partnership will not stay on the table forever.

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American attempts to read Iran began in earnest in the early 1950s, when the US reluctantly shouldered the burden, too great for an enfeebled British empire, of safeguarding the middle east from the Soviet threat. In Tehran, the US ambassador Loy Henderson began negotiating with the Iranian prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, to find a way to end the oil embargo, save the country from bankruptcy, and stop a much-hyped communist takeover. Henderson hoped for a deal with the Swiss-educated prime minister, but several months of being shown into his sick-room to be fed nougat, theatrics and bon mots changed the American's mind. In spring 1953 he told his bosses that Mossadegh was so much a "creature of his own emotion, prejudices and suspicions" that one should abandon attempts to analyse his actions. Henderson threw his weight behind the CIA coup-makers who joined forces with the pro-US Shah, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, to topple him in August that year. The coup was a triumph for the Shah, but it damned America in the eyes of Iranian democrats, republicans and Islamists alike as an agent of monarchical despotism.

Later attempts to understand Iran were scarcely more successful. In 1979 Bruce Laingen, an American diplomat, regretted the typical Iranian negotiator's "bazaar-mentality" and "overriding egoism" whose roots lay in a long "history of instability and insecurity which put a premium on self-preservation." Less than three months later the revolutionaries took Laingen and 65 other Americans hostage, triggering the 15-month Iranian hostage crisis. By 1986, when the Americans gritted their teeth and secretly offered arms in return for help freeing hostages in Beirut and elsewhere, the gulf of understanding between the two nations had grown so wide that a secret visit to Tehran by Robert McFarlane, Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, ended in befuddlement. Having returned to Washington, McFarlane tried to make sense of his surreal exposure to the Islamic Republic. Recalling his fruitless meetings with Iranian officials, he suggested that Americans "try and picture what it would be like if, after a nuclear attack, a surviving Tartar became vice-president; a recent grad student became secretary of state; and a bookie became the interlocutor for all discourse with foreign countries.'' Such is the Iran—mercurial, untrustworthy, downright perverse—to which President Obama is reaching out.

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Obama prides himself on listening, and so does his new Iran team. This is a big change from the Washington I visited in 2003. Then, the Taliban appeared beaten, Iraq had fallen and the Bush administration had contemptuously rejected a nervous Iranian overture aimed at détente. At meeting after meeting, officials and think-tank analysts leaned back, joined their hands behind their heads and described with miraculous assurance a country that I lived in and they, for the most part, had never visited. A common fallacy was that Iran's people only needed US encouragement to topple their theocratic rulers. And so money was poured into pro-democracy funding, with the result that Iran increased its repression of political activists and the feeble reform movement died.

Unsurprisingly, Obama's new year address drew adverse attention from the neocons who used to run US Iran's policy, like Elliot Abrams, Bush's deputy national security adviser and an architect of the last administration's plans to spread democracy in the middle east. "It was foolish to take the military pressure off Iran," Abrams told me in his new home, the Council for Foreign Relations. "We've just given away legitimisation for nothing. And what was Obama's message for all those Iranians under 30 years of age who don't want to be told what to do by a bunch of guys wearing turbans?" It is perhaps this aspect of the Bush presidency, where US values were presented as universal aspirations, which is most absent from the new US foreign policy.

Even so, Obama's willingness to listen does not guarantee success. My interviews with diplomatic, economic and military officials impressed on me the extent to which America's rivalry with Iran has been institutionalised; after three decades, it informs America's cultural preconceptions and tactical choices. Who could deny that US antipathy towards Hugo Chavez is sharpened by his friendship with Iran, or that US policy towards the southern Mediterranean is partly a function of America's obsessive desire to disrupt Iran's alliance with Hizbullah and Hamas? America's ambition of corralling Iran informs policy towards Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf. It is evident in the treasury department, where a bright undersecretary called Stuart Levey, one of very few Bush-era officials to have been reappointed, applies himself to "dissuading" overseas banks from doing business with Iran. And it extends, of course, to top US generals, who want to neutralise Iran's influence over Iraq's Shia militias and enlist its co-operation in Afghanistan.

But it is the nuclear issue that puts most pressure on the administration. According to some western scientists, Iran has already generated enough low enriched uranium at its plant Natanz, in central Iran, to allow it to make enough weapons grade nuclear fuel for a nuclear bomb (if it further enriched the same uranium). Technical obstacles, however, remain; according to the US defence secretary, the Iranians are "not close to a weapon at this point." If the Iranians continue to reject European and US calls to halt the addition of new centrifuges to its cascade at Natanz, the ticking clock, and Israeli pressure, will inevitably cause Obama discomfort.

As an opposition politician, Binyamin Netanyahu came close to advocating an aerial attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Now, as Israel's prime minister, he has strong support among hawks and neoconservatives in Washington who virulently oppose Obama's initiatives. An attack would be a catastrophe. It would provoke Iranian reactions that could lead to a regional conflagration, and condemn Obama's overtures to Muslims almost before they have begun. The Obama administration has told the Israelis firmly not to entertain thoughts of an attack and congress has delayed pushing through a bill that would squeeze Iran's access to refined petroleum.

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It will be no easier for Iran to recalibrate relations than it will be for the US. It may even be harder. Anti-Americanism not only permeates Iranian institutions, it is also part of the Islamic Republic's ideology, and while changing specific policies may be relatively straightforward in a semi-authoritarian state, each diminution of the traditional invective—the "death to America" chant at Friday prayers, the bellicose roadside hoardings, the schoolroom propaganda—will be used by hardliners as evidence of a betrayal of revolutionary values, and perhaps sabotaged. Indeed, it was an earlier act of Iranian sabotage that led to the country being included in Bush's "axis of evil" in 2002. Only a few weeks before, Iran had been enjoying America's appreciation for its co-operation in the invasion of Afghanistan. Then, in January, Israel intercepted a shipment of Iranian arms bound for Gaza, apparently sent by Iranian hardliners in the expectation that it would be seized and hopes of a US-Iran rapprochement snuffed out. This is exactly what happened.

The new administration has at least avoided another of the pitfalls into which Bush hurled himself, that of selecting which Iranians to address. Obama's team appreciates that, for all the visibility of Iran's elected president, it is Ayatollah Khamenei and his entourage (the "unelected few," in Bush's words) who hold the real power. It would not be a surprise if, in addition to the conventional diplomatic routes, the Americans have opened a back channel to the supreme leader, aiming to establish an agenda and harmonise public messages. Dennis Ross, at least, advocated this before his appointment.

Khamenei seems to genuinely dislike and distrust the US: for claiming spurious "interests" in Iran's back yard, for its support of Israel, and because of his dislike of US democracy and popular culture. Sitting atop a highly fractious political establishment, subject to pressures from hardliners and moderates alike, he must be tempted to fall back on Iran's default position of hating America. A plausible and pleasant-sounding US president is a conundrum he may not have wished for.

For all that, Khamenei has never ruled out détente, so long as he deems it in his interest. Would those interests be served by Obama's offer of partnership—from which Iran might expect an end to sanctions and recognition of its regional weight, in return for accepting limits to its nuclear programme and ending its opposition to the middle east peace process? Much depends on both countries' perceptions of their own strengths and weaknesses. Many American officials believe that Iran's troubled economy will make the clerics more friendly. Inflation has eroded living standards, oil revenues have plummeted, and Iran may now be in recession. One effect of the sanctions has been a new internal debate over the wisdom of current nuclear policy.

The June election campaign will have delayed a coherent Iranian response to Obama's overture, which the Americans have already amplified with a request for Iranian help in sorting out Afghanistan. The Iranians responded favourably, attending a big international conference at the Hague, and an Iranian judge recently released Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American whose conviction on espionage charges had threatened to set back relations still further. In mooted multilateral talks, Iran will be asked to delay its nuclear programme and to make that progress more transparent. If it refuses, it can expect a serious US-led effort to intensify international sanctions. Having done his best to achieve rapprochement, Obama will stand a better chance of winning support for more pressure, particularly from Russia and China.

In Iran all this is acknowledged, if not in public. But many Iranians reckon they are in a relatively strong position. In the words of one well-connected Iranian conservative I spoke to in Tehran recently: "A few years ago Iran felt it needed America to ensure its survival, but that's no longer the case. America is beginning its decline. Its economy is in dire straits." He believes that the US now needs Iran more than the reverse: "Iran is an island of stability. The Americans have the clerics to thank for that. Imagine if the ribbon of insurgency stretched from Afghanistan across Iran and into Iraq; then no one would be able to operate in the region."

A little over half a century ago, friendship with America—fresh, idealistic, untainted with an imperial past—seemed an appealing alternative to the old neocolonial attentions of Britain and the Soviet Union. Then Mossadegh was ousted and after that the Shah; the friendship turned sour. Oddly, if Obama had been among the Americans who were taken hostage in 1979, he might not have remained a prisoner for long. Less than two weeks into the crisis, citing their solidarity with "oppressed minorities," the hostage-takers released several black prisoners. So it is puzzling for the Iranian elite to see that America now has a black president—one who shares a second name, Hussein, with the best loved of the Shia imams, and who is greeted with affection and respect everywhere he goes. Obama's overture provides both countries with a chance to end decades of resentment, misunderstanding and distrust. It may not come again for a long time.