Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2004, pages 28-29, 92

Special Report

 

U.S. Humanitarian Response to Iran Earthquake Sparks New Debate on Relations

	A member of Alabama Disaster Relief (2nd R), a US non-governmental organization, plays with Iranian children in the city of Bam in southeast Iran Jan. 6, 2004. Survivors of the Bam earthquake began moving into vast tent cities away from the rubble as the regime studied plans to move the seat of government out of the quake-prone capital Tehran for fear of impending catastrophe (photo credit AFP/Atta Kenare).

 

By Afshin Molavi

ON DEC. 29, 2003, U.S. Air Force jets landed in southeast Iran to deliver humanitarian supplies and provide search-and-rescue assistance for the victims of the devastating earthquake that took some 40,000 lives and decimated the ancient Silk Road city of Bam. The last time American planes entered Iranian airspace, in 1980, they were on a search-and-rescue mission of a different sort: seeking out U.S. diplomats held hostage by the revolutionary regime that had toppled the U.S.-backed shah.

That journey ended with a fiery crash in the desert, killing all eight on board. The more recent one ended with Iranian and American soldiers forming a human chain to offload blankets, medicines and foods—and sparked intensified debate in both countries on the possibility of engagement after a quarter-century of estrangement. The striking symbolism of the airport tarmac cooperation scene represented a sharp contrast to the public rhetoric of “the Great Satan” and “the axis of evil.” But it also reflects a growing diplomatic reality: the governments of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States have been engaged in a slow, delicate, subtle diplomatic dance over the past few months as both sides have come warily to the realization of the need for dialogue.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told The Washington Post in December that he senses “a new attitude” emerging from Tehran, and noted that the Bush administration remains interested in “the possibility of a dialogue in the appropriate time.” The Powell statement follows a similar one made by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage on Capitol Hill a few months earlier, in which he argued for the need for “limited engagement on issues of mutual interest.”

Some of that “limited dialogue and engagement” has already been taking place. Prior to the U.S. wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, Iranian diplomats met with their American counterparts in neutral cities in both bilateral and multilateral settings to discuss war plans. One Iranian official described the meetings as “of an informational nature, in order to avoid misunderstandings.” American officials concurred, though several expressed appreciation for what they described as Iran’s positive contribution to the Bonn conference leading up to the Afghan war. Views also have been exchanged in multilateral settings and through third-party envoys on the issue of the Iranian nuclear program, the Middle East peace process, and al-Qaeda prisoners held in Iran.

The Bam earthquake, however, intensified the contacts. In a rare move that defied the normal rules of diplomatic protocol between the two countries (in which contacts, messages, or meeting plans are relayed through third parties), Deputy Secretary of State Armitage picked up the phone and called Tehran directly in order to coordinate assistance with Iran’s U.N. envoy, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who was visiting his capital at the time. Zarif returned the middle-of-the-night phone call within 30 minutes—with the blessing, sources in Iran say, of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader.

Washington followed with some concrete measures, such as loosening sanctions on non-governmental organizations seeking to help Iranians, and sending teams of American disaster relief specialists to help the injured. Iranian officials from both the reformist and conservative camps expressed appreciation for U.S. aid—although several cautioned against reading too much into the earthquake-related lowering of tensions. President Mohammad Khatami reminded the Iranian press that substantive differences remain between the two sides, but Khatami’s brother, Parliament Deputy Mohammad Reza Khatami, the leader of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, said “goodwill should beget goodwill,” and stated the need for a parliamentary debate on the future of U.S.-Iran relations.

Perhaps most importantly, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the wily and influential former president and chairman of the powerful Expediency Council, hinted that relations might be on the mend. In his characteristically ambiguous style, he responded to a question about the improvement of U.S. Iran relations by observing that “the signals seem to be leading toward this.”

Of course, veteran observers of this on-again, off-again dance over the past five years know that the two sides can just as easily go back to their corners, trade insults, sulk, and even threaten physical harm to each other. What’s more, they haven’t exactly stopped airing their differences publicly. One week after the quake, President George W. Bush said: “The Iranian government must listen to the voices of those who long for freedom, must turn over al-Qaeda [suspects] that are in their custody, and must abandon their nuclear weapons program.” In response, Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei delivered a harsh rebuke of Washington, saying, “There has been no sign of reduction in enmity of the U.S. officials against Iran’s Islamic establishment and nation because they [Americans] impudently threaten people and the Islamic establishment, while sending [relief] aid to the quake-stricken regions.”

Still, it is a measure of both sides’ hope for a continuation of the process that Iran’s rebuff of a humanitarian mission to be headed by Sen. Elizabeth Dole was played down as a logistics issue rather than the political one it was. Tehran said it wasn’t prepared for the Dole mission since it was so bogged down in recovery and relief efforts, but, according to several Iranian analysts, the reality was that Iranian officials weren’t ready to take the engagement to the next level such a high-profile visit would represent. The Dole delegation, after all, would have been the first public visit of a senior U.S. official since the revolution. “It’s not something to be taken lightly,” explained one Iranian analyst, “so I think officials here were taken aback. They prefer a slower pace.”

Clearly, however, both sides have ratcheted down their hard-line stances—at least for now. As one American observer who participates in Track II talks with non-official Iranians put it: “Six to nine months ago, the talk in Washington in think tanks and among the temporarily ascendant neoconservatives was of: how do we destabilize Iran? Today, most serious observers are talking about how do we engage Iran?”

Gary Sick, author of All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran and a veteran observer and participant in Iran-U.S. relations, argues that “proximity has bred a certain realism on both sides.” The presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, he argues, makes the two countries neighbors with a mutual need for stability.

“When Washington sees the trouble in the Sunni Triangle in Iraq and compares it to the relatively peaceful Shi’i south,” Sick noted, “it comes to realize that Iran has been crucial to some of the successes of the U.S. war in Iraq.”

Ali Ansari, lecturer at the UK’s University of Durham, agrees, saying: “Iran and the U.S. are sensing the mutual need for each other.”

Still, despite the converging national interests, significant obstacles to rapprochement remain—including U.S. opposition to Iran’s WMD program, Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas, and Washington’s stated (and, in the writer’s opinion, justifiable) support for the Iranian people in their struggle for freedom. Tehran expresses opposition to what it views as Washington’s one-sided, pro-Israel regional policies, the sanctions against American and European companies that seek to do business in Iran, and what it considers U.S. meddling in internal Iranian affairs.

Then, there’s the hard-liners in both countries—the neoconservatives in Washington and the hard-line clerics in Iran who will put a stick in the spoke of any movement toward Iranian-U.S. rapprochement.

Washington recently has begun an inter-agency Iran policy review, the Bush administration’s third such review (the other two were never concluded). The idea of a policy review and the growing diplomatic détente between the two countries are positive signs. Washington cannot afford a policy gap on Iran, an historically rich, strategically located country that is three times the size of France, contains the world’s second largest gas reserves and third largest oil reserves, and possesses a population that is well-educated, largely urbanized, and among the most pro-American in the Middle East.

This last point—Iran’s population—should be factored into Washington’s policymaking. Most polls indicate that Iranians overwhelmingly would welcome rapprochement with the U.S. Other polls also indicate that, although they oppose an Iraq-style invasion, they would like Washington to keep up its rhetorical and even institutional support for the Iranian people in their freedom struggle. Washington will need to construct a creative policy that both serves U.S. national interests of engagement, while not ignoring the legitimate aspirations of the Iranian people.

Afshin Molavi has written on Iran and Middle East affairs for a variety of publications, including The Washington Post, BusinessWeek, and Foreign Policy. His book Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys Across Iran is available from the AET Book Club.

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