Iran's Nukes: Now They Tell Us?

(4 of 4)

Hayden and his senior Iran analysts briefed President Bush on the new NIE on Wednesday, Nov. 28. But it seems apparent the President made little effort to figure out how his Administration could leverage the shocking candor of the intelligence report to his advantage in dealing with Iran. "He could have said to the Iranians, 'This document shows that we're not rushing to war. We're not out to get you,'" said Kenneth Pollack, a National Security Council staff member during the Clinton Administration and author of The Persian Puzzle. "'But we — and the rest of the world — are very concerned about your uranium-enrichment program, and so let's sit down and talk about it.'"

Oddly, Bush didn't seem to ask for a delay in the release of the report. He could easily have requested a few weeks for his Administration to chew over the import of the NIE, discuss it with our allies, organize a new diplomatic initiative to negotiate with the Iranians. As it was, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns briefed the U.N. Security Council members who had been considering a new round of sanctions against Iran about the same time that word of the NIE broke in the press. When it did, the Chinese, who had seemed surprisingly ready to approve the sanctions, started backing away from that position.

There was one key finding that the President didn't discuss and wasn't asked about during his White House press conference: that Iran had stopped its weapons program "in response to international scrutiny and pressure." Several intelligence sources told me they considered this the most important finding in the report. "Iran isn't impervious," said one. "Diplomatic pressure works. That's something we simply did not know before."

But diplomatic pressure has been embraced only reluctantly, if at all, by Bush and Cheney. Even when the President does get behind an initiative, as he did with the recent Annapolis conference to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, there is an ad hoc, unprepared quality to the effort — a transparent, last-minute rush to cobble together a legacy. What the NIE makes plain is that diplomacy, combined with the threat of international sanctions, has much greater potential when applied to the Iranians than it has ever had in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To be sure, dealing with the Iranians isn't easy. In 2000, President Bill Clinton tried to stage a handshake at the United Nations with then President of Iran Mohammed Khatami — but at the last minute Khatami was ordered to back down by his superiors in Tehran. The truth is, the Iranian mullahs have often been as reluctant to negotiate with the U.S. as Bush has been to deal directly with them — although there may have been an Iranian initiative in 2003, when it appeared that U.S. armies would soon be perched on two of Iran's borders, in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is a dispute in the intelligence community about whether that démarche, which came to the U.S. via the Swiss embassy and promised broad-ranging negotiations, was a freelance effort by Iranian moderates or had been approved at the highest levels of the Iranian government.

The NIE represented another promising opportunity missed. Imagine if the President had said, "This report means we don't want war. We want to talk, and everything — including lifting of the economic sanctions and our acknowledgment that you are a major regional power — is on the table so long as you put everything on the table too. That means not only your uranium-enrichment program but also your support for terrorist organizations." How could Iran have said no to that?

But that would have required some other President. This President appears to lack the desire, creativity and patience to engage in the most important diplomacy that a nation can face — with its enemies — over issues that could mean the difference between war and peace.