Showdown with Iran: A Grand Bargain?

PBS aired a new FRONTLINE documentary this past Tuesday titled "Showdown With Iran." The documentary was produced with the intent of highlighting the source of tensions between the U.S. and Iran since 9/11, but it fell well short of providing an accurate portrait for a variety of reasons.

At one point, for example, the documentary implies that relations between the two nations were improving until President Bush included Iran in the "Axis of Evil" during his January 2002 State of the Union speech. This verbal assault supposedly emboldened Iran's hardliners and further marginalized the reformists, thereby damaging a real opportunity for meaningful change in the relationship between the two nations. This tripe is frequently repeated, but it is a hollow critique.

In reality, Iran's reformists have no control over Iran's terrorist proxies or national security apparatus and, therefore, are and have been incapable of curtailing the hardliners for decades. The ayatollah and his attending mullahs are the real power in Iran, and until this changes the reformists are feckless. So, whether Iran was in or out of the "Axis of Evil" made no difference at the end of the day because the reformists had no real power to speak of in any event. Moreover, the PBS documentary skirts the issue of the hardliners' unsavory activities at the time and throughout history, which the reformists have never been able to remedy. (More on this later.)

The documentary also implies that the United States spurned a legitimate Iranian offer to settle all debts, so to speak, by striking a "grand bargain." This offer supposedly came in May 2003 via a Swiss Diplomat named Tim Guldimann. The offer is oft-cited by the left as evidence that the Bush administration recklessly flopped a legitimate opportunity to engage in meaningful dialog with Iran. But again, this is nonsense. As Michael Rubin explained in THE WEEKLY STANDARD previously, the Guldimann memo was the work of a wishful thinking, freelancing, Western diplomat, and not a serious attempt by the Iranians to strike a deal.

To its credit, PBS did include some doubts about the Guldimann offer. But the overall impression I got watching the documentary was that PBS thinks there was a legitimate opportunity for setting aside our differences in May 2003. Offering a dissenting view was Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state during President Bush's first term. A transcript of PBS's interview with Armitage, snippets of which were included in the documentary, is available online. Armitage was asked about the Guldimann offer and he confirmed Rubin's take:

PBS: After the invasion [of Iraq], there's been a lot of discussion about the so-called "grand bargain" fax that came through from the Swiss ambassador. Tell us your recollection of that.

Armitage: Our discussions with Iranians were handled by the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, for which we were very grateful, but it had been our view that the Swiss ambassador in Tehran was so intent -- and I mean this positively -- but he was so intent on bettering relations between "the Great Satan," the United States, and Iran that we came to have some questions about where the Iranian message ended and the Swiss message may begin.

I remember talking with people from our Near East division about a fax that came in from the Swiss ambassador, and I think our general feeling was that he had perhaps added a little bit to it because it wasn't in consonance with the state of our relations. And we had had some discussions, ... particularly through intelligence channels with high-ranking Iranian intelligence people, and nothing that we were seeing in this fax was in consonance with what we were hearing face to face. So we didn't give it much weight.

PBS: What were you hearing face to face?

We were getting no cooperation on questions of terrorism, particularly ... turning people over. We had in Europe some very high-level discussions in intelligence channels and were getting a lack of cooperation. ...

Others disagree with Armitage, but he has the better of them on the facts. He rightly points out that the U.S. was already in face-to-face talks with the Iranians, they did not make an offer anything like the Guldimann memo in these talks, and the Guldimann memo was out of step with the rest of Iran's behavior.