Rice Signals Shift In Iran Policy

The US secretary of state is seeking new funds for a policy aimed at putting pressure on Iran's government and promoting internal opposition to it.

Condoleezza Rice asked Congress for $75m to increase TV and radio broadcasts and fund dissident groups.

Correspondents say the move comes amid US fears that the world community will not countenance tough action over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Former Clinton administration official Martin Indyk told the Washington Post newspaper that the groups the US wants to fund have little support on the ground and have been unable to challenge the Islamic government in Iran.

Ms Rice is planning to visit the Middle East next week to discuss the Iranian issue with regional leaders.

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, the secretary of state outlined a two-track approach, involving concerted international pressure to deter Iran from seeking nuclear weapons and an attempt to change the country from within.

$50m - to introduce 24-hour Farsi broadcasts into Iran by US government TV and radio
$15m - for trade unions and human rights groups
$5m - for student exchanges
$5m - to set up independent websites, TV and radio stations in Farsi

"The United States will actively confront the policies of this Iranian regime, and at the same time we are going to work to support the aspirations of the Iranian people for freedom in their own country," she said.

The funds being sought, though not a substantial amount, are a huge increase on the $10m already budgeted to support dissidents in 2006.

Most of the money, if approved, will go towards stepping up broadcasts in the Farsi language, with a smaller amount earmarked for help to human rights and other groups.

Ms Rice added that by resuming small-scale uranium enrichment last week the Iranians had "crossed a point where they are in open defiance of the international community".

Iran's decision came in response to a resolution by the International Atomic Energy Agency to report Iran to the UN Security Council.

The move could lead eventually to sanctions against Iran, but it is far from clear whether Russia or China, who backed the resolution, would agree to this.

BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says that it is this uncertainty which has led the US to shift its policy and seek to change Iran from within.

"Critics of the US plan say the funds are not enough to make a difference.

Former Clinton administration official Martin Indyk told the Washington Post newspaper that the groups the US wants to fund have little support on the ground and have been unable to challenge the Islamic government in Iran. "

A little more from Mr. Indyk...

DLC | Blueprint Magazine | November 20, 2003
A Squandered Opportunity
By Martin Indyk

Unengaged in the Middle East peace process, President Bush let the violence spin out of control. Now it's much harder to get the genie back into the bottle.

Table of Contents

When President Bush came into the White House, he was faced with two choices in the Middle East: He could try to stop the Palestinian intifadah before it destroyed the framework of peace that President Clinton had so painstakingly constructed over the previous eight years; or he could stay disengaged and watch it be dismantled.

It would have been so much easier at that moment to engage. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians had accepted the Mitchell recommendations and CIA Director George Tenet's ceasefire plan for ending the intifadah. Israel's newly elected prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was so concerned about proving himself a worthy ally of the new president that he was prepared to commit to a complete freeze on new settlements in the Occupied Territories. (As the U.S. ambassador to Israel, I conveyed his offer to Washington.) In return, the Israeli prime minister wanted the United States to use its influence to pressure Yasser Arafat to stop the terrorists.

Sharon was prepared to work with Arafat in those days -- if only the Palestinian leader would stop the terrorism. Sharon even sent his son Omri to meet with the PLO chairman as a gesture of his good intentions. The last thing Sharon wanted to do was to send the Israeli army back into West Bank cities and towns to stop the terrorists. As prime minister, he was intent on expunging the stigma of having led the Israeli army in 1982 into Lebanon, where it became stuck for 10 years. Indeed, Sharon waited 15 months for Washington to pressure Arafat to stop the terrorism until a horrendous series of suicide bombings in March and April 2002 so shook the Israeli nation that he was left with no choice but to intervene militarily.

But Bush was convinced that anything Clinton or former Sen. George Mitchell or any other Democrat did was not just wrong, it was feckless, even stupid. He proudly told the press that he "didn't do nuance," didn't do Middle East summitry, and wasn't looking for a Nobel Peace Prize. And so the Bush administration did away with the special Middle East envoy's office, dismantled the Clinton-era peace team, and systematically removed officials who had any peace process experience or expertise. Indeed, the words "peace process" were banished from the Bush State Department's diplomatic lexicon. The Bush administration sat back and watched while hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians died, and thousands of casualties were inflicted on both sides.

Of course, everything changed after 9/11. After ignoring the Middle East for nine months, Bush came to focus on it with an intensity equal to Clinton's. He had come to understand that to protect and promote American interests, he needed to embark on a strategy with four branches, designed to transform the region: to remove Saddam Hussein, to dry up the swamp, to deal with the rogue sponsors of terror, and to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace. He came only late and reluctantly to realize the importance of this last goal.

Clinton had chosen the engine of peacemaking to drive the train of transformation; Bush used the engine of war-making. In the post-9/11 circumstances, his overall strategy and objectives were laudable. It was right to seek regime change in Iraq, to promote political and economic reform in the Arab world, to press Iran and Syria to end their sponsorship of terror, and to promote a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem. Democrats were and are right to support those goals.

But in launching a war process rather than a peace process, Bush was making a radical departure from policies pursued by previous administrations, Democratic and Republican alike. They had all regarded stability in the Middle East as a vital interest. The Bush administration, by contrast, concluded that it was actually the pursuit of stability that helped generate the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Therefore, if the use of force was necessary to transform the Middle East, and that created some instability along the way, so be it.

In fact, there is nothing in itself wrong with promoting a little instability. With the benefit of hindsight, we now recognize that previous administrations, including Clinton's, were wrong to allow a preoccupation with stability in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to blind us to the consequences of allowing those governments to export their Islamic fundamentalism problem to our shores. But if an American administration is going to pursue a strategy that generates instability in an already volatile region where the United States has vital interests at stake, then it needs to make sure that it prepares the ground well. It has to plan for the unexpected, build broad international support, and put in place safety nets to guard against the inevitable unintended consequences of its actions.

With hindsight, the importance of doing those things is all too obvious. There is a symbiotic relationship among the four objectives adopted by the Bush administration. The president argued correctly that if we achieved regime change in Iraq, it could help our efforts to make Israeli-Palestinian peace, reform the Arab world, and pressure the rogue states to end their evil ways. But the reverse proposition was also true, and he should have been mindful of it: If you stumble on the first objective -- if you get into trouble in Iraq -- you hinder all your other efforts.

Not surprisingly, as our problems have mounted in the aftermath of the successful toppling of Saddam's regime, the road map process has collapsed, the Arab reform process has halted, and the rogues have concluded that we have grown short of breath and they don't have to fear us. Increasingly, it looks as if what we are left with is not transformation or peace, but just instability. We went from accepting instability as a necessary byproduct of our strategy to actually producing it as the result. And if we end up only with instability, the United States and our allies in the region, especially Jordan and Israel, are going to face serious trouble.

All of this could have been foreseen. Indeed, many Democrats did stand up before the war and loudly proclaim that we had time to prepare the ground better, that we needed U.N. approval, broader international support, and an effort to move the Israeli-Palestinian process forward before launching war in Iraq. But hubris blinded the president and his administration. They thought they needed no help; that all they had to do was lead and the rest of the world would have no choice but to follow; that it would be a "cakewalk"; that the Iraqi people would welcome us with open arms; and that Israelis and Palestinians would blithely put aside their mistrust and enmity.

Bush squandered a great opportunity that he himself had generated by going to war to remove Saddam from power. Far from promoting our national security, he is placing our national interests in great jeopardy. And in the process, he also fumbled the opportunity created by the war to move the Israelis and Palestinians out of the vortex of violence and back on the road toward peace.

The United States and Israel just lost a Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas -- also known as Abu Mazen -- who had the potential to be the Palestinian Anwar Sadat. Instead, Arafat is back in complete control, unless the Israelis expel him. Israel now faces a dire situation and, lacking any good options to stop the terrorism, is contemplating a confrontation with Syria to cut off that source of succor for the terrorists. And Bush is taking the easy way out -- walking away from the commitment to peacemaking he made at the Aqaba summit in Jordan and blaming the Palestinians.

The moment of opportunity was certainly there after the successful toppling of Saddam. In anticipation of it, Palestinian reformers with outside backing had insisted that Arafat appoint and empower a prime minister. Fearing that the Palestinian people were exhausted and their Iranian and Syrian sponsors were on the defensive after Saddam's demise, Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had decided to declare a unilateral cease-fire. Sharon committed his right-wing government to the road map and argued to his cabinet, in a historic turnabout for a right-wing prime minister, that it was in Israel's interests to accept a Palestinian state.

In attempting to seize this moment, the president got off to a good start in Aqaba, where he promised his personal commitment (the very thing he criticized Clinton for doing). He wisely moved the effort into the White House under National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and he established a special road map mission in Jerusalem under a new Middle East envoy, John Wolfe, equipping him with monitors in shiny new armored Chevy SUVs. But then the president became preoccupied with Iraq, and his administration went off on summer vacation. The SUVs sat in the parking lot at Jerusalem's David Intercontinental Hotel, and the process rapidly unraveled.

At the heart of the problems Bush faced with moving the road map forward was a structural flaw -- the lack of a responsible Palestinian leadership, capable of dismantling the infrastructure of terror, with the popular legitimacy to do so. To correct that flaw, the president had to lead an effort to convert Abu Mazen from a potential Sadat into a real one. He had the potential because, like Sadat, he understood that, in his words, there could be no military solution to the conflict, and that terrorism was not only wrong on moral and religious grounds, it was also doing great damage to the Palestinian cause.

Abu Mazen was that rare Palestinian leader who was prepared to stand up and consistently speak this truth to his people, in Arabic. You won't hear those words from his successor, Abu Ala. Even though he believes them, Abu Ala not only lacks the courage and moral clarity of his predecessor, he has observed that speaking the truth in the absence of a capability to do anything about it only hastened Abu Mazen's demise.

Dropped ball. To convert Abu Mazen's words into a new reality, he needed our help; the Bush administration failed to provide it. He needed a restructured security apparatus that was taken out of the hands of Arafat; we dropped the ball on that one. Only now, in the wake of Abu Mazen's resignation, is the Bush administration demanding that it be done. Abu Mazen also needed the security forces to be rapidly retrained and re-equipped; the CIA was given that task but didn't take it seriously. And Abu Mazen needed a massive infusion of funds into the Palestinian Authority that he could use to demonstrate some tangible improvement in the lives of ordinary Palestinians. The United States offered him $50 million, which was important, but it should have been $250 million. Instead, on his only visit to Washington, Abu Mazen was promised visits from the treasury and commerce secretaries, an old Washington trick that signals a lack of commitment. Abu Mazen also needed Israel to take a series of meaningful steps that would change the day-to-day reality of his people (e.g., removing checkpoints, withdrawing the Israeli army from the major cities of the West Bank, dismantling outposts, freezing settlements). The Israelis started to do these things, but when the Palestinians failed to act against the terrorists, they backtracked. And at that critical moment, Bush got sidetracked into arguing about the route of Israel's security fence, which was an unnecessary battle, because Sharon had already decided to change it as a result of our unhappiness.

Finally, Abu Mazen needed the Arab states to cut off funding and support for the terrorist organizations. On that front, the Bush administration did make a little progress with Saudi Arabia. But we failed to persuade Syria to stop the flow of support from Iran through Damascus to the Hamas and PIJ terror organizations and the bands of armed thugs who operated in the West Bank under the banner of the Fatah Tanzim.

There is an old maxim about the Middle East peace process: It's like a bicycle: If you're not pedaling forward you will fall off. That is precisely what happened. The ceasefire unraveled. Hamas, PIJ, and Tanzim launched several suicide bombing attacks, the most egregious of which killed 21 Israelis, including nine children, who were returning from their prayers at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The Israelis responded by undoing all the military steps they had taken to ease the situation. And the Bush administration's grudging policy of belated minimal engagement failed as Arafat took advantage of the determination to force Abu Mazen's resignation. Arafat is back in control; Bush and Sharon will not deal with him, and this leaves the arena and U.S. interests vulnerable to the next terror attack.

Martin Indyk is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. During the Clinton administration, he served as senior director for the Near East and South Asia in the National Security Council, assitant secretary of state for Near East Affairs, and twice as U.S. ambassador to Israel.

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