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US edges closer to engaging Iran By M K Bhadrakumar April 12, 2008 April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.T S Eliot's famous opening lines from The Waste Land come to mind as Washington confirms that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is heading for the Middle East to attend an international conference regarding the Iraq situation, in Kuwait on April 22. This will be no ordinary run-of-the-mill international conference. It's about Iraq. And Rice may well bump into her Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki. The big question is, as Eliot wrote, will they "drink coffee, and talk for an hour?" Indeed, will Mottaki call Rice "the hyacinth girl"? All that US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack would say at his press briefing on Wednesday was that "there's nothing on the schedule for them to meet". He wouldn't make promises, nor rule out anything. But then Tehran hasn't yet announced Mottaki's participation at the Kuwait conference. McCormack, however, volunteered an estimation that the Iranians have incrementally thawed in recent months. He added, "There was a sort of avoidance on the part of the Iranians. But that's changed ... They didn't have what I would describe as any substantive conversations, but there was some interaction ."
So, if the "iceman cometh" from Tehran, this could undoubtedly turn out to be one of the most crucial missions undertaken by Rice in her diplomatic career. The entire Middle East will be watching, attentively looking for clues in Rice's gait, her demeanor. They will want to know whether Washington is taking the plunge for unconditional talks with Tehran.
Everyone knows that when the Americans talk to the Iranians, finally, the kaleidoscope of Middle Eastern politics will have irrevocably shifted. The stakes are particularly high for the Middle East's "pro-West" sclerotic rulers. There is already serious unrest in Egypt, a key US ally. Helena Cobban, the contributing editor of the Boston Review and veteran writer on the Middle East, promptly put down in her blog a recollection from the great Cairo riots of 1977, when the late Mohammed Hassanein Heikal told her as he sat in his lovely Nile-side office at the al-Ahram newspaper that "the Egyptian people are like the Nile: they run deep and apparently quietly - until the point where suddenly they burst their banks".
There is surely expectation in the air, as Egypt is still in many respects the weightiest of all Arab countries. En route to Kuwait, Rice is taking care to stop in Bahrain for an exclusive meeting on April 21 with her counterparts from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. McCormack was short on specifics, merely saying, "I would expect they'd talk a lot about Iraq." Surely, there is a lot on their minds - especially regarding Iran.
The pro-West regimes in the Middle East will be keen to hear from Rice the import of a series of signals in recent days suggestive of a maneuvering in the Iran policy of the George W Bush administration. What is very obvious is that a lot of back-channel contacts are going on - rearranging the deckchairs, as it were. On balance, it certainly appears that the US Congressional testimonies by the top US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus and the US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, earlier in the week in Washington, turned out to be a low-key affair that was deliberately, almost ostentatiously, mild in rhetoric against Iran.
Crocker at one point said, "We support constructive relations between Iran and Iraq," and he went on to acknowledge, "Iran has a dialogue with everyone" - the good, the bad and the ugly - in the Iraqi Shi'ite community. There was the customary criticism of Iran arming and training "special groups", but Crocker balanced it by saying Iran has a relationship with every group in Iraq, not just Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, which was the US's main adversary in the recent fighting in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. These are important signals by way of exchanging glances.
..... The article also describes how Iran is going out of its way to avoid provoking the US; its restraint of using inflammatory Iran-Israel rhetoric; Iran's news agency Fars has implicated Saudi Arabia, and not Israel, as responsible for the murder of top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh; Iran is demonstrating that it is concerned about stability in Iraq. We'll see what Condoleezza "This is your baby. Go do it." Rice's intentions are, very soon. Related thread
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