For the most part, major media outlets uncritically transmitted the Obama Administration’s charge, without much manifestation of serious effort to verify it, find out more about the sourcing upon which it was based, or place it in any sort of detailed and nuanced historical context. Stories by Joby Warrick, see here, in the Washington Post and Helene Cooper, see here, in The New York Times exemplify this kind of “reporting”.

For nearly ten years, a cadre of hawkish analysts, politicians, and some Iranian expatriates have pushed their insistent but unsubstantiated claims of extensive collaboration between the Islamic Republic and al-Qa’ida. Some even charged that Osama bin Ladin was “living in luxury” in Iran, an assertion later elaborated in a 2010 “documentary” film that was extensively “covered” on Fox News.

During her service at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and at the National Security Council in 2001-2003, Hillary was one of a handful of U.S. officials who participated in nearly two years of substantive talks with Iranian counterparts about Afghanistan and al-Qa’ida.

–Since leaving government, we—and other former U.S. officials knowledgeable about the U.S.-Iranian dialogue over these matters—have related how the Iranians raised, almost immediately after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the problem of al-Qa’ida personnel trying to make their way from Afghanistan into Iran, consistently warning about the difficulties of securing Iran’s 936 kilometer-long border with Afghanistan (as well as its 700 kilometer-long border with Pakistan).

–We and others have also related how Tehran documented its detention of literally hundreds of suspected al-Qa’ida operatives, repatriated as many of these detainees to their countries of origin as it could, and requested U.S. assistance in facilitating repatriations of detainees whose governments did not want to cooperate (a request the Bush Administration denied).

–Furthermore, we described how, over the course of 2002 and early 2003, Bush Administration hardliners made substantive discussion and coordination with Iran over Iraq dependent on Tehran finding, arresting, and deporting a small number of specific al-Qa’ida figures—beyond the hundreds of suspected al-Qa’ida operatives the Islamic Republic had already apprehended—that Washington suspected had sought refuge in Iran’s lawless Sistan-Balochistan province. Although Tehran deployed additional security forces to its eastern borders, Iranian officials acknowledged that a small group of al-Qa’ida figures had managed to avoid capture and enter Iranian territory, most likely through Sistan-Balochistan, in 2002. The Iranian government located and took some of these individuals into custody and said that others identified by the United States were either dead or not in Iran. At the beginning of May 2003, after Baghdad had fallen, Tehran offered to exchange the remaining al-Qa’ida figures in Iran for a small group of MEK commanders in Iraq, with the treatment of those repatriated to Iran monitored by the International Committee for the Red Cross and a commitment not to apply the death penalty to anyone prosecuted on their return. But the Bush Administration rejected any deal.

Today, much of the American media unquestioningly “reports” information provided by the U.S. government about Iran’s supposed links to al-Qa’ida, noting, as Helene Cooper does in her story, that U.S. “officials admit that they are largely in the dark about what is going on with the Qaeda operatives believed to be in Iran.” But the only reason why the United States does not know more or have a cooperative relationship with the Islamic Republic over al-Qa’ida is that Washington cut off talks with Tehran over al-Qa’ida and Afghanistan in late May 2003. This decision was supposedly taken because the Defense Department claimed to have a communications intercept indicating that an al-Qa’ida figure inside Iran might have been involved in the May 12, 2003 Riyadh terrorist bombings. But the claim was never substantiated and was disputed by much of the U.S. Intelligence Community; by 2007, the Bush Administration was reduced to telling the Washington Post that “there are suspicions, but no proof” that an al-Qa’ida figures in Iran “may have been involved from afar in planning” the May 2003 attacks, see here.

Not even the George W. Bush Administration was prepared to make concrete accusations that the Islamic Republic was deliberately facilitating al-Qa’ida’s terrorist activities. Now, however, the Obama Administration is advancing specific, on-the-record charges that Iran is helping al-Qa’ida. There is no reason for anyone to have any confidence that official Washington “knows”, in any empirically serious way, that Tehran is cooperating with al-Qa’ida in the ways that are alleged.

Of the six al-Qa’ida operatives sanctioned by the Treasury Department last week, only one is alleged to be physically present in Iran—and, by Treasury’s own account, he is there primarily to get al-Qa’ida prisoners out of Iranian jails. Moreover, the United States apparently has no hard evidence that the Iranian government is supportive of or even knowledgeable about the alleged al-Qa’ida network in the Islamic Republic. In her story, Helene Cooper writes that a “senior Administration official” said “in a conference call for reporters” (which means that the White House wanted everyone to hear this, and Helene did not have to leave her office to hear it), that “our sense is this network is operating through Iranian territory with the knowledge and at least the acquiescence of Iranian authorities”. A “sense” that al-Qa’ida is operating in Iran with “at least the acquiescence of Iranian authorities” now apparently amounts to proof of a “secret deal” that can be authoritatively referenced in the announcement of a legally and politically significant action by the Treasury Department.

This is all strongly reminiscent of the way in which the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations prepared the way for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. And much of the mainstream media seems content to reprise the dishonorable role they played in making that war possible. As her pre-war reporting on Saddam Husayn’s weapons of mass destruction programs unraveled in the war’s aftermath, Judy Miller of The New York Times sought to defend herself by arguing that “my job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself.” Ms. Miller may no longer be at The New York Times. But it seems that her spirit lives on there, at the Washington Post, and in too many other journalistic venues.

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

We live in critical times.  A rising clamor from those who wish to see the United States start a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran highlights the ongoing need for fact-based, objective analysis of Iran-related issues—which is exactly what www.RaceForIran.com has provided over the past year and a quarter.

As you know, we also live in challenging economic times.  www.RaceForIran.com operates because of funding provided through the New America Foundation.  Consequently, we are asking those of our readers who value what we do and may be in a position to help to make an end-of-the-year, tax-deductible contribution to help keep www.RaceForIran.com up and running.  If you choose to donate, your tax-deductible contribution would go to the New America Foundation, not directly to the authors of the blog.  Click here to make a secure donation.

Although some those who do not like the kind of analysis that is presented on www.RaceForIran.com have accused us of somehow being “on the take”, or at least benefitting from all-expenses-paid trips to Iran, this is not true.  In fact, we pay for all of our travel, including to Iran.  Our personal incomes are derived from salaries that we receive from the New America Foundation, Yale University, and Pennsylvania State University, and from Hillary’s consulting business.  Any money that you donate will be used to help us present our arguments—and our readers’ valuable input—on www.RaceForIran.com.

As always, we are very grateful for our readers’ continuing attention and engagement with www.RaceForIran.com.  For those who observe the Christian and Jewish holidays, we offer our best wishes for a wonderful holiday season.  For those who observe Muslim or other holidays, we extend our warmest regards.
Sincerely,

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

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As anticipated in our post on The Washington Note on October 13 (and a monograph published by Johns Hopkins’ Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies earlier this week), China authoritatively signaled today that it will not support the imposition of anything approaching “crippling” international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear activities.

Nor will Chinese leaders support measures that would negatively impact what Beijing sees as its most important economic and strategic interests at stake in China’s developing relationship with the Islamic Republic.

Indeed, after meeting with Iran’s Vice President, Mohammad Reza Rahimi, in Beijing, China’s Premier Wen Jiabao noted that Sino-Iranian “cooperation in trade and energy has widened and deepened”, and stated that the Chinese government “will maintain high-level exchanges with Iran, enhance mutual understanding and trust, promote bilateral pragmatic cooperation and coordinate closely in international affairs”.

Wen’s statement comes a day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – who has done more than anyone else in the Obama Administration to promulgate the threat of “crippling” sanctions if Tehran does not surrender on the nuclear issue – was disabused of whatever illusions she was clinging to about Moscow’s willingness to support a strategically meaningful intensification of international pressure on the Islamic Republic.

Furthermore, it comes a day after Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Kurt Campell, also in Beijing, offered more hot air about “the need to see more cooperation and coordination between the United States and China” regarding Iran.

We supported Barack Obama in his campaign for the White House in 2008 – but we have to say that, at this point, it is hard to identify any significant improvement in America’s Iran policy under President Obama compared to the strategically dysfunctional approach pursued by the George W. Bush Administration.

The Obama Administration’s continuing advocacy of a “dual track” approach to Iran is particularly misleading. There is not a serious sanctions “option” for resolving the nuclear issue or other strategic differences with Iran. The Administration’s constant cheer leading for sanctions does nothing for U.S. interests – but will undercut the credibility of whatever diplomatic overtures Secretary Clinton and her colleagues make toward Tehran.

The “dual track” approach only makes sense as a lowest-common-denominator consensus position among different camps of Obama’s foreign policy and political advisers. Looking for that kind of consensus may have been an effective way to run the Harvard Law Review. It is not a way to define coherent and effective foreign policy.

Significantly, the meeting between Wen and Rahimi took place on the margins of a summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – a regional security forum comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, in which Iran, India, and Pakistan have observer status.

Among other things, summit participants will be launching discussions about expanding use of member states’ currencies for intra-SCO trade (including oil and gas), thereby reducing the dollar’s use as a transactional currency.

It is popular in U.S. foreign policy circles to dismiss the SCO as a “talk shop”. But we think the SCO is interesting as a harbinger of future strategic trends – trends that, left unchecked, could profoundly accelerate the decline of America’s strategic position. Checking those trends requires that the United States pursue a fundamentally different sort of relationship with Iran.

But that won’t happen until the Obama Administration faces reality about what its options really are.

Center for Strategic and International Studies Middle East Director Jon Alterman has a different perspective.

– Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

A lot of attention is being focused on Chinese policy toward Iran, particularly regarding the Obama Administration’s threats to impose “crippling” international sanctions if diplomacy does not provide Washington with satisfaction (however defined) regarding the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. The Administration’s reasoning about how the imposition of “crippling” sanctions on Tehran would come about runs roughly as follows:

• Because of President Obama’s efforts to “hit the reset button” with Russia, Moscow has come a long way toward the U.S. position regarding additional sanctions against Iran.

• China may not necessarily be happy at the prospect of new sanctions against one of its major energy suppliers, but, over the last three years, Beijing has let Moscow take the lead in opposing or watering down anti-Iran sanctions proposed by the United States and its European partners.

• Beijing does not want to be “on its own” in opposition to new sanctions, so, as long as Washington has Moscow on board, China will not block tougher international measures against Iran.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration’s logic regarding the plausibility of imposing “crippling” sanctions against the Islamic Republic hardly stands up to serious scrutiny. First of all, we do not believe that Moscow is, in fact, on board for significantly tougher sanctions against Iran. (We will have more to say on this in future posts.) Secondly–and more to the point here–our monograph demonstrates that the Obama Administration’s logic chain misreads China’s strategic calculus about its relations with the Islamic Republic.

In broad terms, the development of China’s relations with Iran epitomizes the challenges that Beijing faces in managing what John Garver describes as China’s “Persian Gulf dilemma”. This “dilemma” requires China to balance a major interest in maintaining comity with the United States against its interests in building cooperative ties to important Gulf countries–including those, like the Islamic Republic, in policy conflict with Washington. In their efforts to balance these interests, China’s leaders have been careful not to let their country’s developing ties to the Islamic Republic be perceived in Washington as a direct challenge to America’s longstanding hegemonic position in the Gulf. But, at the same time, Beijing is moving ahead to cultivate an increasingly strategic energy relationship with Iran.

On the Iranian nuclear issue, more specifically, Beijing has given just enough to Washington to avoid a fundamental rupture while also supporting Tehran against U.S.-led international pressure. Thus, since 2006, China has endorsed three UN Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions on the Islamic Republic. In the process, Beijing has succeeded in keeping the nuclear issue in the Security Council–where, as a permanent member, China has significant influence and can, among other things, ensure that any prospective military action against Iran would have no interantional legitimacy. But Beijing has also worked (as has Moscow) to water down the sanctions actually actually imposed, thereby protecting China’s most important economic and strategic interests vis-à-vis Iran.

While China remains disinclined to challenge American hegemony in the Gulf directly, governmental and corporate decision-makers in Beijing are becoming more assertive in advancing China’s energy and economic interests in Iran–even as American concern over the nuclear problem intensifies. China is increasingly willing to stand on its own–that is, without necessarily having political cover from Russia–in opposition to specific measures proposed by the United States to raise international pressure on Tehran. In particular, Beijing has made clear that it will not endorse any measure that would seriously impede China’s access to Iranian hydrocarbon supplies or Chinese energy companies’ potential to pursue upstream positions in Iran.

Furthermore, China will continue developing its strategic energy ties to the Islamic Republic. Since 2007, China has not only continued to buy large amounts of Iranian oil–Chinese energy companies are now also developing substantial investment positions there. (Indeed, Iran is one of the few places in the Gulf where foreign firms can access upstream resources directly.) The willingness of Chinese energy companies to move beyond MOUs and other preliminary agreements to conclude actual investment deals in Iran indicates that governmental and corporate decision-makers in Beijing calculate that China can now “get away with more” in the Islamic Republic without provoking a serious U.S. backlash. Among other considerations, these decision-makers are increasingly (and justifiably) confident that Washington is not about to impose secondary sanctions on Chinese companies over investments in Iranian energy projects.

In this context, Dennis Ross’s idea to facilitate Chinese support for tougher sanctions against Tehran by having Saudi Arabia “replace” the oil that China currently imports from Iran is completely detached from the reality of the Islamic Republic’s growing importance for China’s energy security interests.

• China is not about to agree to such a significant reduction in the diversity of its oil supply sources in the Gulf. Likewise, Beijing will not abandon its interest in Iran as a potential suplier of natural gas to international markets–a role that Saudi Arabia will not be able to assume.

• Riyadh may let Chinese and other foreign companies explore for non-associated natural gas in Saudi Arabia (not for export, but for domestic use inside the Kingdom). However, Saudi Arabia is not about to let Chinese or other foreign companies into its upstream oil sector.

• Moreover, Chinese military officials are focused on the potential for Iranian hydrocarbons to come to China through pipelines running across Central Asia, rather than through seaborne routes vulnerable to American naval interdiction. Iran is the only Gulf country that can offer China such diversification of transit routes as well as supply sources.

Beyond the cricital issue of energy security, China also has important geopolitical interests at stake in its relationship with the Islamic Republic. While, as we noted above, Chinese leaders are not inclined to challenge American hegemony in the Middle East directly, Beijing does have an interest in deflecting overly assertive exercises of that hegemony. Chinese leaders simply do not believe arguments advanced from Washington that American leadership has contributed to peace and stability in the Gulf and the “greater Middle East”. From a Chinese perspective, China’s interest in the stable and uninterrupted flow of Persian Gulf oil has more often been hurt, not helped, by the exercise of American power.

In this context, Beijing has long seen Iran as a putative regional power–not only in the Persian Gulf, but also in Central Asia. Shared opposition to U.S. hegemony in both of these critical regions makes the Islamic Republic a potentially important ally for China.

Thus, China is not going to endorse anything coming close to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s frequently invoked threshold of “crippling” sanctions against Iran. If push comes to shove, China might at some point agree to a modest expansion of existing sanctions–but that is the most it will do. Unfortunately, by continuing to pursue the fatally flawed “dual track” approach to Iran that it inherited from the George W. Bush Administration, the Obama Administration has rooted its Iran policy in a delusion.

– Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Today, the ongoing competition for regional influence between the United States and Iran is the Middle East’s most strategically significant fault line. Even the Arab-Israeli conflict is now subordinated to the U.S.-Iranian struggle—not, as some would suggest, because regional players care less about Arab-Israeli issues, but because it is now impossible to achieve negotiated settlements on the unresolved tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict without a more productive U.S.-Iranian relationship.

Iran’s “rise” makes the Islamic Republic’s choices regarding its alignment toward key international players an increasingly critical factor in regional and global power balances. As a result, the Islamic Republic has become a strategic focus not only for the United States, but for important countries in and outside the Middle East. As the hegemonial struggle between the United States and Iran plays out, both established and rising powers—China, Europe, India, Russia—are seeking to influence this competition in ways that will promote their economic and strategic interests. Likewise, major Middle Eastern states—Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey—must deal with the impact of Iran’s rise and the evolving dynamics of U.S.-Iranian relations on their own places in the regional balance of power.

Taken together, we call these two interlocking geopolitical contests—one between Washington and Tehran over strategic dominance in the broader Middle East, and the other among major international and regional players for influence over the Islamic Republic’s strategic orientation—the “race for Iran”. (This phrase was first used by Flynt Leverett in a June 2006 Op Ed in The New York Times.) So defined, the “race for Iran” will have determinative influence over the structure of international relations—and, in particular, for America’s longstanding hegemonic position in the Middle East—throughout the first half of the 21^st century.

We are launching this blog to track and understand the “race for Iran”, in all of its myriad dimensions. In practical terms, The Race for Iran seeks to serve three main purposes.

First, The Race for Iran will present cutting-edge analyses of Iran and its geopolitics. Substantively, we will cover Iranian foreign policy in all of its dimensions, as well as the policies of the United States and other major regional and global players toward Iran. Many of the analyses presented here will come from us, but we will also provide a platform for other commentators, writing from their own intellectual and national or regional perspectives.

Second, The Race for Iran will serve as a “clearing house” for essential material on Iran and its geopolitics. With the support of Ben Katcher, an outstanding political analyst with the New America Foundation’s American Strategy Program, we will assemble and frequently update documents and publications in multiple categories—UN Security Council resolutions pertaining to Iran, International Atomic Energy Agency reports on Iran’s nuclear activities, Iranian proposals for dealing with the nuclear issues and other regional and international controversies, U.S. and Western proposals for dealing with such issues, material on Iran’s economy (including its enormous hydrocarbon reserves), and resources on U.S. policy—for easy reference.

Third, The Race for Iran will provide a forum for an ongoing conversation about Iran and its geopolitics, for interested persons all over the world.

We are excited to embark on this journey, and invite you to come along with us.

– Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett