Rooyesh

Steve Clemons of the Washington Note reports there is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy. On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney’s team and acolytes — who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy.

The Pentagon and the intelligence establishment are providing support to add muscle and nuance to the diplomatic effort led by Condi Rice, her deputy John Negroponte, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, and Legal Adviser John Bellinger. The support that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and CIA Director Michael Hayden are providing Rice’s efforts are a complete, 180 degree contrast to the dysfunction that characterized relations between these institutions before the recent reshuffle of top personnel. However, the Department of Defense and national intelligence sector are also preparing for hot conflict. They believe that they need to in order to convince Iran’s various power centers that the military option does exist. But this is worrisome. The person in the Bush administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney. The person in Iran who most wants a conflict is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force would be big winners in a conflict as well — as the political support that both have inside Iran has been flagging. Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney’s national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush’s tack towards Condoleezza Rice’s diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously. This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an “end run strategy” around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument. The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles). This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf — which just became significantly larger — as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war. There are many other components of the complex game plan that this Cheney official has been kicking around Washington. The official has offered this commentary to senior staff at AEI and in lunch and dinner gatherings which were to be considered strictly off-the-record, but there can be little doubt that the official actually hopes that hawkish conservatives and neoconservatives share this information and then rally to this point of view. This official is beating the brush and doing what Joshua Muravchik has previously suggested — which is to help establish the policy and political pathway to bombing Iran. The zinger of this information is the admission by this Cheney aide that Cheney himself is frustrated with President Bush and believes, much like Richard Perle, that Bush is making a disastrous mistake by aligning himself with the policy course that Condoleezza Rice, Bob Gates, Michael Hayden and McConnell have sculpted. According to this official, Cheney believes that Bush can not be counted on to make the “right decision” when it comes to dealing with Iran and thus Cheney believes that he must tie the President’s hands. On Tuesday evening, i spoke with a former top national intelligence official in this Bush administration who told me that what I was investigating and planned to report on regarding Cheney and the commentary of his aide was “potentially criminal insubordination” against the President. I don’t believe that the White House would take official action against Cheney for this agenda-mongering around Washington — but I do believe that the White House must either shut Cheney and his team down and give them all garden view offices so that they can spend their days staring out their windows with not much to do or expect some to begin to think that Bush has no control over his Vice President. It is not that Cheney wants to bomb Iran and Bush doesn’t, it is that Cheney is saying that Bush is making a mistake and thus needs to have the choices before him narrowed.

JAVAD ZARIF has appeared at universities, public policy forums and social and political clubs so often that Lisa Anderson, dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, recently asked him wryly if he was thinking of running for office. Mr. Zarif is the United Nations ambassador from Iran, a country that has had no diplomatic relations with the United States since 1980, and he is confined by the American authorities within a 25-mile radius of Columbus Circle.

Punctuating the point, a map in the Iranian Mission shows the boundaries as Parsippany, N.J., the New York-Connecticut border and Exit 40 on the Long Island Expressway. State Department demarcations? he was asked. “No,” he said, smiling beneath a Koranic inscription in his ambassadorial office. “Everything here in the U.S. is private, isn’t it? We had Hagstrom’s do it.” Brand names, local geography and American customs come easily to Mr. Zarif, 47, who has spent most of his adult life in this country and speaks colloquial English with an American accent. His ability to strike cordial relations with many American leaders and with the crowds of Americans he frequently addresses, while defending a country whose leadership they have no sympathy for, is being much commented on as his five years of service come to an end. He has degrees from San Francisco State University and a doctorate from the University of Denver, and his American-born son and daughter now study in the United States. Though he dresses in austere Iranian style, with a high-buttoned collarless shirt and no necktie, and follows the Iranian practice of not shaking hands with women, he is disarmingly informal and punctuates his comments with chuckles and grins. He has combined this beguiling ease with communication tools like video- and telephone-conferencing and Web postings (www.zarif.net) to influence the American-Iranian relationship. YET Mr. Zarif also represents a country that is locked in a contentious standoff with the West over its nuclear program, has harassed and recently jailed three Iranian-American intellectuals, and is led by a president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has declared that Israel should be “wiped off the map” and that the Holocaust should be questioned. “It’s a dilemma for any diplomat to bring the right balance between defending his government and not defending the indefensible,” said Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Nixon Center, which studies national security issues. “I think he was able to find such a balance.” Mr. Zarif became Iran’s chief representative in the United States by an accident that he traces back to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He was born into a well-to-do family with textile and trade interests in Tehran, and his wife’s family had extensive real estate holdings, some of which it lost in the 1979 revolution. But neither family was politically involved, he said, so there were no further consequences. When he came to this country on a student visa in 1976, he was preparing for a teaching career in Iran. But just after he passed his comprehensive tests for his Ph.D. in Denver in 1985, the Immigration and Naturalization Service withdrew his visa, dooming his chances to pursue the degree. Still wanting to remain here legally, he went to New York and took a job in the Iranian Mission. He fulfilled his degree requirements long distance over the next three years, and by then he had proven his worth to the government, which asked him to join the foreign service. “So I’m a diplomat both by default and by the decision of the I.N.S,” he said. Mr. Zarif lives in an elegant French neo-Classical Fifth Avenue townhouse built in 1912, which Iran purchased in the 1960s and which was the site of lavish parties during the shah’s time. “We may not serve champagne anymore,” he said, “but we make up for it with very good Iranian food.” One of his dinner guests there last year was James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, which soon after recommended establishing direct communication with Iran. DURING his years in New York, he says, he has been so busy making addresses that he has had little time to experience the city or join the diplomatic party circuit. “Also, however I am seen here in New York, I am a religious person, and my wife and I have certain religious limitations on the food we can eat, on the company we can entertain, and we observe those, both personally and officially,” he said. On weekends, he does grocery shopping with his wife and takes walks through Central Park. “If I want relaxation, that’s how I get it,” he said. In his public appearances he is listened to respectfully and often applauded warmly. “I know that what I am saying is not exactly what they want to hear, but I do not see any problem in establishing genuine communication with a whole lot of Americans,” he said. Part of his appeal is the tantalizing suspicion that he contests the extreme views of Mr. Ahmadinejad. “I was in his office in April, and I told him, ‘I don’t know any ambassador who is as derisive of his president as you,’ ” said Ray Takeyh, an expert on Iran at the Council on Foreign Relations. In his speeches and interviews, however, Mr. Zarif is a tough advocate for Iran. On the Holocaust, Mr. Zarif argues that Mr. Ahmadinejad was not questioning whether it had occurred but merely saying that the Palestinians wrongly bore the consequences of it. “The Palestinians had nothing to do with this crime — and it was a crime, it must be condemned, it should never be repeated,” he said. “This is what I say to audiences here.” He also says he believes that the United States is fabricating evidence to back up its accusation that Iran is sending bombs and weapons into Iraq. As for the nuclear impasse, he says that the West refused to negotiate during the two years that Iran agreed to suspend its uranium enrichment, and that Iran has lost faith in negotiations. Asked if he would also fault the Iranian approach, Mr. Zarif acknowledged only, “We might have contributed to the misunderstanding by not explaining our case in the best possible way.” Critics of Iran, like John R. Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, say Mr. Zarif’s charm is an unreliable barometer of Tehran’s true intentions. “The Foreign Ministry of Iran is the last place that is going to know, and it makes it easier for Zarif to tell untruths with a completely straight face because he doesn’t know,” Mr. Bolton said. As for reports that hard-liners view him suspiciously at home, Mr. Zarif said, “Some people would consider that my vocabulary is inappropriate, and they attack me for my tone and say I try to be too accommodating.” As he heads off to realize his original wish to be a teacher at Tehran University, does he think his effort here to bridge the gap has been successful? “I would be satisfied if I have helped in the creation of just a dent in the misunderstanding,” he said. “And I think I have.”

New York Times

The Los Angeles Times reporting regarding Ali Shakeri, an Iranian-American citizen missing in Iran. Ali Shakeri is admired for diplomacy through wit. He has a knack, said fellow board members at UC Irvine’s Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, for cutting through tension with a well-timed joke. He has kidded tirelessly to knit together Orange County’s large Iranian American community and has taken his lessons home, sharing meals with another board member who is Jewish.

In March, Shakeri told colleagues he was flying to Tehran; his mother was ailing. But when former President Carter spoke at UCI this month, and Shakeri was oddly absent from the event, board members began to wonder whether he was coming home. This week, the group Human Rights Watch said the Iranian government probably detained Shakeri, 59, at a Tehran airport and might be interrogating him in an isolated location. He was scheduled to leave Iran and fly to Europe on May 13 but never arrived at his destination. Instead, his ticket had been canceled and his luggage taken from the airline’s possession, the group said. “It’s a disaster,” said John Graham of the UC Irvine center, “that this voice of peace has been potentially silenced.” Iranian officials have not commented publicly on Shakeri’s whereabouts. In recent weeks, two Iranian American scholars with dual citizenship have been imprisoned while visiting the country. A reporter, also a dual national, had her passport confiscated and is unable to leave Iran. The detention of one of those scholars, Haleh Esfandiari, bears close parallels to Shakeri’s apparent disappearance. Esfandiari, a researcher based at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, traveled to Iran late last year to visit her 93-year-old mother. When she headed to the airport to leave Iran on Dec. 30, she was stopped by knife-wielding men in masks, according to center officials. She was interrogated extensively and, earlier this month, imprisoned. The Iranian government this week announced she was being charged with setting up a network to overthrow the Islamic establishment. Her husband, Shaul Bakhash, denied the allegations as “totally without foundation.” Javad Payam, a friend of Shakeri’s who edits a Persian magazine in Laguna Hills, is anxious. He has interviewed former detainees who have described being locked in cells without windows, air-conditioning or radio and forced to sleep on the floor. “When you look at the history of the regime for the past 25 years, whoever has a voice lands in jail, is killed or disappears. It’s nothing new,” said Payam, who met Shakeri at a rally in Los Angeles. “We pray and hope nothing happens to him.” In Orange County, where immigrant groups estimate about 250,000 Iranians live, Shakeri moved in political circles but did not dominate them, friends said. He gave speeches and radio interviews and periodically wrote about politics for Payam-E-Ashena, Payam’s magazine. Shakeri’s biography on the UCI center’s website describes him as “an Iranian American activist who advocates democracy in Iran and peace in the world.” Hossein Hosseini, a member of the Network of Iranian-American Professionals of Orange County, said Shakeri advocated changing Iran’s leadership but maintained that the Iranian people would bring about that change only over time. “He was only controversial depending on your point of view,” Hosseini said. “To those who wanted to up and overthrow the regime, he’s a sympathizer. He wasn’t a big thing. He wasn’t well-known across the world. He was a harmless local guy.” Shakeri was born in Iran but spent much of the last three decades in the United States. He earned a business administration degree from the University of Texas in 1979, according to the biography, and briefly returned to Iran after the revolution that overthrew the late shah. “He had a false hope that there would be real dialogue between the civilizations, but it didn’t work,” said Ahmad Mesbah, who helped found the local Iranian American professionals network. Shakeri then moved to Orange County and opened a mortgage company, Global Estate Funding, in Irvine. He and his wife live in Lake Forest and have two adult sons, both of whom attended UCI, friends said. A short, mustached man who favored dress suits, Shakeri helped found the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, which examines how people can promote peace in divided societies, said co-director Paula Garb, an anthropology professor. Shakeri’s mother died during his visit to Iran and, after attending her funeral, Shakeri had planned to meet friends in Europe, said Hadi Ghaemi, an Iran analyst for Human Rights Watch, the New York-based nongovernmental organization. He never showed up. Two days later, Shakeri called family members and said “there was some misunderstanding, it wasn’t a big deal and he will be OK,” Ghaemi said. It appears no one has heard from him since.