AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, courtesy of PBS
FRONTLINE: “Showdown With Iran”
Writer, producer, and director: Greg Baker
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
9-10 p.m.
PBS
Frontline offers a first-rate and frightening portrait of two national powers bungling an awkward diplomatic dance at a moment of opportunity, assuming the worst about each other’s motives, rousing their citizens with fearsome propaganda, and heading stubbornly toward potentially disastrous confrontation.
Here in outline is the story the briskly edited and impressively sourced program tells:
Post-9/11, the United States and Iran cooperated to a historic degree in fighting Taliban forces in Afghanistan. The U.S. nonetheless distrusted Iran’s hard-line government, and feared Iranian reformists were insufficiently powerful to significantly change the regime’s outlook. (The Bush Administration suspected, among other things, that Iranian fundamentalists, with the government’s approval, helped Osama bin Laden’s son across the border into Iran and were harboring him.)
As America prepared to attack Iraq, Iran wanted to be part of the planning and implementation to help quell subsequent sectarian violence and have some say in Iraq’s future. America dismissed the offer (instead branding Iran part of “the axis of evil,” spurring Iran, defensively, to play silent partner to Iraq’s new Shiite-dominated government instead. That in turn scared American allies like Egypt into supporting Iraqi Sunni insurgents to help counterbalance the Shiite forces.
As Iraq violence escalated, Iranian reformers, perhaps with the tacit nod of hard-line leaders, tried offering through back channels a “grand bargain” with America to work together in Iraq and ease Middle East tensions generally. Their offer was ignored. That undermined and sidelined the reformers, paving the way for the populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rise to the presidency.
Since then the U.S. and Iran have dug in their heels on nuclear and strategic issues. And the rhetoric is worrisome.
“You will not find a single instance in which a country has inflicted harm on us and we have left it without a response,” says Mohammad Jafari, deputy head of Iran’s National Security Council, in what Frontline says is his first TV interview. “So if the United States makes such a mistake, they should know that we will definitely respond.”
Former American U.N. Ambassador John Bolton tells Frontline: “The president has said repeatedly that it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons. If action is not taken in terms of regime change or, if need be, the use of military force, the question of when Iran achieves nuclear weapons is entirely in Iran’s own hands. And that is extraordinarily undesirable.”
“As risky and unattractive as it is,” Bolton says, “the use of force would put time back on our side.”
Frontline takes pains to give the Bush administration’s side of the story – primarily through interviews with Bolton and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. But the unmistakable thrust of the tale it lays out – put most articulately by former National Security Council official Flynt Leverett and Tufts and Harvard professor Vali Nasr – is that had the U.S. managed post-invasion Iraq well, it would have succeeded in its goal of establishing a model democracy in the region that would have destabilized Iran’s hard-line regime. Instead, it overplayed its hand and strengthened Iran’s position as an international player, leaving America in the position, at one point, of diplomatic supplicant before an Iranian official whom it had recently tried to capture in military raids.
Leverett says of the administration’s regional democracy-promotion view of the Iraq invasion: “It was a nice idea completely out of touch with the way Iranian society and politics work, fundamentally rooted in ignorance about the region.” One aspect among too many that the U.S. failed to foresee was the Iranian Shiite identification with Shiites in Iraq despite the longstanding nationalistic enmity between the two countries.
A point of consensus from just about everyone Frontline talks to is that the current game of chicken between the U.S. and Iran is an explosive one. Nasr says, “There’s a threshold when this kind of an indirect game of cat and mouse will become an outright direct confrontation.”
If and when that happens, experts suggest, it will involve U.S. air strikes (including bunker-busting weapons to get at underground facilities) targeting nuclear facilities and revolutionary-guard training camps. While the Iranians boast of their ability to strike Israel, the most immediate response, experts say, would likely be stepping up support for Shiite militias in Iraq, making today’s chaos look restful in comparison.
“The only reason I can see that you would suddenly advocate going ahead right now [with a U.S. strike against Iran] is if you become obsessed by computer war games and you’ve forgotten there are real people somewhere outside the computer,” says Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It would be the worst of worlds for an outgoing administration to start a conflict,” says Armitage.
But Iran’s former Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist, encapsulates the program’s grim mood when he says: “Relations between Iran and America won’t get better any time soon. Leaders in both countries don’t just see themselves as politicians; they also see themselves as carrying out the work of God. They’ve left the ground a bit. And that’s very dangerous for the world.”
-Alexander C. Kafka
