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On Oct 30, 4:08 pm, "Doomsday Cultist" <poki_po...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House
> Doesn't Want You to Know
>
> Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Administration say the
> U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming
> otherwise. It'll be Iraq all over again.
> Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Adminstration say the
> U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming
> otherwise. It'll be Iraq all over again.
>
> In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the
> highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for
> the National Security Council. Mann conducted secret negotiations with Iran.
> Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza Rice. They each
> played crucial roles in formulating policy for the region leading up to the
> war in Iraq. But when they left the White House, they left with a growing
> sense of alarm -- not only was the Bush administration headed straight for
> war with Iran, it had been set on this course for years. That was what
> people didn't realize. It was just like Iraq, when the White House was so
> eager for war it couldn't wait for the UN inspectors to leave. The steps
> have been many and steady and all in the same direction. And now things are
> getting much worse. We are getting closer and closer to the tripline, they
> say.
>
> "The hard-liners are upping the pressure on the State Department," says
> Leverett. "They're basically saying, 'You've been trying to engage Iran for
> more than a year now and what do you have to show for it? They keep building
> more centrifuges, they're sending this IED stuff over into Iraq that's
> killing American soldiers, the human-rights internal political situation has
> gotten more repressive -- what the hell do you have to show for this
> engagement strategy?' "
>
> But the engagement strategy was never serious and was designed to fail, they
> say. Over the last year, Rice has begun saying she would talk to "anybody,
> anywhere, anytime," but not to the Iranians unless they stopped enriching
> uranium first. That's not a serious approach to diplomacy, Mann says.
> Diplomacy is about talking to your enemies. That's how wars are averted. You
> work up to the big things. And when U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had
> his much-publicized meeting with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad this
> spring, he didn't even have permission from the White House to schedule a
> second meeting.
>
> The most ominous new development is the Bush administration's push to name
> the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization.
>
> "The U.S. has designated any number of states over the years as state
> sponsors of terrorism," says Leverett. "But here for the first time the U.S.
> is saying that part of a government is itself a terrorist organization."
>
> This is what Leverett and Mann fear will happen: The diplomatic effort in
> the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia's and China's
> geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience of energy
> sanctions against Iran. Without any meaningful incentive from the U.S. to be
> friendly, Iran will keep meddling in Iraq and installing nuclear
> centrifuges. This will trigger a response from the hard-liners in the White
> House, who feel that it is their moral duty to deal with Iran before the
> Democrats take over American foreign policy. "If you get all those elements
> coming together, say in the first half of '08," says Leverett, "what is this
> president going to do? I think there is a serious risk he would decide to
> order an attack on the Iranian nuclear installations and probably a wider
> target zone."
>
> This would result in a dramatic increase in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq,
> attacks by proxy forces like Hezbollah, and an unknown reaction from the
> wobbly states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where millions admire Iran's
> resistance to the Great Satan. "As disastrous as Iraq has been," says Mann,
> "an attack on Iran could engulf America in a war with the entire Muslim
> world."
>
> Mann and Leverett believe that none of this had to be.
>
> Flynt Lawrence Leverett grew up in Fort Worth and went to Texas Christian
> University. He spent the first nine years of his government career as a CIA
> analyst specializing in the Middle East. He voted for George Bush in 2000.
> On the day the assassins of Al Qaeda flew two hijacked airplanes into the
> World Trade Center, Colin Powell summoned him to help plan the response.
> Five months later, Leverett landed a plum post on the National Security
> Council. When Condoleezza Rice discussed the Middle East with President Bush
> and Donald Rumsfeld, Leverett was the man standing behind her taking notes
> and whispering in her ear.
>
> Today, he sits on the back deck of a house tucked into the curve of a leafy
> suburban street in McLean, Virginia, a forty-nine-year-old white American
> man wearing khakis and a white dress shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. Mann
> sits next to him, also wearing khakis. She's thirty-nine but looks much
> younger, with straight brown hair and a tomboy's open face. The polish on
> her toenails is pink. If you saw her around McLean, you wouldn't hesitate:
>
> Soccer mom. Classic soccer mom.
>
> But with degrees from Brandeis and Harvard Law and stints at Tel Aviv
> University and the powerful Israeli lobby known as AIPAC, she has even
> better right-wing credentials than her husband.
>
> As they talk, eating grapes out of a bowl, lawn mowers hum and birds chirp.
> The floor is littered with toy trucks and rubber animals left behind by the
> youngest of their four children. But the tranquillity is misleading. When
> Mann and Leverett went public with the inside story behind the impending
> disaster with Iran, the White House dismissed them. Then it imposed prior
> restraint on them, an extraordinary episode of government censorship.
> Finally, it threatened them.
>
> Now they are afraid of the White House, and watching what they say. But
> still, they feel they have to speak out.
>
> Like so many things these days, this story began on the morning of September
> 11, 2001. On Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan, Mann had just been evacuated f
> rom the offices of the U.S. mission to the United Nations and was walking
> home to her apartment on Thirty-eighth Street -- walking south, toward the
> giant plume of smoke. When her cell phone rang, she picked it up immediately
> because her sister worked at the World Trade Center and she was frantic for
> word. But it wasn't her sister, it was a senior Iranian diplomat. To protect
> him from reprisals from the Iranian government, she doesn't want to name
> him, but she describes him as a cultured man in his fifties with
> salt-and-pepper hair. Since early spring, they had been meeting secretly in
> a small conference room at the UN.
>
> "Are you all right?" he asked.
>
> Yes, she said, she was fine.
>
> The attack was a terrible tragedy, he said, doubtless the work of Al Qaeda.
>
> "I hope that we can still work together," he said.
>
> That same day, in Washington, on the seventh floor of the State Department
> building, a security guard opened the door of Leverett's office and told him
> they were evacuating the building. Leverett was Powell's specialist on
> terrorist states like Syria and Libya, so he knew the world was about to go
> through a dramatic change. As he joined the people milling on the sidewalk,
> his mind was already racing.
>
> Then he got a call summoning him back to Foggy Bottom. At the entrance to a
> specially fortified office, he showed his badge to the guards and passed
> into a windowless conference room. There were about a dozen people there,
> Powell's top foreign-policy planners. Powell told them that their first job
> was to make plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The second job was to
> rally allies. That meant detailed strategies for approaching other
> nations -- in some cases, Powell could make the approach, in others the
> president would have to make the call. Then Powell left them to work through
> the night.
>
> At 5:30 a.m. on September 12, they walked the list to the office of the
> deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage. Powell took it straight to the
> White House.
>
> Mann and Leverett didn't know each other then, but they were already
> traveling down parallel tracks. Months before September 11, Mann had been
> negotiating with the Iranian diplomat at the UN. After the attacks, the
> meetings continued, sometimes alone and sometimes with their Russian
> counterpart sitting in. Soon they traded the conference room for the
> Delegates' Lounge, an airy two-story bar with ashtrays for all the
> foreigners who were used to smoking indoors. One day, up on the second floor
> where the windows overlooked the East River, the diplomat told her that Iran
> was ready to cooperate unconditionally, a phrase that had seismic diplomatic
> implications. Unconditional talks are what the U.S. had been demanding as a
> precondition to any official diplomatic contact between the U.S. and Iran.
> And it would be the first chance since the Islamic revolution for any kind
> of rapprochement. "It was revolutionary," Mann says. "It could have changed
> the world."
>
> A few weeks later, after signing on to Condoleezza Rice's staff as the new
> Iran expert in the National Security Council, Mann flew to Europe with Ryan
> Crocker -- then a deputy assistant secretary of state -- to hold talks with
> a team of Iranian diplomats. Meeting in a light-filled conference room at
> the old UN building in Geneva, they hammered out plans for Iranian help in
> the war against the Taliban. The Iranians agreed to provide assistance if
> any American was shot down near their territory, agreed to let the U.S. send
> food in through their border, and even agreed to restrain some "really bad
> Afghanis," like a rabidly anti-American warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,
> quietly putting him under house arrest in Tehran. These were significant
> concessions. At the same time, special envoy James Dobbins was having very
> public and warm discussions in Bonn with the Iranian deputy foreign minister
> as they worked together to set up a new government for Afghanistan. And the
> Iranians seemed eager to help in more tactical ways as well. They had
> intimate knowledge of Taliban strategic capabilities and they wanted to
> share it with the Americans.
>
> One day during the U.S. bombing campaign, Mann and her Iranian counterparts
> were sitting around the wooden conference table speculating about the future
> Afghani constitution. Suddenly the Iranian who knew so much about
> intelligence matters started pounding on the table. "Enough of that!" he
> shouted, unfurling a map of Afghanistan. Here was a place the Americans
> needed to bomb. And here, and here, he angrily jabbed his finger at the map.
>
> Leverett spent those days in his office at the State Department building,
> watching the revolution in the Middle East and coming up with plans on how
> to capture the lightning. Suddenly countries like Syria and Libya and Sudan
> and Iran were coming forward with offers of help, which raised a vital
> question -- should they stay on the same enemies list as North Korea and
> Iraq, or could there be a new slot for "friendly" sponsors of terror?
>
> As a CIA analyst, Leverett had come to the view that Middle Eastern
> terrorism was more tactical than religious. Syria wanted the Golan Heights
> back and didn't have the military strength to put up a serious fight against
> Israel, so it relied on "asymmetrical methods." Accepting this idea meant
> that nations like Syria weren't locked in a fanatic mind-set, that they
> could evolve to use new methods, so Leverett told Powell to seize the moment
> and draw up a "road map" to peace for the problem countries of the Middle
> East -- expel your terrorist groups and stop trying to develop weapons of
> mass destruction, and we will take you off the sponsors-of-terrorism list
> and start a new era of cooperation.
>
> That December, just after the triumph over Afghanistan, Powell took the idea
> to the White House. The occasion was the regular "deputies meeting" at the
> Situation Room. Gathered around the table were the deputy secretary of
> state, the deputy secretary of defense, the deputy director of the CIA, a
> representative from Vice-President Cheney's office, and also the deputy
> national security advisor, Stephen Hadley.
>
> Hadley hated the idea. So did the representatives from Rumsfeld and Cheney.
> They thought that it was a reward for bad behavior, that the sponsors of
> terrorism should stop just because it's the right thing to do.
>
> After the meeting, Hadley wrote up a brief memo that came to be known as
> Hadley's Rules:
>
> If a state like Syria or Iran offers specific assistance, we will take it
> without offering anything in return. We will accept it without strings or
> promises. We won't try to build on it.
>
> Leverett thought that was simply nutty. To strike postures of moral purity,
> they were throwing away a chance for real progress. But just a few days
> later, Condoleezza Rice called him into her office, warming him up with talk
> of how classical music shaped their childhoods. As he told her about the
> year he spent studying classical piano at the Liszt Academy in Budapest,
> Leverett felt a real connection. Then she said she was looking for someone
> to take the job of senior director of Mideast affairs at the National
> Security Council, someone who would take a real leadership role on the
> Palestinian issue. Big changes were coming in 2002.
>
> He repeated his firm belief that the White House had to draw up a road map
> with real solutions to the division of Jerusalem and the problem of
> refugees, something with final borders. That was the only remedy to the
> crisis in the Middle East.
>
> Just after the New Year, Rice called and offered him the job.
>
> The bowl of grapes is empty and the plate of cheese moves to the center of
> the table. Leverett's teenage son comes in with questions about a teacher.
> Periodically, Mann interrupts herself. "This is off the record," she says.
> "This is going to have to be on background."
>
> She's not allowed to talk about confidential documents or intelligence
> matters, but the topic of her negotiations with the Iranians is especially
> touchy.
>
> "As far as they're concerned, the whole idea that there were talks is
> something I shouldn't even be talking about," she says.
>
> All ranks and ranking are out. "They don't want there to be anything about
> the level of the talks or who was involved."
>
> "They won't even let us say something like 'senior' or 'important,'
> 'high-ranking,' or 'high-level,' " Leverett says.
>
> But the important thing is that the Iranians agreed to talk unconditionally,
> Mann says. "They specifically told me time and again that they were doing
> this because they understood the impact of this attack on the U.S., and they
> thought that if they helped us unconditionally, that would be the way to
> change the dynamic for the first time in twenty-five years."
>
> She believed them.
>
> But while Leverett was still moving into the Old Executive Office Building
> next to the White House, Mann was wrapped up in the crisis over a ship
> called the Karin A that left Iran loaded with fifty tons of weapons.
> According to the Israeli navy, which intercepted the Karin A in the Red Sea,
> it was headed for the PLO. In staff meetings at the White House, Mann argued
> for caution. The Iranian government probably didn't even know about the arms
> shipments. It was issuing official denials in the most passionate way, even
> sending its deputy foreign minister onto Fox News to say "categorically"
> that "all segments of the Iranian government" had nothing to do with the
> arms shipment, which meant the "total government, not simply President
> Khatami's administration."
>
> Bush waited. Three weeks later, it was time for his 2002 State of the Union
> address. Mann spent the morning in a meeting with Condoleezza Rice and the
> new president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, who kept asking Rice for an
> expanded international peacekeeping force. Rice kept saying that the Afghans
> would have to solve their own problems. Then they went off to join the
> president's motorcade and Mann headed back to her office to watch the speech
> on TV.
>
> That was the speech in which Bush linked Iran to Iraq and North Korea with a
> memorable phrase:
>
> "States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil,
> arming to threaten the peace of the world."
>
> The Iranians had been engaging in high-level diplomacy with the American
> government for more than a year, so the phrase was shocking and profound.
>
> After that, the Iranian diplomats skipped the monthly meeting in Geneva. But
> they came again in March. And so did Mann. "They said they had put their
> necks out to talk to us and they were taking big risks with their careers
> and their families and their lives," Mann says.
>
> The secret negotiations with Iran continued, every month for another year.
>
> Leverett plunged right into a dramatic new peace proposal floated by Crown
> Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Calling for "full normalization" in
> exchange for "full withdrawal" from the occupied territories, Abdullah
> promised to rally all the Arab nations to a final settlement with Israel. In
> his brand-new third-floor office at the Old Executive Office Building, a
> tiny room with a very high ceiling, Leverett began hammering out the details
> with Abdullah's foreign-policy advisor, Adel Al-Jubeir. When Ariel Sharon
> said that a return to the '67 borders was unacceptable, Al-Jubeir said the
> Saudis didn't want to be in the "real estate business" -- if the
> Palestinians agreed to border modifications, the Saudis could hardly refuse
> them. Al-Jubeir believed he had something that might actually work.
>
> But the White House wasn't interested. Sharon already rejected it, Rice told
> Leverett.
>
> At the Arab League meeting, Abdullah got every Arab state to sign his
> proposal in a unanimous vote.
>
> The White House still wasn't interested.
>
> Then violence in the Palestinian territories began to increase, climaxing in
> an Israeli siege of Arafat's compound. In April, Leverett accompanied Colin
> Powell on a tour that took them from Morocco to Egypt and Jordan and Lebanon
> and finally Israel. Twice they crossed the Israeli-army lines to visit
> Arafat under siege. Powell seemed to think he had authorization from the
> White House to explore what everyone was calling "political horizons," the
> safely vague shorthand for a peaceful future, so on the final day Leverett
> holed up in a suite at the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem with a group of
> senior American officials -- the U. . ambassador to Israel, the U. S. consul
> general to Jerusalem, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs
> Bill Burns -- trying to hammer out Powell's last speech.
>
> Then the phone rang. It was Stephen Hadley on the phone from the White
> House. "Tell Powell he is not authorized to talk about a political horizon,"
> he said. "Those are formal instructions."
>
> "This is a bad idea," Leverett remembers saying. "It's bad policy and it's
> also humiliating for Powell, who has been talking to heads of state about
> this very issue for the last ten days."
>
> "It doesn't matter," Hadley said. "There's too much resistance from Rumsfeld
> and the VP. Those are the instructions."
>
> So Leverett went back into the suite and asked Powell to step aside.
>
> Powell was furious, Leverett remembers. "What is it they're afraid of?" he
> demanded. "Who the hell are they afraid of?"
>
> "I don't know sir," Leverett said.
>
> In the spring, Crown Prince Abdullah flew to Texas to meet Bush at his
> ranch. The way Leverett remembers the story, Abdullah sat down and told Bush
> he was going to ask a direct question and wanted a direct answer. Are you
> going to do anything about the Palestinian issue? If you tell me no, if it's
> too difficult, if you're not going to give it that kind of priority, just
> tell me. I will understand and I will never say anything critical of you or
> your leadership in public, but I'm going to need to make my own judgments
> and my own decisions about Saudi interests.
>
> Bush tried to stall, saying he understood his concerns and would see what he
> could do.
>
> Abdullah stood up. "That's it. This meeting is over."
>
> No Arab leader had ever spoken to Bush like that before, Leverett says. But
> Saudi Arabia was a key ally in the war on terror, vital to the continued
> U.S. oil supply, so Bush and Rice and Powell excused themselves into another
> room for a quick huddle.
>
> When he came back, Bush gave Abdullah his word that he would deal seriously
> with the Palestinian issue.
>
> "Okay," Abdullah said. "The president of the United States has given me his
> word."
>
> So the meeting continued, ending with a famous series of photographs of Bush
> and Abdullah riding around the ranch in Bush's pickup.
>
> In a meeting at the White House a few days later, Leverett saw Powell
> shaking his head over Abdullah's threat. He called it "the near-death
> experience."
>
> Bush rolled his eyes. "We sure don't want to go through anything like that
> again."
>
> Then the king of Jordan came to Washington to see Bush. There had to be a
> road map for peace in Palestine, the king said. Despite the previous
> experience with Abdullah in Crawford, Bush seemed taken by surprise,
> Leverett remembers, but he listened and said that the idea of a road map
> seemed pretty reasonable.
>
> So suddenly they were working on a road map. For moderate Arab states, the
> hope of a two-state solution would offer some political cover before
> Washington embarked on any invasion of Iraq. In a meeting with the king of
> Jordan, Leverett made a personal promise that it would be out by the end of
> 2002.
>
> But nothing happened. In Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices, opposition came
> from men like John Hannah, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby. In Rice's office,
> there was Elliott Abrams. Again they said that negotiation was just a reward
> for bad behavior. First the Palestinians had to reject terrorism and
> practice democracy.
>
> Finally, it was a bitter-cold day just after Thanksgiving and Leverett was
> on a family trip to the Washington Zoo, standing in front of the giraffe
> enclosure. The White House patched through a call from the foreign minister
> of Jordan, Marwan Muasher, who said that Rice had just told him the road map
> was off. "Do you have any idea how this has pulled the rug out from under
> us, from under me?" Muasher said. "I'm the one that has to go into Arab
> League meetings and get beat up and say, 'No, there's going to be a plan out
> by the end of the year.' How can we ever trust you again?"
>
> On Monday, Leverett went straight to Rice's office for an explanation. She
> told him that Ariel Sharon had called early elections in Israel and asked
> Bush to shelve any Palestinian plan. This time Leverett couldn't hide his
> exasperation. "You told the whole world you were going to put this out
> before Christmas," he said. "Because one Israeli politician told you it's
> going to make things politically difficult for him, you don't put it out? Do
> you realize how hard that makes things for all our Arab partners?"
>
> Rice sat impassively behind her broad desk. "If we put the road map out,"
> she said, "it will interfere with Israeli elections."
>
> "You are interfering with Israeli elections, just in another way."
>
> "Flynt, the decision has already been made," Rice said.
>
> There was also an awkward scene with the secretary of defense. They were in
> the Situation Room and Leverett was sitting behind Rice taking notes when
> suddenly Rumsfeld addressed him directly. "Why are you laughing? Did I say
> something funny?"
>
> The room went silent, and Rumsfeld asked it again.
>
> "Why are you laughing? Did I say something funny?"
>
> "I'm sorry Mr. Secretary, I don't think I know what you're talking about."
>
> "It looks to me like you were laughing," Rumsfeld said.
>
> "No sir. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I was just listening to the
> meeting and taking notes. Didn't mean to disturb you."
>
> The meeting continued, message received.
>
> By that time, Leverett and Mann had met and fallen in love. They got married
> in February 2003, went to Florida on their honeymoon, and got back just in
> time for the Shock and Awe bombing campaign. Leverett quit his NSC job in
> disgust. Mann rotated back to the State Department.
>
> Then came the moment that would lead to an extraordinary battle with the
> Bush administration. It was an average morning in April, about four weeks
> into the war. Mann picked up her daily folder and sat down at her desk,
> glancing at a fax cover page. The fax was from the Swiss ambassador to Iran,
> which wasn't unusual -- since the U.S. had no formal relationship with Iran,
> the Swiss ambassador represented American interests there and often faxed
> over updates on what he was doing. This time he'd met with Sa-deq Kharrazi,
> a well-connected Iranian who was the nephew of the foreign minister and
> son-in-law to the supreme leader. Amazingly, Kharrazi had presented the
> ambassador with a detailed proposal for peace in the Middle East, approved
> at the highest levels in Tehran.
>
> A two-page summary was attached. Scanning it, Mann was startled by one
> dramatic concession after another -- "decisive action" against all
> terrorists in Iran, an end of support for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, a
> promise to cease its nuclear program, and also an agreement to recognize
> Israel.
>
> This was huge. Mann sat down and drafted a quick memo to her boss, Richard
> Haass. It was important to send a swift and positive response.
>
> Then she heard that the White House had already made up its mind -- it was
> going to ignore the offer. Its only response was to lodge a formal complaint
> with the Swiss government about their ambassador's meddling.
>
> A few days after that, a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia killed thirty-four
> people, including eight Americans, and an intelligence report said the
> bombers had been in phone contact with Al Qaeda members in Iran. Although it
> was unknown whether Tehran had anything to do with the bombing or if the
> terrorists were hiding out in the lawless areas near the border, Rumsfeld
> set the tone for the administration's response at his next press conference.
> "There's no question but that there have been and are today senior Al Qaeda
> leaders in Iran, and they are busy."
>
> Colin Powell saw Mann's memo. A couple weeks later he approached her at a
> State Department reception and said, "It was a very good memo. I couldn't
> sell it at the White House."
>
> In response to questions from Esquire, Colin Powell called Leverett "very
> able" and confirms much of what he says. Leverett's account of the clash
> between Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah was accurate, he said. "It was a very
> serious moment and no one wanted to see if the Saudis were bluffing." The
> same goes for the story about his speech in Israel in 2002. "I had major
> problems with the White House on what I wanted to say."
>
> On the subject of the peace offer, though, Powell was defensive. "I talked
> to all of my key assistants since Flynt started talking about an Iranian
> grand bargain, but none of us recall seeing this initiative as a grand
> bargain."
>
> On the general subject of negotiations with Iran, he responded with pointed
> politesse. "We talked to the Iranians quietly up until 2003. The president
> chose not to continue that channel."
>
> That is putting it mildly. In May of 2003, when the U.S. was still in the
> triumphant "mission accomplished" phase of the Iraq war, word started
> filtering out of the White House about an aggressive new Iran policy that
> would include efforts to destabilize the Iranian government and even to
> promote a popular uprising. In his first public statement on Iran policy
> since leaving the NSC, Leverett told The Washington Post he thought the
> White House was making a dangerous mistake. "What it means is we will end up
> with an Iran that has nuclear weapons and no dialogue with the United
> States."
>
> In the years that followed, he spoke out in dozens of newspaper editorials
> and a book, all making variations on the same argument -- America's approach
> to rogue nations was all sticks and no carrots, all economic sanctions and
> threats of war without any dialogue. "To bring about real change," he
> argued, "we must also offer concrete benefits." Of course states like Iran
> and Syria messed around in Iraq, he said. Iran was supporting the Iraqi
> opposition when the U.S. was still supporting Saddam Hussein. It was insane
> to expect them to stop when the goal of a Shiite Iraq was finally in reach.
> The only way to solve the underlying issues was to offer Iran a "grand
> bargain" that would recognize the legitimacy of Iran's government and its
> right to a role in the region.
>
> But that was an unthinkable thought. The White House ignored him. Democrats
> ignored him. The Brookings Institution declined to renew his contract.
>
> Then he started talking about the peace offer. By then it was 2006 and the
> war wasn't going well and suddenly people started to respond: You mean Iran
> isn't evil? They helped fight the Taliban? They wanted to make peace? He
> summed it all up in a long paper for a Washington think tank that happened
> to be scheduled for publication last November, a vulnerable time for the
> White House, just after the Democrats swept the midterm elections and the
> Iraq Study Group released its report calling for negotiations with Syria and
> Iran. When he submitted the paper to the CIA for a routine review, they told
> him the CIA had no problem with it but someone from the NSC called to
> complain. "You shouldn't have cleared this without letting the White House
> take a look at it," the official said.
>
> Leverett told them he wasn't going to let White House operatives judge his
> criticisms of White House operatives and distilled his argument into an
> op-ed piece for The New York Times. This time he shared a byline with his
> wife, who had experienced the peace offer up close. They submitted their
> first draft to the CIA and the State Department on a Sunday in early
> December, expecting to hear back the next day.
>
> The next morning, Leverett gave a blistering talk on Bush's Iran policy to
> the influential conservatives at the Cato Institute. The speech was carried
> live on C-SPAN. Later that day, he flew to New York and made the same
> arguments at a private dinner with the UN ambassadors of Russia and Britain.
> He was starting to have an impact.
>
> By Tuesday, he still hadn't heard from the CIA review board.
>
> They called on Wednesday and told him that there was nothing classified in
> the piece as far as the agency was concerned, but someone in the West Wing
> wasn't happy with it and would be redacting large sections.
>
> "You're the clearing agency," Leverett said. "You're the people named in my
> agreement."
>
> They said their hands were tied.
>
> After consulting a lawyer, Leverett and Mann and a researcher worked through
> the night to assemble a list of public sources where the blacked-out
> material had already been published. They also took out one line that might
> have been based on a classified document.
>
> But the White House wouldn't budge. It was a First Amendment showdown.
>
> On Thursday, Leverett and Mann decided to publish the piece with large
> sections of type blacked out, 168 words in all. Since the piece had been
> rendered pretty much incomprehensible, they included a list of public
> sources. "To make sense of our op-ed article, readers will have to look up
> the citations themselves."
>
> As they tell their story, Mann rushes off to pick up one of their sons from
> a play date and Leverett takes over, telling what happened over the
> following months:
>
> Bush sent a second carrier group to the Persian Gulf.
>
> U.S. troops started to arrest Iranians living in Baghdad, accusing them of
> working with insurgents.
>
> Bush accused Iran of "providing material support" for attacks on U.S.
> forces, a formulation that suggested a legal justification for a preemptive
> attack.
>
> Senator Jim Webb of Virginia pushed through an amendment requiring Bush to
> get congressional authorization for an attack.
>
> Colin Powell broke his long silence with a pointed warning. "You can't
> negotiate when you tell the other side, 'Give us what a negotiation would
> produce before the negotiations start.' "
>
> Even Henry Kissinger started giving interviews on the need to "exhaust every
> possibility to come to an understanding with Iran."
>
> From inside the White House, Leverett was hearing a scary scenario: The
> Russians were scheduled to ship fuel rods to the Iranian nuclear reactor in
> Bushehr, which meant the reactor would become operational by this November,
> at which point it would be impossible to bomb -- the fallout alone would
> turn the city into an urban Chernobyl. The White House was seriously
> considering a preemptive attack when the Russians cooled things down by
> saying Iran hadn't paid its bills, so they would hold back the Bushehr fuel
> rods for a while.
>
> That put things into a summer lull. But by August, tensions were rising
> again. U.S. troops in Baghdad arrested an official delegation of Iranian
> energy experts, leading them out of a hotel in blindfolds and handcuffs.
> Then Iran said that it had paid its bills and that the Russians were ready
> to deliver the Bushehr shipment. In Time magazine, former CIA officer and
> author Robert Baer quoted a highly placed White House official:
>
> "IEDs are a casus belli for this administration. There will be an attack on
> Iran."
>
> Mann steps back out on the deck and starts collecting the scattered toys to
> prepare the house for a dinner party, the typical modern American mother
> multitasking her way through a busy day. "The reason I have to be so careful
> now is that I'm legally on notice and they will prosecute things that I say
> or do," she says, picking up a plastic truck.
>
> "Because of that one article?"
>
> "Yeah."
>
> Outside, it's getting warmer. There's a heavy haze and floating bugs and for
> a moment it feels a bit ominous, a gathering silence, one of those moments
> when giant pods start to sprout in local basements.
>
> "We're tired," Mann says. "Nobody listens."
>
> It seems inconceivable to her that once again a war could be coming, and
> once again no one is listening. Another pair of lawn mowers joins the chorus
> and the spell breaks. A cab pulls in the driveway. The caterer comes to
> prepare for the dinner guests.
>
> Find this article at:http://www.esquire.com/features/iranbriefing1107
>
> --
> +
>
> Pucker your lips for the Apocalypse!
>
> Johnny Asia, Guitarist from the Futurehttp://music.download.com/johnnyasia
>
> "These are the times that try men's souls." - Thomas Paine
Here is the link without the racy pictures:
http://www.esquire.com/print-this/iranbriefing1107
> The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House
> Doesn't Want You to Know
>
> Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Administration say the
> U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming
> otherwise. It'll be Iraq all over again.
> Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Adminstration say the
> U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming
> otherwise. It'll be Iraq all over again.
>
> In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the
> highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for
> the National Security Council. Mann conducted secret negotiations with Iran.
> Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza Rice. They each
> played crucial roles in formulating policy for the region leading up to the
> war in Iraq. But when they left the White House, they left with a growing
> sense of alarm -- not only was the Bush administration headed straight for
> war with Iran, it had been set on this course for years. That was what
> people didn't realize. It was just like Iraq, when the White House was so
> eager for war it couldn't wait for the UN inspectors to leave. The steps
> have been many and steady and all in the same direction. And now things are
> getting much worse. We are getting closer and closer to the tripline, they
> say.
>
> "The hard-liners are upping the pressure on the State Department," says
> Leverett. "They're basically saying, 'You've been trying to engage Iran for
> more than a year now and what do you have to show for it? They keep building
> more centrifuges, they're sending this IED stuff over into Iraq that's
> killing American soldiers, the human-rights internal political situation has
> gotten more repressive -- what the hell do you have to show for this
> engagement strategy?' "
>
> But the engagement strategy was never serious and was designed to fail, they
> say. Over the last year, Rice has begun saying she would talk to "anybody,
> anywhere, anytime," but not to the Iranians unless they stopped enriching
> uranium first. That's not a serious approach to diplomacy, Mann says.
> Diplomacy is about talking to your enemies. That's how wars are averted. You
> work up to the big things. And when U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had
> his much-publicized meeting with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad this
> spring, he didn't even have permission from the White House to schedule a
> second meeting.
>
> The most ominous new development is the Bush administration's push to name
> the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization.
>
> "The U.S. has designated any number of states over the years as state
> sponsors of terrorism," says Leverett. "But here for the first time the U.S.
> is saying that part of a government is itself a terrorist organization."
>
> This is what Leverett and Mann fear will happen: The diplomatic effort in
> the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia's and China's
> geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience of energy
> sanctions against Iran. Without any meaningful incentive from the U.S. to be
> friendly, Iran will keep meddling in Iraq and installing nuclear
> centrifuges. This will trigger a response from the hard-liners in the White
> House, who feel that it is their moral duty to deal with Iran before the
> Democrats take over American foreign policy. "If you get all those elements
> coming together, say in the first half of '08," says Leverett, "what is this
> president going to do? I think there is a serious risk he would decide to
> order an attack on the Iranian nuclear installations and probably a wider
> target zone."
>
> This would result in a dramatic increase in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq,
> attacks by proxy forces like Hezbollah, and an unknown reaction from the
> wobbly states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where millions admire Iran's
> resistance to the Great Satan. "As disastrous as Iraq has been," says Mann,
> "an attack on Iran could engulf America in a war with the entire Muslim
> world."
>
> Mann and Leverett believe that none of this had to be.
>
> Flynt Lawrence Leverett grew up in Fort Worth and went to Texas Christian
> University. He spent the first nine years of his government career as a CIA
> analyst specializing in the Middle East. He voted for George Bush in 2000.
> On the day the assassins of Al Qaeda flew two hijacked airplanes into the
> World Trade Center, Colin Powell summoned him to help plan the response.
> Five months later, Leverett landed a plum post on the National Security
> Council. When Condoleezza Rice discussed the Middle East with President Bush
> and Donald Rumsfeld, Leverett was the man standing behind her taking notes
> and whispering in her ear.
>
> Today, he sits on the back deck of a house tucked into the curve of a leafy
> suburban street in McLean, Virginia, a forty-nine-year-old white American
> man wearing khakis and a white dress shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. Mann
> sits next to him, also wearing khakis. She's thirty-nine but looks much
> younger, with straight brown hair and a tomboy's open face. The polish on
> her toenails is pink. If you saw her around McLean, you wouldn't hesitate:
>
> Soccer mom. Classic soccer mom.
>
> But with degrees from Brandeis and Harvard Law and stints at Tel Aviv
> University and the powerful Israeli lobby known as AIPAC, she has even
> better right-wing credentials than her husband.
>
> As they talk, eating grapes out of a bowl, lawn mowers hum and birds chirp.
> The floor is littered with toy trucks and rubber animals left behind by the
> youngest of their four children. But the tranquillity is misleading. When
> Mann and Leverett went public with the inside story behind the impending
> disaster with Iran, the White House dismissed them. Then it imposed prior
> restraint on them, an extraordinary episode of government censorship.
> Finally, it threatened them.
>
> Now they are afraid of the White House, and watching what they say. But
> still, they feel they have to speak out.
>
> Like so many things these days, this story began on the morning of September
> 11, 2001. On Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan, Mann had just been evacuated f
> rom the offices of the U.S. mission to the United Nations and was walking
> home to her apartment on Thirty-eighth Street -- walking south, toward the
> giant plume of smoke. When her cell phone rang, she picked it up immediately
> because her sister worked at the World Trade Center and she was frantic for
> word. But it wasn't her sister, it was a senior Iranian diplomat. To protect
> him from reprisals from the Iranian government, she doesn't want to name
> him, but she describes him as a cultured man in his fifties with
> salt-and-pepper hair. Since early spring, they had been meeting secretly in
> a small conference room at the UN.
>
> "Are you all right?" he asked.
>
> Yes, she said, she was fine.
>
> The attack was a terrible tragedy, he said, doubtless the work of Al Qaeda.
>
> "I hope that we can still work together," he said.
>
> That same day, in Washington, on the seventh floor of the State Department
> building, a security guard opened the door of Leverett's office and told him
> they were evacuating the building. Leverett was Powell's specialist on
> terrorist states like Syria and Libya, so he knew the world was about to go
> through a dramatic change. As he joined the people milling on the sidewalk,
> his mind was already racing.
>
> Then he got a call summoning him back to Foggy Bottom. At the entrance to a
> specially fortified office, he showed his badge to the guards and passed
> into a windowless conference room. There were about a dozen people there,
> Powell's top foreign-policy planners. Powell told them that their first job
> was to make plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The second job was to
> rally allies. That meant detailed strategies for approaching other
> nations -- in some cases, Powell could make the approach, in others the
> president would have to make the call. Then Powell left them to work through
> the night.
>
> At 5:30 a.m. on September 12, they walked the list to the office of the
> deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage. Powell took it straight to the
> White House.
>
> Mann and Leverett didn't know each other then, but they were already
> traveling down parallel tracks. Months before September 11, Mann had been
> negotiating with the Iranian diplomat at the UN. After the attacks, the
> meetings continued, sometimes alone and sometimes with their Russian
> counterpart sitting in. Soon they traded the conference room for the
> Delegates' Lounge, an airy two-story bar with ashtrays for all the
> foreigners who were used to smoking indoors. One day, up on the second floor
> where the windows overlooked the East River, the diplomat told her that Iran
> was ready to cooperate unconditionally, a phrase that had seismic diplomatic
> implications. Unconditional talks are what the U.S. had been demanding as a
> precondition to any official diplomatic contact between the U.S. and Iran.
> And it would be the first chance since the Islamic revolution for any kind
> of rapprochement. "It was revolutionary," Mann says. "It could have changed
> the world."
>
> A few weeks later, after signing on to Condoleezza Rice's staff as the new
> Iran expert in the National Security Council, Mann flew to Europe with Ryan
> Crocker -- then a deputy assistant secretary of state -- to hold talks with
> a team of Iranian diplomats. Meeting in a light-filled conference room at
> the old UN building in Geneva, they hammered out plans for Iranian help in
> the war against the Taliban. The Iranians agreed to provide assistance if
> any American was shot down near their territory, agreed to let the U.S. send
> food in through their border, and even agreed to restrain some "really bad
> Afghanis," like a rabidly anti-American warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,
> quietly putting him under house arrest in Tehran. These were significant
> concessions. At the same time, special envoy James Dobbins was having very
> public and warm discussions in Bonn with the Iranian deputy foreign minister
> as they worked together to set up a new government for Afghanistan. And the
> Iranians seemed eager to help in more tactical ways as well. They had
> intimate knowledge of Taliban strategic capabilities and they wanted to
> share it with the Americans.
>
> One day during the U.S. bombing campaign, Mann and her Iranian counterparts
> were sitting around the wooden conference table speculating about the future
> Afghani constitution. Suddenly the Iranian who knew so much about
> intelligence matters started pounding on the table. "Enough of that!" he
> shouted, unfurling a map of Afghanistan. Here was a place the Americans
> needed to bomb. And here, and here, he angrily jabbed his finger at the map.
>
> Leverett spent those days in his office at the State Department building,
> watching the revolution in the Middle East and coming up with plans on how
> to capture the lightning. Suddenly countries like Syria and Libya and Sudan
> and Iran were coming forward with offers of help, which raised a vital
> question -- should they stay on the same enemies list as North Korea and
> Iraq, or could there be a new slot for "friendly" sponsors of terror?
>
> As a CIA analyst, Leverett had come to the view that Middle Eastern
> terrorism was more tactical than religious. Syria wanted the Golan Heights
> back and didn't have the military strength to put up a serious fight against
> Israel, so it relied on "asymmetrical methods." Accepting this idea meant
> that nations like Syria weren't locked in a fanatic mind-set, that they
> could evolve to use new methods, so Leverett told Powell to seize the moment
> and draw up a "road map" to peace for the problem countries of the Middle
> East -- expel your terrorist groups and stop trying to develop weapons of
> mass destruction, and we will take you off the sponsors-of-terrorism list
> and start a new era of cooperation.
>
> That December, just after the triumph over Afghanistan, Powell took the idea
> to the White House. The occasion was the regular "deputies meeting" at the
> Situation Room. Gathered around the table were the deputy secretary of
> state, the deputy secretary of defense, the deputy director of the CIA, a
> representative from Vice-President Cheney's office, and also the deputy
> national security advisor, Stephen Hadley.
>
> Hadley hated the idea. So did the representatives from Rumsfeld and Cheney.
> They thought that it was a reward for bad behavior, that the sponsors of
> terrorism should stop just because it's the right thing to do.
>
> After the meeting, Hadley wrote up a brief memo that came to be known as
> Hadley's Rules:
>
> If a state like Syria or Iran offers specific assistance, we will take it
> without offering anything in return. We will accept it without strings or
> promises. We won't try to build on it.
>
> Leverett thought that was simply nutty. To strike postures of moral purity,
> they were throwing away a chance for real progress. But just a few days
> later, Condoleezza Rice called him into her office, warming him up with talk
> of how classical music shaped their childhoods. As he told her about the
> year he spent studying classical piano at the Liszt Academy in Budapest,
> Leverett felt a real connection. Then she said she was looking for someone
> to take the job of senior director of Mideast affairs at the National
> Security Council, someone who would take a real leadership role on the
> Palestinian issue. Big changes were coming in 2002.
>
> He repeated his firm belief that the White House had to draw up a road map
> with real solutions to the division of Jerusalem and the problem of
> refugees, something with final borders. That was the only remedy to the
> crisis in the Middle East.
>
> Just after the New Year, Rice called and offered him the job.
>
> The bowl of grapes is empty and the plate of cheese moves to the center of
> the table. Leverett's teenage son comes in with questions about a teacher.
> Periodically, Mann interrupts herself. "This is off the record," she says.
> "This is going to have to be on background."
>
> She's not allowed to talk about confidential documents or intelligence
> matters, but the topic of her negotiations with the Iranians is especially
> touchy.
>
> "As far as they're concerned, the whole idea that there were talks is
> something I shouldn't even be talking about," she says.
>
> All ranks and ranking are out. "They don't want there to be anything about
> the level of the talks or who was involved."
>
> "They won't even let us say something like 'senior' or 'important,'
> 'high-ranking,' or 'high-level,' " Leverett says.
>
> But the important thing is that the Iranians agreed to talk unconditionally,
> Mann says. "They specifically told me time and again that they were doing
> this because they understood the impact of this attack on the U.S., and they
> thought that if they helped us unconditionally, that would be the way to
> change the dynamic for the first time in twenty-five years."
>
> She believed them.
>
> But while Leverett was still moving into the Old Executive Office Building
> next to the White House, Mann was wrapped up in the crisis over a ship
> called the Karin A that left Iran loaded with fifty tons of weapons.
> According to the Israeli navy, which intercepted the Karin A in the Red Sea,
> it was headed for the PLO. In staff meetings at the White House, Mann argued
> for caution. The Iranian government probably didn't even know about the arms
> shipments. It was issuing official denials in the most passionate way, even
> sending its deputy foreign minister onto Fox News to say "categorically"
> that "all segments of the Iranian government" had nothing to do with the
> arms shipment, which meant the "total government, not simply President
> Khatami's administration."
>
> Bush waited. Three weeks later, it was time for his 2002 State of the Union
> address. Mann spent the morning in a meeting with Condoleezza Rice and the
> new president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, who kept asking Rice for an
> expanded international peacekeeping force. Rice kept saying that the Afghans
> would have to solve their own problems. Then they went off to join the
> president's motorcade and Mann headed back to her office to watch the speech
> on TV.
>
> That was the speech in which Bush linked Iran to Iraq and North Korea with a
> memorable phrase:
>
> "States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil,
> arming to threaten the peace of the world."
>
> The Iranians had been engaging in high-level diplomacy with the American
> government for more than a year, so the phrase was shocking and profound.
>
> After that, the Iranian diplomats skipped the monthly meeting in Geneva. But
> they came again in March. And so did Mann. "They said they had put their
> necks out to talk to us and they were taking big risks with their careers
> and their families and their lives," Mann says.
>
> The secret negotiations with Iran continued, every month for another year.
>
> Leverett plunged right into a dramatic new peace proposal floated by Crown
> Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Calling for "full normalization" in
> exchange for "full withdrawal" from the occupied territories, Abdullah
> promised to rally all the Arab nations to a final settlement with Israel. In
> his brand-new third-floor office at the Old Executive Office Building, a
> tiny room with a very high ceiling, Leverett began hammering out the details
> with Abdullah's foreign-policy advisor, Adel Al-Jubeir. When Ariel Sharon
> said that a return to the '67 borders was unacceptable, Al-Jubeir said the
> Saudis didn't want to be in the "real estate business" -- if the
> Palestinians agreed to border modifications, the Saudis could hardly refuse
> them. Al-Jubeir believed he had something that might actually work.
>
> But the White House wasn't interested. Sharon already rejected it, Rice told
> Leverett.
>
> At the Arab League meeting, Abdullah got every Arab state to sign his
> proposal in a unanimous vote.
>
> The White House still wasn't interested.
>
> Then violence in the Palestinian territories began to increase, climaxing in
> an Israeli siege of Arafat's compound. In April, Leverett accompanied Colin
> Powell on a tour that took them from Morocco to Egypt and Jordan and Lebanon
> and finally Israel. Twice they crossed the Israeli-army lines to visit
> Arafat under siege. Powell seemed to think he had authorization from the
> White House to explore what everyone was calling "political horizons," the
> safely vague shorthand for a peaceful future, so on the final day Leverett
> holed up in a suite at the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem with a group of
> senior American officials -- the U. . ambassador to Israel, the U. S. consul
> general to Jerusalem, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs
> Bill Burns -- trying to hammer out Powell's last speech.
>
> Then the phone rang. It was Stephen Hadley on the phone from the White
> House. "Tell Powell he is not authorized to talk about a political horizon,"
> he said. "Those are formal instructions."
>
> "This is a bad idea," Leverett remembers saying. "It's bad policy and it's
> also humiliating for Powell, who has been talking to heads of state about
> this very issue for the last ten days."
>
> "It doesn't matter," Hadley said. "There's too much resistance from Rumsfeld
> and the VP. Those are the instructions."
>
> So Leverett went back into the suite and asked Powell to step aside.
>
> Powell was furious, Leverett remembers. "What is it they're afraid of?" he
> demanded. "Who the hell are they afraid of?"
>
> "I don't know sir," Leverett said.
>
> In the spring, Crown Prince Abdullah flew to Texas to meet Bush at his
> ranch. The way Leverett remembers the story, Abdullah sat down and told Bush
> he was going to ask a direct question and wanted a direct answer. Are you
> going to do anything about the Palestinian issue? If you tell me no, if it's
> too difficult, if you're not going to give it that kind of priority, just
> tell me. I will understand and I will never say anything critical of you or
> your leadership in public, but I'm going to need to make my own judgments
> and my own decisions about Saudi interests.
>
> Bush tried to stall, saying he understood his concerns and would see what he
> could do.
>
> Abdullah stood up. "That's it. This meeting is over."
>
> No Arab leader had ever spoken to Bush like that before, Leverett says. But
> Saudi Arabia was a key ally in the war on terror, vital to the continued
> U.S. oil supply, so Bush and Rice and Powell excused themselves into another
> room for a quick huddle.
>
> When he came back, Bush gave Abdullah his word that he would deal seriously
> with the Palestinian issue.
>
> "Okay," Abdullah said. "The president of the United States has given me his
> word."
>
> So the meeting continued, ending with a famous series of photographs of Bush
> and Abdullah riding around the ranch in Bush's pickup.
>
> In a meeting at the White House a few days later, Leverett saw Powell
> shaking his head over Abdullah's threat. He called it "the near-death
> experience."
>
> Bush rolled his eyes. "We sure don't want to go through anything like that
> again."
>
> Then the king of Jordan came to Washington to see Bush. There had to be a
> road map for peace in Palestine, the king said. Despite the previous
> experience with Abdullah in Crawford, Bush seemed taken by surprise,
> Leverett remembers, but he listened and said that the idea of a road map
> seemed pretty reasonable.
>
> So suddenly they were working on a road map. For moderate Arab states, the
> hope of a two-state solution would offer some political cover before
> Washington embarked on any invasion of Iraq. In a meeting with the king of
> Jordan, Leverett made a personal promise that it would be out by the end of
> 2002.
>
> But nothing happened. In Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices, opposition came
> from men like John Hannah, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby. In Rice's office,
> there was Elliott Abrams. Again they said that negotiation was just a reward
> for bad behavior. First the Palestinians had to reject terrorism and
> practice democracy.
>
> Finally, it was a bitter-cold day just after Thanksgiving and Leverett was
> on a family trip to the Washington Zoo, standing in front of the giraffe
> enclosure. The White House patched through a call from the foreign minister
> of Jordan, Marwan Muasher, who said that Rice had just told him the road map
> was off. "Do you have any idea how this has pulled the rug out from under
> us, from under me?" Muasher said. "I'm the one that has to go into Arab
> League meetings and get beat up and say, 'No, there's going to be a plan out
> by the end of the year.' How can we ever trust you again?"
>
> On Monday, Leverett went straight to Rice's office for an explanation. She
> told him that Ariel Sharon had called early elections in Israel and asked
> Bush to shelve any Palestinian plan. This time Leverett couldn't hide his
> exasperation. "You told the whole world you were going to put this out
> before Christmas," he said. "Because one Israeli politician told you it's
> going to make things politically difficult for him, you don't put it out? Do
> you realize how hard that makes things for all our Arab partners?"
>
> Rice sat impassively behind her broad desk. "If we put the road map out,"
> she said, "it will interfere with Israeli elections."
>
> "You are interfering with Israeli elections, just in another way."
>
> "Flynt, the decision has already been made," Rice said.
>
> There was also an awkward scene with the secretary of defense. They were in
> the Situation Room and Leverett was sitting behind Rice taking notes when
> suddenly Rumsfeld addressed him directly. "Why are you laughing? Did I say
> something funny?"
>
> The room went silent, and Rumsfeld asked it again.
>
> "Why are you laughing? Did I say something funny?"
>
> "I'm sorry Mr. Secretary, I don't think I know what you're talking about."
>
> "It looks to me like you were laughing," Rumsfeld said.
>
> "No sir. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I was just listening to the
> meeting and taking notes. Didn't mean to disturb you."
>
> The meeting continued, message received.
>
> By that time, Leverett and Mann had met and fallen in love. They got married
> in February 2003, went to Florida on their honeymoon, and got back just in
> time for the Shock and Awe bombing campaign. Leverett quit his NSC job in
> disgust. Mann rotated back to the State Department.
>
> Then came the moment that would lead to an extraordinary battle with the
> Bush administration. It was an average morning in April, about four weeks
> into the war. Mann picked up her daily folder and sat down at her desk,
> glancing at a fax cover page. The fax was from the Swiss ambassador to Iran,
> which wasn't unusual -- since the U.S. had no formal relationship with Iran,
> the Swiss ambassador represented American interests there and often faxed
> over updates on what he was doing. This time he'd met with Sa-deq Kharrazi,
> a well-connected Iranian who was the nephew of the foreign minister and
> son-in-law to the supreme leader. Amazingly, Kharrazi had presented the
> ambassador with a detailed proposal for peace in the Middle East, approved
> at the highest levels in Tehran.
>
> A two-page summary was attached. Scanning it, Mann was startled by one
> dramatic concession after another -- "decisive action" against all
> terrorists in Iran, an end of support for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, a
> promise to cease its nuclear program, and also an agreement to recognize
> Israel.
>
> This was huge. Mann sat down and drafted a quick memo to her boss, Richard
> Haass. It was important to send a swift and positive response.
>
> Then she heard that the White House had already made up its mind -- it was
> going to ignore the offer. Its only response was to lodge a formal complaint
> with the Swiss government about their ambassador's meddling.
>
> A few days after that, a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia killed thirty-four
> people, including eight Americans, and an intelligence report said the
> bombers had been in phone contact with Al Qaeda members in Iran. Although it
> was unknown whether Tehran had anything to do with the bombing or if the
> terrorists were hiding out in the lawless areas near the border, Rumsfeld
> set the tone for the administration's response at his next press conference.
> "There's no question but that there have been and are today senior Al Qaeda
> leaders in Iran, and they are busy."
>
> Colin Powell saw Mann's memo. A couple weeks later he approached her at a
> State Department reception and said, "It was a very good memo. I couldn't
> sell it at the White House."
>
> In response to questions from Esquire, Colin Powell called Leverett "very
> able" and confirms much of what he says. Leverett's account of the clash
> between Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah was accurate, he said. "It was a very
> serious moment and no one wanted to see if the Saudis were bluffing." The
> same goes for the story about his speech in Israel in 2002. "I had major
> problems with the White House on what I wanted to say."
>
> On the subject of the peace offer, though, Powell was defensive. "I talked
> to all of my key assistants since Flynt started talking about an Iranian
> grand bargain, but none of us recall seeing this initiative as a grand
> bargain."
>
> On the general subject of negotiations with Iran, he responded with pointed
> politesse. "We talked to the Iranians quietly up until 2003. The president
> chose not to continue that channel."
>
> That is putting it mildly. In May of 2003, when the U.S. was still in the
> triumphant "mission accomplished" phase of the Iraq war, word started
> filtering out of the White House about an aggressive new Iran policy that
> would include efforts to destabilize the Iranian government and even to
> promote a popular uprising. In his first public statement on Iran policy
> since leaving the NSC, Leverett told The Washington Post he thought the
> White House was making a dangerous mistake. "What it means is we will end up
> with an Iran that has nuclear weapons and no dialogue with the United
> States."
>
> In the years that followed, he spoke out in dozens of newspaper editorials
> and a book, all making variations on the same argument -- America's approach
> to rogue nations was all sticks and no carrots, all economic sanctions and
> threats of war without any dialogue. "To bring about real change," he
> argued, "we must also offer concrete benefits." Of course states like Iran
> and Syria messed around in Iraq, he said. Iran was supporting the Iraqi
> opposition when the U.S. was still supporting Saddam Hussein. It was insane
> to expect them to stop when the goal of a Shiite Iraq was finally in reach.
> The only way to solve the underlying issues was to offer Iran a "grand
> bargain" that would recognize the legitimacy of Iran's government and its
> right to a role in the region.
>
> But that was an unthinkable thought. The White House ignored him. Democrats
> ignored him. The Brookings Institution declined to renew his contract.
>
> Then he started talking about the peace offer. By then it was 2006 and the
> war wasn't going well and suddenly people started to respond: You mean Iran
> isn't evil? They helped fight the Taliban? They wanted to make peace? He
> summed it all up in a long paper for a Washington think tank that happened
> to be scheduled for publication last November, a vulnerable time for the
> White House, just after the Democrats swept the midterm elections and the
> Iraq Study Group released its report calling for negotiations with Syria and
> Iran. When he submitted the paper to the CIA for a routine review, they told
> him the CIA had no problem with it but someone from the NSC called to
> complain. "You shouldn't have cleared this without letting the White House
> take a look at it," the official said.
>
> Leverett told them he wasn't going to let White House operatives judge his
> criticisms of White House operatives and distilled his argument into an
> op-ed piece for The New York Times. This time he shared a byline with his
> wife, who had experienced the peace offer up close. They submitted their
> first draft to the CIA and the State Department on a Sunday in early
> December, expecting to hear back the next day.
>
> The next morning, Leverett gave a blistering talk on Bush's Iran policy to
> the influential conservatives at the Cato Institute. The speech was carried
> live on C-SPAN. Later that day, he flew to New York and made the same
> arguments at a private dinner with the UN ambassadors of Russia and Britain.
> He was starting to have an impact.
>
> By Tuesday, he still hadn't heard from the CIA review board.
>
> They called on Wednesday and told him that there was nothing classified in
> the piece as far as the agency was concerned, but someone in the West Wing
> wasn't happy with it and would be redacting large sections.
>
> "You're the clearing agency," Leverett said. "You're the people named in my
> agreement."
>
> They said their hands were tied.
>
> After consulting a lawyer, Leverett and Mann and a researcher worked through
> the night to assemble a list of public sources where the blacked-out
> material had already been published. They also took out one line that might
> have been based on a classified document.
>
> But the White House wouldn't budge. It was a First Amendment showdown.
>
> On Thursday, Leverett and Mann decided to publish the piece with large
> sections of type blacked out, 168 words in all. Since the piece had been
> rendered pretty much incomprehensible, they included a list of public
> sources. "To make sense of our op-ed article, readers will have to look up
> the citations themselves."
>
> As they tell their story, Mann rushes off to pick up one of their sons from
> a play date and Leverett takes over, telling what happened over the
> following months:
>
> Bush sent a second carrier group to the Persian Gulf.
>
> U.S. troops started to arrest Iranians living in Baghdad, accusing them of
> working with insurgents.
>
> Bush accused Iran of "providing material support" for attacks on U.S.
> forces, a formulation that suggested a legal justification for a preemptive
> attack.
>
> Senator Jim Webb of Virginia pushed through an amendment requiring Bush to
> get congressional authorization for an attack.
>
> Colin Powell broke his long silence with a pointed warning. "You can't
> negotiate when you tell the other side, 'Give us what a negotiation would
> produce before the negotiations start.' "
>
> Even Henry Kissinger started giving interviews on the need to "exhaust every
> possibility to come to an understanding with Iran."
>
> From inside the White House, Leverett was hearing a scary scenario: The
> Russians were scheduled to ship fuel rods to the Iranian nuclear reactor in
> Bushehr, which meant the reactor would become operational by this November,
> at which point it would be impossible to bomb -- the fallout alone would
> turn the city into an urban Chernobyl. The White House was seriously
> considering a preemptive attack when the Russians cooled things down by
> saying Iran hadn't paid its bills, so they would hold back the Bushehr fuel
> rods for a while.
>
> That put things into a summer lull. But by August, tensions were rising
> again. U.S. troops in Baghdad arrested an official delegation of Iranian
> energy experts, leading them out of a hotel in blindfolds and handcuffs.
> Then Iran said that it had paid its bills and that the Russians were ready
> to deliver the Bushehr shipment. In Time magazine, former CIA officer and
> author Robert Baer quoted a highly placed White House official:
>
> "IEDs are a casus belli for this administration. There will be an attack on
> Iran."
>
> Mann steps back out on the deck and starts collecting the scattered toys to
> prepare the house for a dinner party, the typical modern American mother
> multitasking her way through a busy day. "The reason I have to be so careful
> now is that I'm legally on notice and they will prosecute things that I say
> or do," she says, picking up a plastic truck.
>
> "Because of that one article?"
>
> "Yeah."
>
> Outside, it's getting warmer. There's a heavy haze and floating bugs and for
> a moment it feels a bit ominous, a gathering silence, one of those moments
> when giant pods start to sprout in local basements.
>
> "We're tired," Mann says. "Nobody listens."
>
> It seems inconceivable to her that once again a war could be coming, and
> once again no one is listening. Another pair of lawn mowers joins the chorus
> and the spell breaks. A cab pulls in the driveway. The caterer comes to
> prepare for the dinner guests.
>
> Find this article at:http://www.esquire.com/features/iranbriefing1107
>
> --
> +
>
> Pucker your lips for the Apocalypse!
>
> Johnny Asia, Guitarist from the Futurehttp://music.download.com/johnnyasia
>
> "These are the times that try men's souls." - Thomas Paine
Here is the link without the racy pictures:
http://www.esquire.com/print-this/iranbriefing1107