Iran could be among our best allies

Posted by Joshua Holland at 1:56 PM on February 27, 2007.

Newsweek caught on to a point I made a couple of weeks ago about the administration's saber-rattling towards Iran. Of the ominous-sounding "Quds Force," Christopher Dickey and John Barry write:

...the unit appears to be as close to America's Shiite and Kurdish allies as to splinter groups accused of killing perhaps 170 of the more than 3,000 American soldiers who've died in Iraq. The relationship between the Quds Force and figures like Iraqi President Jalal Talabani or Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (both of whom have been received in the White House recently) goes back two decades to the days when only Tehran was aiding Saddam Hussein's enemies.

Bien. We knew that. But I hadn't realized that we've been on the same side as the Quds Force in several other conflicts as well. According to Newsweek:

[Quds] supported the legendary Ahmed Shah Massoud against the Russians and his Taliban rivals in Afghanistan...

As did we!

... [and] Quds helped the Bosnians hold back the Serbian war machine.

We did too!

And let's not forget Iran/ Contra, although I wouldn't use "we" in that context.

Of course, they've also reportedly supported Hezbollah, a group our government thinks is quite bad. But still, we've been on the same side as the Quds Force for three of our past four conflicts - not including Haiti. Oh, and the recent bombing of Somalia. And the earlier invasion of Somalia -- oh, it gets so hard to keep track sometimes, but you know what I mean. (It's still been 102 years since Iran invaded anyone.)

Think about that, and also recall the point Juan Cole made:

In 2003, Iran offered to come in from the cold in a proposal to George W. Bush. Recognition of Israel within 1967 borders, pressure on Hizbullah and the Palestinians to moderate, signing the additional protocols of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, it was all there for Bush's taking.

What did Bush do?

He reprimanded the Swiss embassy, which takes care of US affairs in Iran, for daring to forward this proposal to Crawford on the Potomac.

Then there was this recently:

CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour recently traveled in Iran, and here she recaps a conversation with a top government official.

Tehran - As I sat down recently with a senior Iranian government official, he urgently waved a column by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times in my face, one about how the United States and Iran need to engage each other.

"Natural allies," this official said.

It was a surprising choice of words considering the barbs Washington and Tehran have been trading of late.

"We are not after conflict. We are not after crisis. We are not after war," said this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But we don't know whether the same is true in the U.S. or not. If the same is true on the U.S. side, the first step must be to end this vicious cycle that can lead to dangerous action - war."

He confided that what he was telling me was not shared by all in the Iranian government, but it was endorsed so high up in the religious leadership that he felt confident spelling out the rationale.

"This view is not off the streets. It's not the reformist view and it's not even the view of the whole government," he replied.

But he insisted he was describing the thinking at the highest levels of the religious leadership - the center of decision-making power in Iran.

I asked whether he meant Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself.

"Yes," he said.

Did I mention that they pretty much hate al Qaeda? Well, they do:

Both Iranians and Americans have strongly negative views of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Three in four Iranians (74%) and more than nine in ten Americans (94%) view bin Laden unfavorably, including large majorities (68% and 89%, respectively) who view him very unfavorably. Only 10 percent of Iranians look at the al Qaeda leader favorably (2% Americans).

That's why Iran tried to help us in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and spring of 2002. That is, until Don Rumsfeld and Stephen Hadley smacked away the country's outstretched hand. The fact that we're now supporting al Qaeda muddies the waters a bit, of course.

I know I've made this point many times before, but it's important. Iran is not our natural enemy. We perpetrated a coup against their most popular leader in the 20th century and replaced him with a dictator; they took our embassy and held our people hostage. We fought a proxy war with them through our boy Saddam Hussein. We're more than even. And while we may not like their right-wing, theocratic government, the bottom line is that they'll stop being our enemies the day we stop casting them in the role.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.