Breaking the silence with Iran
NEITHER SIDE would like to admit the resemblance, but when diplomats from Iran and the United States take their places at today's Iraq security conference in Baghdad, they will be representing governments with striking similarities. Both were eager to get rid of Saddam Hussein's regime. Each is afraid that the other may obtain too much influence in the new Iraq. And at various times each has made the mistake of overestimating its advantages and passing up opportunities for dialogue and cooperation with the other.
Iraqis have paid a high price for those missed opportunities. One reason Iraq has become a battleground for several simultaneous conflicts is that Iran and the United States have been too wary of each other to act upon their common interest in fostering stability in Iraq.
One irony in this failure to work out mutually beneficial rules for cooperation in Iraq is that Iran and the United States have the same partners in Iraq's government. The major parties in Iraq's United Shi'ite Alliance all have ties to Tehran, and the Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, maintains a telling balance between two longstanding friendships, with Washington and with Tehran.
It should be obvious to all the parties at the Baghdad conference -- a preliminary to the ministerial-level meeting planned for next month in Turkey -- that they all share a profound interest in putting out the flames of sectarian barbarism in Iraq. The Sunni regimes of the Arab League as well as Turkey and the members of the United Nations Security Council have come together in Baghdad not merely because they were invited by Iraq's elected government, but because all are threatened by the prospect of Iraq descending into chaos.
That is a prospect of sectarian slaughters beyond anything yet seen; of an Al Qaeda sanctuary being established in western Iraq; of neighboring states being drawn into superimposed conflicts between Shi'ites and Sunnis, Arab states and Iran, Turkey and the Kurds of Iraq. What all the conferees in Baghdad recognize -- or should -- is that Iraq has been brought to the verge of these calamities in large part because the governments in Washington and Tehran have been too fearful of each other even to discuss how they might cooperate in securing their shared interests in Iraq.
If there is one similarity that explainsthis mutual failure, it is that both governments are driven by deep-seated differences between pragmatists and hard-liners. This is the time for the pragmatists in both camps to reinforce each other. During the Cold War, earlier US administrations carried on dialogues with the Soviet Union and China. Iraq is the right place to begin a dialogue between adversaries that should be no more difficult.
