Talks called positive as US asks Iran for help on Iraq
Tehran offers plan for security
WASHINGTON -- In the highest-level public talks between the United States and Iran in nearly 30 years, US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker yesterday reached out to his Iranian counterpart for help in improving Iraqi security and asked that Iran stop supplying arms to Iraqi militia groups.
The Iranians did not respond to the arms charge, Crocker said in a conference call with reporters after the four-hour meeting in Baghdad, but offered their own proposal to establish formal security cooperation between the United States, Iran, and the Iraqi government.
The meeting ended with Crocker saying that President Bush and his senior advisers would decide how to respond to Iran's proposal and with the Iranians reserving the right to respond to the weapons charge at a later date.
Despite the lack of a major breakthrough, both sides described the meeting between Crocker and Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi in positive terms.
"We're taking this step by step," Crocker said. "We've laid out some concerns. We'll be watching to see what action is taken."
The meeting itself was a key shift for the Bush administration, which has been leading a global campaign to iso late Iran for its alleged nuclear weapons program and support for extremist groups in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories.
Yesterday's meeting, hosted by Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki of Iraq, focused solely on Iraq and did not cover allegations about Iran's nuclear program.
US and Iranian officials have had little diplomatic contact since the two countries cut off ties after the 1979 Iranian revolution that sparked the storming of the US embassy in Tehran and the holding of American hostages. Some secret meetings have occurred.
Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, senior US policy makers have pushed to exclude Iran from regional meetings about Iraq, despite the recommendation of a high-level bipartisan commission last fall that talks with Iran could be helpful to reducing violence in Iraq. In March, the administration reversed its position and agreed to include Iran and Syria in regional talks on Iraq.
Yesterday's talks, during which US officials drank tea with Iranian and Iraqi officials, lasted longer than expected and were cordial and business-like, Crocker told reporters.
Crocker said the Iranians gave few details about what their proposed joint "security mechanism" would look like.
On the American side, Crocker reiterated the US demand that the Qods Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, stop funneling weapons to Sunni insurgent groups and extremist Shi'ite militias, particularly factions of Madhi Army, which is loosely controlled by radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
US officials previously had been reluctant to make the claim that Iran supports Sunni as well as Shi'ite insurgents. But yesterday Crocker said he made the case forcefully.
"We were quite clear on what we see on the ground and quite clear in describing how damaging we believe it is to Iraq's own efforts to establish security and stability, and that it needs to stop," Crocker said.
At the meeting, the Iranians also took issue with the US "occupation" of Iraq and criticized the US-led effort to train and equip Iraqi security forces.
"Why [do] the Iraqi police and the country's security forces suffer lack of equipment and the terrorists would have an upper hand to this end?" Qomi asked rhetorically at a news conference after the meeting, according to Iran's state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.
But Qomi also said that Iranian officials "hope that the current meeting would put an end to the country's insecurity and help the country's reconstruction," according to the agency.
Iraqi officials expressed an eagerness to host further meetings, but so far no further talks have been planned.
Several Middle East analysts saw the meeting as an encouraging step, but warned that it is still unclear whether such talks can rescue Iraq from the brink of collapse.
"Even if the meeting had gone absolutely swimmingly, and the Iranians had agreed to stop arming Shi'ite militias, you would still have a situation in Iraq that continues to deteriorate by the hour," said Kenneth Katzman , a Middle East specialist at the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress. "This meeting is just a very small slice of a very big picture."
Katzman said that even if Iran helped get Shi'ite militias under control, Sunni insurgents would continue to wage war against the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government.
Joost Hiltermann , a regional analyst with the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution organization, called the proposed joint security mechanism a "definitive way forward."
"We would like to see it expanded to a regional framework to stop the Iraqi civil war from spreading," he said in a telephone interview from Jordan.
But he said it remains to be seen how much cooperation Iran is seeking and how much cooperation conservative policy makers in Washington will permit.
"It's going to be a slow and painful process," he said. "We don't really know how far this can go."
One major challenge is that the United States has committed itself to pushing for further sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council over Tehran's nuclear program, a move that gives Iranians an incentive to make trouble for Americans in Iraq, he said.
Yesterday's meeting comes after months of increasing tension between the United States and Iran. Each country accuses the other of funneling weapons to its enemies. The United States has arrested a group of Iranian officials in Iraq who are accused of smuggling arms to militias.
Iran, in turn, recently announced that it uncovered a US spy network aimed at toppling its regime, arresting an Iranian-American journalist and an Iranian-American scholar with the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com. 