fool me twice, shame on . . . well, look, uh, what I mean is . . .

[realthog]

There's a long and very important story by Eric Umansky in the current edition of Columbia Journalism Review. You can find it at http://www.cjr.org:80/cover_story/lost_over_iran.php?page=all.

You'll recall that the US "news" media have made a decorous habit of giving Our Glorious Leader a pass on perhaps the most egregious of all his 935 lies about the Iraq invasion (or, as they say in Rehab, memory lapses) -- the one that insists we invaded Iraq solely because Saddam Hussein wouldn't let the UN Weapons Inspectors into the country, the one that startles Hans Blix and his merry band of, well, UN Weapons Inspectors, who were under the illusion that they left Iraq in a hurry precisely because the Pentagon was about to bomb the shit out of the place.

Well, it seems that all those highly trained reporters have been helping for the past few years to perpetrate a similar Administration falsehood, this time concerning the mad mullahs of Iran and their intransigent refusal to negotiate with the US, their implacable hostility to us at every turn. Here's a short (well, relatively short!) extract from Umensky's piece:

In the fall of 2001, U.S. attention was focused on Osama bin Laden and rooting out Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. At the same time, something else was happening in Afghanistan: Iran was cooperating with the U.S. to a degree that hadn’t been seen since the days of the Shah. It was, as Ray Takeyh, author of Hidden Iran, put it, “the underreported story of the first episode of America’s war on terrorism.”

Before the U.S. began its air strikes against the Taliban in October 2001, U.S. and Iranian diplomats started to meet and coordinate on Afghanistan. (Iran had long opposed the Taliban, whose Sunni extremism brands Shia, Iran’s state religion, as heretical.) Iran invited the U.S. to use its airbases for emergency landings and offered to conduct rescue operations for lost American pilots. Tehran’s diplomats apparently also stepped in to save a U.S.-proposed power-sharing deal that the Northern Alliance initially opposed. Indeed, Iran even offered to help train the nascent Afghan Army—under U.S. supervision.

James Dobbins, then the Bush administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan, recounted his shock at just how cooperative the Iranians were being in a May 2004 Washington Post op-ed. Diplomats from a number of countries were helpful, wrote Dobbins, but “none were more so than the Iranians.” He duly reported the overtures back to Washington where, Dobbins noted, “none was ever taken up.”

Mid-level contacts between Tehran and Washington continued in fits and starts. In May 2003, Iranian leaders appear to have made a last-ditch effort at a deal. They may have been motivated by the speed with which the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. After all, Iran had fought an eight-year war with Iraq that ended in a stalemate; the U.S. march to Baghdad took three weeks. Whatever its inspiration, Iran’s offer put nearly everything on the table, from support for Hezbollah to Iran’s nuclear energy program. It has since been dubbed the “Grand Bargain.”

The exact provenance of the offer wasn’t initially clear. It came sans letterhead via a fax from the Swiss ambassador to Iran—Washington’s designated middleman for communications. But the offer does appear to have been serious. “I have talked to people in Iran who were responsible for editing and sending it,” says Gary Sick. “It was cleared at the highest levels as an offer in good faith.”

The offer wasn’t an easy story for journalists to nail down. The Iranians who had crafted a peace offering to the “Great Satan” had every incentive to stay mum, as did an administration in Washington that had little interest in negotiating. But the Financial Times published a short piece by diplomatic correspondent Guy Dinmore in July 2003 sketching out the overture and the U.S.’s lack of interest. “We are not reaching out at this point,” a State Department official told Dinmore.

And there the story sat. The first follow-up didn’t come for nearly a year, until Dinmore himself wrote another, more detailed piece in which he clarified that the fax was actually the culmination of a series of feelers. The added details still did not set off a rush for follow-up. The next story on Iran’s interest in a deal didn’t appear until the fall of 2004, roughly eighteen months after Dinmore’s first report, in The Washington Post. That story, the first to refer to a “Grand Bargain,” included more intriguing revelations:

• Through Swiss Ambassador Tim Guldimann, Tehran indicated a desire to discuss its nuclear program.

• The offer held the outlines of a “Grand Bargain,” but Washington balked. “We’re not interested in a grand bargain,” then U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said.

• Over eighteen months, the countries periodically discussed their mutual interests in Afghanistan and Iraq. But a Bush administration policymaker said “instructions were clear” to the U.S. negotiators: “Don’t bring up the nukes.”

All of which were mentioned roughly sixty paragraphs into the Post piece. . . .

In fact, Our Man Bolton went further than simply rejecting the Iranian proposal: the Swiss Ambassador was rebuked by the White House for his impertinence in having presumed to pass the offer along.

This story of diplomatic intransigence -- and it's not the fabled mad mullahs who're being diplomatically intransigent -- would be shameful enough in itself, but what's doubly shameful in any free society is the "news" media's role in burying it. In this instance, failing to inform the public is significantly to misinform it. Despite the growing influence of the internet, the vast majority of us still get the information upon which we base our opinions from traditional sources like TV news, newspapers, the bar, the post office queue, etc. It's not much of a wonder that, with the first two of those sources gagging themselves, the vast majority of us think of Iran as the unremittingly unreasonable "Axis of Evil" caricature our masters have created.

There is, of course, every possibility that the Iranian offer was disingenuous -- who knows? The vast majority of diplomatic offers traded between the world's governments are probably disingenuous in part or in all. Yet this alters not at all the reality-corrupting fraudulence of our media in going along with the falsehood that the Iranians have never made diplomatic overtures to us.

A further relevant story the media bury, of course, is that, before Our Glorious Leader's "Axis of Evil" speech, Iran was in the process of liberalization, and was making increasingly frequent overtures to the West, the US included. In fact, Iran seemed well along the way towards making itself democracy's major beachhead in the Middle East, the ally from whom much else could flow. The Bush Administration's response to this ongoing development was to declare Iran a foe -- with the result that the religious authorities clamped down again and that evil little clown Ahmadinejad was elected Iranian President. Granted that the position of President in Iran is largely a figurehead role (something else our media almost never make clear to us), his election was hardly an assistance to constructive relations. At the same time, it was not an insurmountable obstacle to them.

If some of the nutcases who currently pull the strings of power in DC get their way, we may soon be going to war with Iran. Doubtless a sizeable percentage of the US public, perhaps even a majority, will back this new war of aggression on the basis of the false information they've been given through the mainstream media that Iran has refused at every step to negotiate about their program to create nuclear weapons.

WMDs, anyone?

Comments

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

The complicity of the media in this debacle that continues, and will be continuing into the adult years of great-grandchildre, if the planet survives that long, cannot be exaggerated.

The media is owned by the same crimesyndicatecabal that owns the lobbyistscongresslegislaturesovaloffice etc. Thus we are in this.

They learned very well the lessons of the Civil Rights and Vietnam era about photos and television: if the voters don't see it on television it does not exist.

Love, C.

[hutch0.livejournal.com]

Good article. I'd kind of heard of the FT piece Umansky cites, but I never saw it.
I'm a little more sanguine than al_zorra about the complicity of the media in this - but not a lot. I think there's been a kind of mass hysteria regarding Iran, powered by an unpopular administration which believes it needs to promote an enemy in order to regain some kind of legitimacy. We might despise Bush/Cheney for what they did to Iraq, but by god we need 'em to protect us from Iran. And the press have just gone along with it.
The beasting of Ahmedinajad is a case in point - very few articles in the press mention just how limited his powers are, and concentrate instead on his increasingly wiggy pronouncements.
However, the fact that we know about the Grand Bargain at all means that some journalism has been done on the subject, and surely that's hopeful?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"However, the fact that we know about the Grand Bargain at all means that some journalism has been done on the subject, and surely that's hopeful?"

I think that if it hadn't been for the "alternative media", mostly internet-based (I believe Seymour Hersch in the New Yorker was a print exemplar), the facts would have been almost entirely buried.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

By serendipity, I've just come across a rather good resume of the dismal state of the US "news" media at the moment: http://www.alternet.org/story/79465/. I'll e-mail you a copy, Hutch. I think its author has matters about right -- i.e., that he's not overstating his case. You have no idea of the level of my incredulity at the Tucker Carlson "UK journalistic standards are so much lower than here" garbage you picked up on the other day. US mainstream news journalism is currently the absolute pits.

[hutch0.livejournal.com]

Ach, Tucker Carlson. I'll wrestle him naked and covered in olive oil to defend British journalism, and even though I am the ultimate panty-waist I bet I'd win. Man's a fool.