A new grand bargain?

Tuesday, 11th December 2007

More and more people are saying that the NIE which said Iran had stopped its nuclear programme is a load of old bull. At the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph reported that British intelligence believes the NIE’s authors were hoodwinked by disinformation from Iran:

The source said British analysts believed that Iranian nuclear staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation. ‘We are sceptical. We want to know what the basis of it is, where did it come from? Was it on the basis of the defector? Was it on the basis of the intercept material? They say things on the phone because they know we are up on the phones. They say black is white. They will say anything to throw us off. It's not as if the American intelligence agencies are regarded as brilliant performers in that region. They got badly burned over Iraq.’

A US intelligence source has revealed that some American spies share the concerns of the British and the Israelis. ‘Many middle-ranking CIA veterans believe Iran is still committed to producing nuclear weapons and are concerned that the agency lost a number of its best sources in Iran in 2004,’ the official said.

This version of events, however, seems to credit the NIE authors with having acted in good faith. But the question remains open whether they are incompetent or malign, having put out information they knew was false; and the further question is whether they stitched up President Bush, as many believe, or whether this is all part of a major and potentially cataclysmic strategic reversal by the US which has now given up the ghost of the Bush doctrine -- and the defence of the west -- for good.

On this blog on December 5, I floated the theory that the US had done a deal with both Iran and Saudi Arabia to produce calm in Iraq in return for a promise not to bomb Iran and to serve Israel to them on a plate. Now Debkafile -- whose bulletins, based on intelligence sources, are not reliable but often contain more than a germ of truth -- is reporting a grander version of the same theory. It claims that a Washington-Tehran understanding is in the making, brokered by Saudi Arabia.

According to Washington and intelligence sources, the first steps of the dialogue were made possible by the US National Intelligence Estimate of Dec. 3 affirming that Iran’s nuclear weapons program had been put on hold in 2003. This public statement effectively took the US military option off the table, as stipulated by Riyadh and Tehran.

The Saudis have been offering to mediate the US-Iranian dispute since the beginning of 2007. In early November, DEBKA-Net-Weekly disclosed, the White House announced it was ready to deal. But first, Tehran must undertake to halt its arms smuggling into Iraq, guarantee non-interference in the election of the next Lebanese president later that month and tacitly approve Syrian participation in the Middle East conference at Annapolis on Nov. 27. Furthermore, Iran must guarantee not to torpedo the conference, to which the administration attached the highest importance, by unleashing its terrorist pawns against Israel.

Shortly after DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s exclusive disclosure, the well-connected Saudi journalist Jihad El-Khazen gave his version of the course of events in the Arab newspaper Al-Hayat : ‘Here is what happened: The rate of violent acts dropped in Iraq; therefore the American intelligence services discovered that Iran had halted its military nuclear program in 2003. This means that the resumption of violence will make American intelligence services find out that there is a secret military program that is different from the peaceful and famous one.’

The Saudi reporter went on to ask: ‘Is there a deal between the Bush administration and Iran? I cannot categorically assert that a deal was concluded between the two parties through direct negotiations; however, there is an understanding resulting in the 2007 national intelligence report.’

Saudi and American sources told DEBKAfile that President George W. Bush used the Annapolis conference as a piece of theater, which presented a sham moderate Arab front against Iran to disguise the intense work underway on a Saudi-mediated accommodation between Washington and Tehran.

The Bush administration appears to be in the midst of developing a new foreign strategy based on five key elements:

1. The halt of Iranian weapons and road bomb shipments into Iraq for use against US forces;

2. An Iranian instruction to Hizballah to open the way for the election of a Lebanese president, in return for which Washington will not interfere with the formation of a new government with a place of honor for the Iranian surrogate militia.

In other words, the Bush administration is not only engaged in a sellout of the Israeli government but also of the pro-Western Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora.

3. The cessation of Iranian arms and roadside bombs to Afghanistan.

4. The naming of Saudi Arabia as a channel for arbitrating American and Iranian differences.

5. A US pledge to backtrack on its charges that the Iran is engaged in developing nuclear weapons. This pledge was embodied in the dramatically revised US National Intelligence Estimate compared with its estimate of 2005, and effectively lifted not only the American military axe from over Iran’s strategic and economic infrastructure – and possibly regime - but also tied Israel’s hands.

True? It sounds horribly as if it may be. And there is another dimension to all this. The picture above says it all. Saudi Arabia, which is aghast at Iranian power, appears to have reached the same conclusion about the US -- that it has now totally lost its bottle. Saudi can no longer rely on the US to do what Saudi wanted it to do -- to destroy the Iranian regime. So it has now given up on the US and is doing the next best thing: cosying up to Iran itself. If you can't beat them, make deals with them seems to be its motto.

Far from creating a new strategic realignment with Saudi against Iran, therefore, American Baker/Hamilton/Gates 'realism' would appear to have pushed Saudi into bed with Iran. What a disaster.