Proving Ann Coulter Wrong

It's remarkably easy, but irritating. Because nobody should have to waste their time doing it. And if anyone has to do it more than once, you have to ask yourself why Coulter, a known fabricator, is given air time to lie and confuse people.

Knowing Coulter's casual relationship with facts and truth, could there be any other reason for Republicans and Corporate Media to keep putting her (and Limbaugh and Drudge and Hannity) on the air and in print if not to keep us on the left occupied, correcting the record?

When it comes to appointing minorities (women, blacks, hispanics, asians of either gender) to government posts, Democrats have been responsible for the "mosts" and most of the "firsts" - But specifically with regard to black people in general, and black women specifically:

Patricia Roberts Harris, appointed Ambassador to Luxembourg (first black woman to serve as ambassador) by Lyndon B. Johnson; appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and Secretary of Health and Human Services by Jimmy Carter.

Robert C. Weaver, appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (first black ever to serve in a Presidential cabinet) by Lyndon B. Johnson.

Thurgood Marshall, appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court (first black ever to serve on the USSC) by Lyndon B. Johnson.

Rodney Slater, appointed Secretary of Transportation by Bill Clinton.

Ron Brown, appointed Secretary of Commerce by Bill Clinton.

Hazel O'Leary, appointed Secretary of Energy (first woman, first black, to hold the post) by Bill Clinton.

Jesse Brown, appointed Secretary of Veterans Affairs by Bill Clinton.

Mike Espy, appointed Secretary of Agriculture by Bill Clinton.

Lee Brown, appointed Drug Policy Coordinator and elevated to a cabinet post by Bill Clinton.

Togo D. West, Jr., appointed first as Secretary of the Army by Bill Clinton and then Secretary of Veterans Affairs by Bill Clinton.

With the exception of two 'tokens' in the current Bush administration (Powell and Rice, one moderate and one neocon who are used by Bush as window-dressing and whose counsel was and is ignored in matters of policy) and Bush41's appointment of Clarence Thomas and elevation of Colin Powell to chair the Joint Chiefs, Republican administrations are remarkably absent of 'color.'

War Jitters

Newsweek reports, "America's Hidden War With Iran":

Jalal Sharafi was carrying a videogame, a gift for his daughter, when he found himself surrounded. On that chilly Sunday morning, the second secretary at the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad had driven himself to the commercial district of Arasat Hindi to checkout the site for a new Iranian bank. He had ducked into a nearby electronics store with his bodyguards, and as they emerged four armored cars roared up and disgorged at least 20 gunmen wearing bulletproof vests and Iraqi National Guard uniforms. They flashed official IDs, and manhandled Sharafi into one car. Iraqi police gave chase, guns blazing. They shot up one of the other vehicles, capturing four assailants who by late last week had yet to be publicly identified. Sharafi and the others disappeared.

At the embassy, the diplomat's colleagues were furious. "This was a group directly under American supervision," said one distraught Iranian official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. Abdul Karim Inizi, a former Iraqi Security minister close to the Iranians, pointed the finger at an Iraqi black-ops unit based out at the Baghdad airport, who answer to American Special Forces officers. "It's plausible," says a senior Coalition adviser who is also not authorized to speak on the record. The unit does exist—and does specialize in snatch operations.

The Iranians have reason to feel paranoid. In recent weeks senior American officers have condemned Tehran for providing training and deadly explosives to insurgents. In a predawn raid on Dec. 21, U.S. troops barged into the compound of the most powerful political party in the country, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and grabbed two men they claimed were officers in Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Three weeks later U.S. troops stormed an Iranian diplomatic office in Irbil, arresting five more Iranians. The Americans have hinted that as part of an escalating tit-for-tat, Iranians may have had a hand in a spectacular raid in Karbala on Jan. 20, in which four American soldiers were kidnapped and later found shot, execution style, in the head. U.S. forces promised to defend themselves.

Some view the spiraling attacks as a strand in a worrisome pattern. At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. "They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for," says Hillary Mann, the administration's former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs. U.S. officials insist they have no intention of provoking or otherwise starting a war with Iran, and they were also quick to deny any link to Sharafi's kidnapping. But the fact remains that the longstanding war of words between Washington and Tehran is edging toward something more dangerous. A second Navy carrier group is steaming toward the Persian Gulf, and NEWSWEEK has learned that a third carrier will likely follow. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. With Americans and Iranians jousting on the chaotic battleground of Iraq, the chances of a small incident's spiraling into a crisis are higher than they've been in years.

Sometimes it seems as if a state of conflict is natural to the U.S.-Iranian relationship—troubled since the CIA-backed coup that restored the shah to power in 1953, tortured since Ayatollah Khomeini's triumph in 1979. With the election of George W. Bush on the one hand, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the other, the two countries are now led by men who deeply mistrust the intentions and indeed doubt the sanity of the other. Tehran insists that U.S. policy is aimed at toppling the regime and subjugating Iran. The White House charges that Iran is violently sabotaging U.S. efforts to stabilize the Middle East while not so secretly developing nuclear weapons. As the raids and skirmishes in Iraq underscore, a hidden war is already unfolding.

Yet a NEWSWEEK investigation has also found periods of marked cooperation and even tentative steps toward possible reconciliation in recent years—far more than is commonly realized. After September 11 in particular, relations grew warmer than at any time since the fall of the shah. America wanted Iran's help in Afghanistan, and Iran gave it, partly out of fear of an angry superpower and partly in order to be rid of its troublesome Taliban neighbors. In time, hard-liners on both sides were able to undo the efforts of diplomats to build on that foundation. The damage only worsened as those hawks became intoxicated with their own success. The secret history of the Bush administration's dealings with Iran is one of arrogance, mistrust and failure. But it is also a history that offers some hope.

For Iran's reformists, 9/11 was a blessing in disguise. Previous attempts to reach out to America had been stymied by conservative mullahs. But the fear that an enraged superpower would blindly lash out focused minds in Tehran. Mohammad Hossein Adeli was one of only two deputies on duty at the Foreign Ministry when the attacks took place, late on a sweltering summer afternoon. He immediately began contacting top officials, insisting that Iran respond quickly. "We wanted to truly condemn the attacks but we also wished to offer an olive branch to the United States, showing we were interested in peace," says Adeli. To his relief, Iran's top official, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, quickly agreed. "The Supreme Leader was deeply suspicious of the American government," says a Khameini aide whose position does not allow him to be named. "But [he] was repulsed by these terrorist acts and was truly sad about the loss of the civilian lives in America." For two weeks worshipers at Friday prayers even stopped chanting "Death to America."

The fear dissipated after Sept. 20, when the FBI announced that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. But there was new reason for cooperation: for years Tehran had been backing the Afghan guerrillas fighting the Taliban, Osama bin Laden's hosts. Suddenly, having U.S. troops next door in Afghanistan didn't seem like a bad idea. American and Iranian officials met repeatedly in Geneva in the days before the Oct. 7 U.S. invasion. The Iranians were more than supportive. "In fact, they were impatient," says a U.S. official involved in the talks, who asked not to be named speaking about topics that remain sensitive. "They'd ask, 'When's the military action going to start? Let's get going!' "

Opinions differ wildly over how much help the Iranians actually were on the ground. But what is beyond doubt is how critical they were to stabilizing the country after the fall of Kabul. In late November 2001, the leaders of Afghanistan's triumphant anti-Taliban factions flew to Bonn, Germany, to map out an interim Afghan government with the help of representatives from 18 Coalition countries. It was rainy and unseasonably cold, and the penitential month of Ramadan was in full sway, but a carnival mood prevailed. The setting was a splendid hotel on the Rhine, and after sunset the German hosts laid on generous buffet meals under a big sign promising that everything was pork-free.

The Iranian team's leader, Javad Zarif, was a good-humored University of Denver alumnus with a deep, measured voice, who would later become U.N. ambassador. Jim Dobbins, Bush's first envoy to the Afghans, recalls sharing coffee with Zarif in one of the sitting rooms, poring over a draft of the agreement laying out the new Afghan government. "Zarif asked me, 'Have you looked at it?' I said, 'Yes, I read it over once'," Dobbins recalls. "Then he said, with a certain twinkle in his eye: 'I don't think there's anything in it that mentions democracy. Don't you think there could be some commitment to democratization?' This was before the Bush administration had discovered democracy as a panacea for the Middle East. I said that's a good idea."

Toward the end of the Bonn talks, Dobbins says, "we reached a pivotal moment." The various parties had decided that the suave, American-backed Hamid Karzai would lead the new Afghan government. But he was a Pashtun tribal leader from the south, and rivals from the north had actually won the capital. In the brutal world of Afghan power politics, that was a recipe for conflict. At 2 a.m. on the night before the deal was meant to be signed, the Northern Alliance delegate Yunus Qanooni was stubbornly demanding 18 out of 24 new ministries. Frantic negotiators gathered in the suite of United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. A sleepy Zarif translated for Qanooni. Finally, at close to 4 a.m., he leaned over to whisper in the Afghan's ear: " 'This is the best deal you're going to get'." Qanooni said, " 'OK'."

That moment, Dobbins says now, was critical. "The Russians and the Indians had been making similar points," he says. "But it wasn't until Zarif took him aside that it was settled ... We might have had a situation like we had in Iraq, where we were never able to settle on a single leader and government." A month later Tehran backed up the political support with financial muscle: at a donor's conference in Tokyo, Iran pledged $500 million (at the time, more than double the Americans') to help rebuild Afghanistan.

In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the "Axis of Evil." Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush's controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn't ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan's ringing denunciations of the "evil empire."

Once again, Iran's reformists were knocked back on their heels. "Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized," says Adeli. "The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America's intentions." The Khameini aide concurs: "The Axis of Evil speech did not surprise the Supreme Leader. He never trusted the Americans."

It would be another war that nudged the two countries together again. At the beginning of 2003, as the Pentagon readied for battle against Iraq, the Americans wanted Tehran's help in case a flood of refugees headed for the border, or if U.S. pilots were downed inside Iran. After U.S. tanks thundered into Baghdad, those worries eased. "We had the strong hand at that point," recalls Colin Powell, who was secretary of State at the time. If anything, though, America's lightning campaign made the Iranians even more eager to deal. Low-level meetings between the two sides had continued even after the Axis of Evil speech. At one of them that spring, Zarif raised the question of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a rabidly anti-Iranian militant group based in Iraq. Iran had detained a number of senior Qaeda operatives after 9/11. Zarif floated the possibility of "reciprocity"—your terrorists for ours.

The idea was brought up at a mid-May meeting between Bush and his chief advisers in the wood-paneled Situation Room in the White House basement. Riding high, Bush seemed to like the idea of a swap, says a participant who asked to remain anonymous because the meeting was classified. Some in the room argued that designating the militants as terrorists had been a mistake, others that they might prove useful against Iran someday. Powell opposed the handover for a different reason: he worried that the captives might be tortured. The vice president, silent through most of the meeting as was his wont, muttered something about "preserving all our options." (Cheney declined to comment.) The MEK's status remains unresolved.

Around this time what struck some in the U.S. government as an even more dramatic offer arrived in Washington—a faxed two-page proposal for comprehensive bilateral talks. To the NSC's Mann, among others, the Iranians seemed willing to discuss, at least, cracking down on Hizbullah and Hamas (or turning them into peaceful political organizations) and "full transparency" on Iran's nuclear program. In return, the Iranian "aims" in the document called for a "halt in U.S. hostile behavior and rectification of the status of Iran in the U.S. and abolishing sanctions," as well as pursuit of the MEK.

An Iranian diplomat admits to NEWSWEEK that he had a hand in preparing the proposal, but denies that he was its original author. Asking not to be named because the topic is politically sensitive, he says he got the rough draft from an intermediary with connections at the White House and the State Department. He suggested some relatively minor revisions in ballpoint pen and dispatched the working draft to Tehran, where it was shown to only the top ranks of the regime. "We didn't want to have an 'Irangate 2'," the diplomat says, referring to the secret negotiations to trade weapons for hostages that ended in scandal during Reagan's administration. After Iran's National Security Council approved the document (under orders from Khameini), a final copy was produced and sent to Washington, according to the diplomat.

The letter received a mixed reception. Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage were suspicious. Armitage says he thinks the letter represented creative diplomacy by the Swiss ambassador, Tim Guldimann, who was serving as a go-between. "We couldn't determine what [in the proposal] was the Iranians' and what was the Swiss ambassador's," he says. He added that his impression at the time was that the Iranians "were trying to put too much on the table." Quizzed about the letter in front of Congress last week, Rice denied ever seeing it. "I don't care if it originally came from Mars," Mann says now. "If the Iranians said it was fully vetted and cleared, then it could have been as important as the two-page document" that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger received from Beijing in 1971, indicating Mao Zedong's interest in opening China.

A few days later bombs tore through three housing complexes in Saudi Arabia and killed 29 people, including seven Americans. Furious administration hard-liners blamed Tehran. Citing telephone intercepts, they claimed the bombings had been ordered by Saif al-Adel, a senior Qaeda leader supposedly imprisoned in Iran. "There's no question but that there have been and are today senior Al Qaeda leaders in Iran, and they are busy," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld growled. Although there was no evidence the Iranian government knew of Adel's activities, his presence in the country was enough to undermine those who wanted to reach out.

Powell, for one, thinks Bush simply wasn't prepared to deal with a regime he thought should not be in power. As secretary of State he met fierce resistance to any diplomatic overtures to Iran and its ally Syria. "My position in the remaining year and a half was that we ought to find ways to restart talks with Iran," he says of the end of his term. "But there was a reluctance on the part of the president to do that." The former secretary of State angrily rejects the administration's characterization of efforts by him and his top aides to deal with Tehran and Damascus as failures. "I don't like the administration saying, 'Powell went, Armitage went ... and [they] got nothing.' We got plenty," he says. "You can't negotiate when you tell the other side, 'Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start'."

Terrorism wasn't the only concern when it came to Iran. For decades, Washington's abiding fear has been that Iran might pick up where the shah's nuclear program (initially U.S.-backed) left off, and make the Great Satan the target of its atomic weapons. The Iranians, who were signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, insisted they had nothing to hide. They lied. In August 2002, a group affiliated with the MEK revealed the extent of nuclear activities at a facility in Isfahan, where the Iranians had been converting yellowcake to uranium gas, and in Natanz, where the infrastructure needed to enrich that material to weapons-grade uranium was being built. A year later Pakistani scientist AQ Khan's covert nuclear-technology network unraveled, bringing further embarrassments and investigations.

For months, European negotiators worked to get Tehran to formalize a temporary and tenuous deal to freeze its nuclear fuel-development program. In May 2005, they met with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, at the Iranian ambassador's opulent Geneva residence. There was some reason to be optimistic: in Washington, Rice had announced that the United States would not block Iran's bid to join the World Trade Organization. Yet a sense of enormous tension filled the room, according to a diplomat who was there but asked not to be identified revealing official discussions. The Europeans told Rowhani they hadn't nailed down exactly what they could offer in return for a freeze, and the Americans still weren't fully onboard. Iran would have to wait for the details for a few more months. But in the meantime, the program had to remain suspended.

Rowhani, in full clerical robes and turban, obviously was not authorized to make any such deal. "The man was in front of us sweating," says the European diplomat. "He was trapped: he couldn't go further ... I realized very clearly that he couldn't deliver, that he was not allowed to deliver. Psychologically he was broken. Physically he was almost broken."

Part of the problem was that elections in Iran were only a few days away. They brought to power a man who satisfied the darkest stereotypes of Iran's fervid leaders. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly renounced the freeze on Iran's nuclear fuel-development program, broke the seals the International Atomic Energy Agency had placed on Iran's conversion facilities at Isfahan and pushed ahead with work at Natanz. In the span of no more than a month or two, nuclear enrichment had become a symbol of national pride for a much wider spectrum of Iranian society than the voters who elected Ahmadinejad. In a warped parallel to Bush, who found his voice after 9/11 rallying Americans to the struggle against a vast and unforgiving enemy, the Iranian president rose in stature throughout the Middle East as he railed against America. The one problem U.S. negotiators had always had with Iran was determining who in the byzantine regime to talk to, and whether they could deliver anything. Now they faced another: the Iranians had almost no incentive to talk. With the United States bogged down in Iraq, Iran now had the leverage—roles had reversed.

In its second term the Bush administration, despite Powell's sour memories, has supported European efforts to resolve the nuclear impasse diplomatically. Rice has offered to meet her Iranian counterpart "any time, anywhere." "What has blocked such contact is the refusal of Iran to meet the demands of the entire international community," says a White House official, who could not be named discussing Iran. The official expressed deep frustration with critics. He argued they were naive about Tehran's intentions, and "parroting Iranian propaganda."

By last summer Iran seemed ascendant. Hizbullah's performance in the Lebanon war had rallied support for Ahmadinejad, one of the group's loudest proponents, across the Arab world. In a series of meetings in New York in September the Iranian president was defiant, almost giddy. (A senior British official who would only speak anonymously about deliberations with the Americans describes Tehran's mood around this time as "cock-a-hoop.") He would not back down when grilled about his dismissals of the Holocaust, and scoffed at the threat of U.N. sanctions over Iran's nuclear defiance.

The West's patience was running out. In Baghdad, American troops seemed powerless to stop a wave of gruesome sectarian killings that they claimed were fueled by Iran. In Amman and Riyadh, Arab leaders warned darkly of a rising "Shia crescent." After Bush's defeat in the midterm elections, Israeli officials began wondering aloud if they would have to deal with the Iranian threat on their own. Partly in consultation with the British, U.S. officials began to map out a broader strategy to fight back. "We felt we needed to have a much more knitted-together policy, with a number of different strands working, to hit different parts of the Iranian system," says the senior British official.

Critics have questioned how much of that plan is military—whether the administration is secretly setting a course for war as it did back in 2002. Last week officials were at great pains to deny that scenario. "We are not planning offensive military operations against Iran," said Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns. The Pentagon does have contingency plans for all-out war with Iran, on which Bush was briefed last summer. The targets would include Iran's air-defense systems, its nuclear- and chemical-weapons facilities, ballistic missile sites, naval and Revolutionary Guard bases in the gulf, and intelligence headquarters. But generals are convinced that no amount of firepower could do more than delay Tehran's nuclear program. U.S. military analysts have concluded that nothing short of regime change would completely eliminate the threat—and America simply doesn't have the troops needed.

Iraq is another story. American military officials and politicians accuse the Iranian government of providing Iraqis with an new arsenal of advanced rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, heavy-duty mortars and the newest armor-piercing technology for roadside bombs—explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), said to have been developed by Hizbullah. Military security experts are especially worried by "passive infrared sensors," readily available devices that are often used for burglar alarms or automatic light switches but increasingly seen as triggers for improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Unlike cell phones, remote-control systems and garage-door openers, the sensors emit no signal, making them that much tougher to spot before they detonate.

What's scant is hard evidence that the weapons are provided by the Iranian government, rather than arms dealers or rogue Revolutionary Guard elements. "Iranian lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants clearly intensifies the conflict in Iraq," says the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. But the most that can be said with certainty is that Tehran is failing to stop the traffic. The Iranians themselves admit they're not trying as hard as they could. "I can give you my word that we don't give IEDs to the Mahdi Army," says an Iranian intelligence official who asked not to be named because secrecy is his business. "But if you asked me if we could control our borders better if we wanted to, I would say: 'Yes, if we knew that the Americans would not use Iraq as a base to attack Iran'."

The real thrust of Washington's multipronged attack is political. Banking restrictions levied by the U.S. Treasury have begun to pinch the Iranian economy. Voters angry about rising prices dealt Ahmadinejad an embarrassing blow in municipal elections in December, when his supporters were trounced. That wouldn't much matter if he still retained Khameini's support. But that may no longer be the case. The Khameini aide says the Supreme Leader blames Ahmadinejad's overheated rhetoric about Israel and the Holocaust for the unanimous Security Council resolution that passed in late December, demanding that Tehran suspend its nuclear program.

Every time America or Iran has gained an advantage over the other in the last five years, however, they've overplayed their hand. More pressure on Ahmadinejad could well make him popular again—the chief martyr in a martyr culture. Sunni insurgents in Iraq need only kill some Americans and plant Iranian IDs nearby to start a full-scale war. Like so many times in this complicated relationship, this is a moment of opportunity. And one of equally great danger.

Blown Chance For Peace With Iran?

Did the Bush hard-liners blow a shot at meaningful diplomacy with Iran in 2003 so that they could go to war?


Newsweek reports:

Did the Bush administration pass up a chance for meaningful diplomacy with Iran before its radical president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took over? The question has taken on particular urgency in recent days, as the Bush administration has appeared to lay the legal groundwork for war, even while denying it has any intention of attacking Iran. On Jan. 10, in his speech to the nation announcing his “surge” plan for Iraq, Bush declared that “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.” Such a statement is considered a traditional justification for war under international law. And The Washington Post recently reported that the president has given orders allowing U.S. troops in Iraq to capture or kill suspect Iranian operatives. Then, last week, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns, speaking on National Public Radio, invoked Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which has been used by member states in the past to justify unilateral military action. At the same time the president is moving more U.S. naval forces to the Persian Gulf.

In the view of some critics, who include former senior members of the administration, the Bush team may believe that war with a clerical regime they consider to be illegitimate and dangerous is still likely, or even inevitable. But Bush and his senior aides, recognizing they have little public or allied support, seem to be putting in place a policy that incites the Iranians to act first, these critics say. They compare the current Iran policy to past pretexts for war that later proved ill-founded, like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing large-scale military intervention in Vietnam. The Bush administration intends “to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something they would be forced to retaliate for,” says Hillary Mann, the former director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice during Bush’s first term. “When they state that the Iranians are building support networks to kill U.S. soldiers—I mean, I went to Harvard Law School, and that’s a casus belli. Nick Burns recently invoked Article 51 of U.N. charter. That’s the right to self-defense. That means you don’t need another U.N. Security Council resolution to go to war.”

Burns, in an interview with NEWSWEEK on Thursday, said his invocation of Article 51 was not directed toward justifying war in any way, but was merely a general statement of any state's right to self-defense. "We are not planning offensive military operations against Iran. We are definitely on a diplomatic path," he said. "I do not believe that military conflict with Iran is inevitable or desirable."

Secretary of State Rice has also vehemently denied that the administration is looking for a way to go to war. In congressional testimony on Wednesday, she repeated that “the president [has] made very clear that we’re not planning or intending an attack on Iran.” She added: “When we have a carrier strike group into the gulf, or provide PAC-3 [the latest version of the Patriot antimissile system], which is a defensive system, it’s simply to demonstrate that the United States remains determined to defend its interests in the gulf and the interests of its allies.” Some defenders of the Bush “realignment” plan toward Iran—in which the administration is seeking to get friendly Sunni Arab states and Israel, along with Europe, Russia and Asia, to form a united front and isolate Tehran—say it has begun to work. They point to fresh signals from the Iranian government that it may be willing to talk. “All across the region, the aggressors are stepping back,” a Western diplomat in Washington told NEWSWEEK.

Still, “not planning or intending an attack” isn’t exactly the same thing as embracing diplomacy with Tehran. In fact, Bush has specifically rejected that idea unless Iran acts first to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. Mann, as well as former senior administration officials such as former secretary of State Colin Powell and his then-top deputy, Richard Armitage, say the president has ignored or played down a number of opportunities to negotiate—especially in the era before Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005. As Powell told NEWSWEEK in an interview this week: “You can’t negotiate when you tell the other side, ‘Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start.’”

Rice was asked again this week about a dramatic opening for such a negotiation that took place in late April and May of 2003, when Iranian officials, using their regular Swiss intermediary, faxed a two-page proposal for comprehensive talks to the State Department. According to the document, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, Tehran plainly laid out the two countries’ “aims” and proposed “steps” to resolve them “in mutual respect.” The document, believed to reflect the views of Iran’s president at the time, the moderate Mohammad Khatami, proposes negotiations on most of the main outstanding issues of interest to Washington—including Iran’s nuclear program, its support for Hizbullah and Hamas and terrorism in general, and stabilizing Iraq. Some officials who saw the proposal at the time, including Hillary Mann and her husband, Flynt Leverett, the former National Security Council (NSC) senior director for Mideast under Rice, have angrily criticized Rice and the administration for not taking it seriously.

Asked about that proposal in House testimony this week, Rice fudged. Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler queried her on it during a hearing Wednesday, though he mistakenly summed up its contents by suggesting that it proposed the “acceptance” of Israel (the document doesn’t say that explicitly, though it does refer to a “two-state approach” to the Palestinian conflict). Rice’s initial reply: “I just don’t remember ever seeing any such thing.” Wexler asked her again, “So you did not see that supposed fax?” Rice said: “I just have to tell you that perhaps somebody saw something of the like, but I can tell you I would have noticed if the Iranians had offered to recognize Israel.” Then she added: “I don’t know what Flynt Leverett’s talking about, quite frankly. Maybe I should ask him when he came to me and said, ‘We have a proposal from Iran and we really ought to take it.’ I have read about this so-called proposal from Iran. We had people who said, ‘The Iranians went to talk to you,’ lots of people who said, ‘The Iranians want to talk to you.’” Asked about her comments later by NEWSWEEK, Leverett shot back: “If I had been in such a position I certainly would have done that. The two people who were in that position then were Elliott Abrams and Zal Khalilzad.” A spokeswoman for Abrams, who is currently the deputy national-security adviser for democracy promotion—but was then in charge of Mideast affairs—told NEWSWEEK on Thursday: “He has absolutely no recollection of getting any sort of fax at all.” (Khalilzad, soon to be the next ambassador to the U.N., was traveling abroad as special envoy to Afghanistan at the time, and is unlikely to have been in Washington when the fax came through.)

Such a proposal did find its way to the State Department in 2003, via Swiss ambassador Tim Guldimann. But a lot of questions remain about its origins and importance. Iranian officials insist that the document began as a U.S. trial balloon, possibly developed out of the office of former deputy secretary of State Armitage. But Armitage, in an interview this week, said he had nothing to do with creating the document and saw it for the first time as an Iranian fax. At the time, Armitage said, he thought it might have represented some creative diplomacy by Guldimann (who would not comment on the proposal to NEWSWEEK). “We couldn’t determine what was the Iranians’ and what was the Swiss ambassador’s,” Armitage said. His impression at the time was that the Iranians “were trying to put too much on the table,” Armitage added.

However, Powell’s former chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, said in an e-mail that it was a significant proposal for beginning “meaningful talks” between the U.S. and Iran. Wilkerson added that it “was a non-starter so long as [Dick] Cheney was VP and the principal influence on Bush.” The hardline vice president has long been known as an opponent of diplomatic engagement. Mann and Leverett say it was a historic missed opportunity. “I don’t care if it originally came from Mars,” says Mann. “If the Iranians said it was fully vetted and cleared, then it could have been as important” as the two-page document that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger received from Beijing in 1971, indicating Mao Zedong’s interest in talks.

Mann says Bush and other senior officials, including Cheney and former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were simply not interested in broad-based talks with Iran. "I think the president does believe the Iranian government is fundamentally illegitimate, and as long as Iran stays that way there will never be the freedom that needs to be brought to the Middle East,” Mann said. “I attended meeting after meeting on Iran for years. This was the tenor of the discussions, that the Iranian government was shaky, a ripe apple on the tree.… And I don’t think war fever has ever abated.”

Others also continue to question the administration’s commitment to real negotiation with Tehran—even if its nuclear concerns are met. “If there is a coherent strategy in place to deal with Iran, I’d like to hear more about it,” Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Rice at another hearing on Thursday. “Maybe the strategy is this: by increasing pressure on Iran across the board, we put Tehran on the defensive and strengthen our hands in any future negotiations. That makes sense—provided we’re serious about talking.”

We may know soon. A senior administration official says that, after four months of silence, the chief Iranian nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, is expected to meet within days in Munich with his European counterpart, Javier Solana, who is representing Germany, France and Great Britain in talks backed by the United States. Says Burns: “We have the sense that there's a turbulent environment inside Iran itself. There's a great deal of opposition to Ahmadinejad's failed policies, and a lot of Iranians seem to understand that they're being isolated." We can only hope that if a conversation starts, both sides listen.

,