ANOTHER NEO-CON BLUNDER

(h/t Bill W. at Crooks & Liars)

According to David Ignatius in the article cited below, Iran had been helpful to us in Afghanistan:

One former U.S. official says flatly that without Iranian help, it would have been impossible to establish the new government in Afghanistan under President Hamid Karzai.

and there was a chance that Iran could've done more if we were willing to trade.

Iran had captured some high-level Al Qaeda personnel and was willing to trade them to us for some MEK (anti-Iran) terrorists. We scotched the deal because the neo-cons wanted to use the MEK to destabilize Iran.


Lost Chances in Iran
By David Ignatius
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A19
Washington Post

What's poignant about these wary U.S.-Iranian feelers is that just over a year ago, they yielded a plan for an "anti-terrorist" deal that both countries should have loved: Iran would hand over some senior al Qaeda operatives in its custody and the United States would transfer to Iran some prisoners it was holding from the Iraqi-backed Mujaheddin-e Khalq organization, a group America has officially branded as terrorist.

The State Department is said to have favored such a deal, but the Pentagon balked -- arguing that the Mujaheddin-e Khalq might be useful in fomenting regime change in Tehran.

[SNIP]

A second group of high-level al Qaeda leaders crossed into Iran's remote Baluchistan province in the spring of 2002. U.S. intelligence officials believed this group included Osama bin Laden's security chief, Saif Adel, and one of his sons, Saad bin Laden. The administration badly wanted to interrogate them outside Iran.

But the Iranians had a demand of their own, which ripened after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003. About 4,000 members of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq had been captured at their bases in Iraq, which they had used for years to conduct attacks against Iran. Though the group's members were officially terrorists, the administration was wary about turning them over to Tehran. (Bush's own initial reaction is said to have been "Why not? They're terrorists.")

In a secret meeting in May in Geneva, the two sides explored an exchange of the "terrorist" captives. To assuage U.S. human rights worries, Iranians pledged to grant amnesty to most of the 4,000 Mujaheddin-e Khalq captives, to forgo the death penalty for about 65 leaders who would be tried in Iranian courts and to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to supervise the transfer.

The Bush administration ultimately rejected this exchange, bowing to neoconservatives at the Pentagon who hoped to use the Mujaheddin-e Khalq against Tehran. Some administration officials were disappointed: "Why we didn't cut this deal is beyond me," says Flynt Leverett, who was in charge of Middle East policy for the National Security Council until last spring.