Three Pinocchios for Kerry’s latest attack on Bush crew

The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker gives John Kerry three Pinocchios for his comment on ABC’s “This Week” a few weeks back when Kerry made the claim that the Bush Administration had “blew it” when Iran had made overtures to the US to slow or end the Iranians’ nuclear program back in 2003. Kerry was trying to make it look like the Obama Administration is just cleaning up the mess that the Bush Administration created by inactivity to sell the Obama Administration’s recent agreement with Iran. It turns out that the source of the overture was greatly in doubt. Is still in doubt.

Whether the missive represented a genuine proposal has long been the subject of debate. Some mid-level State Department officials had wanted to test Iran’s unorthodox approach, but then-Secretary of State Colin Powell never forwarded any proposal to the White House.

Condoleezza Rice, at the time the national security adviser, told Congress in 2007 she had never seen the fax.

“We had people who said, ‘The Iranians want to talk to you,’ lots of people who said, ‘The Iranians want to talk to you,’ ” she testified when she was secretary of state and pushing for talks with Iran. “But I think I would have noticed if the Iranians had said, ‘We’re ready to recognize Israel.’ . . . I just don’t remember ever seeing any such thing.”

[…]

Richard Armitage, told PBS’s Frontline in 2007 that not much weight was given to the fax because it did not match up with other signals at the time from the Iranian government.

[…]

[Mohammad Javad Zarif, then Iran’s U.N. ambassador and now Iran’s foreign minister] had had a secret meeting in Geneva with two senior U.S. officials — Ryan Crocker and Zalmay Khalilzad — just the day before the mysterious fax arrived at the State Department. It was the fourth such meeting that year — and came during a period of unusual and frequent discussions between Iranian and U.S. officials.

So the question arises: If Iran was serious, why would such an important diplomatic undertaking be transmitted in such a haphazard way through the Swiss ambassador when one of the supposed co-authors was already holding senior-level talks with U.S. officials? It’s possible Zarif was skittish about making such a “grand bargain” approach through official channels, but this puzzle has never been adequately answered.

As it happens, the May 3, 2003, meeting marked the end of those talks with Zarif. The Americans had asked Iran to interrogate al-Qaeda-linked individuals in Iran regarding intelligence about a possible terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. The Iranians failed to do so, and The Washington Post later reported that U.S. officials concluded that the Riyadh attacks, which took place nine days later and killed 35 people, were planned by al-Qaeda in Iran and ordered from there. The Bush administration abruptly terminated the discussions, and then U.S. officials became mired in a contentious debate about policy toward Iran.

Given that the Post loves them some Kerry, I’d guess that he deserves more than three Pinocchios for this one. But there’s much more at the link that you should read before you just take a couple of cherry-picked paragraphs. They also have the original document that supposedly comes from the Iranians.

Category: John Kerry