A Single Roll of the Dice, by Trita Parsi - review

In May 2003, when the Bush administration's might was at its zenith, a Swiss diplomat called Tim Guldimann arrived in Washington carrying an extraordinary message.

As Switzerland's ambassador in Tehran, Guldimann's job was to represent the interests of the United States, which had no embassy, and that was he thought he was doing. The letter he was carrying was an offer of comprehensive negotiations from the Iranian government. In return for a lifting of US sanctions and the handing over of members of a US-designated Iranian terrorist group, Tehran was willing to place its nuclear programme under an intrusive monitoring and inspection regime, end armed support for Hamas and Hizbullah, and accept a Saudi plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

In short, Iran was ticking just about every box on the American diplomatic wish-list. So what happened? Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld rejected the offer out of hand. "We don't speak to evil," was the official line. Not only was Guldimann sent packing, the Bush administration actually reprimanded the Swiss for over-stepping their diplomatic mandate.

The depressing fiasco is the opening scene of a perfectly-timed new book, A Single Roll of the Dice, by Trita Parsi, a carefully balanced and thoroughly researched account of the tortured US-Iranian relationship in recent years.

Parsi is the ideal person to write it. As the head of the National Iranian American Council with plenty of experience as a foreign policy advisor on Capitol Hill, the Iranian-born author has both Washington insider access and an understanding of how Tehran sees the world around it. Given the fact that the Middle East could be on the brink of another war that would likely suck in the US, the UK and their allies, the expression 'must-read' is particularly appropriate.

The book is a challenge to the increasingly-accepted narrative that says all the diplomatic avenues have been explored, leaving crippling sanctions and military action as the only realistic policy options left for dealing with the Iranian nuclear crisis. Parsi argues the US and its allies have in fact only explored one diplomatic avenue, before turning around and giving up. Or as a senior state department official told him: "Our Iran diplomacy was a gamble on a single roll of the dice."

The book scrutinises Obama's policy, but Bush's recklessness sets the stage. Since that almighty snub in May 2003, US power has ebbed, the pragmatic government of Mohammad Khatami has given way to the more radical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in turn has been accused on pro-Western deviancy by an ever more paranoid, conservative and insular Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.

Even in such unpromising conditions, there have been diplomatic openings, Parsi writes. The election of Obama (whose names translates directly in Farsi as 'He is with us') created one such opportunity. Tehran responded well to the offer of 'mutual respect' in his inaugural speech. Parsi portrays it as one of the keys to the Iranian world view:

While from the American point of view the US-Iran conflict is rooted in policy differences and opposing visions for the Middle East, to the Iranians it is very much about discarding an uneven relationship – that between a master and a servant.

Based on past experience, however, Tehran decision-makers were deeply fearful that the 'outstretched hand' offered by Obama was a tactical ploy, rather than a strategic shift. And those suspicions were deepened by Obama's appointment of officials like Hillary Clinton and Dennis Ross, who Tehran saw as pro-Israel hawks, and the constant threat of military action. Parsi writes:

Iran was wary of negotiations potentially designed to fail, as failed talks could strengthen the case for military action against Iran.

In the summer of 2009, amid the chaos of Ahmadinejad's rigged re-election, a new opening unexpectedly presented itself. The Iranians were running short of uranium enriched to the level of 19.75%, which they used in the Tehran Research Reactor to make isotopes for medical diagnostics and treating cancer, and was looking to buy some more. Spotting an opportunity, the US and Russia put together a deal by which Iran would export 1200 kg of its low enriched uranium (enough, if further enriched, to make a bomb) and would get foreign-made fuel rods for its research reactor in return a year later.

At a meeting in Geneva at the beginning of October, 2009, Iranian negotiators accepted the deal in principle. It did not solve the basic disagreement over Iran's right to enrich uranium, but it promised to buy time for diplomacy and perhaps rebuild some badly-needed mutual trust. However, the apparent breakthrough lasted just a couple of weeks before Iranian officials came to a follow-up meeting in Vienna, seeking to renegotiate the deal.

The US response was: take it or leave it. After the Vienna meeting broke up, Parsi believes Obama ran out of patience, stamina and domestic political space to keep up the frustrating process of dealing with Iranian bargaining antics.

Japan offered its services as mediator and the White House at first gave its support and then suddenly went cold on the idea. Then in 2010 Turkey and Brazil had a go, and Obama sent their respective leaders, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, identical letters outlining the Geneva deal. To everyone's surprise, Erdogan and Lula went to Iran in May and clinched the same bargain that had evaded the major powers in Vienna.

To Erdogan and Lula's astonishment, the US immediately rejected the agreement, as did Britain and France. The western powers argued that since Vienna, Iran had continued to produce enriched uranium so that 1200 kg represented only 50% of the stockpile, not 75% as it had at the time of the Geneva and Vienna meetings. Furthermore, Iran had started producing more enriched (19.75%) uranium of its own, and was not obliged to stop under the Turkey-Brazil deal. American officials had told their Turkish and Brazilian counterparts these were the new benchmarks for a deal, but Erdogan and Lula had viewed Obama's letter as the bottom line. Washington had omitted to tell them it had past its sell-by date.

By May 2010, the Obama administration had negotiated an array of side deals with Moscow in return for Russian support for sanctions, and the Obama administration felt it could not unpick the 'reset' with Russia to give Iranian diplomacy another go.

As a former senior Obama official told Parsi: "The impression, right or wrong, that was created was that we could not take yes for an answer."

Once more, Iran and the US could not get their timing right. It has long seemed that when one side is ready is dialogue, the other has other priorities or is mired in internal conflict. Right now, the conditions look unpromising either way you look. In the midst of an election, Obama has little time or political room for the sustained, patient diplomacy that the Iran crisis requires. Tehran has meanwhile sunk deeper and deeper into dysfunction.

It is arguable that the divided Iranian leadership has been incapable of sustaining a coherent position for years, focused as it is on crippling internal rivalry. It could be said that Tehran's seeming vacillation has been a ploy all along to buy time to creep nearer to nuclear weapons capacity. In A Single Roll of the Dice, however, Parsi makes a convincing case that neither of those freqently-made assertions have been properly tested.