In early May 2003, just after American troops had triumphantly swept up the Tigris-Euphrates and taken Baghdad, an extraordinary message was delivered to Washington via the Swiss Embassy in Tehran.  It came as a two-page fax, on plain paper.  Now known as the “Grand Bargain,” this proposal had the apparent support of all the major actors in Iran’s government of then-President Muhammad Khatami.  Although the proposed deal offered to settle all disputes between Iran and the United States, the Bush Administration dismissed it with contempt.  Not only did American officials refuse to receive the message; they even scolded the Swiss ambassador in Tehran for having forwarded it to Washington.

At the time Bush rejected the offer, it seemed nothing could be gained from talking with Teheran.  The United States was sated with hubris.  American troops had just toppled the statue of Saddam Hussain, who himself would soon be captured and ultimately hanged. Just days earlier, George Bush had swaggered aboard the S.S. Abraham Lincoln to give his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech.  In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden was reportedly on the run, while neo-cons in Washington, flushed with these victories, were already eying Iran as the next domino to fall to America’s grand plan of  unilateral regime-changes in the region.  As Bill Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinsky stated in their 2004 report to the Council on Foreign relations, Why talk with the Iranians when we’ve got them hemmed in on both their eastern and western flanks? 

Today, however, with some six million Iraqis either killed or exiled as a result of the war, with the country’s infrastructure destroyed, and with no end in sight to America’s five-year debacle in Iraq, the world is a very different place.  Here at home, war-fatigue has set in, and the economy is dangerously weak.  Nonetheless, neither proponents nor opponents of the war — including presidential aspirants — have offered ideas on how American might end its Iraq adventure.  This, then, might be an appropriate time to revisit Tehran’s offer.

Since most Americans are unfamiliar with the Grand Bargain, which the mainstream media ignored it when it was made, we can begin by asking what it proposed to do.   For their own part, Iran offered to make no attempts to obtain nuclear arms and to accept much tighter controls by the IAEA in exchange for access to nuclear technology.  They offered to stop supporting Hamas and Hizbullah in Palestine and Lebanon respectively.  They offered to cooperate with Iraq in all matters dealing with that country’s security.  And crucially, they offered not only to recognize the state of Israel, but also to accept a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.  Quite obviously, the offer contradicted Bush’s claim, which was made then as it still is today, that Iran is committed to sponsoring terrorism and to seeing the destruction of Israel. 

For its part, the U.S. would fully normalize its relations with Iran, end its sanctions on the country imposed at the time of Iran’s Revolution in 1979, cooperate on a wide range of issues dealing with technology transfers, and recognize Iran’s security concerns. That would mean ceasing to characterize Iran as an “axis of evil” or a “terrorist” state.  It also meant ending threats to attack their country.  And finally, America would take action against the Mujahidin-i Khalq in Iraq, a group of hold-overs from the days of the Iranian Revolution who had never accepted the Islamic Republic and are determined to undo the revolution by overthrowing Iran’s current regime.

Read the Rest of the Grand Bargain After the Flip...