Iran’s “Grand Bargain”: how the story disappeared

by Richard Gowan | Mar 29, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa, North America

The current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review should be required reading for foreign policy wonks as well as aspiring hacks.  It has a great piece on how marines  in Iraq turned to a blogger in New Jersey to track the patterns of insurgent attacks – as well as a thoughtful dismissal of  indie documentaries on the war.  Best of all is the cover story, which explains how the U.S. print media have followed the administration’s line on Iran, including this account of how the Iranian offer of a “grand bargain”in May 2003 has been kept out of the news. 

Whatever its inspiration, Iran’s offer put nearly everything on the table, from support for Hezbollah to Iran’s nuclear energy program. It has since been dubbed the “Grand Bargain.” The exact provenance of the offer wasn’t initially clear. It came sans letterhead via a fax from the Swiss ambassador to Iran—Washington’s designated middleman for communications. But the offer does appear to have been serious.

The offer wasn’t an easy story for journalists to nail down. The Iranians who had crafted a peace offering to the “Great Satan” had every incentive to stay mum, as did an administration in Washington that had little interest in negotiating. But the Financial Times published a short piece by diplomatic correspondent Guy Dinmore in July 2003 sketching out the overture and the U.S.’s lack of interest. “We are not reaching out at this point,” a State Department official told Dinmore.

And there the story sat. The first follow-up didn’t come for nearly a year, until Dinmore himself wrote another, more detailed piece in which he clarified that the fax was actually the culmination of a series of feelers. The added details still did not set off a rush for follow-up. The next story on Iran’s interest in a deal didn’t appear until the fall of 2004, roughly eighteen months after Dinmore’s first report, in The Washington Post. That story, the first to refer to a “Grand Bargain,” included more intriguing revelations:

• Through Swiss Ambassador Tim Guldimann, Tehran indicated a desire to discuss its nuclear program.
• The offer held the outlines of a “Grand Bargain,” but Washington balked. “We’re not interested in a grand bargain,” then U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said.
• Over eighteen months, the countries periodically discussed their mutual interests in Afghanistan and Iraq. But a Bush administration policymaker said “instructions were clear” to the U.S. negotiators: “Don’t bring up the nukes.”

All of which were mentioned roughly sixty paragraphs into the Post piece. The story itself, written in the run-up to the 2004 presidential elections, was a lengthy (and stinging) assessment of the administration’s nonproliferation strategy. There’s very little to criticize in the Post’s effort. The story’s reporters—Dafna Linzer and Barton Gellman—simply happened across some fine nuggets as part of a larger investigation.

What is surprising was (again) the lack of follow-up. Few other reporters seemed interested in the evidence of Iran’s apparent peace overtures and the U.S.’s recalcitrance. The first headline about any of this in a U.S. paper wouldn’t come for another year and a half, nearly three years after the Financial Times first revealed those overtures. (That story was published in February 2006 by a freelancer, Greg Beals, in Long Island’s Newsday.)

Reporters seemed interested in the story and later—when a source began providing documentary proof—some tried to write it. But “editors slashed it down to something like the last paragraph of a larger story,” says Trita Parsi, the Iran expert and former congressional staffer who provided the documents. “It was something that went against people’s assumptions.”

Through the rest of 2006, there appears to have been one piece devoted to the offer, in The Washington Post—it ran on page A16. Even though the offer had never really made news, it was considered old news.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof decided to write about the proposals in early 2007. Kristof says he, too, was “concerned about the possibility of a military encounter. So I started doing some reporting.” Kristof eventually added more detail showing that the Iranians had not simply sent the offer through the Swiss, but had also approached the State Department, and had sent an offer to the White House itself. Writing about the various versions of the offer, Kristof concluded “neo-cons killed [an] incipient peace process.”

No story about the “Grand Bargain” ever appeared in the news pages of the Times.