The Neocon Damage

Esquire has a must-read piece about Bush administration Middle East experts Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann efforts to engage Iran. Both were able to get Iranian leaders to talk about opening up relations with the United States. They were defeated at every turn by the administration's neocons. Stephen Hadley outlined a policy that is designed to make Iran not come to the negotiating table.

After the meeting, Hadley wrote up a brief memo that came to be known as Hadley's Rules:

If a state like Syria or Iran offers specific assistance, we will take it without offering anything in return. We will accept it without strings or promises. We won't try to build on it.

It gets worse. Hadley killed Colin Powell's attempts for peace in Israel.

Then the phone rang. It was Stephen Hadley on the phone from the White House. "Tell Powell he is not authorized to talk about a political horizon," he said. "Those are formal instructions."

"This is a bad idea," Leverett remembers saying. "It's bad policy and it's also humiliating for Powell, who has been talking to heads of state about this very issue for the last ten days."

"It doesn't matter," Hadley said. "There's too much resistance from Rumsfeld and the VP. Those are the instructions."

So Leverett went back into the suite and asked Powell to step aside.

Powell was furious, Leverett remembers. "What is it they're afraid of?" he demanded. "Who the hell are they afraid of?"

"I don't know sir," Leverett said.

The road map temporarily got back on track when Crown Prince Abdullah challenged Bush in an amazing exchange.

In the spring, Crown Prince Abdullah flew to Texas to meet Bush at his ranch. The way Leverett remembers the story, Abdullah sat down and told Bush he was going to ask a direct question and wanted a direct answer. Are you going to do anything about the Palestinian issue? If you tell me no, if it's too difficult, if you're not going to give it that kind of priority, just tell me. I will understand and I will never say anything critical of you or your leadership in public, but I'm going to need to make my own judgments and my own decisions about Saudi interests.

Bush tried to stall, saying he understood his concerns and would see what he could do.

Abdullah stood up. "That's it. This meeting is over."

One thing the Bush administration doesn't do is blow off Saudia Arabia. The White House would later scrap the road map plan because Ariel Sharon didn't want to hurt the Likud Party's election prospects.

Rice sat impassively behind her broad desk. "If we put the road map out," she said, "it will interfere with Israeli elections."

"You are interfering with Israeli elections, just in another way."

"Flynt, the decision has already been made," Rice said.

Read the whole article. It's a fascinating study on how the neoconservatives have hurt American foreign policy. The next president will spend his or her time trying to clean up the mess.