Grand Bargaining and Basketball Trades

BOSTON -- The United States in the greater Middle East is doing the equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time, i.e., doing more than one thing at a time, and tackling more than one political issue at a time. The Obama administration has sent envoys to the Middle East peace process and Afghanistan-Pakistan, and is simultaneously re-establishing lines of communication with Syria and Iran. President Obama this week said the US should consider speaking with some elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan in order to wind down that country's war.

This is a worthy approach that will probably be supported widely in the United States and abroad. It was also one of several key themes that dominated a fine two-day conference I just attended at the Issam Fares Center of the Fletcher School at Tufts University near Boston. The knowledgeable and experienced participants -- academics, journalists, former senior military and political officials -- kept returning to two core issues: a "grand bargain" is likely to be needed to resolve the tensions between the US and Iran that are so pivotal to other conflicts in the Middle East, and, the US has much work to do on this because Washington knows nothing about key aspects of Iran's strategic aims, nuclear goals or motivations, or decision-making system.

Washington and Tehran have not talked for 30 years, since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. The list of things the United States and the West do not know about Iran is long, including crucial things like how the inner circle of decision-makers really operates, what Iran will settle for in a deal on its nuclear enrichment capabilities, whether it wants a nuclear bomb or just the capability to make one if needed one day, and how it sees its vital national interests served through long-term relations with partnerships and alliancews in the Arab world.

Iran has already achieved its important first goal, despite intense American-led threats, warnings and sanctions. It has established a spinning-centrifuge-based system of enriching uranium. Having faced down the demand to stop enrichment, Iran probably feels that it can negotiate from a position of strength. Faced now with the Obama approach of talking rather than only sanctioning, this opens the door for many possibilities.

The most intriguing but complex one is the idea of a "grand bargain" in which multiple players reach agreements to resolve several problems at once. Iran (like Syria on a smaller scale) is strategically placed to talk and work on many fronts. Its links with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas, for starters, provide opportunities for new understandings that could be strategically valuable for the United States. It can certainly cooperate to make the American withdrawal from Iraq easier, and perhaps help cool down the conflict in Afghanistan.

In return, it will want American and Western recognition of its right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, along with more intangible things like "respect" for its status and acknowledgment of its role as a major regional power. Conceding enrichment should be no problem, as Iran has already achieved this. Preventing the ultimate move towards creating a nuclear bomb will be the main issue to be negotiated here, and that will require the Iranians to be clearer about precisely what they desire and what they will settle for in their negotiations.

Yet some Iran experts who actually go there and know the country warn that the Iranian leadership might actually fear a grand bargain deal with the United States because the tension with the US is a major source of regime legitimacy in Tehran. The only way to find out, they say, is for the Iranians and their adversaries in the West to meet and talk. Such a process will quickly sort out the real grievances that both sides have against each other, from the side issues or the third party concerns of Israel or Gulf Arab states that have been taken up by the US.

Achieving a grand bargain is a very complex operation, requiring juggling several different issues, and placating multiple interests among many players. The Americans, though, should have no trouble achieving this, because they have an impressive national legacy of this sort of thing in their world of sports: the three-way trade among professional basketball teams. This time-consuming endeavor requires knowing the precise weaknesses, strengths, aspirations and needs of several different teams, then crafting trades that send players moving around among three teams.

The process works -- and can be very elegant at times -- because those making the deal take the time to study its component elements realistically, and try to work out a deal that satisfies the minimum needs of each team. A grand bargain on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Arab-Israeli peacemaking would require the same sort of complex analysis leading to agreements that satisfy the needs of all sides.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.