U.S. sounds out Iran on joint Iraq effort

Secretary of State John Kerry addresses the Our Ocean conference Monday at the State Department in Washington. President Barack Obama’s administration is willing to talk with Iran about deteriorating security conditions in Iraq and is not ruling out potential U.S.-Iranian cooperation in stemming the advance of Sunni extremists, Kerry said Monday.

Secretary of State John Kerry addresses the Our Ocean conference Monday at the State Department in Washington. President Barack Obama’s administration is willing to talk with Iran about deteriorating security conditions in Iraq and is not ruling out potential U.S.-Iranian cooperation in stemming the advance of Sunni extremists, Kerry said Monday.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

WASHINGTON -- A senior U.S. diplomat met with his Iranian counterpart in Vienna on Monday to explore whether the United States and Iran could work together to create a stabler Iraqi government and ease the threat from Sunni militants.

The initial meeting took place after Secretary of State John Kerry signaled that President Barack Obama's administration was open to cooperating with Iran on Iraq, raising the possibility of seeking help from the country the United States has often described as a state sponsor of terrorism that must be prevented from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Cooperation between the United States and Iran to contain the Iraqi crisis would represent the first time the two countries -- estranged adversaries for more than three decades -- have jointly undertaken a common security purpose since they shared military intelligence to counter the Taliban in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Kerry, in an interview with Yahoo News, called the advance by insurgents under the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant during the past week an "existential threat" to Iraq and suggested that U.S. airstrikes were one possible answer. Asked if the United States would cooperate with Iran to thwart the Islamic State, Kerry said, "I think we need to go step by step and see what, in fact, might be a reality, but I wouldn't rule out anything that would be constructive."

William Burns, the deputy secretary of state, briefly raised the subject of Iraq on the margins of previously scheduled negotiations on Iran's nuclear program in Vienna. A State Department official said the purpose of "these engagements" with Iran and other neighbors would be to discuss the threat posed by Sunni militants and to discuss "the need to support inclusivity in Iraq and refrain from pressing a sectarian agenda."

While, in his interview, Kerry left the door open for military cooperation with Iran, a State Department spokesman, Jen Psaki, later sought to more precisely define the nature of any cooperation, saying it would be entirely political. The State Department statement emphasized that the meetings would not discuss "military coordination or strategic determination about Iraq's future over the head of the Iraqi people."

U.S. officials did not say when the next meeting would take place, but a senior official said the United States will "continue to engage as long as it makes sense."

At the Pentagon, spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby reiterated that "we are not planning to engage with Iran on military activities inside Iraq."

Kirby said that while there may be discussions about regional security with the Iranians, those talks would not include discussion on military coordination.

In addition to Vienna, officials said U.S.-Iran talks could be held in Baghdad, possibly between the two countries' ambassadors to Iraq.

Kerry's comments were met with speedy rebuke from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has been harshly critical of the administration's policy toward Iran. In a statement, McCain said it would be the "height of folly to believe that the Iranian regime can be our partner" in Iraq.

He noted that Iran has long been deemed the world's most active state sponsor of terrorism by the State Department and argued that any greater Iranian intervention in Iraq would make matters worse and severely inflame sectarian tensions that are already near a boiling point.

McCain's position puts him at odds with fellow Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, with whom he has long shared opinions critical of Obama's foreign policy. On Sunday, Graham said a U.S. alliance with Iran might be needed to keep Iraq from collapsing.

He said a U.S. partnership with Iran would make him uncomfortable but likened it to the United States working with Soviet leader Josef Stalin in World War II against Adolf Hitler.

Others in Washington sounded off on the possibility of cooperation between the U.S. and Iran.

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, a group that has promoted diplomacy with Iran and a peaceful resolution to the nuclear dispute, welcomed such cooperation.

"The fact that Iran has signaled openness to U.S. strikes in Iraq shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom in Washington, Iran is either not seeking hegemony in the region and/or is incapable of materializing such a desire," Parsi said in an email. "The scaremongering about Iran's intents and capabilities are put in check by these recent events."

Vocal U.S. critics of Iran's government, on the other hand, castigated the Obama administration for even considering a collaboration with Iran on the Iraq crisis, calling it a blunder that Iran would seek to exploit for its own ends in the nuclear talks. Iran is negotiating with world powers, including the United States, which want guarantees that the Iranian nuclear program is peaceful.

With an initial July 20 deadline for an agreement looming, Iran has been pressing for a deal that involves a brief period of limits on its ability to enrich uranium, followed by a significant expansion in the number of centrifuges it can build to enrich uranium. The United States and its European allies say that the limits must be permanent and that any arrangement must provide considerable warning if Iran tries to race for a bomb.

"Iran helped turn both Syria and Iraq into a jihadist inferno, which threatens American security, and now is positioning itself as the firewall against the very violence it created," said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based group that has advocated strong sanctions against Iran over the nuclear issue. "The White House keeps granting Iran strategic openings that Tehran is converting into greater levels of negotiating leverage and nuclear intransigence."

In Iran, a strong backer of the Shiite government in Iraq, top officials also signaled readiness to collaborate with the United States on containing a crisis in a neighbor that the Iranian government has partly blamed on the legacy of the U.S. military's eight-year war that ousted Saddam Hussein. President Hassan Rouhani of Iran has said he would welcome efforts by "all countries in combating terrorism."

On Sunday, a key aide to Rouhani, Hamid Aboutalebi, wrote in a series of messages on his Persian Twitter account that only Iran and the United States are in a position to solve the Iraq crisis.

The conciliatory tone was noteworthy given that Aboutalebi, Rouhani's choice to be Iran's new United Nations ambassador, was rejected by the United States earlier this year because of his indirect role as a translator for the militants who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, setting off the break in Iranian-U.S. ties that has shaped the countries' relationship ever since.

However, Iran is "strongly against U.S. military intervention in Iraq," said Marzieh Afkham, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, according to the official IRNA news agency.

Information for this article was contributed by Rick Gladstone, Thomas Erdbrink and Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times; by Terry Atlas, Glen Carey, Jonathan Tirone, Eddie Buckle, Tony Capaccio, Zaid Sabah and Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News; and by Matthew Lee, Lolita C. Baldor, Kimberly Hefling and George Jahn of The Associated Press.

A Section on 06/17/2014