Although it is less than a decade old the New America Foundation in Washington, DC has a deserved reputation for promoting new ideas and for helping reveal what is really going on with our government. It did so back in 2005 when Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, (USA-Ret.), former chief of staff to Colin Powell, both when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State, said in a speech at the Foundation that Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government’s foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world. In decidedly unambiguous words, Wilkerson said, “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.”

Yesterday, the Foundation did another public service when it held a conference on the future of U.S.-Iran relations. Held, ironically enough at the Dirksen (former senator who was an early hawk on the Vietnam war) Senate Office Bldg. the first panel was Ruse or Opportunity? The Provenance of Iran’s Spring 2003 Negotiations Offer.  The panelists were Flynt Leverett, a Foundation Senior Fellow and a former senior director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council  and Col. Wilkerson.

Now follow closely because this is both a bit complex but very important. Late last year Leverett and his wife Hilary Mann made the news because the CIA had blacked out portions of an op-ed they had written for the New York Times, after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Their op-ed simply pointed out the obvious fact that Iran was unlikely to cooperate with the U.S. over its nuclear program or other specific issues on a limited basis. Instead the only diplomatic approach that might succeed is a comprehensive one aimed at a “grand bargain” between the United States and the Islamic Republic...

For the complete post, please visit Partnership for a Secure America's blog.