{"id":9,"date":"2011-12-22T01:16:41","date_gmt":"2011-12-22T01:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/?p=9"},"modified":"2012-01-23T01:29:54","modified_gmt":"2012-01-23T01:29:54","slug":"9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/?p=9","title":{"rendered":"Closing UK Embassy in Tehran–There is a cost…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Closing the respective embassies in Tehran and London may have been inevitable for political reasons, but there is a cost to this action.\u00a0 Two governments that already have a poor understanding of one another will now have even less contact and data to base critical decisions.\u00a0 Having examined in depth the previous case of Iraq and the United States, it is clear that massive miscalculations based on gross misperceptions on both sides contributed to the Iraq tragedy.\u00a0 The absence of an embassy drastically reduced the number of officials who had any real grasp of the other government.\u00a0 There was astonishing ignorance at senior levels and costly errors were made.\u00a0 It may feel good to slam the embassy door shut, but there is a loss of knowledge and understanding that can be critical. The United States had full diplomatic relations with Saddam\u2019s Iraq from 1984 until the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.\u00a0 A cadre of diplomats, businessmen, and academics had regular dialogue\u2014formal and informal–with real Iraqis in both Washington and Baghdad.\u00a0 The former Iraqi Ambassador, Nizar Hamdoon (who died in a New York hospital in June 2003), was widely known and could interpret Baghdad to audiences in the US.\u00a0 Perhaps more importantly, he interpreted Washington to Baghdad.\u00a0 On both sides, during the 1980\u2019s there were people who knew each other and had a tactile sense for the realities of both countries.\u00a0 There were people who had a sense of the real dynamics in each country. However, from 1991 until 2003, relations were cut.\u00a0 During that time, individuals with direct knowledge moved on.\u00a0 During that period the misperceptions of each government grew uncorrected by the regular direct contact of officials when diplomatic relations are ongoing.\u00a0 Consequently, politically expedient images of the opposing country grew unmodified by diplomats charged with reporting from their assigned posts.\u00a0 In Washington, Saddam became a one-dimensional cartoonish image\u2014a crazed monomaniacal ruthless dictator\u2014end of story.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course he was a dangerous dictator, but he also ruled a complex country and produced important results inside Iraq.\u00a0 Such data were unexamined but would have provided a fuller image of the problem subsequently confronted when he was removed. Likewise, and in many ways more challenging, was the task for Iraqis to explain Washington to Saddam.\u00a0 Pity the poor Iraqi who had to explain how decisions were made in Washington\u2014Congress, lobbyists, journalists and, yes, to some extent the president all have their say. We learned from debriefing Saddam just how malformed his model of Washington was.\u00a0 His limited frame of reference provided him only a very distorted image of Washington decision processes. Even Tariq Aziz, the relatively worldly former Deputy Prime Minister asked me informally in 1998, \u201cWhat is an intern?\u201d\u00a0 This was in the context of the Monica Lewinsky scandal then-breaking in Washington.\u00a0 Try to explain to Saddam that the last super-power is tied up in knots over some young inconsequential intern. Absent contrary information and views, Saddam sustained a model of Washington that was based upon his experiences.\u00a0 For example, he assumed presidents could act with far more freedom than is the reality.\u00a0 He considered that President Bush, the son of the former president would be acting based on familial objectives.\u00a0 And he had a simplistic notion of the influence of Israel on Washington\u2019s behavior.\u00a0 Baghdad also assumed that the United States knew more than we really did.\u00a0 Their default assumption was that we must know the true extent of Iraq WMD programs.\u00a0 After all, the US has a massive intelligence system with unknown technical capacities.\u00a0 So Saddam evaluated US statements and actions assuming Washington was aware of his WMD status. And in Washington, assumptions about Saddam became progressively simplified as direct access atrophied.\u00a0 The influence of external opposition groups became disproportionate because there was so little access to Iraqis living inside Iraq.\u00a0 The repetition of the horrors of the regime dominated.\u00a0 However, it would have been useful to examine the question, \u201cWhat good things has Saddam done in Iraq?\u201d\u00a0 Whilst Iraq had an active embassy in Washington, it reminded interlocutors that there was a broader picture to the Saddam regime. There is a natural tendency to simplify the image of opponents.\u00a0 There is a natural tendency to focus on the particularly absurd or horrible.\u00a0 Media reporting focuses attention on such.\u00a0 Often it is only embassy reporting that provides real context.\u00a0 And they provide a pool of officials that have first-hand knowledge of the regime and that can be invaluable to decision-makers.\u00a0 It was the Iraq embassy in Washington that would explain to Baghdad the difference between the Hollywood image of the United States and reality.\u00a0 And, an operating American embassy in Baghdad would have been more attuned to the stability that, albeit at great cost, Saddam enforced on Iraq. Today, we risk becoming more ignorant of the dynamics inside Iran just at the time when progressively more critical decisions may be taken.\u00a0 Maybe this is always the case, but we should remind ourselves that the uncertainty band of our knowledge is very large may become larger still.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Closing the respective embassies in Tehran and London may have been inevitable for political reasons, but there is a cost to this action.\u00a0 Two governments that already have a poor understanding of one another will now have even less contact … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[71,70],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/22"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}