A Glimmer of Pragmatism on Iran

(Before It's News)

Flynt Leverett, Hillary Mann Leverett and Seyed Mohammad Marandi

It took a searing crisis for the United States to officially acknowledge that it needs Iran’s help. On Monday, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns reportedly discussed the jihadist takeover of Iraq’s Sunni heartland with his Iranian counterparts on the sidelines of nuclear talks in Vienna.

Good idea. For years, we’ve been calling on the United States to sit down and discuss its mutual interests with Iran like adults, instead of shouting across the Atlantic. Two of us — Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, both former career Middle East specialists for the U.S. government — have been vilified in the American press for calling for pragmatic engagement.

Now there’s an opportunity to work together to face down a common threat, and even Republican leaders like Lindsey Graham, the unfailingly hawkish South Carolina senator, are starting to see things our way.

The United States should engage Iran not just as an unavoidably influential player, however, but as an actor with its own concerns about terrorism — including by jihadis involved in the U.S.-supported campaign against Bashar Assad’s government in Syria. If the United States tries — as in past episodes of cooperation with Tehran — to elicit Iranian help in Iraq without recognizing Iran’s wider interests, dialogue will fail.

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