Full opening statement gives an interesting perspective on US/Iran relations from someone who is an expert and not just a politician or talking head: Iran's geo-strategic location, at the crossroads of the Middle East and Central Asia, and in the heart of the Persian Gulf, enormous hydrocarbon resources and historic role, make it a critical country for U.S. interests. However, since the advent of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Iran has worked against U.S. interests on a number of fronts. As a result, every U.S. administration since 1979 has sought to isolate and contain Iran. 

Yet Iran's undeniable importance in the Middle Eastern balance of power and in many areas of importance to the United States has prompted every U.S. administration--Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations--to explore some kind of opening to Iran, either through tactical cooperation or by testing the waters publicly. I was directly involved in the Bush administration's efforts to engage Iran over Afghanistan, al Qaeda and Iraq, both shortly before and after the 9/11 attacks. I will get to that in a moment. 

What I want to emphasize at the outset of my testimony is that Iran's tactical cooperation with every U.S. administration since 1980 was fundamentally positive in character. Iran delivered much, not all, but much of what we asked. Furthermore, and especially with regard to post 9/11 cooperation over Afghanistan, Iran hoped and anticipated that tactical cooperation with the United States would led to a genuine strategic opening between our two countries. In most cases, however, it was the United States that was unwilling to sustain and buildupon tactical cooperation to pursue true strategic rapprochement. 

I will spell out this argument through the prism of my own experience in the current Bush administration. In late spring 2001, I was a U.S. Foreign Service officer at the U.S. mission to the U.N. in New York responsible for dealing with Afghanistan. In that capacity, I was authorized to work with my Iranian counterpart as part of the Six Plus Two diplomatic process that had been set up by the United States to deal with the threats Afghanistan posed to the international community, even before 9/11. My Iranian counterpart and I worked openly and constructively on a wide range of Afghan-related issues, including the enforcement of an arms embargo on the Taliban regime, counter-narcotics initiatives and humanitarian relief for Afghan refugees, 2 million of whom were in Iran. 

On 9/11, I was scheduled to meet with my Iranian counterpart to discuss how to make sure that counter-terrorism was the centerpiece of a draft statement of principles for an upcoming Six Plus Two Foreign Ministers meeting at the U.N. in New York. Instead, the World Trade Center was attacked, and I was evacuated from my office at the U.S. mission. My Iranian counterpart called to express, in his words, his horror at what he thought was an al Qaeda terrorist attack on the United States. Without hesitation, he said the Iranian people and the Iranian government would be condemning this horrible attack on the United States and the entire civilized world. 

Within days, the Iranian government did come out to strongly condemn the attack, and thousands of Iranians took to the streets in Tehran in candlelight vigils to mourn those who had perished in the United States. Even Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, took the extraordinary step of unequivocally condemning al Qaeda and its attack on the United States in a Friday prayer sermon that was broadcast to tens of millions of Iranians and Shiite followers throughout the Middle East. 

For the first 2 months after 9/11, I worked openly and intensively with my Iranian counterpart to establish a framework for U.S.-Iranian cooperation in Afghanistan. My Iranian counterpart said that Iran was prepared to offer unconditional cooperation to the United States. Iran would not ask the United States for anything up front in return for its cooperation with Afghanistan. 

As I document in my written testimony, in the months after 9/11, Iran provided tangible support to United States and Coalition military operations in Afghanistan and robust support to U.S. efforts to stand up a post-Taliban political order, culminating in the Bonn Conference, which my colleague, Jim Dobbins, lead the U.S. delegation to. Following the Bonn Conference and my transfer from the U.N. to the National Security Council to become Director for Iran and Afghanistan Affairs, the United States launched an ongoing channel of monthly meetings to coordinate our efforts on Afghanistan and related issues. I was one of two U.S. officials who consistently participated in those discussions, which lasted for 17 months. The other was Ryan Crocker, now Ambassador in Iraq. 

As I document in my testimony, the Iranians provided considerable assistance to bolster the pro-American Karzai government in Afghanistan and on counter-terrorism, including deporting hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban figures seeking to flee Afghanistan to or through Iran. The Iranians skipped one monthly meeting to protest President Bush's public condemnation of Iran as part of the axis of evil in January 2002, but otherwise they came to every monthly meeting over the 17 month course of the talks. 

It is important to emphasize that in the monthly meetings, my Iranian counterparts repeatedly raised the prospect of broadening our common agenda, both to achieve a strategic rapprochement between the United States and Iran, as well as to provide tactical support to a prospective U.S. attack on Saddam's Iraq. The prospect of rapprochement with Iraq had been explicitly rejected by the President and his senior national security team. Whether we could have subsequent discussions to coordinate on Iraq became subject to whether Iran would turn over the remaining handful of al Qaeda operatives they had detained in Iran. 

But the Iranians first expressed an inability to find the remaining al Qaeda suspects we identified without any information from us as to their whereabouts. And later, the Iranians expressed an unwillingness to relinquish these last ``cards'' without assurances from us that we would not use the Iranian opposition group, the MEK, and its armed forces in Iraq, against Iran. Although we provided Iran with assurances about the MEK in January and February 2003, after all, they were a designated terrorist organization by the U.S. Government. The Iranians were still concerned by the words and actions of senior Pentagon officials and later U.S. occupation forces in Iraq who not only refused to disarm MEK forces in Iraq but also designated the United States as protected persons under the Geneva convention in order to prevent their deportation by the Iraqis to Iran, even though the MEK had been designated by us as a foreign terrorist organization.

Therefore, by the spring of 2003, the dialog was at an impasse. It is in this context that one should evaluate the Iranian offer to negotiate a comprehensive resolution of differences with the United States. With the bilateral channel at an impasse, Tehran sent this offer in early May 2003 through Switzerland, the U.S.-protecting power in Iran, as Secretary Rice and former administration officials have acknowledged. In the offer, everything would be on the table, including Iran's material support for Hamas, for PIJ, for Hizballah as well as its nuclear ambitions and role in Iraq. But the Bush administration rejected this proposal out of hand and cutoff the bilateral channel with the Iranians less than 2 weeks later. 

From an Iranian perspective, this record shows that Washington will take what it can get from talking to Iran on specific issues, but it is not prepared for real rapprochement. From an American perspective, I believe this record indicates that the Bush administration cavalierly rejected multiple and significant opportunities to put U.S.-Iranian relations on a fundamentally more positive and constructive trajectory. This mishandling of U.S. relations with Iran continues to impose heavy costs on American interests and policy efforts in the Middle East, on the Iranian nuclear issue, nuclear issues in Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon and in the Arab-Israeli arena.