So President Bush is shooting off his mouth again, falsely stating that Iran has stated their intent to acquire nuclear weapons. This shouldn't come as a surprise to those of us used to hearing this administration's falsehoods, but it did seem like a good reason to revisit a certain missed opportunity, which represents one of the great failures of the last seven years: the White House's failure to engage Iran in diplomatic talks in the aftermath of 9/11. Coincidentally, the Columbia Journalism Review took on this very story in their most recent issue, and by their account the failure was two-fold. One failure on the part of the administration to engage the Iranians, and the other failure by the media's lack of curiosity about the story.

There does appear to have been an opportunity [negotiation] that, with little notice in the media, was passed up not by Iran but by the Bush administration.

In the fall of 2001, U.S. attention was focused on Osama bin Laden and rooting out Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. At the same time, something else was happening in Afghanistan: Iran was cooperating with the U.S. to a degree that hadn’t been seen since the days of the Shah. It was, as Ray Takeyh, author of Hidden Iran, put it, “the underreported story of the first episode of America’s war on terrorism.”

Before the U.S. began its air strikes against the Taliban in October 2001, U.S. and Iranian diplomats started to meet and coordinate on Afghanistan. (Iran had long opposed the Taliban, whose Sunni extremism brands Shia, Iran’s state religion, as heretical.) Iran invited the U.S. to use its airbases for emergency landings and offered to conduct rescue operations for lost American pilots. Tehran’s diplomats apparently also stepped in to save a U.S.-proposed power-sharing deal that the Northern Alliance initially opposed. Indeed, Iran even offered to help train the nascent Afghan Army—under U.S. supervision.

Mid-level contacts between Tehran and Washington continued in fits and starts. In May 2003, Iranian leaders appear to have made a last-ditch effort at a deal. They may have been motivated by the speed with which the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. After all, Iran had fought an eight-year war with Iraq that ended in a stalemate; the U.S. march to Baghdad took three weeks. Whatever its inspiration, Iran’s offer put nearly everything on the table, from support for Hezbollah to Iran’s nuclear energy program. It has since been dubbed the “Grand Bargain.”

The sincerity of Iran's offers during this time might be questionable to those who believe it to be an irrational actor on the world stage, but one thing is clear: regardless of the ultimate efficacy of these possible negotiations, the administration failed to even pursue them. The compounding of this error came when the media failed to pursue the story. The story of the "Grand Bargain" appeared in the media, but usually as a smaller part of a much larger story. The media never fixated on the story in a way that might have compelled the appropriate political actors to pay attention at the time.

Few other reporters seemed interested in the evidence of Iran’s apparent peace overtures and the U.S.’s recalcitrance. The first headline about any of this in a U.S. paper wouldn’t come for another year and a half, nearly three years after the Financial Times first revealed those overtures. (That story was published in February 2006 by a freelancer, Greg Beals, in Long Island’s Newsday.)

This is yet another perfect example of how cautious or careless reporting, combined with an administration with limited concern for the truth, can cost the country greatly in the form of lost opportunities, or -- as is the case with Iraq -- imprudent and ill-informed action. The press is happy to cover Rev. Wright's remarks nearly 24 hours a day for a week straight, but on the substantive issues, our media continue to fall short. The one news organization that CJR reserves praise for is McClatchy, which took over for Knight Ridder and continues to be the first place to go for sober analysis and good old fashioned muckraking.

As always, more news and commentary available at The Left Anchor.