The main point is that the public and media have literally no clue that critical negotiations or correspondence is passing between supposed enemies/neutral parties. In recent history, a prime example might be Nixon's visit to China and the secret meetings which led to diplomatic relations. The media had no clue that such negotiations were in progress.

Some instances sound like crazy schemes. Germany supposedly approached Mexico in 1917, urging an invasion of the southwestern U.S. Sounds far-fetched, but the cable was intercepted/copied and reached the White House, where it supposedly helped push the administration of President Woodrow Wilson into agreeing to enter the war against the Axis.

Shortly after World War Two, Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter to the U.S. State Department, seeking U.S. support for Vietnamese independence. The U.S. didn't bother to reply, and the rest is, well, history.

As a face-saving gesture during the tense negotiations with the Soviet Union over their missiles in Cuba, the U.S agreed to remove some obsolete missiles based in Turkey. It was a diplomatic sop of zero military import, but it allowed the Soviet leadership to go home with some "concession" to counter their defeat in Cuba.

There are two compelling pieces of evidence which suggest the U.S. negotiated a deal with Iran in May, 2007. The first is a chart of coalition combat deaths in Iraq, which show a steady increase up to May 2007 as horrifically effective armor-piercing roadside bombs were deployed by insurgents.

Second, the U.S. made it clear that such advanced weaponry was coming from Iran:

Officials: Iran behind advanced, lethal IED Top levels of Iranian government said to be authorizing export of weapon (Army Times, 2/11/07)

Military officials on Sunday accused the highest levels of the Iranian leadership of arming Shiite militants in Iraq with sophisticated armor-piercing roadside bombs that have killed more than 170 American forces. The deadly and highly sophisticated weapons the military said it traced to Iran are known as 'explosively formed penetrators,' or EFPs.

A sophisticated type of roadside bomb that U.S. officials have linked to Iran has been used increasingly against U.S. troops in Iraq. The device is called an explosively formed projectile (EFP). It is usually made from a pipe filled with explosives and capped by a copper disk. When the explosives detonate, they transform the disk into a molten jet of metal capable of penetrating armor. They perform in the same way that U.S. anti-tank missiles do.

"Properly handled, it goes through armor like a hot knife through butter," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a military think tank in Alexandria, Va.

Officials such as Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, and National Intelligence Director John Negroponte have said the new bombs are being provided by Iran and are killing U.S. troops. U.S. officials have declined to say exactly how many have been killed or how the weapons have been traced to Iran, which has denied supplying them.

I think it is highly likely that the Iranian leadership is aware that the Achilles Heel of any U.S. military operation is high/rising casualties--even if the war is being won tactically and strategically.

I have long recommended an out-of-print book on the 1968 Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington. The book details how the Tet Offensive was a battlefield disaster for the Viet Cong and NVA (North Vietnamese Army), both of which were decimated. It took the NVA four long years to build up the capability to launch another countrywide assault.

Nonetheless, the Tet Offensive was viewed in the U.S. as a huge defeat, for two reasons: 1) it showed that the positive "light at the end of the tunnel" propaganda mouthed by the White House and the Pentagon was false, and 2) the high casualties inflicted on U.S. forces soured the American people; the war was widely seen as no longer "worth the cost" in American lives.

So put yourselves in the room with the Iranian leadership. How do you create some leverage over the U.S. in Iraq? It's horribly, terribly easy: just kill more U.S. soldiers every month. Shaped-charge IEDs were the "easy, cheap" answer, and they took the terrible desired toll.

Now put yourself in the U.S. administration's shoes. Five years after you launch an elective pre-emptive war, casualties are rising and all the positive propaganda you've spun is looking very tattered if not outright false. The public is tired of the war and tired of your constant saber-rattling around the world. Your wartime decisions and policies have stretched the Army and Marines, and the grinding attrition is eating away at readiness, materiel, recruitment, mid-rank officer corps, everything.

So you blame the Iranians, daily and pointedly, hopijng the American public will rally round the accusations. But after five years, blaming the Iranians is not getting any traction with the public, who only sees more deaths of young Americans in an increasingly dubious and increasingly deadly war.

So what exactly are the U.S. options? Stop the IEDs from coming across the hundreds of kilometers-long border with Iran? No chance. If you do nothing and let casualties keep mounting, you lose the American public--and thus the 2008 elections. Your military leaders are worried about morale and their inability to counter the new powerful Iranian-suppled IEDs, and somebody finally gasps the nettle and admits that the only way to cut the combat deaths is to cut a deal with Iran.

That doesn't go over too big with the chicken-hawk (i.e. no combat duty or even Military service) civilian advisors, but the political and military logic is inescapable. So through the same "informal" intermediaries the U.S. has used since 1978, you put out the feelers for secret talks.

It's a straightfoward quid pro quo: we give you the promise not to invade or strike your nuclear facilities, and you stop the flow of deadly IEDs into Iraq. The U.S. administration could see the writing on the wall; the U.S. public, sick of five years of grinding war, had no stomach for an invasion or strike against Iran--especially after doubts about the danger of their nuclear program surfaced.

The Iranians must have been pleased, for their leverage had worked exceedingly well. And like the rational players they are, they kept their end of the bargain and voila, coalition combat deaths plummeted once the deal was made.

Now the U.S. administration has nothing to gain from letting even a whisper of this deal out, so the "story" is that the "troop surge" has "driven Al Queda into the hinterlands," and these factors are the cause of declining combat deaths.

No doubt the surge in U.S. forces helped secure areas in and around Baghdad, and the Iraqi disgust with Al Qaeda suicide bombings probably led to a determination to cut off insurgent cooperation/support of Al Qaeda--but neither explains why combat deaths from IEDs have declined and continue to decline.

Does the U.S. have an absolutely pressing need to lower combat deaths? Yes. Do the Iranians have a compelling reason to obtain U.S. assurances that invasion/bombardment is off the table? Yes. Not only that, but the U.S.--whether this administration wants to admit it or not--needs Iranian cooperation to stabilize Iraq. And the Iranians, for their part, have good reasons to prefer a U.S. presence to keep the Sunnis from re-exerting control of Iraqi oil fields, and to limit the prospects of all-out civil war.

In summary: nothing about the "surge" or other operations explains the sudden and permanent decline in sophisticated, deadly IED attacks on coalition forces since May 2007. Given the compelling interests of both the U.S. and Iran, the precariousness of the situation in Iraq and of their respective political situations, then secret negotiations and a very secret deal would punch everyone's ticket.

It will be many years before the public ever learns if negotiations took place, and who the players were. But I believe the evidence that a deal was cut is extremely compelling.

Thank you, Barry P. ($20), for your surprising and generous contribution to this humble site. I am greatly honored by your support and readership. All contributors are listed below in acknowledgement of my gratitude.


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