WASHINGTON: After an eight-week hiatus, the American and Iranian ambassadors in Baghdad are scheduled to meet soon to discuss Iraq. Some accounts portray these encounters as a departure from decades of non-communication. In fact, American and Iranian officials have met many times over the years.

Perhaps the most constructive period of US-Iranian diplomacy since the fall of the shah of Iran took place in the months after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Many believe that in the wake of 9/11, the United States formed an international coalition and toppled the Taliban. It would be more accurate to say that the United States joined a coalition that had been battling the Taliban for nearly a decade. This coalition — made up of Iran, India, Russia and the Northern Alliance, and aided by massive American airpower — drove the Taliban from power.

The coalition then worked closely with the United States to secure agreement among all elements of the Afghan opposition on the formation of a broadly based successor to the Taliban regime.

As the American representative at the UN conference in Bonn, Germany, where this agreement was reached, I worked closely with the Iranian delegation and others. Iranian representatives were particularly helpful.

In 2001, we were dealing with representatives of Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, a moderate, reformist leader looking for better relations with Washington. Today, Crocker is meeting with officials of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a radical populist who has shown little interest in US-Iranian accommodation.

If the Iranian position has hardened and strengthened since 2001, that of Washington has both hardened and weakened. US-Iranian cooperation then was toward a common victory. Tehran is now being asked to help retrieve an incipient American defeat. This will be a harder sell.

Only weeks after Hamid Karzai was sworn in as interim leader in Afghanistan, President Bush listed Iran among the “axis of evil” — surprising payback for Tehran’s help in Bonn. A year later, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, all bilateral contacts with Tehran were suspended. Since then, confrontation over Iran’s nuclear programme has intensified.

Yet Washington and Tehran still have largely coincident objectives in Iraq, as they did in Afghanistan almost six years ago.

If they are serious, both sides should try to make their dialogue more private. Prospects for progress would be greatly increased if the conversations could be held frequently, informally and confidentially. —Dawn/The Washington Post News Service