Well, just browsing the timeline some more, and I see the CFR’s entry for 2001:
Ayatollah Khamenei condemns the attacks of 9/11 and many Iranians hold candlelight vigils. After the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan topples the Taliban government, American and Iranian diplomats meet together in Bonn, with a handful of representatives from other UN members, to form a new government and constitution for Kabul. Iran also cooperates with the United Nations to repatriate nearly one million Afghan refugees residing on its soil and provides support to the Northern Alliance. The brief U.S.-Iranian cooperation ends after President Bush labels Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” in his 2002 State of the Union.
Richard Haass is really playing skittles with history here and should know better. Iranians came out and held candlelight vigils, true. The same Iranians who are in the street now, until the regime forbade them from doing so. Haass’s team at CFR forgets, however, that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps then sheltered senior al-Qaeda officials and refused to turn them over to international authorities. The CFR team also forgets that while Iranian diplomats engaged their U.S. counterparts in Afghanistan, the IRGC was doing something quite more malicious, all before the Axis of Evil speech. We also know, from the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, that the Islamic Republic was actively working on nuclear-warhead design at this stage. Policymakers can debate the wisdom of Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, and they can hate Bush all they want, but Richard Haass knows full well that Bush’s declaration wasn’t an arbitrary utterance.
I hope this is just a case of poor supervision in an echo chamber. It will be interesting to see if the site goes down for maintenance and a more balanced — and accurate — narrative appears.