US
“Diplomacy” On Iran: Thuggery And Threats Of Military Aggression
By Peter Symonds
16 February, 2007
World
Socialist Web
Despite
the continuing American military build up in the Persian Gulf, President
Bush and his officials insist the US is not planning a military strike
against Iran. In an interview with C-Span on Monday, Bush repeated what
has become a mantra. He dismissed warnings of war as “people speculating”
and declared that the US seeks to “solve the issue diplomatically”.
Nevertheless, he reiterated that “the military is the last resort”.
Bush’s claims are simply
absurd. The White House has flatly ruled out negotiations with Iran
unless Tehran complies with US demands in advance and shuts down its
nuclear programs. Just two months ago, the US administration rejected
the recommendation of the top-level Iraq Study Group (ISG) to seek a
political solution to the war in Iraq, including through direct talks
with Iran and Syria.
At the time, former US Secretary
of State James Baker, who chaired the ISG, publicly chided the Bush
administration, by pointing out one of the elementary rules of international
diplomacy: one talks to one’s enemies, not just one’s allies.
Baker’s remark simply underscores the fact that the Bush administration
is not engaged in diplomacy—at least, not in the usually accepted
meaning of the word—but in international gangsterism.
Over the past six years,
US “diplomacy” on Iran has consisted of ultimatums and threats
against Tehran, combined with a concerted effort to bully and strong-arm
other countries—the European Union, Russia and China in particular—into
backing the American campaign. Unwilling to challenge Washington, its
rivals followed a policy of appeasement, manoeuvring to avoid an open
confrontation with Iran, but, in the end, voting for a UN Security Council
resolution last December that the US will exploit to justify military
action.
For all its rather empty
anti-American bluster, the Iranian regime has repeatedly sought an accommodation
with the US and other major powers. Protracted talks with the so-called
EU-3—Britain, France and Germany—broke down primarily because
it became clear that the European powers could not deliver a guarantee
from the US to end its threats and move to normalise relations with
the US. All of Tehran’s direct overtures to Washington have been
contemptuously rebuffed.
An article in this week’s
Newsweek magazine confirms that Iran quietly assisted the US invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq. Prior to the 2001 intervention in Afghanistan,
“American and Iranian officials met repeatedly in Geneva.”
One US official who was present told the magazine: “In fact, they
were impatient. They’d ask, ‘When’s the military action
going to start? Let’s get going!” Following the toppling
of the Taliban regime in Kabul, Tehran played a key role at the UN conference
in Germany in helping to install the US puppet Hamid Karzai as the new
Afghan president.
Far from using the opportunity
to normalise relations with Tehran, President Bush notoriously chose
to brand Iran in his 2002 State of the Union speech as part of an “axis
of evil” with Iraq and North Korea. Nevertheless, in the lead-up
to the US invasion of Iraq, as Newsweek explained, “low-level
meetings between the two sides had continued even after the Axis of
Evil speech”. For all the latest unsubstantiated claims that Iran
is arming anti-US militias in Iraq, Washington relied heavily on Tehran
to ensure that the major Iraqi Shiite parties supported the invasion
in 2003 and subsequently participated in the US occupation administration.
Comments last week by US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before the House Foreign Relations
Committee have focussed attention on one little-reported, but highly
significant Iranian offer to the US for comprehensive talks to settle
all outstanding issues. The proposal came in the wake of the US invasion
of Iraq as the Bush administration seized on revelations about Iran’s
nuclear facilities to escalate tensions with Tehran. Iran’s top
leadership passed a memo via the Swiss ambassador in Tehran to the US
State Department outlining a plan for negotiations.
Extraordinarily, Rice, who
was Bush’s national security adviser at the time, denied any knowledge
of the memo last week. Under questioning in Congress, she declared:
“I have read about this so-called proposal from Iran. I think
I would have noticed if the Iranians had said, ‘We’re ready
to recognise Israel.’... I just don’t remember ever seeing
any such thing.”
Other US officials have been
equally dismissive. Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage
acknowledged reading the document, but told Newsweek that the administration
“couldn’t determine what was the Iranians’ and what
was the Swiss ambassador’s” in the proposal. Parrotting
the same line, State Department spokesman Tom Casey declared on Tuesday:
“This document did not come through official channels but rather
was a creative exercise on the part of the Swiss ambassador.”
Stung by the criticisms,
ambassador Tim Guldimann provided the Washington Post with details of
his involvement. In an article published yesterday, Guldimann explained
that he had told the State Department that the Iranian proposal had
been reviewed and approved at the highest levels in Tehran by supreme
leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then president Mohammad Khatami, and
then-foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi. “I got the clear impression
that there is a strong will of the regime to tackle the problem with
the US now and to try it with this initiative,” Guldimann wrote
in a cover note, which was faxed with the document on May 4, 2003.
Whether or not Rice and other
US officials are lying about the offer, the incident reveals that the
Bush administration was simply not interested in negotiations with Tehran.
The document, which is now available at the Newsweek website, makes
clear just how far the Iranian regime was prepared to go. While seeking
security guarantees and an end to the two-decade US economic embargo,
Tehran was willing to discuss “full transparency” on its
nuclear programs, assistance in politically stabilising Iraq, ending
support for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, and recognising Israel
as part of a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue.
Former Secretary of State
Colin Powell told Newsweek he had met fierce opposition to any diplomatic
overtures to Iran and its ally Syria. “My position in the remaining
year and a half [of Bush’s first term] was that we ought to find
ways to restart talks with Iran. But there was a reluctance on the part
of the president to do that,” he explained. Powell rejected claims
that his diplomatic efforts were failures. “I don’t like
the administration saying, ‘Powell went, Armitage went... and
[they] got nothing,” he said. “You can’t negotiate
when you tell the other side, ‘Give us what a negotiation would
produce before the negotiations start’.”
That is exactly the Bush
administration’s current stance: an offer to negotiate, but only
after Iran has unconditionally shut down its uranium enrichment plant
and other nuclear programs. This is not a proposal to talk but an ultimatum
backed by increasingly open threats of military aggression and the assembling
of a huge armada of warships in the Persian Gulf. By buckling to US
pressure and voting for the UN Security Council resolution in December,
the EU, China and Russia have given the US war drive a fig leaf of international
legitimacy.
The Bush administration’s
provocative stance against Iran is in marked contrast to the deal struck
this week in Beijing over North Korea’s nuclear programs. Unlike
Tehran, Pyongyang had not only withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty and expelled international inspectors, but last year exploded
a primitive nuclear device. Yet the White House has sought to neutralise
the conflict, offering to meet North Korean officials face-to-face and
reaching a comprehensive agreement—at least temporarily—before
Pyongyang agreed to any of the US demands.
The North Korean deal does
not reflect any fundamental change of course by the US. Whatever the
immediate tactical reasons for the arrangement with Pyongyang, it is
clear that the Bush administration can now focus its full attention
on its top priority: Iran. Despite the obvious contradictions, the White
House has no intention of replicating the talks over North Korea, by
offering comprehensive negotiations with Iran. Instead the US is busy
manufacturing new allegations against Tehran that could serve as a pretext
for war.
The long string of accusations
against the Iranian regime are simply a convenient cover for US ambitions
to establish its dominance over Iran as part of broader plans for American
hegemony throughout the resource-rich regions of the Middle East and
Central Asia. That is the real purpose behind the Bush administration’s
diplomacy and the reason for its gangster character.
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