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worldwideWAMM November 2006
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Has the U.S. made any genuine diplomatic effort to end Iran’s nuclear program?
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by Omid Mohseni
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| The U.S. report card for dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions in the past five years is comprised of name-calling, demonization, funding of opposition groups, and supporting a proxy war in Lebanon. |
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For the past two years, Iran has refused to comply with UN Security Council demands that it halt its nuclear program, suspected to be for military purposes. The U.S. government, however, presents the image of an administration that has been cooperating with its European allies to end Iran’s future nuclear threat diplomatically. Meanwhile, Iran is being portrayed as an administration that has been toying with the EU and the UN Security Council to buy time for its nuclear arsenal development. Is this the real picture?
In 2000, Iran’s President Khatami proposed naming 2001 the year for a Dialogue among Civilizations at a UN conference.1 Since Iran already had ongoing dialogue with all other UN members besides Israel and the U.S., this was a clear attempt to build up their relationship with the US. Nothing came of that effort.
Four months after 9/11, in January 2002, President Bush named Iran as one of the members of the Axis of Evil. This name-calling occurred despite the Iranian government’s offer to help with the war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. Then, the U.S. administration started an aggressive campaign to depict Iran as a regime supporting terrorism and in pursuit of nuclear weapons, which would ultimately pose a threat to American citizens. This campaign lost steam during the period the U.S. was intensely searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
In May 2003, the Iranian administration sent a letter through the Swiss Embassy proposing an end to the hostility between the two governments and the start of a new relationship with mutual respect.2 The U.S. administration did not disclose the receipt of the letter and neither did they deny it, but more importantly, they never responded to it at all.
Due to the disastrous outcome and increasing condemnation of the invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Cheney administration began making an effort to portray the face of the U.S. administration as different from the one that had invaded Iraq based on the phony weapons of mass destruction argument. However, though they claimed to be seeking diplomatic solutions for Iran’s case, the U.S. never took part in any negotiations between the EU members and the Iranian government, while simultaneously demonizing the Iranian regime in speeches and interviews. In addition, the U.S. administration demanded a complete halt to the Iranian nuclear program as a precondition to negotiations. During Khatami’s presidency, the Iranian government was more compliant to UN demands and even temporarily stopped its nuclear program. However, since Ahmadinejad became president in 2005, the Iranian government has not accepted any proposals from the Europeans or the UN, which stresses a complete halt to the Iranian nuclear energy program as a precondition for negotiations.
In February 2006, the U.S. government allocated $85 million for an extensive propaganda campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran to help build a new dissident network.3 In April 2006, Seymour Hersh wrote an article in the New Yorker4 quoting current and former American military and intelligence officials who said that the U.S. government is planning a military strike against Iran that would include the possibility of using nuclear weapons. In May 2006, President Ahmadinejad wrote an 18-page letter to President Bush, clearly signaling a willingness for direct negotiations. The letter was completely ignored by U.S. officials.
On July 12, 2006, the Israeli government started a bombing campaign against Lebanon which ended in the killing of more than 1,000 civilians. The Israeli government claimed that its campaign was in response to Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of another three. The kidnapping of Israeli soldiers has been a frequent practice by the Hezbollah since the occupation of Southern Lebanon in the 1980s. Hostages were then exchanged for the Hezbollah supporters incarcerated by the Israeli government. The U.S. government’s unconditional support for the Israeli government’s attack on Lebanon was seen as a strong message that the war against Hezbollah was a proxy war against Iran.5
Finally, by the end of September, when EU members were claiming important progress in their negotiations with Iranian representatives, the U.S. Congress passed the Iran Freedom Act, which was the renewal of the 1995 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. Representative Dennis Kucinich as the opponent of the act stressed that this act funds media propaganda machines to lay the groundwork for a war against Iran.6
The U.S. report card for dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions in the past five years is comprised of name-calling, demonization, funding of opposition groups, and supporting a proxy war in Lebanon. There has been no indication of any sort of diplomatic effort on the part of the U.S. to negotiate its differences with the Iranian government.
The Iranian regime, however, has taken many steps to start up a dialogue with the U.S., all of which have been rejected by the U.S. administration. The Iranian administration has come to understand that any agreement with the EU will not defuse U.S. hostility. They also realize that halting their nuclear program or even suspending uranium enrichment as a precondition for any negotiations will make them vulnerable, even as Iraq was, before it was attacked by the U.S.
Accepting that precondition before any agreement means that UN inspectors will begin an intrusive search throughout the country, which would undermine the sovereignty of the state, as it did in Iraq. Subsequently, UN inspectors will be able to provide a complete assessment of Iran’s missile defense system for any U.S. potential war plans. The Iraqi regime did not have weapons of mass destruction, but the way the inspection was conducted, in an aggressive and humiliating manner encouraged by the U.S. administration officials,7 forced Saddam Hussein to stop it and oust UN inspectors. The same scenario is guaranteed to be repeated for the Iranian government. This will put Iran where Iraq was on March 19, 2003.
Ahmadinejad’s administration knows that as long as the U.S. does not have definite intelligence on the extent of Iran’s nuclear program, there could be some chance of dodging an attack. What he doesn’t know is how to bring the U.S. administration to the negotiation table. Perhaps no one except the American public can demand this from the Bush administration. Otherwise another war in the region will be inevitable.
Omid Mohseni is an Iranian-American who moved to the U.S. in 1993 and is currently working as a researcher at the University of Minnesota.
1 http://www.unesco.org/dialogue/en/khatami.htm
2 Gareth Porter. Iran Proposal to U.S. Offered Peace with Israel. May 24, 2006, Inter Press Service.
3 Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger. Bush plans huge propaganda campaign in Iran. Guardian Unlimited, February 16, 2006. http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1710721,00.html
4 http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact
5 Lawrence Kaplan. America’s proxy war; Other Means. The New Republic, July 20, 2006.
6 Dan Robinson. U.S. House approves Iran sanctions, Senate expected to follow. Voice of America, September 29, 2006. http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-09-29-voa1.cfm
7 One can search the entire 2002-2003 inspectors’ program to see how intrusive and provocative it was, e.g., http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/ 2003/01/18/iraq/main537096.shtml |
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WAMM Resource
Updated Iraq Survey Affirms Earlier Mortality Estimates
According to the Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine, October 11, 2006, as many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.
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© 2006 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete November 2006 Index - click here
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