It’s very simple really. It’s because of this:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. has not offered a guarantee against attacking or undermining Iran’s hard-line government in exchange for having Tehran curtail its nuclear program, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.

“Iran is a troublemaker in the international system, a central banker of terrorism. Security assurances are not on the table,” Rice said.

In short, regime change is still on the table.

(cont. below the fold)
You might recall that back in May, 2003, Iran offered to negotiate directly with the United States regarding its nuclear program. And it was a pretty good offer:

The Iranian negotiating offer, transmitted to the State Department in early May 2003 by the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, acknowledged that Iran would have to address US concerns about its nuclear program, although it made no specific concession in advance of the talks, according to Flynt Leverett, then the National Security Council’s senior director for Middle East Affairs.

Iran’s offer also raised the possibility of cutting off Iran’s support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad and converting Hezbollah into a purely socio-political organization, according to Leverett. That was an explicit response to Powell’s demand in late March that Iran “end its support for terrorism”.

In return, Leverett recalls, the Iranians wanted the US to address security questions, the lifting of economic sanctions and normalization of relations, including support for Iran’s integration into the global economic order.

In essence, Iran was willing to address America’s concerns about their nuclear program, and about their support for Hamas and Hezbollah, the very things which Secretary Rice is still complaining about in 2006, three years later. What Iran principally wanted from from the Bush administration were assurances that the United States would not actively seek to overthrow Iran’s regime by military force, or subvert it by covert support for regime opponents. But as Lawrence Wilkerson, then Chief of Staff to Secretary Colin Powell at the State Department explained, this proposal to peacefully negotiate an end to US/Iranian tensions was cut off at the knees by the same people who dragged us into invading Iraq:

Lawrence Wilkerson, then chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell, said the failure to adopt a formal Iran policy in 2002-03 was the result of obstruction by a “secret cabal” of neo-conservatives in the administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney.

At the time, Bush even nixed the idea of exchanging information about which members of Al Qaida were being held in Iran for information from the Pentagon about the names of the MEK terrorist organization held by US forces in Iraq. Click on this link for background info about the terrorist organization MEK currently being employed by US forces in the Middle East to obtain intelligence and carry out other covert actions inside Iran on our behalf.

Indeed, Secretary Rice has apparently ordered our Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, to abandon his plans to hold meetings with Iranian officials regarding both countries mutual concerns about the security situation in Iraq, because the Bush administration wants to avoid any and all contacts with Iran that might give even the appearance that a negotiated settlement of this “crisis” is possible. It seems nothing short of unconditional surrender by the current regime in Iran will satisfy those in the Bush administration intent on pushing this crisis to the brink of war.

During a visit to Washington from April 3 to 4, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told reporters he had advised Rice and Hadley that the talks he understood were to occur between the US and Iran should not be limited to Iraq but should include the nuclear issue as well.

Steinmeier also said that former British foreign minister Jack Straw joined him in supporting direct US-Iranian negotiations. Straw, who had infuriated hardliners in the US by referring to an attack on Iran as “inconceivable” and unjustified, was replaced by Prime Minister Tony Blair as foreign minister early this month. In late April, German Minister of Defense Franz Josef Jung struck the same theme. “This is our request to Washington: that it begin direct talks and from there reach results,” Jung said.

When Merkel arrived in Washington for a meeting with Bush on May 3, the White House expected her to raise the issue directly with Bush. A senior US official told the Financial Times that Bush would reaffirm US opposition to direct negotiations with Iran should she do so.

Note the pattern. Iran requests talks. Our European allies request talks. Even Jack Straw, Britain’s Foreign Secretary (until his recent resignation, perhaps over this very issue) was calling for talks. And our own Ambassador to Iraq was working behind the scenes to bring them about. Nonetheless, in each instance, the very idea of direct talks between Iran and the US has been scuttled by “Senior White House Officials” who have a very different agenda in mind:

Rice had told reporters on a flight to Berlin on March 29-30 that the talks would take place “sooner or later”, suggesting that Khalilzad was “very busy right now in Iraq”. The new report by [David Ignatius of the Washington Post] indicates, however, there was was a high-level political decision in Washington not to proceed with the talks at all.

Ignatius also revealed that Khalilzad had held “several secret meetings with an Iranian representative around the turn of the year”. Such meetings were presumably to try to convince Tehran to agree to higher-level talks on Iraq. Although he cites no source for these revelations, Ignatius has broken news in the past based on exclusive access to Khalilzad. The ambassador has also used the press in the past to try to overcome resistance to his own policy initiatives from high-ranking officials in Washington.

The columnist attributes the March decision to scuttle the talks with Iran to Rice’s desire for close coordination of Iran strategy with the three European countries – Britain, France and Germany – which had been conducting direct negotiations with Iran. But the decision had much less to do with multilateral diplomacy on Iran than with the determination of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to avoid anything that legitimized the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Thus, Iran today continues to insist on its right to enrich uranium, and makes bellicose statements about what it would do if attacked. What other option does it have? Even if Iran were to strike a deal with the Europeans it knows it wouldn’t achieve what it really wants: assurances that the United States will not seek to subvert its regime through an overt military assault or through covert operations carried out by MEK and other groups opposed to Iran’s current government.

I am no proponent of the Iran’s ruling mullahs or of Iranian President Ahmanijead. They head up a repressive regime that violates and suppresses many of the human rights of its citizens. A government that executes gay teenagers simply because they are gay, for Christ’s sake! However, our government’s current policy seemed designed to strengthen the hardliners in Iran, and cripple internal opposition, by raising the specter of an America bent on bombing and killing Iranians. Bush’s “take no prisoners” approach also seems determined to push Iran’s leaders to accelerate their nuclear program in the hopes that their possession of nukes would forestall an attack. In short, we are creating conditions that build internal support for the most radical elements in the Iranian leadership, and weaken the more moderate elements.

Demanding regime change in Iran is also deeply hypocritical on the part of our government. We support governments in the Middle East and Southwest Asia in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that are at least as oppressive as the one in Teheran (if not more so). Governments that torture, murder and repress religious freedom and individual liberty for both men and women, Christians and Jews, and even Shia muslims (in the case of the Saudis). We allow the government of Sudan to literally engage in genocide against its own citizens. The Bush administration’s claim that we are seeking regime change in Iran in order to bring freedom and democracy to ordinary Iranians insults our intelligence with its bald faced deception.

No, one can only conclude that the Bush administration, led by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, are intent on triggering a war with Iran. No other explanation fits the fact that at every turn the Bush Whiet House has refused to meet with Iran’s representatives to address our nations’ mutual and legitimate security fears. Nothing else explains why we are still insisting upon regime change in Iran, nor why the usual suspects are trying to evoke public outrage against the current Iranian government.

And nothing else explains wild accusations like this one by our most prominent ally in the region:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a cable news channel that he believes Iran is just a few months rather than a few years from acquiring the technological expertise needed to build a nuclear bomb.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: be prepared for a wild ride this Summer and Fall as the war talk rachets up the closer we come to the November Congressional elections.

























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