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2 Iran stands its
ground By M K Bhadrakumar
"The course of true love never did run
smooth," Lysander comforted Hermia in William
Shakespeare's wedding play A Midsummer Night's
Dream. That's pretty much how the dialogue
struggling to get started between the United
States and Iran may look.
In the event,
the one-day security conference aimed at seeking
solutions to Iraq's problems ended with limited
results in Baghdad on Saturday. "I think it's
going to be hard," responded James
Dobbins of the Rand
Corporation, when asked by the media whether the
conference would see the much-anticipated
commencement of a US-Iran dialogue.
Dobbins should know. He was the last
senior US official to talk one-on-one with the
Iranians, in December 2001, in the melancholic,
brooding Koenigswinter castle overlooking the
Rhine near Bonn, Germany, where diplomats had
gathered in search of peace in Afghanistan.
Dobbins, then US assistant secretary of
state, told recently of Iran's pivotal role in
persuading the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan to
accept the deal worked out by Washington to accept
Hamid Karzai's leadership of the post-Taliban
interim government in Kabul.
"They
[Iranians] took the Northern Alliance [envoy]
aside ... and whispered in his ear, 'This is the
best deal you are going to get. You probably ought
to take it.' He did," Dobbins reminisced.
The Iranians didn't even ask for a quid
pro quo from Washington, but were gratified
they could be of help as a legitimate member of
the international community. Yet within days, in
his 2002 State of the Union address in Washington,
President George W Bush had forgotten about it.
"States like these [North Korea, Iraq and
Iran] and their terrorist allies," Bush expounded,
"constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten
the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass
destruction, these regimes pose a grave and
growing danger ... In any of these cases, the
price of indifference would be catastrophic."
Now, five years later, sobering
experiences in Iraq have brought the Bush
presidency, as it battles with its dismal final
legacy, to seek out Iran's help once again. The
irony of it all! In essence, what Bush seeks today
is that one center of the "axis of evil" should
help him to stabilize another center, which he
wantonly destabilized.
Naturally, Tehran
remains circumspect about Bush's intentions. Thus,
in the run-up to the Iraq international
conference, former president Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani fired away at Washington. Among other
things, the aging veteran, who has witnessed the
ebb and flow of Iran-US relations from the inside
track over the past quarter-century, plainly
decried that "most American intrigues for
negotiations are tricks". He said the US wants to
increase its military presence in the region
further - "the eyes of global arrogance are
acutely focused on the Middle East - its
resources, energy, oil and gas".
He
continued that Washington "has placed the Zionist
regime in the region so as to advance its
interests in sensitive areas through various
means, such as by causing discords in the region
and promoting the sale of military hardware". And
Rafsanjani asserted that Iran has effectively
thwarted US regional policy in the Middle East.
The influential head of the Majlis
(parliament) Commission for National Security and
Foreign Policy, Alaeddin Broujerdi, who used to be
deputy foreign minister during Rafsanjani's
presidency, went a step further and said Tehran
was "skeptical of the US agenda" in the
forthcoming Iraq conference. He doubted
Washington's sincerity toward Iran and Iraq's
stabilization itself. He stressed that the US
military occupation of Iraq is "currently the
major question".
It came as no surprise
that despite Tehran's stated intention to attend
the conference, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar
Zebari put a call through on Thursday to remind
his Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki, that
"in the context of the current situation in Iraq,
Iran's presence in the meeting has great
significance".
Not that Iran's
participation was ever in doubt, or that any
section of Iranian opinion voiced discontent with
the decision to participate. Rafsanjani was only
gently reminding that expectations should not be
pitched high. It was the considered assessment of
the country's religious leadership, too. A major
cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, was chosen as the
Friday prayer leader last week to remind the
nation that the Iranian people have a united
slogan, "Down with the US" and "Nuclear energy is
our inalienable right."
Jannati said the
US is trying hard to get a resolution passed
against it in the United Nations Security Council
and is robustly pursuing a campaign to tarnish
Iran's reputation. And he warned the nation that
by bandying allegations of human-rights violations
and lack of democracy, "Washington is trying to
cause disunity."
Jannati said the US
failed in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine, and
its Middle East policies are a fiasco, which it is
now trying to cover up. Most important, he alleged
that on the pretext of fighting terrorism, the US
is fueling Shi'ite-Sunni strife.
Tehran
also wants to made sure that its all-important
regional understanding with Damascus will not be
eroded by any fresh US stratagem. A steady stream,
almost continuous, of high-level political
exchanges has been apparent between the two
capitals in the recent period. While the Iraq
conference was in session on Saturday, Iranian
First Vice President Parviz Davudi and Defense
Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar were visiting
Damascus separately on official visits. Syrian
Prime Minister Naji al-Otari is to arrive in
Tehran on Wednesday.
In sum, Tehran
studiously refrained from giving credibility to
the deliberate US attempt to hype the Iranian
participation in the Baghdad conference. Tehran
perfectly understood that the Bush administration
was in great need to play up the conference to the
US domestic audience.
Thus US Ambassador
Zalmay Khalilzad had a hard time creating "body
language" at the conference. He approached the
Iranian delegation, shook their hands and welcomed
their attendance. On the eve of the conference, he
speculated about the possibility of direct talks
between the US and Iran. He later claimed he had
spoken to the Iranians "directly and in the
presence of the others", and that they laughed at
times.
But the leader of the Iranian
delegation, Abbas Araghchi, who is also deputy
foreign minister, demurred, "We didn't have any
direct contact. If the Americans are interested,
there is a proper channel for that." The Iranians
have forcefully raised the issue of their
officials who have been kidnapped by US forces in
recent weeks.
Tehran is clearly digging
in. Araghchi berated the US publicly, saying,
"Unfortunately, the Americans are suffering from
intelligence failure. They have made so many
mistakes in Iraq ... so many wrong policies
because of false information and
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