Regarding the US-Iran confrontation,
It’s not about nukes
But now it’s time Iranians show Bush’s admin "we can give you a hard time"
Despite repeatedly claiming being committed to diplomacy in dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue, the U.S. has recently rejected a proposal by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan demanding it to start talks with the Islamic Republic.
Mr. Annan urged the Bush administration to ''lower the rhetoric'' in the international standoff over Iran's nuclear program and to join Europe in resuming talks with Tehran.
But Washington rejected the Secretary General’s call, repeating same old rhetoric; accusing Tehran of having "refused to engage in a constructive and serious manner."
"We believe that we are following the right diplomatic process now," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, which implies that the U.S. is determined to continue with the war of words it has launched recently against Tehran and proving what’s been circulating among various news reports about the possibility of using the military option to knock down Iran’s nuclear installations instead of pursuing diplomacy in order to stop it from carrying on with its nuclear program, which the U.S. claims is being used as a guise for hidden preparations aimed at producing nuclear weapons.
Trying to lobby international support over its stance from Tehran’s nuclear ambitions so as to refer the country to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions, Bush’s admin. presented the issue as a matter of global security - a threat that the world nations should unite to deter.
But the truth of the matter is that the current crisis is not simply about Iran’s nukes and the threat its program poses, but rather the American President’s drive for greater dominance in the Middle East and Iran's need for recognition as a regional power, an editorial on Asia Times said.
In April 2003, after the U.S. launched its war on Iraq to out its President Saddam Hussein, the Iranian government approached Washington, offering to negotiate the very same issues the Bush administration now uses in launching its anti-Iran campaign which are:
“Its nuclear program, its support for Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli armed groups, and its hostility to Israel's existence,” the editorial said, adding that the Islamic Republic had proposed solid solutions for those worries, but it was the Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Mr. Bush who refused to cooperate.
An analysis about the Iranian nuclear crisis, published last October in the book Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran, Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative think-tank, who was the deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century from 1999 to 2002, and main author of "Rebuilding America's Defenses", suggested that the real reason behind U.S.’ persistent rejection of a nuclear Iran is the fear that Tehran would impede U.S. goals in the Middle East – or as Donnelly called it, the Bush administration's "project of transforming the Middle East".
Donnelly believes that Iran, which the U.S. refers to as a radical state threatening the region, is "more the status quo power" in the region in relation to the United States.
Iran "stands directly athwart this project of regional transformation," he said in his analysis.
Iran had always been a challenge to "the seeping U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf and in the broader region," Donnelly stated, adding that U.S. war on Iraq "completed the near-encirclement of Iran by U.S. military forces".
The U.S. is afraid of a "nuclear Iran" not because Tehran would have those weapons or pass them on to ‘terrorist organisations’, but mainly because of "the constraining effect it threatens to impose upon U.S. strategy for the greater Middle East".
Donnelly explained that the U.S.’ "greatest danger" is that the "realists" would "pursue a 'balance of power' approach with a nuclear Iran, undercutting the Bush 'liberation strategy'".
According to Donnelly's analysis, “a nuclear capability would incline those outside the neo-conservative priesthood to negotiate a detente with Iran, which would bring the plan for the extension of U.S. political-military dominance in the Middle East to a halt.”
According to Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iran's foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who conducted extensive interviews with senior Iranian national-security officials in 2004, Iran "is now primarily trying to become rehabilitated in the political order of the region".
Najmeh Bozorgmehr, an Iranian journalist, with a long experience in covering Iran's national-security policy, says that "Iran wants to bargain with the United States on Iran's regional role," as well as on removal of sanctions and assurances against U.S. attack.
Bozorgmehr suggests that Iran has been looking for any source of leverage with which to bargain with the United States on those issues and "enrichment has become a big bargaining chip".
But now it’s time Iranians show Bush’s admin "we can give you a hard time" to persuade it start negotiations.
The way Bush’s admin views it, the U.S.’ long standing goal of further extending its dominance in the Middle East can only be achieved by the threat of force and, if that didn't work, war against Iran.
Numerous analysts have repeatedly suggested that a U.S. war against Iran would be part of a longer term American military agenda in the region.
The longer term objective under the U.S. “Project” for the Middle East is to exert military and economic control over the entire region, so as to ensure the U.S. authority over oil reserves and pipeline corridors.
(Emphases were inserted by me, RN))
Source:
aljazeera.com
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