Have you heard of the term "rope-a-dope"? Is was a phrase coined by the boxer Muhammad Ali to describe a strategy he employed of misleading his opponents until they had weakened themselves and an opportunity was presented for him to win.
Washington Post reporter Bart Gellman, while discussing his new book on Cheney entitled "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency" on National Public Radio, said something quite interesting: that Cheney would play "rope-a-dope" with foreign governments that he wanted to see toppled, by agreement to talk to the foreign governments whilst at the same time also imposing preconditions on talks that were meant to make it impossible for talks to happen, all the while waiting for an opportunity to engage in regime change.
Gellman used the example of North Korea, but naturally the example of Iran comes to mind too, when the US agreed to talk to Iran but only on the condition if Iran first abandoned enrichment. And according to Gellman, in the meantime Cheney was busy holding talks with the "baby Shah" and Khomeini's grandson in the hopes of finding a way for regime-change.
This is proof of what I have ALWAYS said: that the US is not really interested in resolving the nuclear dispute with Iran, but instead wants to keep it alive as a pretext for another policy entirely: regime change. In short, they've been playing rope-a-dope with Iran, and so no amount of concessions by Iran on the nuclear issue would have ever sufficed since it would have only led to more rope-a-dope games and endless preconditions intended to prevent any resolution.
And remember when they sent Willian Burns to attend the last set of EU-Iran nuclear talks in Geneva back in July 2008? A lot of people quite credulously thought that signalled some sort of change of policy even though Burns had been instructed to not talk with Iran and instead reassert the same old preconditions on talks -- in short, they were playing more rope-a-dope with Iran then too, as I suspected.
makes sense.
Posted by: Amir | September 16, 2008 at 09:15 PM