Being an Iran-observer involves a lot of "connecting-the-dots", in trying to figure out what's going on by discovering over-all patterns in the policies and actions of the various actors involved. And, it can get frustrating when an obvious pattern develops, and yet others are determined to ignore it.
Gary Sick and others have recognized that the Obama administration was never serious in offering engagement to Iran over the nuclear issue, based on the reported content of the Wikileaks documents:
[T]he Obama administration was briefing allies almost from the start — and before Iran had even had a chance to respond to offers of engagement — that we expected this initiative to fail and that we were actively preparing the pressure track that would immediately follow.
Iran could hardly have been unaware of all this, so the chance that they would respond favorably — even before the contested election in June 2009 and the brutal crackdown that followed — was essentially zero. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Obama was never sincere about his engagement strategy. It has yet to be tried.
Finally, they recognize something I've been saying for a long, long time now. However, they have yet to connect to the next dot by asking the next question: WHY has the US not been serious in engaging Iran despite the rhetoric?
The answer, of course, is that the entire nuclear issue is pretextual, and not really the reason for the conflict, and that the US wants to deliberately provoke conflict with Iran rather than resolve anything. This is something I've been saying for a long time now, not because I'm a particularly smart guy or anything but because the pattern was apparent everytime the US moved the goalposts on Iran or saddled any offer of engagement or negotiations with poison pills intended to guarantee rejection and failure of the same, going back to the old Paris agreement negotiations or perhaps even earlier. It was obvious from then that the US really didn't give a damn about nuclear weapons proliferation beyond using it as a convenient excuse (just as "WMDs in Iraq" was a pretext and excuse)
And once we accept that conclusion, we will have to then accept the collorary and connect to the next following dot: that no amount of Iranian concessions on the nuclear issue will therefore suffice to resolve this dispute, but instead each time the goalposts will be moved to ensure the contination of the conflict. No amount of IAEA inspections, no amount of restrictions and limitations on enrichment, will ever be enough. THis isn't about nukes and never was, and the US is pursuing an entirely different objective than nonproliferation.
Saying this may seem obvious, of course, but that's the problem: not enough people are saying this out loud. They still talk about enrichment and moving uranium overseas etc as if any of that really mattered.
So, here's me waiting for these analysts and experts to finally connect these dots too.
[At the risk of justifying the Orientalist statement about how "IRanians play chess while American play football" I have to say that as a semi-competent chess player, I can see patterns in a game just by looking at the layout of the pieces on a board. I can see what strategy each player is pursuing, and how many moves they have to achieve the goals. The thing about chess is no real vagueness involved. When you see a certain set of moves, the conclusion is self-evident, and only a bad chess player would pretend not to see the gambit pursued by his opponent. So, in short, I recommend that these analysts to play some chess, and start to connect the dots.]
We can't trust the IAEA- at least NOT the Japanese boss Amano.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2010/1202/WikiLeaks-cable-portrays-IAEA-chief-as-in-US-court-on-Iran-nuclear-program?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+feeds%2Fworld+%28Christian+Science+Monitor+|+World%29
He is a US tool - that's how he got the job in the first place.
Posted by: External | December 03, 2010 at 01:29 PM