Even if all goes well in Baghdad between our diplomats and those from the US, nothing substantial will emerge that could be billed as a small breakthrough.
The very fact that Tehran agreed to the meeting with a sworn enemy of three decades is seen in many quarters as a respite for Bush’s America that has long behaved like a global outlaw and continues to do so despite growing condemnation at home and abroad.
And mind you it is not only Iraq or for that matter Afghanistan that King George Jr. of the Oval Office has destroyed and pauperized. The list is long and could well take up several pages if one were to jot down the shocking lawlessness of the neocon enclave that, among other things, has made the world less safe and more confused.
Suffice to say that today something is very wrong in the United States, as its government is hated all over the world. The only other ’country’ that comes second is Ehud Olmert’s Israel.
Getting terrifying marks for its military aggressiveness, Uncle Sam loves to spread fear through a whole set of levers the most apparent of which is its now demoralized military with all its offensive wherewithal. The fact that the world’s most powerful policeman and banker has not been able to get out of the rot it created in Iraq is a different story.
The poor Iraqis and Afghans aside, America has long been looking for a fight with Iran and Syria, waging a proxy war against traumatized Lebanon, dislodging Somalia, provoking Chavez’s Venezuela, threatening North Korea, trying to strangle Castro’s Cuba, pushing China to its “proper place“, lecturing the Russians on how to mind its business, warning Central Asia on how to assess its friends and foes É.
For a few weeks the rabidly pro-Israel media in western lands (it has become very difficult to see why they act so dumb) has been ranting about “hardliners and extremists“ in the Iranian press who are strongly opposed to the Baghdad talks that open today.
True, Bush is running out of precious time and his press agents are trying desperately to make something out of nothing. They love to compartmentalize Muslim mass media into hawks and doves, and Iran’s political establishment into moderates and radicals.
But the plain truth remains that when it comes to “dealing“ with arrogant America you will not find a whole lot of differences among our thinkers and public opinion makers.
After all, to what extent the US has harmed Iran and Iranians over the past half century is known to all informed minds. We only need to open our eyes and see the writing on the wall. With due respects to all those good folks who rightly contend that friends and enemies are not forever and only interests are what counts, we need to mention that in this particular case there is nothing for Iran.
Direct negotiations with one of the “axis of evil“ and the “central bank of terrorists“ do little to shed the political baggage of the recent past that the Bush-Cheney-Rice triangle used regularly to hit Tehran only because it wanted to go its own course and openly disagreed with the greedy lot in Washington, Tel Aviv and other western capitals.
Let us also not forget that the neocon apparatus had sought to use the “gains“ of the Afghan war to solidify its regional paramountcy before it launched the ill-fated Iraqi venture. Two failed military adventures have cost the American people a lot in international credibility, not to mention their mounting losses in men, money and munitions.
All things considered, public opinion in Iran is very eager to know what we stand to gain by engaging an embattled and arrogant US government. And this is no ordinary regime. It is a major destabilizing force that has brought great evil to Iran and Iraq, caused the death of more than half a million innocent Iraqis (most of them Shiites), dismantled all their major economic infrastructure and is telling the world precisely that all this death and destruction are compulsory to stabilize the strategic but volatile Middle East (read safeguarding Israel’s ’borders’.)