Washington Post: Talk Boldly With Iran

By David Ignatius
Friday, June 23, 2006;

Sometime in the next several months, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or a senior colleague is likely to sit down at a negotiating table with representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As she prepares for these meetings, I suspect Rice is reviewing the most famous instance of America talking to an enemy: Henry Kissinger's secret opening to China in the early 1970s.

A new window has just opened on Kissinger's secret diplomacy with the National Security Archive's publication of the eyes-only memoranda summarizing some of his most sensitive discussions. Reading these transcripts is a reminder that Kissinger's diplomacy was, to use a modern expression, "outside of the box."

As a diplomatic emissary, Kissinger was almost recklessly frank -- gossiping, teasing, wheedling, flattering. In a June 1972 meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Kissinger described Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield as "monastic," Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern as "professorial" and his own foreign policy bureaucracy as "pro-Soviet." Even the wily Zhou was obviously charmed by Kissinger's seeming willingness to broach any subject. It conveyed the useful sense that in the U.S.-China opening, nothing was off-limits. He told Zhou at one point: "We achieve secrecy by saying so much that no one knows what is true."

Running through Kissinger's discussions was the same fundamental tenet of foreign policy realism: Rational nations act in their self-interest. Their diplomacy is driven not by emotion or abstract moral principle or past practice but by the bedrock of mutual interest. In his discussion with Zhou, for example, Kissinger was startlingly frank about America's willingness to subordinate Vietnam: "We believe that the future of our relationship with Peking is infinitely more important for the future of Asia than what happens in Phnom Penh, in Hanoi or in Saigon."

I asked Kissinger this week what lessons he would draw for the new U.S. engagement with Iran from his own diplomatic experience. Kissinger said he didn't want to give public advice to Rice, but he said that as a general proposition, the United States should seek to find common security interests with Iran -- stressing that a strong and prosperous Iran doesn't threaten the United States so long as the Iranians refrain from reckless and destabilizing actions.

"Iran has to take a decision whether it wants to be a nation or a cause," Kissinger explained. "If a nation, it must realize that its national interest doesn't conflict with ours. If the Iranian concern is security and development of their country, this is compatible with American interests." If Iran connected with the global economy, he argued, it could soon become a regional economic powerhouse, comparable to South Korea.

Kissinger noted that America's good relations with Iran while he was secretary of state during the early 1970s were based on U.S. national interest rather than on the personality of the shah or the domestic political system in Iran. "There is no rational reason why America should be a threat to the national security of Iran," he said. "It is in our interest to have a stable country and a prosperous country. If it went in the direction of South Korea, that would be in our interest." But he cautioned: "If the Iranian interest is to destabilize the region, then it will be difficult to come to an agreement."

On the nuclear issue at the heart of the U.S.-Iran dialogue, Kissinger argued that the Iranians must recognize that nuclear proliferation threatens their own security as much as that of the United States or Israel. Wherever the nonproliferation line is drawn, it will seem unfair to countries that don't yet have the bomb, he said. "But if the process isn't stopped, it threatens every country, including the proliferators."

Thinking about Kissinger's opening to China, it seems to me that one clear lesson for the Bush administration is that it shouldn't be overly cautious in its engagement with Iran. It's time to talk, and if the Iranians will agree to the West's appropriate precondition that they halt enrichment of uranium, then all issues should be on the table. You can't have an opening that's constricted. What's needed is a broad discussion of whether the security interests of Iran and those of the United States and its allies can be linked.

Here's the pitch that you can imagine Kissinger making: Iran's hopes of becoming a major power can be achieved only by halting its nuclear program and working with the United States to stabilize Iraq and the wider Middle East. I hope Secretary Rice is preparing a similar presentation. If that seems like an impossible goal, think how far China has come in the few decades since Zhou was coaxed and cajoled by Henry Kissinger.

davidignatius@washpost.com

Iranian Cold Warriors in Sheep's Clothing

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/pourzal300506.html
by Rostam Pourzal

Actual mass murderers are higher on my watch list than those who just think or shout hateful beliefs. But you would be mistaken if you thought the leading lights among Iranian defectors -- the type who boycotted Iran's elections last summer -- feel the same way. These proponents of "tolerance" frighten the Western public about Islamist fanatics amongst us who allegedly do not appreciate freedom. (And for their tireless effort to save civilization from the Muslim hordes, Western punditocracy celebrates the defectors as "brave." Brave like Fouad Ajami or Hitchens!) In contrast, the defectors do not similarly panic about actual trained killers on the loose on North American soil. Hostile thoughts bad, organized murder OK? How could that be, you ask.

Well, it is like the West's propaganda against Iran. The superpower that stockpiles thousands of nuclear weapons and dropped two of them on Japanese cities is keeping the world sleepless over a nuclear weapons program that Iran could possibly be contemplating. This despite the fact that Iran has not attacked any country in at least 250 years while the accuser, Washington, regularly bombs, invades, kidnaps, and tortures on every continent.

Most Iranian defectors rant against Muslim fundamentalist threat to what George W. Bush calls "our way of life," but never about the officially sanctioned immigration of Nazis to the US. The leaders among these fascists are known activists in the Republican Party's so-called Heritage Groups Council.

Iranian defectors also remain calm about hateful and violent Cuban Americans roaming the streets of South Florida, cheered on by many local radio stations and politicians. Funded and trained by the CIA and tightly allied with the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, the known terrorists have boasted of bombing multiple civilian targets in Cuba, Latin America, and south Florida.

Proven criminals of this sort do not worry most of my fellow Iranian dissidents. But Florida's Islamist professor Sami al-Arian, now that's something to lose sleep over. Neither the Florida edition nor the Toronto edition of North America's most widely circulated Farsi-language weekly, Shahrvand, has protested the politically motivated trial of al-Arian and others on bogus terrorism charges. Although there are good Muslims who deserve to be left alone, the thinking goes, Islamist activists must be stopped before they impose censorship on Western press.

This is the message conveyed in a warning published recently in the Canadian daily Toronto Star by two Iranian intellectuals, Shahrzad Mojab and Saeed Rahnema, and a few "Muslim" cohorts. The group has been active in the Islamophobic opposition to proposed improvements to Ontario's family law arbitration. Despairng of the electoral victories of Islamists in Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran, they resort to a McCarthy-style warning about the Muslim enemy lurking among us in North America. Beware! Beware! The "international communist conspiracy" to overrun the West has resurfaced as the threat of bearded men and veiled women. Never mind that the fanatics are not dotting the landscape here with their own military bases.

The authors of the alert assure us that they are not against all Muslims, only the "fundamentalist" ones. But not one of them protested when American and Canadian politicians publicly returned campaign contribution checks they received from all known Arabs. They contest assertions that they are helping anti-Muslim bigotry and hate speech. But let us remember that, although the Red Scare claimed to target only the "dangerous" agitators in American workplaces who "threatened" freedom, in reality it succeeded in smashing the labor movement and, with it, democracy. Wal-Mart couldn't be happier, as the 1.6 million exploited female workers who have filed a class-action lawsuit against the conglomerate attest.
Samuel Huntington would be proud! Just when the White House desperately needs to explain its jihad on what remains of constitutionalism in this land, just when Bush's allies are gaining ground north of the border, come expatriate crusaders for freedom to finger the foreign infiltrators. Just when abortion rights enemies need to deflect attention from their historic control of the Supreme Court, the righteous Iranian dissidents oblige. The anti-communist émigrés who helped sell the ever ballooning "defense" budget to the American public in decades past could not be more pleased. No wonder Azar Nafisi, the defector who authored Reading Lolita in Tehran, has dinner with them at the White House.

We are supposed to forget that, as long as the anti-Islamist modernizers that these defectors personify were in charge, Iranian universities were inaccessible to millions of women in Islamic cover. Saeed Rahnema should know, as his father was the Shah's minister of higher education. The authors of the Toronto Star alert are clearly not bothered that in secular Turkey women in Islamic dress are barred from universities and government employment. Their defense of global sisterhood does not extend to the scarf-clad wife of Turkey's current prime minister, who has to stay home when her husband attends state functions. They rightly condemn the subjugation of Iran's elected parliament and presidency to unelected ayatollahs. But they never utter a word against Turkey, a close ally of Israel and the US, where the unelected generals similarly lord over the elected government.

The last time "enlightened" intellectuals on these shores campaigned to defend freedom of expression against enemies of "Western values," they founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funneled CIA funds to hundreds of them during the 1950s and 1960s. The former leftists then went on to establish the cabal that is known today as the neo-conservatives, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Two other luminaries among these Israel apologists, William Bennet and Alan Dershowitz, recently defended the controversial Danish cartoons of Prophet Mohammad for "freedom of expression," as the Shahrzad Mojab and Saeed Rahnema did soon after in the Toronto Star. Neither party so much as mentioned that, while they were busy shoring up Western values against presumed fundamentalist censorship, David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for doubting the Holocaust! As I have argued elsewhere, the campaign to defend the offensive cartoons is a fraud.

It is now common knowledge that the neo-conservative empire builders raised funds for El Salvador's death squads, derailed the Oslo Accords, and were behind the push to double the US military build-up and the invasion of Iraq. In 2001, a number of the Cold Warriors, including an Israeli Embassy staff publicist named Nir Boms, formed the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington. It was FDD's close allies in the Committee on the Present Danger that previously sabotaged détente with the Soviet Union with massive lies about the latter's military strength. FDD's top priorities coincide with campaigns spearheaded by the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Those priorities begin with support for Israel's apartheid wall and the discrediting of Muslim American civil rights groups.

One of FDD's growing projects sends dozens of professors and students from American colleges every summer to be indoctrinated in Israel about "the threat of Islamic terrorism." The returning students establish campus groups that obtain college funds under names like "Students Defending Democracy," whose priority at the present is to demonize Iran. To lend such groups an air of legitimacy, the indoctrinated students often get better-known national groups -- usually the Hillel Center, College Republicans, and College Democrats -- to co-sponsor their "nonpartisan, educational" events. The University of South Carolina is emerging as a hotbed of these extremists, followed closely by the University of Chicago, Brandeis University, and George Washington University. FDD activists were also behind the Iran Freedom Concert last March at Harvard University.

A favorite speaker at FDD's campus events is Akbar Atri, a defector who describes himself as a former "leader" of the student movement in Iran. He was brought to the United States in 2005 by the Committee on the Present Danger. Another self-styled "persecuted student leader," Amir Abbas Fakhravar, was brought to the US this year by FDD associate Richard Perle and is being groomed for a similar purpose. That purpose seems to be to deflect attention from the US and Israeli occupations and war crimes in the so-called war on terror, which George Bush is now describing as a repeat Cold War. During the first Cold War, similarly, Eastern Bloc defectors succeeded in erasing from memories the leading role of communists in the fight against Fascism and for Jewish lives. Not coincidentally, they were a hot commodity in Western capitals. The imperialist fraud that played out as the American "movement to free Soviet Jews" in the 1980s has now mutated into the campaign to shield Western innocence from Muslim "totalitarianism." Welcome to the Orwellian 21st Century world of Iranian defectors.

Based in Washington, DC, Rostam Pourzal writes about the politics of human rights for Iranian expatriate journals. MRZnie has published his "Market Fundamentalists Lose in Iran (For Now)" (3 Aug. 2005); "Open Letter oto Iran's Nobel Laureate" (27 Feb. 2006); and "Open Letter to Iran's Nobel Laureate: Part 2" (9 March. 2006)

Iraq: Mission Accomplished?

Another blow to Iraq's vital but beleaguered oil industry

William Fisher: Reaching Out to Iran: Negotiation or Regime Change

From YubaNet.com

Author: William Fisher
Published on Jun 19, 2006, 07:32



Every once in while, the US Congress gets it right.

It got it right last week when it defeated Senator Rick Santorum's proposal to appropriate $100 million to promote pro-democracy efforts in Iran.

The vote came after an impassioned plea from Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat and the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Biden said the amendment to the defense spending bill by the conservative Pennsylvania Republican - which would also have expanded sanctions against Iran and anyone who helps it acquire nuclear technology - would handcuff the Bush Administration as it works with other major powers to negotiate an end to Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Biden's plea managed to attract enough Republicans to defeat the Santorum measure by a 54-45 vote.

Instead, the Senate voted 99-0 to support the decision, announced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on May 31, that the United States would join other Western states in engaging Iran in negotiations and offering a package of incentives if Tehran suspends its uranium enrichment activities.

Santorum's proposal was in line with a bill passed by the House last April, over the objections of the administration. The administration said the House bill would limit the flexibility it needed to reach a diplomatic solution to the deadlock over Iran's nuclear program.

President Bush's 180-degree turn on direct negotiations with Iran clearly represents a defeat for the super-hawks who have been urging military action - and arguably an act of desperation for an administration that has run out of good options.

But in spite of the defeat of the Santorum proposal, the Bush Administration's Iran policy still faces some basic contradictions. For example, should Iran decide to come to the table, the US will still find itself negotiating at the same time it is stepping up its "soft power" efforts to "democratize" the country through broadcasting, cultural exchanges, and support for dissident political parties, labor unions and human rights organizations.

Such pro-democracy efforts, however, are seen by many experts as nothing more than euphemisms for regime change, and question whether such programs are likely to help or hinder the nuclear negotiations.

But equally important are questions about the content and effectiveness of such programs as well as how committed the Administration is to a pro-democracy agenda.

As to credibility and commitment, the potential of soft-power initiatives must be measured against the backdrop of what many in Iran (and elsewhere) see as the hypocrisies and contradictions of US foreign policy. America's credibility as the world's champion of human rights has been diminished by such issues as the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, renditions, excessive secrecy, and what appears through Middle East eyes to be a U.S. policy blindly tilted in favor of Israel. And, as evidenced by its dealings with countries like Egypt, Libya, and Saudi Arabia, the Bush Administration has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to abandon its democracy agenda in favor of recruiting partners for the "Global War on Terror" and cultivating cozy relationships with energy-rich countries, even if they are ruled by dictators.

As to the effectiveness of the "soft power" initiatives currently being implemented or discussed, the situation is even murkier and more complex.

After the 1978 Islamic Revolution in Iran - the hostage-taking and the end of US-Iran diplomatic relations -- the US effectively ignored that country. Iran did not again become a priority for the US Government until 2003, when some of our officials awakened to the reality that Iran was next door to Iraq, and thus positioned to do good or mischief. It was mooted that there would be discussions between the Iranian Government and US Ambassador to Iraq, but as far as we know, this never happened.

What did happen was that President Bush - at the urging of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice - decided that using the Europeans as surrogate negotiators simply wasn't working, and that the US needed to participate in direct negotiations over the nuclear issue.

In the months during which Bush's major policy change was being battled out within the Administration, the State Department was already tooling up for a renaissance of "public diplomacy" directed toward Iran. This planning started from a baseline of almost zero.

Before the nuclear issue exploded onto the world stage, there was limited support for aid to émigré groups by conservative Republican lawmakers including Santorum and anti-Iran organizations such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC). Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, a Christian Right ally of the neo-conservatives, introduced the "Iran Democracy Act" that sets as US policy the goal of "an internationally monitored referendum to allow the Iranian people to peacefully change their system of government."

But their efforts only succeeded in extracting a paltry $3 million from Congress, $1 million of which was granted to a single US-based NGO known as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. Its mission was to document human rights violations committed in Iran since the 1979 revolution.

At the same time, the large Iranian émigré community in Los Angeles continued to press for government support of private US-based broadcasting services and for pro-democracy groups inside Iran. Some in the administration, however, were gun-shy about supporting émigré groups, recalling that that's how we got Mr. Chalabi and his pal, Curveball.

But well before the current nuclear issue became a daily page-one story, a growing sense of urgency about Iran had landed at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees all US foreign broadcasting efforts. The BBG's current budget for Persian broadcasting through the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe is approximately $14.7 million.

So, back in 2003, the BBG's controversial Republican chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, called Washington from a board meeting in Prague to urgently order the Voice of America's main Persian-language television show to go daily from once a week. In the fall of 2004, Tomlinson persuaded then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to push for funding that would allow VOA to boost its Persian-language television programming from just nine original hours per week to 28 per week.

But today, the State Department's vision for the immediate future is far more ambitious. Dr. Rice has asked Congress for another $75 million to implement an ambitious three-pronged strategy involving:

Expanding independent radio and television, with some $50 million allocated to establishing round-the-clock, Farsi-language television in tandem with current foreign nonstop radio broadcasts;

Funding pro-democracy groups, an initiative that would require lifting the current ban on US financing of Iran-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), trade unions, human rights groups, and opposition candidates. Most of the money was to go to organizations based outside of Iran but with direct ties to eligible groups and people inside the country to protect their identity;

Boosting cultural and education fellowships and exchanges to help pay Iranian students and scholars to enroll in US universities. During the 1970s, there were 200,000 Iranian students in the United States, Rice told Congress; today that figure has plummeted to around 2,000.

The State Department has already begun to implement this more robust Iran strategy. For example, it has created an Iran desk. Last year, only two people in the department worked full time on Iran; now there will be 10. The department is also launching more training in the Farsi language and is planning an Iranian career track, which will be difficult without an embassy in Tehran. And the Office of the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) is seeking proposals for grant applications that support democratic governance and reform in Iran.

But, realistically, there are major components of this Iran strategy that the US Government simply cannot implement.

Current law would have to be changed to allow direct support for labor unions, opposition political parties, and dissident NGOs within Iran. More important, the US Government cannot "empower civil society" - without landing the recipients in jail.

It can work to increase the number of Iranian students enrolled in US colleges and universities. But this will not be easy. US visa restrictions represent one obstacle. Another is the absence of a US Embassy in Tehran, which means prospective students have to travel to locations outside Iran in order to apply for US visas. And while increasing the number of visiting students is a time-tested and successful effort, it is a very long-term proposition.

So, if many of the more ambitious visions of what the State Department can do are off the table, what's left is broadcasting, which is why two-thirds of the $75 million request will be spent to increase Farsi-language television and radio broadcasting into Iran.

This involves expanding existing Persian-language television and radio programs directly financed by American taxpayers, such as shows produced by the Persian desk of Voice of America in Washington. VOA would share roughly $30 million of the emergency funding with Radio Farda, a joint effort of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America.

Radio Farda produces fresh news and information at least twice an hour, with longer news programming in the morning and the evening. It also broadcasts a combination of popular Persian and Western music, operating 24 hours a day on medium wave digital audio satellite and on the Internet, as well as 21 hours a day on shortwave. It claims to receive 100 emails daily from its Internet service.

VOA also broadcasts daily half-hour satellite TV news programs. Although it is illegal to own a satellite dish in Iran, an estimated 15 million Iranians are believed to have access to satellite TV. But because of the difficulty of surveying the Iranian public, US officials do not know how many actually tune in.

This month, VOA'S popular Persian-language Mizegerdi ba Shoma (Roundtable With You) program will expand to a new daily schedule, broadcasting 60 minutes a day. The radio-TV simulcast has been broadcast weekly for 90 minutes for nearly a decade.

How effective have US-funded broadcasts been in Iran?

The impact has been mixed, experts say. While less than five percent of Iranians who listen to foreign broadcasts tune into VOA, Radio Farda appears to have had more success. The 24-hour news and music station is the third-most important conduit of information in Iran after local television and radio (excluding print media), according to an April-May 2005 survey commissioned by the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Another survey - carried out by telephoning Iranian phone numbers and asking the person on the other end whether he/she listens to Radio Farda -- put the number of adult listeners per week at 13.6 percent of the adult population. But sponsors of the survey acknowledge that it is not clear "how many Iranians will speak honestly with a complete stranger who has telephoned them out of the blue?"

Is the new effort worth $75 million in taxpayer funds?

John Brown, a former Foreign Service Officer and now a professor of public diplomacy at Georgetown University, supports the new public-diplomacy effort but says it may be too little, too late. "We should have started ages ago," he says. "Now we're playing catch-up."

Brown adds, "I think that public diplomacy efforts in Iran are bound to fail unless our policies drastically change. After all, Persians weren't exactly 'born yesterday' and pop songs or even 'serious' discussions about values on the air are not going to change people's mindsets."

Lionel Beehner of the Council on Foreign Relations also takes a skeptical view of the potential impact of US plans. "I'm generally skeptical of the good soft diplomacy can have in Iran. The surveys I see show that most Iranians, particularly youth, who make up a bulk of the country, are pretty pro-America already (not pro-US foreign policy, however). A growing number have access to satellite TV. This is not Poland circa 1980," he says.

And William Rugh, former US Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and a specialist in Middle East public diplomacy, says, "The package of new public diplomacy initiatives directed at Iran contains some positive elements and some well meaning but doubtful ones. The positive elements of the new Iran package are those that involve broadcasting, both radio and television. These are the soft power instruments that are highly appropriate in current circumstances with respect to Iran."

Rugh says, "Other parts of the package are impractical. There is no way we can work with NGOs or dissidents or reformers inside Iran effectively, and working with exiles has limited value. For such programs, we must wait for an improvement in the overall atmosphere," adding, "We should engage Tehran instead of confronting Tehran."

Overall, he says, "Public diplomacy is a positive step but it's very difficult to do without our being there."

Will Iranians be influenced by US-funded media?

The outcome is unclear, experts say. According to Alvin Snyder, a VOA veteran now associated with the Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, "The VOA's Persian-language TV programs must be compelling to successfully compete for viewers in Iran, where a variety of indigenous program fare is readily available, from sports to movies, and from news to family shows and entertainment. The VOA needs to speak out quickly and boldly, to stake out its turf within Iran's media landscape, to excite viewers and attract immediate attention."

The CFR's Beehner says he is "not convinced that most Iranians are diehard pro-nuclear. For most, it's an issue of national pride; it's not about energy, or flouting NPT rules, or striking Israel. They see others with nuclear programs and think, why not us?"

One additional critical issue needs to be factored into this equation: Resistance to US pro-democracy offers from within Iran. Human rights advocate Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman and first Iranian to win the Nobel Peace Prize, expressed this view in a recent PBS Newshour interview.

Asked if the Bush administration's $75 million program would be "useful to you and your colleagues who are engaged in this fight from the inside?" Ebadi replied, "No, I don't think that it benefits me or people like me, because whoever speaks about democracy in Iran will be accused of having been paid by the United States."

Ebadi is not alone. Her views echo those of many other Iranian civil society activists who worry that the proposed US initiative will simply be used by the Islamic Republic as a pretense for intensifying its repressive approach toward civil society organizations.

Lionel Beehner agrees. In funding pro-democracy groups abroad or in Iran, "you endanger those you're trying to help."

Beyond that, however, the reality of public diplomacy - whether through broadcasting, cultural exchanges, or support for dissident groups - is that it cannot be turned on and off. It was never intended to be a quick fix. Even in a best-case scenario, it depends on a consistent effort over an extended period.

The US has failed to mount that kind of effort, and that failure does not bode well for the prospect of "winning hearts and minds" in Iran any time soon.

And may well make the nuclear negotiations even more difficult.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Now retired, he writes daily for InterPress News Service. His work has also appeared in the Washington Post and the N.Y. Daily News, as well as in newspapers in the Middle East and in many online e-zines. His blog is at The World According to Bill Fisher.

Exceptional Americans manifest their destiny: and to hell with the consequences...

by Jason MillerJune
19, 2006
The Free Press

Contrary to the "catapulted propaganda", Enron, Haditha, and Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents or the work of a "few bad apples". American savagery and oppressive behavior pervades our society and predates our nation's birth. Building its patriarchal wealth on the backs of Black slaves and cheap labor while acquiring its territory through Native American genocide, predatory exploitation of non-Anglos, the poor, women, and the working class emerged as a pillar of America's socioeconomic "success" before we even declared our independence.

With the advent of the Industrial Age, transcontinental railroads, and the rapid proliferation of Capitalism, an increasingly empowered young nation with an insatiable lust for more land, resources, and profits began to seek prey beyond its borders. At the close of the Nineteenth Century, the American Eagle spread its wings as it began mimicking the rapacious behavior of its Western European ancestors.

With the sun finally preparing to set on the British Empire, the days of conquest and expansion dawned for the nascent American Empire. Pathologically hubristic notions like Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism served to dehumanize indigenous people to justify invasion, theft and murder as acts of necessity to bring civilization to "primitives".

In his latest book, Overthrow, former New York Times Bureau Chief Stephen Kinzer chronicles America's exploits as an empire and imperialist nation.

What is it that they are spreading?

The Bush Regime's launch of the Project for the New American Century with the invasion of Iraq was not really out of character for the United States. While it was certainly executed with more blatant disregard for international law than America's previous imperial endeavors, it typifies the American sanctimonious belief that it can do no wrong.

George Bush was simply reiterating America's long-standing mendacious rationale for its exploitative behavior when he stated:

"What I'm trying to suggest to you that this program is a part of a strategic goal, and that is to protect this country in the short-term and protect it in the long-term by spreading freedom."

Consider some of the freedoms the United States is spreading:

1. Freedom to work under miserable conditions for a pittance.

2. Freedom to exist in an environment permeated with depleted uranium.

3. Freedom to sell precious resources to soulless multinational corporations at garage sale prices. 4. Freedom to experience a Kafkaesque nightmare including arrest with no charges, no trial to determine guilt or innocence, the endurance of torture, and indefinite detention.

5. Freedom to realize the inherent inferiority of one's culture, religion, and language, and to cast them aside like sacks of rank-smelling garbage.

6. Freedom to be maimed or killed if one dares to reject the "gifts" of these freedoms.

America's corporate media propaganda machine has managed to maintain a fastidiously manicured façade for many years. Despite appearing to exist as a champion of democracy, equality, freedom, and human rights, the reality of the United States was, and is, that its socioeconomic and governmental systems are racist, bigoted, ruthless and plutocratic in nature.

Democracy has never existed in the United States. A de facto aristocracy has dominated our constitutional republic dating back to the Continental Congress. Capitalism is a brutal, pitiless economic system that encourages and rewards greed, selfishness, exploitation, and annihilation of the competition.

Obsessed with materialism, conspicuous consumption, convenience, physical appearance, and winning, many Americans gorge themselves on the abundant fruits of Capitalism, oblivious to the fact that billions of human beings live in abject poverty and misery to make their feast possible.

America is a nation of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. Its ruling elite class is buttressed by the poor and working people who have been rendered politically impotent by the allure of conspicuous consumption (which further enriches the elite), the illusion of democracy, and the extremely remote possibility that one of them could be the next Bill Gates.

Wearing its cloak of benevolence, America is an abstract embodiment of the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing. Governed by avaricious profiteers produced and enabled by a ruthless system that brings out the worst in humanity, the United States is a predacious nation innocently posing as a bastion of human rights and democracy.

Running out of real estate (and victims)

Overthrow captures the essence of the zeitgeist in America in the late Nineteenth Century with an apt quote from American historian Frederick Jackson Turner:

For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. With the settlement of the Pacific Coast and the occupation of the free lands, this movement has come to a check. That these energies of expansion will no longer operate would be a rash prediction; and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries, are indications that the movement will continue.

According to Kinzer's historical analysis, the United States cut its imperial fangs on Mexico in the 1840's, but Hawaii marked America's initial push beyond the North American continent. Two American missionaries, Amos Starr Cooke and Samuel Castle zealously worked to convert native Hawaiian "savages" into "civilized" Christians, but eventually abandoned their missionary work for the profits of the sugar trade. Cooke and Castle were the fathers of the White American aristocracy in Hawaii. This group eventually came to wield powerful economic and political influence on the islands by virtue of the huge sugar plantations they owned. Manipulation of a pliable Hawaiian monarch whom they had educated enabled them to engineer land reform which stripped indigenous people of their traditional communal form of land ownership.

On January 17, 1893 the Marines landed in Hawaii with a small contingency. In a bloodless coup, the 6220 Whites (on an archipelago populated by 41,000 native Hawaiians and 28,000 Asian laborers) seized control of the government and appointed none other than Sanford Dole (cousin to pineapple magnate James Dole) to lead. By 1897 the United States had formally annexed Hawaii.

Remember the Maine….And a few hundred thousand Filipinos

Fueled by the mainstream media lie that Spain had caused an explosion aboard the USS Maine, a battleship President McKinley had dispatched to Cuba in 1898, the United States declared war on Spain, won, and quickly acquired Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines in the process. Despite the Teller Amendment in which Americans had promised Cuban sovereignty, President McKinley justified American rule of Cuba through the "law of belligerent right over conquered territory." The Platt Amendment eventually became the US tool to give outward appearances of Cuban autonomy without actually ceding full self-determination.

Having defeated Spain in the Philippines, Americans encountered another enemy. It seems the indigenous people were prepared to forcefully resist their new masters. Viewing the Philippines as crucial to its business interests in Asia, the United States fought vigorously to retain its new colony. Sending an occupation force of 126,000 (eerily similar to the number of troops in Iraq), America suffered fewer than 5,000 casualties. At least 16,000 Filipino troops and 250,000 civilians were slaughtered by the United States military. Rampant and blatant atrocities committed by American soldiers were white-washed by a compliant mainstream media and farcical Senate hearings in which Henry Cabot Lodge justified American torture, cruelty and murder by characterizing Filipinos as "semi-civilized people with all the tendencies and characteristics of Asiatics."

Better dead than red? Not necessarily….

Throughout its history as an imperial power, the perpetuation of United States corporate interests abroad has been its primary motivation. However, no analysis of America's malignant impact on the world would be complete without addressing its fixation with crushing movements and governments showing even a hint of Socialist or Communist tendencies.

Champions of American Capitalism triumphantly proclaim that the totalitarian and barbaric regimes of Stalin and Mao are "absolute proof" that any socioeconomic system based on "leftist" ideologies dooms its people to torture, despotism, and mass murder. Stalin and Mao were indeed murderous dictators, but the evolution of their regimes do not negate the possibility of a socioeconomic system placing a reasonable degree of power in the hands of the working class and affording a more equitable distribution of wealth.

In fact, critical analysis reveals that the manifestation of Capitalism in the United States has been as morally repugnant and vicious as the regimes the champions of our system love to cite as evil. Those believing otherwise are in deep denial.

Domestically, Americans enslaved millions (3.9 million according to the 1860 census) and committed genocide against the millions of indigenous inhabitants whose land they stole. Aside from the egregious crimes committed against non-Anglos at home, America's system of Capitalism exists as the virtual antithesis of the "Communist" systems of Mao and Stalin in terms of inhumanity. Instead of pointing its malevolence inward on its "own", the United States has committed its wholesale slaughter abroad (i.e. 3 million in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands in Central America, and at least a million Iraqis, including the victims of the Gulf War and the brutal economic sanctions). Anglo exemption from slavery, genocide, and slaughter explains why American Capitalism has outlasted the "Communism" of Russia and China.

Portrait of a truly ugly American

Kinzer devotes a chapter of Overthrow to former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who could easily have been the poster-child for American Capitalism and its inherent hypocrisy and malevolence. Dulles easily warrants his own chapter. He exerted tremendous influence on US foreign policy throughout the Cold War and orchestrated a number of the interventions detailed in Overthrow.

Kinzer writes of Dulles (who in private life had been a highly successful attorney representing multinational corporations for the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell):

"He had been shaped by three powerful influences: a uniquely privileged upbringing, a long career advising the world's richest corporations, and a profound religious father. His deepest values, beliefs, and instincts were those for the international elite in which he had spent his life…."

"According to the most exhaustive book about Sullivan & Cromwell, the firm thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime, and Dulles spent much of 1934 publicly supporting Hitler….Soon after World War II ended, Dulles found in Communism the evil he had been so slow to find in Nazism."

Out of the frying pan….

In Overthrow, Kinzer does more than simply detail the horrific consequences to the victims of America's imperial interventions. He also reminds us of the self-destructive nature of America's foreign policy. Perhaps the most timely and poignant example is that of Iran.

In 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh became Iran's democratically elected prime minister. To alleviate the abject poverty of many of his people, he quickly moved to nationalize the oil industry to utilize the profits to benefit Iranians. The British, who had significant oil interests in Iran, raised serious objections to Mossadegh's actions despite the obscene oil profits they had made over the years in Iran, his offer to compensate them for the oil infrastructure they had built, and the British government's recent nationalization of its own coal and steel industries.

While the existence of the Soviet Union as a rival world power precluded the use of direct military intervention by the United States, John Foster Dulles contrived a plan to crush the Socialist "ambitions" of Mossadegh. Disseminating propaganda through America's mainstream media (including the New York Times and Time Magazine) which portrayed Mossadegh as a Communist while simultaneously utilizing the CIA to create a subversive environment in Iran, the United States succeeded in toppling Mossadegh and replacing him with the Shah of Iran. Representing US and Western business interests with great enthusiasm until he was deposed by radical Islamic elements in 1979, the Shah ruled Iran autocratically. SAVAK, his intelligence agency, tortured and murdered thousands of Iranian dissidents.

Like Hugo Chavez is in Venezuela, Mossadegh was anathema to American Capitalism. Leaders of developing countries who threaten the flow of capital to the Empire by diverting it to their own people quickly become enemies of the United States. The irony is that the replacement rulers America installs to preserve its economic interests are almost always corrupt and murderous dictators who foster deep hatred of the United States. Ultimately, Washington finds itself grappling with reactionary regimes which are overtly hostile to the United States, like the current leadership in Iran.

Like a good neighbor…

Kinzer devotes several chapters of Overthrow to America's numerous interventions in Central and South America over the last century. Virtually all were launched to protect American corporate interests by crushing Leftist governments and installing business friendly despots like Pinochet in Chile. Corporations like the United Fruit Company and presidents like Ronald Reagan were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Hispanics throughout Central America.

Let them burn

Kinzer also provides an enlightening analysis of the Vietnam debacle. In contrast to the tissues of lies propagated by America's media and textbook authors, Ho Chi Minh was not a threat to US interests. He was too busy striving for independence from Japan while facing recolonization by France. Neither China nor the Soviet Union (the "Communist" powers the ruling elite of the United States professed to fear so greatly because of their "conspiracy to spread Communism"), was interested in aligning themselves with Minh because of his nationalism.

When Ho Chi Minh spoke to a large group of supporters in Hanoi in 1945, he stated these subversive "Communist principles":

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Minh greatly admired the United States and even appealed to the American government for help.

America ignored Minh's pleas for help. Instead, the United States chose to take up where France left off and go to war with him. It also chose to support Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of South Vietnam. Diem was a rotten human being and surrounded himself with family members whose corruption and inhumanity exceeded his own.

When Buddhist leaders led popular protests against the aristocratic and authoritarian rule of Diem and his family, Thich Quang Duc, a revered bodhisattva, burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection on June 11, 1963.

New York Times reporter David Halberstam witnessed the event and wrote:

"I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him."

Madame Nhu, a member of the Diem ruling family responded to the protest by quipping:

"Let them burn. We shall clap our hands."

She was one of America's proxies in Vietnam. What does that say about the United States?

A pattern emerges….

Afghanistan and Iraq are not aberrations in United States foreign policy. Bush and his Neocons are not "a few bad apples". They may be more malevolent than their predecessors, but they are not the first to advance American corporate and plutocratic interests through lies, propaganda, invasion, and flagrant crimes against humanity. America's socioeconomic system has engendered and reinforced such pathological behavior for years.

In Cannery Row, Steinbeck's Doc concluded:

"The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest, are the traits of success."

In America, the inmates truly run the asylum.

Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow, rife with well-researched examples of America's imperial conquests from Mexico to Iraq, further validates the assertion many other writers and I have been making for some time now. While manifestations of the dark side of human nature are inevitable aspects of human civilization, the American Way requires its dedicated adherents to commit their lives to cruelty and inhumanity. If human civilization is to survive, we need to collectively reject this abominable mandate. ---

Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts and an extensive self-education (derived from an insatiable appetite for reading). He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.

A negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis is within reach

The US must take three basic steps to defuse this confrontation. The consequences of not doing so could be grim
Noam Chomsky
Monday June 19, 2006
The Guardian

The urgency of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and moving toward their elimination, could hardly be greater. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology's only experiment with higher intelligence. As threatening as the crisis is, the means exist to defuse it.

A near-meltdown seems to be imminent over Iran and its nuclear programmes. Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported these programmes. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme. "For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources," Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post last year.

Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President Gerald Ford, he held that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals".

Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his usual engaging frankness: "They were an allied country."

In 1976 the Ford administration "endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium - the two pathways to a nuclear bomb", Linzer wrote. The top planners of the Bush administration, who are now denouncing these programmes, were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

Iranians are surely not as willing as the west to discard history to the rubbish heap. They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been tormenting Iranians for more than 50 years, ever since a US-UK military coup overthrew the parliamentary government and installed the Shah, who ruled with an iron hand until a popular uprising expelled him in 1979.

The Reagan administration then supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, providing him with military and other aid that helped him slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians (along with Iraqi Kurds). Then came President Clinton's harsh sanctions, followed by Bush's threats to attack Iran - themselves a serious breach of the UN charter.

Last month the Bush administration conditionally agreed to join its European allies in direct talks with Iran, but refused to withdraw the threat of attack, rendering virtually meaningless any negotiations offer that comes, in effect, at gunpoint. Recent history provides further reason for scepticism about Washington's intentions.

In May 2003, according to Flynt Leverett, then a senior official in Bush's National Security Council, the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami proposed "an agenda for a diplomatic process that was intended to resolve on a comprehensive basis all of the bilateral differences between the United States and Iran".

Included were "weapons of mass destruction, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Lebanon's Hizbullah organisation and cooperation with the UN nuclear safeguards agency", the Financial Times reported last month. The Bush administration refused, and reprimanded the Swiss diplomat who conveyed the offer.

A year later the European Union and Iran struck a bargain: Iran would temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, and in return Europe would provide assurances that the United States and Israel would not attack Iran. Under US pressure, Europe backed off, and Iran renewed its enrichment processes.

Iran's nuclear programmes, as far as is known, fall within its rights under article four of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which grants non-nuclear states the right to produce fuel for nuclear energy. The Bush administration argues that article four should be strengthened, and I think that makes sense.

When the NPT came into force in 1970 there was a considerable gap between producing fuel for energy and for nuclear weapons. But advances in technology have narrowed the gap. However, any such revision of article four would have to ensure unimpeded access for non-military use, in accord with the initial NPT bargain between declared nuclear powers and the non-nuclear states.

In 2003 a reasonable proposal to this end was put forward by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency: that all production and processing of weapon-usable material be under international control, with "assurance that legitimate would-be users could get their supplies". That should be the first step, he proposed, toward fully implementing the 1993 UN resolution for a fissile material cutoff treaty (or Fissban).

ElBaradei's proposal has to date been accepted by only one state, to my knowledge: Iran, in February, in an interview with Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator. The Bush administration rejects a verifiable Fissban - and stands nearly alone. In November 2004 the UN committee on disarmament voted in favour of a verifiable Fissban. The vote was 147 to one (United States), with two abstentions: Israel and Britain. Last year a vote in the full general assembly was 179 to two, Israel and Britain again abstaining. The United States was joined by Palau.

There are ways to mitigate and probably end these crises. The first is to call off the very credible US and Israeli threats that virtually urge Iran to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

A second step would be to join the rest of the world in accepting a verifiable Fissban treaty, as well as ElBaradei's proposal, or something similar.

A third step would be to live up to article six of the NPT, which obligates the nuclear states to take "good-faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons, a binding legal obligation, as the world court determined. None of the nuclear states has lived up to that obligation, but the United States is far in the lead in violating it.

Even steps in these directions would mitigate the upcoming crisis with Iran. Above all, it is important to heed the words of Mohamed ElBaradei: "There is no military solution to this situation. It is inconceivable. The only durable solution is a negotiated solution." And it is within reach.

· Noam Chomsky's new book is Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy; he is professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

www.chomsky.info

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A Talk at Lunch That Shifted the Stance on Iran

By HELENE COOPER and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 4, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 3 — On a Tuesday afternoon two months ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat down to a small lunch in President Bush's private dining room behind the Oval Office and delivered grim news to her boss: Their coalition against Iran was at risk of falling apart.

A meeting she had attended in Berlin days earlier with European foreign ministers had been a disaster, she reported, according to participants in the discussion. Iran was neatly exploiting divisions among the Europeans and Russia, and speeding ahead with its enrichment of uranium. The president grimaced, one aide recalled, interpreting the look as one of exasperation "that said, 'O.K., team, what's the answer?' "
That body language touched off a closely held two-month effort to reach a drastically different strategy, one articulated two weeks later in a single sentence that Ms. Rice wrote in a private memorandum. It broached the idea that the United States end its nearly three-decade policy against direct talks with Iran.
Mr. Bush's aides rarely describe policy debates in the Oval Office in much detail. But in recounting his decisions in this case, they appeared eager to portray him as determined to rebuild a fractured coalition still bearing scars from Iraq and find a way out of a negotiating dynamic that, as one aide said recently, "the Iranians were winning."
Mr. Bush gradually grew more comfortable with offering talks to a country that he considers the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism, and whose president has advocated wiping Israel off the map. Mr. Bush's own early misgivings about the path he was considering came in a flurry of phone calls to Ms. Rice and to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser, that often began with questions like "What if the Iranians do this," gaming out loud a number of possible situations.
Mr. Bush left open the option of scuttling the entire idea until early Wednesday morning, three senior officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were describing internal debates in the White House. He made the final decision only after telephone calls with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, led him to conclude that if Tehran refused to suspend its enrichment of uranium, or later dragged its feet, they would support an escalating series of sanctions against Iran at the United Nations that could lead to a confrontation.
Even after Mr. Bush edited the statement Ms. Rice was scheduled to read Wednesday before she flew to Vienna to encourage Europe and Russia to sign on to a final package of incentives for Iran — and sanctions if it turns the offer down — Ms. Rice wanted to check in one more time. She called Mr. Bush. Was he sure he was O.K. with his decision?
"Go do it," he responded.
She did, but the results remain unclear. Iran has given no indication it will agree to Mr. Bush's threshold condition, suspending nuclear fuel production. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Friday that he would oppose "any pressure to deprive our people from their right" to pursue a peaceful nuclear program.
The IRNA news agency reported that Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said Saturday that Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, was expected to arrive in Tehran in the next few days with the new package of incentives.
"Iran will examine the proposal and announce its opinion after that," Mr. Mottaki said. Mr. Bush's aides now acknowledge that the approach they had once publicly described as successfully "isolating" Iran was in fact viewed internally as going nowhere. Mr. Bush's search for a new option was driven, they say, by concern that the path he was on two months ago would inevitably force one of two potentially disastrous outcomes: an Iranian bomb, or an American attack on Iran's facilities.
Conservatives, even some inside the administration, are worried that Mr. Bush may be forced into other concessions, including allowing Iran to continue some low level of nuclear fuel production. Others fear that the commitments Mr. Bush believes he extracted from other world leaders may erode.
But the story of how a president who rarely changes his mind did so in this case — after refusing similar proposals on Iran four years ago — illustrates the changed dynamic between the State Department and the White House in Mr. Bush's second term. When Colin L. Powell was secretary of state, the two buildings often seemed at war. But 18 months after Ms. Rice took over, her relationship with Mr. Bush has led to policies that one former adviser to Ms. Rice and Mr. Bush said "he never would have allowed Colin to pursue."
It is unclear how much dissent, if any, surrounded the decision, which appears to have been driven largely by the president, Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley, with other senior national security officials playing a more remote role. Both White House and State Department officials say that Vice President Dick Cheney, long an opponent of proposals to engage Iran, agreed to this experiment. But it is unclear whether he is an enthusiast, or simply expects Iran to reject suspending enrichment — clearing the way to sanctions that could test the Iranian regime's ability to survive.
After the surprise election of Mr. Ahmadinejad last summer, Iran ended its suspension of uranium enrichment, and the United States and Europe won resolutions at the International Atomic Energy Agency to move the issue to the United Nations Security Council. But it took weeks over the winter to get the weakest of Security Council actions — a "presidential statement." Russia, which has huge financial interests in Iran and is supplying it with nuclear reactors, was particularly reluctant to push the Iranians too hard.
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At a private dinner on March 6 at the Watergate with Ms. Rice, Mr. Hadley and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, Mr. Lavrov warned that Iran could do what North Korea did in 2003 — throw out inspectors and abandon the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That would close the biggest window into Iran's program, making it hard to assess the country's bomb capability — the same issue that had led to huge errors in Iraq.
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The World: It's Just Like Iraq, Only Different (June 4, 2006)
On March 30, Ms. Rice traveled to Berlin for what turned into a fractious meeting with representatives of the other four permanent members of the Security Council and Germany. She questioned what kind of sanctions would be effective. The conversation went nowhere.
That led to Ms. Rice's warning to Mr. Bush over lunch, on April 4, that the momentum to confront Iran was disintegrating. Mr. Bush, one aide noted, was receiving special intelligence assessments every morning, some on Iran's intentions, others examining Mr. Ahmadinejad's personality, still others exploring how long it would take Iran to produce a bomb.
On Easter weekend, Ms. Rice sat in her apartment and drafted a two-page proposal for a new strategy that pursued three tracks: the threat of "coercive measures" through the United Nations, negotiations with Iran that included what Ms. Rice has called "bold" incentives for Iran to give up the production of all nuclear fuel and a separate set of strategies for economic sanctions if the Security Council failed to act.
For the first time, her proposal also raised a question the administration had long avoided: Had the time arrived for the United States to play what she and Mr. Bush, both bridge players, called their biggest card — offering to talk with Iran?
The idea intrigued Mr. Bush, White House officials say, and on May 8, Ms. Rice met with him just hours before flying to New York for a meeting with her European counterparts.
She asked him what kind of body language to display at the United Nations meeting. Should she signal that the United States was considering negotiations with Iran? "Be careful," he said, according to officials familiar with the conversation. "I haven't made up my mind."
That same day, an 18-page letter from Mr. Ahmadinejad arrived. It declared liberal democracy a failure, although it also was perceived by many as an effort to reach out and start a dialogue.
Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley read the letter on the flight to New York, but dismissed it. "It isn't addressing the issues we're dealing with in a concrete way," Ms. Rice said that day.
Her meeting in New York with her European counterparts turned testy, particularly an exchange with Mr. Lavrov, who was still smarting from a speech by Mr. Cheney denouncing Russia for its increasingly authoritarian behavior. But the discussion, while fractious, convinced her that the only way to break the stalemate was to offer to join the negotiations.
While Mr. Bush was intrigued, he was intent on secrecy, and so when the National Security Council met on the subject on May 17, he warned against leaks. The session was notable because Mr. Cheney said the offer might work, largely because it would force the choices back on Iran. And while the council had dismissed the letter, it used the meeting to discuss whether to respond.
While Mr. Bush initially told Ms. Rice that others could work out the final negotiations, Ms. Rice told the president that "only you can nail this down," apparently a reference to keeping Ms. Merkel and Mr. Putin on board. Mr. Bush made the calls.
But Mr. Bush, led by Ms. Rice, is taking a significant risk. He must hold together countries that bitterly broke with the United States three years ago on Iraq. And now, he seems acutely aware that part of his legacy may depend on his ability to prevent Iran from emerging as a nuclear power in the Middle East, without again resorting to military force.

Courtesy of the New York Times

A Man of the People's Needs and Wants

Ahmadinejad Praised in Iran as a Caring Leader

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 3, 2006; A01

ARAK, Iran -- The ordinary Iranians who poured into the local soccer stadium to hear President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad one day last month arrived carrying high hopes and handwritten letters. They left with just the hopes. The letters were collected in oversize cardboard boxes, then hoisted into the postal van Ahmadinejad has taken to parking prominently when he barnstorms the provinces, in an audacious campaign to make every Iranian's wish come true.

"I asked for a proper house," Vaziolla Rezaei, 57, said of the appeal he addressed to His Excellency the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. "And I also told him about my financial situation."

"I mainly wrote about my husband's lack of work," said Kobra Hedyatti, 30. "And also about our poor house and how far the children have to walk to school."

"I actually wrote him two letters," said Reza Karimi, 41. "One was about the problems we have in this neighborhood. The other was about my problems.

"Of course," Karimi added with a wave of the hand, "I do not expect him to answer me individually. But I believe he would at least solve the problem of the neighborhood.

"I believe if he really could, he would help us."

That belief, far more than anything Ahmadinejad has said about nuclear power or the Holocaust, defines Iran's energetic president for the people who elected him almost a year ago, as well as the legions he appears to have won over since taking office in August. If his image in the West is that of a banty radical dangerously out of touch with reality -- "a psychopath of the worst kind," in the words of Israel's prime minister -- the prevailing impression in Iran is precisely the opposite.

Here, ordinary people marvel at how their president comes across as someone in touch, as populist candidate turned caring incumbent. In speeches, 17-hour workdays and biweekly trips like the one that brought him here to Central Province, Ahmadinejad showcases a relentless preoccupation with the health, housing and, most of all, money problems that may barely register on the global agenda but represent the most clear and present danger for most in this nation of 70 million.

"It's good to have a very kind person near you, caring about your problems,"
said Akram Rashidi, 34, at the counter of a stationery store where the run on envelopes outpaced the supply of change. "The important thing is that the president and important people are caring about the people."

Ahmadinejad's ardent professions of solidarity with workaday Iranians defined his dark-horse campaign a year ago. But once in office, he took retail politics to a whole new level. The visit to Arak in mid-May was his 13th trip to the provinces, each time dragging along his cabinet in the name of bringing the government to the people.

"He made a lot of promises," said Aynollah Bagheri, 30, in nearby Khomein, one of eight towns the president hit in two days. "I can't remember them all."

The pledges -- of higher wages, housing loans, recreational centers, car factories -- already are stacked to a precarious height. And he's only halfway through Iran's 30 provinces.

"He's in a perpetual campaign, and he's doing pretty well," said an Iranian political analyst who asked not to be identified because his employer had not authorized him to speak. "But there'll come a time pretty soon when he'll have to pay a second visit to these provinces.

"We are in the stage of hope and demands. If he's successful, he'll turn these demands into results. If he doesn't, there may come a point where complaints turn into anger."

For the time being, Ahmadinejad's image at home stands in stark counterpoint to his notoriety elsewhere. Scrappy and bellicose to the West, his presidency has distinguished itself inside Iran by an almost total absence of pain.

Iran remains Iran, of course. Controls on the press are firmer than ever, and the April arrest of Ramin Jahanbegloo, a philosopher without a strong reputation for political activism, has both mystified and unsettled elements of Tehran's professional class.

But Ahmadinejad's government has delivered none of the widely predicted crackdowns on social behavior. Iranians remain free to drink, party and generally do as they please behind closed doors. In public, young couples can still canoodle lightly on the street, and young women stretch the definition of "Islamic dress" with form-fitting outerwear.

In fact, the hard-line president last month stunned conservatives and liberals alike by ordering the national stadium opened to female soccer fans, an egalitarian gesture that was thwarted when clerics appealed directly to Iran's unelected supreme leader.

But Ahmadinejad's primary focus is the ordinary people normally paid little notice by the country's insular, elitist political culture except at election time.

Ahmadinejad addresses them personally. "I love you too," he told the cheering crowd in Arak. But the only part of the speech heard in the world beyond Iran was what he said about Europe's emerging offer of incentives if Iran abandoned uranium enrichment: "walnuts for gold."

In the audience, Rezaei barely noticed that part.

"The main emphasis of his speech is that he's going to raise up the people who have been deprived of a good life," said Rezaei, who makes his living ambling along the sidewalks of Arak, one hand on a clarinet that plays a flowing, upbeat tune, the other on a crutch. "His main point is he's going to bring a balance between people who have a lot of money and the poor. He's going to give them opportunity. This was the point people loved very much."

The response has been overwhelming in more ways than one. When Ahmadinejad offered Iranians low-interest loans for housing, his office prepared for 30,000 applications. It received 2 million. Other new programs offer loans to newlyweds, farmers, villagers and small businesses.

"Each day we get between 130 and 150 requests," said Hamed Alizadeh at the walk-up window at an office in Tehran, set up around the corner from the modest townhome that symbolized Ahmadinejad's personal integrity during the campaign.

Labeled "President's Public Relations Office," the window receives hand-delivered letters from 8 to 5:30 six days a week. Alizadeh, part of a constituent service staff of 200, runs a highlighter over each essential passage, fills out a form for the relevant ministry, then hands the citizen a phone number to call after 10 days.

The requests can be amusing, he said: One woman wanted the president to find her a husband. But seven in 10 ask for money. The president's visit to Iran's poorest province, Sistan and Baluchistan, brought 200,000 letters alone.

"Everybody is saying he will actually solve the problems, so I've come all this way," said Ashraf Samadi, 47, who borrowed $320 from neighbors for the 16-hour bus ride to Tehran to deliver her letter in person. She wanted funds for a son's failing kidney and a daughter's wedding.

"Is there any chance of seeing the president himself?" she asked.

For a politician, the consequences of disappointing such achingly personal hopes could be catastrophic. But Ahmadinejad's government has been cushioned by the flood of revenue from oil exports at $70 a barrel, a price that in part reflects markets made nervous by his belligerent remarks on nuclear power and Israel.

To many Iranians, the tough talk is simply that. Among a population with both the pride of the Persian empire and a long history of defensive wars, Ahmadinejad's defiance is regarded as welcome and routine. "These kinds of words have to be used," said Azar Mahdavi, 20, behind the counter of a children's boutique. "You have to show that you're a strong man."

Some citizens even resent attention to any issue beyond themselves. One placard in Arak read: "A better life is our undeniable right" -- a pointed play on the government's constant pro-nuclear slogan. Union members at a May Day rally chanted, "Forget about Palestine. What about us?"

"People have high expectations," said Rashidi, at the stationery shop. Her look was introspective as she told of accompanying her sister to see Ahmadinejad when he was still Tehran's mayor, to appeal a zoning issue. There was no result, but what she remembered, years later, was having his attention.

In Khomein, Zabihollah Sarlak asked Ahmadinejad to see that his mentally disabled son is looked after if he should die. "He promised everybody, but he also said it'll take some time," said Sarlak, 50. "He said if you buy a kilo of meat at the market and take it home and cook it, it takes time.

"But he'll do what he says."

Iran Won't Bow to Pressure on Incentives, Leader Says

By NAZILA FATHI and STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: June 3, 2006

TEHRAN, June 2 — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday defied pressure from foreign leaders to accept a package of incentives in return for ending all nuclear activities, saying Iran will pursue its legal right to develop a peaceful nuclear program.

"Any pressure to deprive our people from their right will not bear any fruit," he was quoted as saying on state-run television.
"Their opposition to our program is not because of their concern over the spread of nuclear weapons," he said. "They are worried that Iran would become a model for other independent countries, especially Islamic countries, for access to advanced technology."
The details of the incentive package — approved at a meeting of foreign ministers from the United States, Germany, Britain, France, China and Russia in Vienna on Thursday — have not been made public, but the proposal is expected to be presented to Iran in the coming days. In a statement, the six countries warned that "further steps" would be taken by the United Nations Security Council if Iran did not comply, but avoided any mention of sanctions or other specific punitive measures.
Diplomats emphasized the unanimity of the major nations in drafting a compromise proposal, and in Vienna on Friday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke of a shared commitment to the offer. "We also have an alternative path if Iran doesn't negotiate," she said.
But remarks by Russian and British leaders on Friday made it clear that the unanimity extended only to the incentives, not the possible punishments.
In an interview with international news agencies at his residence outside Moscow, Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia, said his country opposed the use of military force against Iran "under any circumstances."
He also ruled out any immediate discussion of sanctions, leaving open the question of whether Russia would ever support punitive action if Iran persists in resisting demands to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
"As for sanctions, we think it is a bit too early to put those on the agenda, as well," Mr. Putin said, according to the Interfax news agency. "There needs to be a detailed discussion with the Iranian leadership."
In a statement by the Foreign Office, Britain also ruled out the use of military force against Iran. "All parties are committed to a diplomatic solution," the statement said. "The use of military force was not discussed at all last night. This reflects the fact that military force is not on the agenda."
On Friday, the White House dismissed Mr. Ahmadinejad's remarks as a "negotiating position." Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has the final word over decisions on the country's nuclear program.
Highly enriched uranium can be used for making nuclear weapons. Iran has said that it wants to enrich uranium to low levels to use as nuclear fuel at its plants, and that it is entitled to do so under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. The United States says it forfeited that right by using its nuclear power program as cover for developing weapons.
However, Mohammad Saeedi, deputy chief of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, suggested on Friday that Iran might enrich uranium to higher levels than previously announced.
Mr. Saeedi said that Iran would not accept a limit on the levels of its uranium enrichment, the ISNA news agency reported.
"It is incorrect to put a 3.5, 5 or even a 10 percent cap on Iran's level of uranium enrichment," ISNA quoted him as saying. "Fuel for light water reactors needs uranium enriched to even 19.9 percent."
"So, these remarks that Iran should accept a 10 percent cap on its enrichment cannot be correct," he added, without elaborating.
Iran uses a heavy-water program for enriching its uranium and had announced that it would enrich uranium up to 4 percent. Like Russia, China has argued that the best way to win concessions from Iran — at least at this point — is with engagement, not sanctions. That shared position effectively shelved any discussion of punitive action by the Security Council, where Russia and China both have veto power.
Asked if Russia would join in economic sanctions if Iran continued to resist international inspections and demands to suspend its enrichment programs, Mr. Putin said he would not discuss hypothetical questions.
"If a grandmother had certain gender characteristics," he said, "she would be a grandfather."
Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran for this article, and Steven Lee Myers from Moscow.

Courtesy of the New York Times