Juan Cole
January 19, 2007
Lawrence Wilkerson, an aide to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state says that
Iran in 2003 offered to help stabilize Iraq and to cut off aid to Hizbullah in Lebanon and to Hamas. Wilkerson says that the State Department was interested in pursuing the offer, which presumably came from reformist president Mohammad Khatami. He says that when the issue was broached with VP Richard Bruce Cheney, Cheney shot down any notion of "talking to evil." As if Mohammad Khatami is evil and Richard Bruce Cheney is not. (Cheney's lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and connection to 9/11 have gotten hundreds of thousands of people killed).
A description of this, from two newspapers:
Ex-official: Cheney vetoed deal with Iran,
St. Petersburg Times, 1-19-07
An Iranian offer to help stabilize Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was rejected by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003, a former top State Department official told the British Broadcasting Corp.
"We thought it was a very propitious moment" to strike a deal, said Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff.
"But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the vice president's office, the old mantra of 'We don't talk to evil' ... reasserted itself."Wilkerson said Tehran in return asked Washington to lift sanctions. Iran also offered to increase the transparency of its nuclear program, he said.
Cheney rejected Iran offer over Iraq, ex-official says By AP - The Globe and Mail
Jan/22/2007
London -- An Iranian offer to help the United States stabilize Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was rejected by Vice-President Dick Cheney in 2003, a former top State Department official told the British Broadcasting Corp.
The State Department was open to the offer, which came in an unsigned letter sent shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson, former secretary of state Colin Powell's chief of staff, told BBC's Newsnight in a program broadcast Wednesday night. But, Mr. Wilkerson said, Mr. Cheney vetoed the deal.
"We thought it was a very propitious moment" to strike a deal, Mr. Wilkerson said. "But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the Vice-President's office, the old mantra of 'We don't talk to evil' . . . reasserted itself."
And from
Craig Unger in
Vanity Fair, March, 2007 issue, many more details about the "Grand Bargain" offered by Iran:
Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, when the U.S. mission there seemed accomplished or at least accomplishable, Iran came to fear that it would be next in the crosshairs. To stave off that possibility, Iran's leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, began to assemble a negotiating package. Suddenly, everything was on the table—Iran's nuclear program, policy toward Israel, support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and control over al-Qaeda operatives captured since the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan.
This comprehensive proposal, which diplomats took to calling "the grand bargain," was sent to Washington on May 2, 2003, just before a meeting in Geneva between Iran's U.N. ambassador, Javad Zarif, and neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, then a senior director at the National Security Council. (Khalilzad went on to become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and was recently nominated to be America's envoy to the U.N.) According to a report by Gareth Porter in The American Prospect, Iran offered to take "decisive action against any terrorists (above all, al-Qaeda) in Iranian territory." In exchange, Iran wanted the U.S. to pursue "anti-Iranian terrorists"—i.e., the MEK. Specifically, Iran offered to share the names of senior al-Qaeda operatives in its custody in return for the names of MEK cadres captured by the U.S. in Iraq.
Well aware that the U.S. was concerned about its nuclear program, Iran proclaimed its right to "full access to peaceful nuclear technology," but offered to submit to much stricter inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.). On the subject of Israel, Iran offered to join with moderate Arab regimes such as Egypt and Jordan in accepting the 2002 Arab League Beirut declaration calling for peace with Israel in return for Israel's withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. The negotiating package also included proposals to normalize Hezbollah into a mere "political organization within Lebanon," to bring about a "stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad, etc.) from Iranian territory," and to apply "pressure on these organizations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967."
To be sure, Iran's proposal was only a first step. There were countless unanswered questions, and many reasons not to trust the Islamic Republic. Given the initiative's historic scope, however, it was somewhat surprising when the Bush administration simply declined to respond. There was not even an interagency meeting to discuss it. "The State Department knew it had no chance at the interagency level of arguing the case for it successfully," former N.S.C. staffer Flynt Leverett told The American Prospect. "They weren't going to waste Powell's rapidly diminishing capital on something that unlikely."
Iran had sent the proposal through an intermediary, Tim Guldimann, the Swiss ambassador to the U.S. A few days later, Leverett said, the White House had the State Department send Guldimann a message reprimanding him for exceeding his diplomatic mandate. "We're not interested in any grand bargain," said Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, who went on to become interim ambassador to the U.N. until his resignation last December.
So, not only did Bush and Cheney reject Iran's detailed overture, they punished the Swiss ambassador to the US for delivering the Iranian letter to them. Just like they punished Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his covert CIA spouse, Valerie Plame. Nice. But, then, this crowd in the Executive branch has always been about punishment for anyone who questions what they are doing.
Back to
Juan Cole:
Because Khatami kept promising that his reforms would make Iranians better off, and because the US rejected all his overtures and left him with no achievements to show for them, the Iranian electorate turned against the reform movement and put Mahmud Ahmadinejad into power, a loud-mouthed braggart of a sort that Cheney's Likudniks could then build up into a bogey man to frighten Americans with. Cheney created Iran as a menace.
What this article doesn't mention is that the rightwing Likud cabal in Cheney's office, such as Irv Lewis Libby, with its connections to the Israeli far right, almost certainly played a key role in this rejection. I think John Hannah was already there then, too. David Wurmser came later, after getting up the fraudulent case against Iraq in the Pentagon "Office of Special Plans" (i.e. foreign policy plumbers) set up by Likudnik Douglas Feith, then the number 3 man in the Pentagon.
Libby is now on trial for lying to the special prosecutor about his role in betraying CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. Wilson had been working on anti-proliferation efforts versus . . . Iran. She was outed to punish her husband for publicly challenging Cheney's lies about WMD in Iraq.
Cheney is the most fascistic high official in US government in history. He recently implied that al-Qaeda is glad that the Democrats won the mid-term elections, as his way of trying to create the impression that anyone who disagrees with him is a terrorist-loving traitor. But it is Cheney who is the traitor, with his office having betrayed Valerie to the Iranians (and everyone else in the world).
Fascism depends on the creation of straw man enemies said to be dire threats to the Homeland. Iran is a poor weak third world country and poses no threat to the US. It hasn't aggressively invaded another country for over a century. But Cheney needs Iran to substitute for the old Soviet Union, otherwise how could he get you to agree to let him listen in on your telephone calls without a warrant, or let him torture people?
Cheney is the much bigger threat to the integrity of the US constitution than any foreign force. He should be impeached. If lying about a tawdry affair that did not even get to third base is grounds for impeachment, then lying us into a war, slapping Iran's overtures away and setting the stage for another war, and outing a CIA operative certainly are.
At least let us investigate the extent of his crimes.
Amen.
And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just now
weighed in, claiming she never saw any information about any deal offered by Iran in May, 2003, and most certainly would have remembered if she'd seen anything like THAT. Why, she
never could have imagined...Cheney doesn't want any deals offered by Iran; he doesn't want any covert CIA operatives investigating anything related to Iran ..(US national security be damned); he didn't want any credible former Ambassador telling the CIA that Iraq was NOT attempting to acquire yellowcake uranium, and he certainly doesn't want any restraint by Congress, State Department, the CIA, the UN, the courts, the voters, the military experts or world leaders, when all are telling him that he is dead wrong.
As Juan Cole
http://www.juancole.com/2007/01/cheney-blew-off-iran-in-2003-for-love.html">says,
For the Love of God Impeach this Man. (emphasis added)
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