Moves To Iran Negotiations – Moon of Alabama

January 26, 2009

Moves To Iran Negotiations

This could become interesting …

IRNA: Ex-German chancellor to embark on four-day Iran trip on Feb. 19

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is to embark on a visit to Iran from February 19 through 22, dpa cited Schroeder's office in Berlin as saying on Monday.

The trip is "closely coordinated with the (German) foreign ministry," the spokesperson of the foreign ministry Jens Ploetner told the press in Berlin.

One can be certain that this was also closely coordinated with the Obama administration. I find it unlikely that Schröder would sign on for this if there were not some hope for real talks.

Meanwhile there are reports in German business papers about a crack down on German credit guarantees for business with Iran. Oh well – those guarantees count for only 15% of German trade with Iran and, if push comes to shove, no Germany party will dare to really crack down on trade and jeopardize domestic jobs for U.S. policy preferences.

Meanwhile the current EU lead nation Czechia pushes for direct U.S. Iran talks:

"I always believed it was senseless to ignore your opponent," [Czech Foreign Minister] Schwarzenberg added.

Susan Rice, the new U.S. envoy to the UN, seems to be on board:

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — The new US ambassador to the UN said Monday that Washington was committed to direct, "vigorous" diplomacy with Iran …
…
"Dialogue and diplomacy must go hand in hand with a very firm message from the United States and the international community that Iran needs to meet its obligations as defined by the Security Council and its continued refusal to do so will only cause pressure to increase," Rice added.

A lot depends on who in the Obama administration will get the job to talk with Iran. Neocon Dennis Ross tried through controlled leaks to make himself U.S. Czar for Middle East and chief negotiator with Iran policy. His intend, as an arch-Zionist, was of course to let any negotions fail and thus to prepare for a U.S. attack on Iran. The attempt for the Czar job failed. His role, if he gets any at all, has not yet been defined.

Sane folks like Pat Lang speak up against him.

But with the Czar job gone he tries again to get at least the chief-negotiator-with-Iran part.
As Jim Lobe points out, another of Ross' organisations has already congratulated him for a new job in the State Department he does not have yet. Let us hope he never gets one.

Or if he has to have one, why not make him ambassador to Katmandu?

Posted by b on January 26, 2009 at 20:40 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Obama, along with the Democratic Party in general including its campaign platform, has consistently mis-cast the legal Iran nuclear program as a weapons program despite the NIE and IAEA claims to the contrary. So”negotiations” will probably be “demands”, won’t they, written by AIPAC no doubt.

Posted by: Don Bacon | Jan 26 2009 21:06 utc | 1

Schröder’s travel will of course be a business trip. Germany’s trade with Iran has increased by 10 per cent in 2008. Maybe he will travel representing Gazprom :-)). He will definitely represent neither the German government nor the US.
http://jetzt.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/462982

Posted by: outsider | Jan 26 2009 21:17 utc | 2

”
Not since before the 1979 Iranian revolution are U.S. officials believed to have conducted wide-ranging direct diplomacy with Iranian officials. But U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice warned that Iran must meet U.N. Security Council demands to suspend uranium enrichment before any talks on its nuclear program”
No policy change , Iran will not stop enrichment.
Selection of Denis the menis is an insult to Iranian , it’s like selecting Bolton for renovation of UN building.

Posted by: Anonymous | Jan 26 2009 21:21 utc | 3

& where ô where is the mephistopholes himself – john negroponte – planning more massacres

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 26 2009 22:07 utc | 4

Negotiating with Iran could be interesting. Yes, indeed!
US: Stop your nuclear weapons progam.
Iran: We don’t have one and you know it.
US: Yes you do. We know it.
Iran: No, we don’t (and you have proof).
US: I don’t care! Stop it, or else!
US: Stop supplying the Iraqi insurgency.
Iran: Why would we promote an insurgency against our friend, the government of Iraq?
US: Because your’re perverse and devious Iranians.
US: Stop supporting terrorism.
Iran: You mean terrorism like bombing hospitals, schools, ambulances and wedding parties?
US: No, we mean terrorism as in supplying Hezbollah and Hamas.
Iran: I see, so they can have their hospitals, schools, ambulances and wedding parties bombed with impunity?
US: You don’t get it. Stop it or else we’ll bomb your hospitals, schools, ambulances and wedding parties.
Iran: If you agree to lift economic sanctions and not attack us, then we’ll consider it.
US: No deal!
Iran: So you have proof that we have no nuke program, we have no reason to support the Iraqi insurgency, and you can have a deal on the table for what you call terrorism. Could we just do a deal and be done with all this nonsense?
US: No.
Iran: What else do you want?
US: Can’t say.
Iran: Well, then, we can’t help you.
US: Yes you can! You know what it is.
Iran: No, please tell us.
US: No can do.
Iran: So are we supposed to intuit your desires?
US: HAND OVER THE OIL, DAMN IT!! Or we’ll blow you to smithereens.
Iran: Like Iraq? How did that work out? Getting any more oil?
US: Shut up!!!
Interesting, indeed.

Posted by: JohnH | Jan 26 2009 23:13 utc | 5

John@5-
You must be a former diplomat, or are you going to use this as a resume? 🙂

Posted by: David | Jan 26 2009 23:57 utc | 6

Very hard to think of anyone in Obama’s administration who could usefully discuss anything with Iran. However, you never know. . .
Are we really sure that Israel really wants to bomb Iran? Mean little bastards they are, certainly given to blustering and bluffing, but maybe not that stupid.

Posted by: seneca | Jan 27 2009 1:32 utc | 7

Israel has so many problems, they need an outside enemy. The rationalization of US wars is completely irrational in a complex 21st century context, as they have run out of the one enemy – fascism, communism – to end up with a war for security. It is more about securing trade routes and supply lines than anything else, so much so that even pirates are back.

Posted by: outsider | Jan 27 2009 4:12 utc | 8

LOL John H #5–
If there is anything deeper to US “diplomacy” I have yet to hear what it might be.

Posted by: Gaianne | Jan 27 2009 5:32 utc | 9

Irony was now out.
Naiveté, translated into “hope,” was now in.
Innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.
Partisanship could now be appropriately expressed by consumerism.
I couldn’t count the number of snapshots I got e-mailed showing people’s babies dressed in Obama gear.
I couldn’t count the number of times I heard the words “transformational” or “inspirational,” or heard the 1960s evoked by people with no apparent memory that what drove the social revolution of the 1960s was not babies in cute T-shirts but the kind of resistance to that decade’s war that in the case of our current wars, unmotivated by a draft, we have yet to see. It became increasingly clear that we were gearing up for another close encounter with militant idealism—by which I mean the convenient but dangerous redefinition of political or pragmatic questions as moral questions—”convenient” because such redefinition makes those questions seem easier to answer, “dangerous” because this was a time when the nation was least prepared to afford easy answers.
Some who were troubled by this redefinition referred to those who remained untroubled by a code phrase. This phrase, which referred back to a previous encounter with militant idealism, the one that ended at the Jonestown encampment in Guyana in 1978, was “drinking the Kool-Aid.”
No one ever suggested that the candidate himself was drinking the Kool-Aid—if there had been any doubt about this, his initial appointments laid them to rest…. Yet. The expectations got fueled. The spirit of a cargo cult was loose in the land. I heard it said breathlessly on one channel that the United States, on the basis of having carried off this presidential election, now had “the congratulations of all the nations.” “They want to be with us,” another commentator said. Imagining in 2008 that all the world’s people wanted to be with us did not seem entirely different in kind from imagining in 2003 that we would be greeted with flowers when we invaded Iraq, but in the irony-free zone that the nation had chosen to become, this was not the preferred way of looking at it.

Joan Didion
A great Buddhist saying stipulates that Meditation is not what you think. Wishful thinking happens when you refuse to see how painful things are.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 27 2009 6:54 utc | 10

“….As far as U.S. polices are concerned and the aftermath of the Baker-Hamilton report, what is needed is a change in the approach of the U.S. towards Iran, towards Iraq, and towards the region. What has brought all these miseries to the region is that the U.S. has dealt with the region based on wrong perceptions and a totally erroneous approach. The U.S. must come to realize that other countries have interests, have concerns, have anxieties. The U.S. must deal with these anxieties, concerns and interests, and not be concerned with only its own. Of course any country in any situation will try to maximize its national interest. That’s a given. But, you have to address any situation based on a recognition that the other side also has these similar national interests.
If you deal with the other side as less than a human society, then don’t expect to have multiple outcomes. What I’m saying is that in Western terminology, concepts are used that would infuriate the other sides. Even the terminologies used by the United States in the liberal realist tradition—such as “carrot and stick”—are not meant for humans, but rather for donkeys. In studies of Orientalism, the Eastern part of the world is dealt with as an object rather than as serious, real human societies with longer, older civilizations with concerns and needs that have to be dealt with……”

~Iran’s UN Ambassador Javad Zarif, 12, 2006
then there’s this…

Or we could view the threats and challenges we face today as the difficult birth-pangs of a new global order – and our task now as nothing less than making the transition through a new internationalism to the benefits of an expanding global society – not muddling through as pessimists but making the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting the new rules for this new global order.”

Gordon Brown.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 27 2009 7:10 utc | 11

thanks Uncle $sam that sums it up.

Posted by: outsider | Jan 27 2009 8:45 utc | 12

Obama’s negotiating-with-Iran problem is that for some perverse reason he picked a Secretary of State who, just like Joe Lieberman, has “Property of AIPAC, Inc.” tatted on her butt.
And since Israel does NOT want us out of Iraq, the problem is even larger than dealing with just Iran.

Posted by: tanbark | Jan 27 2009 14:44 utc | 13

Gates accuses Iran of subversion in Latin America

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates accused Iran Tuesday of engaging in “subversive activity” in Latin America, saying it concerned him more than Russia’s recent naval forays in the region.
“I’m concerned about the level of frankly subversive activity that the Iranians are carrying on in a number of places in Latin America particularly South America and Central America,” Gates told lawmakers.
“They’re opening a lot of offices and a lot of fronts behind which they interfere in what is going on in some of these countries,” he said.
Gates gave no specifics in leveling the accusation against Iran at a Senate hearing in response to a question about Russia’s recent naval exercises in the Caribbean with Venezuela.
The secretary said nonchalance was the best response to the Russian ship visits.
“In fact if it hadn’t been for the events in Georgia in August, I probably would’ve tried to persuade the president to invite the Russian ships pay a port call in Miami because I think they would’ve had a lot better time than they did in Caracas,” he said.
“But basically I think at 40-dollar (per barrel) oil, the Russian navy does not bother me very much,” Gates added.
“It’s important for us to keep perspective about their capabilities,” he said.
“When they complained about our escorting their Blackjack bombers to Venezuela, I wanted to say that we just wanted to be along there for search and rescue if they needed it.”

Also see, Iran / Contra Report – Chapter 16 Robert M. Gates
Bonus: Pic.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 28 2009 2:43 utc | 14

thanks, as always, uncle

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 28 2009 2:56 utc | 15

This is worth of attention: Europe removes MEQ from terrorists list, while its status is still disputed and Maliki is still intentioned to expel them from Iraq.

Posted by: andrew | Jan 28 2009 9:23 utc | 16

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