IRAQ - A US Geo-Political Issue.

Gareth Porter, a US historian and expert in matters of national security, said in a lengthy article published on May 13 by Inter Press Service (IPS): In pushing for a "showdown" over Iran's atomic ambitions in the UNSC, the Bush team presented the issue as a matter of global security - an Iranian nuclear threat in defiance of the international community. "But", he wrote, "the history of the conflict and the private strategic thinking of both sides reveal that the dispute is really about the Bush administration's drive for greater dominance in the Middle East and Iran's demand for recognition as a regional power".

The Iranian leadership, convinced that Bush was to move against Iran after toppling Saddam in Iraq, proposed in April 2003 to negotiate with the US on the very issues which Washington had claimed were the basis for its hostile posture towards Tehran: its nuclear programme, its support for Hizbollah and other armed anti-Israel groups, and its hostility to Israel's existence. Porter wrote: "Tehran offered concrete, substantive concessions on those issues. But on the advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush refused to respond to the proposal for negotiation. Nuclear weapons were not, therefore, the primary US concern".

In the "hierarchy" of Washington's interests, Porter said, "the denial of legitimacy" to the theocracy "trumped a deal which could have provided assurances against an Iranian nuclear weapon". Porter added: "For insight into the real aims of the Bush administration in pushing the issue of Iranian access to nuclear technology to a crisis point, one can turn to Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neo-conservative (neo-con) think-tank. Donnelly was the deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) from 1999 to 2002, and was the main author of 'Rebuilding America's Defenses'. That paper was written for Cheney and Rumsfeld during the transition following Bush's election and had the participation of four prominent [neo-con] figures who later took positions in the administration: Stephen Cambone, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton".

Porter added: "Donnelly's analysis of the issue of Iran and nuclear weapons, published last October in the book Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran, makes it clear that the real objection to Iran's becoming a nuclear power is that it would impede the larger US ambitions in the Middle East - what Donnelly calls the Bush administration's 'project of transforming the Middle East'.

"Contrary to the official line depicting Iran as a radical state threatening to plunge the region into war, Donnelly refers to Iran as 'more the status quo power' in the region in relation to the US. Iran, he explains, 'stands directly athwart this project of regional transformation'. Up to now, he observes, the Iranian regime has been 'incapable of stemming the seeping US presence in the Persian Gulf and in the broader region'. And the invasion of Iraq 'completed the near-encirclement of Iran by US military forces'.

"Donnelly writes that a 'nuclear Iran' is a problem not so much because Tehran would employ...[them] or pass them on to terrorist groups, but mainly because of 'the constraining effect it threatens to impose...[on] US strategy for the greater Middle East'. The 'greatest danger', according to Donnelly, is that the 'realists' would 'pursue a balance of power' approach with a nuclear Iran, undercutting the Bush 'liberation strategy'. Although Donnelly does not say so explicitly, it would undercut that strategy primarily by ruling out a US attack on Iran as part of a 'regime change' strategy..."

"Instead, in Donnelly's scenario, a nuclear capability would incline those outside the neo-con priesthood to negotiate a 'detente' with Iran, which would bring the plan for the extension of US political-military dominance in the Middle East to a halt".

Porter added that what was really at stake in the confrontation with Iran from the US perspective, according to Donnelly on neo-con strategy, "is the opportunity to re-order the power hierarchy in the Middle East even further in favor of the US" by overthrowing the Shi'ite theocracy of Iran.

Porter wrote: "Iran has not acknowledged its real interest in pushing its position on nuclear-fuel enrichment to the point of confrontation with the US, either. Instead, it has focused in public pronouncements on the enormously popular position that Iran will not give up its right to have civilian nuclear power. According to observers familiar with their thinking, senior Iranian national-security officials have long been saying privately that Iran should try to reach an agreement with the US which would normalize relations and acknowledge officially Iran's legitimate role in the security of the Persian Gulf".

Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iran's foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who had extensive interviews with senior Iranian security officials in 2004, said Iran "is now primarily trying to become rehabilitated in the political order of the region".

Najmeh Bozorgmehr, an Iranian journalist now at the Brookings Institution as a visiting scholar, agreed. Based on several years of covering Iran's national security policy, she said, Tehran wanted to bargain with the US on Iran's regional role, as well as on removal of sanctions and assurances against US attack. She said Tehran had been looking for any source of leverage with which to bargain with the US on those issues, and "enrichment has become a big bargaining chip".

Bozorgmehr said the Iranians had become convinced that they had to do something to show the US "we can give you a hard time" to induce the Bush administration to negotiate. And Parsi said the prevailing view among Iranian officials after the 2003 US rejection of diplomacy was that they had to have the capability to inflict some pain on the US to get its attention. According to Parsi, that rejection confirmed Iranian suspicions that the US problem was not with Iran's policies but with its power.

Porter wrote: "That Iranian conclusion precisely parallels Donnelly's insider analysis of the Bush administration's aims. But what the Iranians really want, according to these observers of Iranian national-security thinking, is not nuclear weapons but the recognition of Iran's status in the power hierarchy of the Persian Gulf region. The Iranian demand for regional status can only be achieved through a broad diplomatic agreement with the US".

Porter concluded: "The Bush administration's insistence on extending its dominance in the Middle East even further can only be achieved, however, by the threat of force and, if that fails, war against Iran". (Gareth Porter's latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published last June).

Another Geo-Political Perspective: Prominent Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, among anti-theocracy activists who recently visited the White House, sees the issue as being primarily geo-political, but from a different perspective: In an article carried on May 13 by Arab News, Taheri focused on the long letter which Iranian President Ahmadi-Nejad had just sent to Bush. But Taheri also focused on the "latest peddler of the idea of a 'diplomatic solution'", ElBaradei says the nuclear crisis is just part of a package of issues which need to be negotiated with Iran.

Taheri wrote: Elbaradei's change of tack is interesting because it was on the basis of his [IAEA] report about Iran's policy of 'cheat-and retreat' that the dossier was referred to the UN Security Council (UNSC) in the first place...

"Call it the 'Blix moment' if you like, but the fact is that we are facing a situation similar to that concerning Iraq in the autumn of 2002. At that time Hans Blix, then the UN's disarmament inspector for Iraq, was doing what ElBaradei is doing today: Refusing to say that Iraq had a clandestine program of weapons of mass destruction while insisting that no action be taken against Saddam Hussein. At that time Blix was asking the international community to believe what he himself refused to believe.

"Today, it is ElBaradei's turn to say that, while he cannot rule out the possibility that Iran has a secret nuclear project, he wants the rest of the world to believe that it does not. Those who, like ElBaradei, call for a 'diplomatic solution', however, have so far failed to suggest the starting point for any putative negotiations. Can talks begin with the assumption that the Islamic Republic, which according to IAEA has been lying and cheating about its nuclear program for 20 years, is suddenly telling the truth?

"If this is the case then ElBaradei has a moral, not to mention legal and political, duty to say so without ifs and buts. If, on the contrary, the talks start with the assumption that...[Iran] continues to lie and cheat, those who recommend a diplomatic solution must suggest a mechanism for dealing with that fact...

"...Interestingly, not even those who, for a wide range of reasons, back the Islamic republic in the current crisis are prepared to provide it with the needed certificate of trustworthiness. Until April the Iranian diplomatic game plan was to defuse the situation by announcing a temporary suspension of uranium enrichment, first for three months and then extended to two years in the context of negotiations covering Tehran's specific concerns. At least one faction in Tehran was even prepared to offer a 10-year suspension of the enrichment program.

"That game plan changed for two reasons. First, the EU3...rejected the idea of a temporary suspension from the start. It insisted that the enrichment program be terminated permanently. Secondly, Tehran soon realized that the EU3, backed by the US, would not be able to secure a 'resolution with some credible dentition' in the...[UNSC].

"That realization helped Ahmadinejad to argue that there was no need for offering any concessions and that all Iran needed to do was to wait until the crisis blew over".

Based on "information from Tehran", Taheri added, the issue of what strategy to adopt was "widely discussed at an informal meeting" with Supreme Leader Khamenei and attended by Ahmadi-Nejad "along with top military commanders".

Taheri said Ahmadi-Nejad "succeeded in convincing the decision-makers that there was no need to retreat when no one was sure whether or not any meaningful move would or, indeed, could be made against Iran. 'We could always announce a termination of enrichment if and when we face real action against us', he reportedly told the meeting". So far, of course, Ahmadi-Nejad has proved right.

Taheri said President Ahmadi-Nejad was "determined to prevent the US and its regional allies from reshaping the Middle East the way they like". Taheri said the Iranian president "believes that Iran is the natural 'regional power' and, in that capacity, has the right and the duty to decide what the Middle East should look like once the Americans have been driven out or decide to run away".

Ahmadi-Nejad's letter was an "invitation to Bush to acknowledge that fact and prepare for handing the future of the Middle East over to the Islamic republic", Taheri argued, concluding: "This is the real issue either for negotiations or for a showdown at the end of which we shall all know who will set the tune in this sensitive region for the foreseeable future. The nuclear issue, therefore, is an effect of a deeper cause".