Pax Americana Is Changing - Part 20 - US Plans For Iran.

Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on April 16 said it would be "useful" for the US to talk directly to Iran over the nuclear stand-off. Iran's ex-president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who heads the powerful Expediency Council (EC), on April 16 ended a five-day visit to Syria saying the US was "incapable of taking a risk" of a war in the region without seriously discussing Tehran's nuclear plan. Rafsanjani, who later visited Kuwait, has been rallying Arab support after Tehran said it had completed uranium enrichment.

Rafsanjani had earlier told al-Hayat Iran was after a direct dialogue with the US. He said Iran counted on help from Saudi Arabia to bring about this dialogue. Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani who heads the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), visited Saudi Arabia recently. With its economy in a mess and spending beyond its means on a number of geo-political projects, Iran can ill-afford being in a cold war with the US (see news17-ArabIPOsReformsIranApr24-06).

Yet, Iran is preparing for the possibility of a US-led attack on its nuclear and other strategic installations. The Sunday Times on April 16 reported that Iran had formed battalions of suicide bombers to hit US and British targets should the country's nuclear sites be attacked.

However, the signals from the US have been mixed. Apart from frequent reports of US attack preparations, as Lugar suggested, three Democratic senators on April 16 said they were for direct US talks with Iran to defuse the tension. Washington has authorised its Ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, to conduct talks over Iraq's future with Iranian diplomats. But this will only be limited to Iraq's future and cannot start until a new Iraqi government has been formed.

Iran is widely seen as the main spoiler for the US in Iraq and is not likely to let the Americans succeed in this heart of the Arab world until Washington and Tehran have come to a global arrangement to include all issues between the two countries. The US may or may not be patient with the Iranian theocracy.