Bush's real lie about Iran

[kurth]

Bush's real lie about Iran
Despite recent claims otherwise, the White House has rebuffed negotiations with Iran at every turn -- a major strategic blunder.
By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Dec. 7, 2007 | The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program raises questions once again about the Bush administration's veracity in describing a nuclear threat. But President Bush's worst misrepresentations about the Iranian nuclear issue do not focus on whether Tehran is currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program or when Bush knew the U.S. intelligence community was revising its previous assessments. Rather, the real lie is the president's claim that his administration has made a serious offer to negotiate with the Islamic Republic, and that Iranian intransigence is the only thing preventing a diplomatic resolution.

Negotiations over Iran's nuclear activities started in the fall of 2003, initiated not by the United States, but by the "EU-3" -- Britain, France and Germany. Iran, for its part, agreed to suspend its nuclear activities as talks proceeded. But, contrary to Bush's statement at his press conference this week, the United States did not "facilitate" these negotiations. Indeed, the Europeans had launched the talks to fill a diplomatic vacuum, after the Bush administration cut off its post-9/11 dialogue with Iran over Afghanistan and rebuffed an Iranian offer to negotiate a comprehensive resolution of U.S.-Iranian differences earlier that year.

On the day the EU-3 and Iran announced the opening of their negotiations, one of us was in Paris, meeting with a senior advisor to then-French President Jacques Chirac. This official said forthrightly that the point of the European effort was to "drag" the Bush administration into talks with Iran that it had refused to enter on its own. For more than two years, the Europeans tried to "drag" the administration in, but to no avail.

In the spring of 2005, in the face of European pleas for U.S. support, President Bush grudgingly approved token gestures: modifying the U.S. trade ban against Iran to permit the sale of spare parts for civilian airliners, and dropping his previous veto of Tehran's application to the World Trade Organization. But still he refused to join negotiations. Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 2005 -- before Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office, after Tehran had suspended its nuclear activities for almost two years -- Iran resumed nuclear development.

Finally, in 2006, faced with a breakdown in international support for sanctioning the Islamic Republic, the Bush administration reluctantly agreed to join the EU-3, Russia and China in nuclear negotiations with Iran, if Tehran would again suspend its nuclear activities. But the administration negated the impact of its decision by effectively gutting the major powers' offer to negotiate...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/12/07/iran_policy/

[magellan]

1. In the presser, Bush** made it sound like his admin was rebuffed by Iran

We all know the opposite is true -- that in fact BushCo were actively ignoring and belittling every overture from Iran shortly after the invasion of Iraq, including a letter faxed to the State Department in which Iran offered to "consider far-reaching compromises on its nuclear programme, relations with Hezbollah and Hamas and support for a Palestinian peace agreement with Israel as part of a larger peace agreement with the United States". (Quoted from CommonDreams.) Condi denied in Congressional testimony ever having ever seen the letter, though she had. It's very existence was covered up for three years until it was finally unearthed in 2006.

Unfortunately these truths will have been lost on most Americans by now, if they ever heard about it from the corporate media in the first place.

Of course Congress knows all this...not that that's much comfort.