| | Jeff, the article to which I provided the link is based on an extended interview with two formerly very highly placed CIA operatives who worked as Middle East policy experts for the National Security Council. Leveret worked closely on a daily basis with Condi Rice and Colin Powell as their expert advisor on terrorist states; Mann was the Iran expert on the NSC and directly involved in secret face-to-face negotiations with Iran for over two years, on a monthly basis. During their tenure, they repeatedly ran up against Bush administration opposition to and sabetage of momentously important concessions offered to the United States by representatives of the Iranian state.
These concessions initially included plans for Iranian help in the war aginst the Taliban in Afghanistan, including rendering assistance to any American shot down near their borders, permitting Americans to route food supply lines to Afghanistan through Iran, and agreeing to restrain belligerant anti-American Afghan war lords, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom they placed under house arrest. According to these two CIA people, the Iranians had intimate knowlege of Taliban strategic capabilities, which they were eager to share with the USA. At the same time, James Dobbins, special envoy, was conducting public and cordial negotiations with Iranians in Bonn, Germany, in which both sides agreed to details about the government being set up in Afghanistan.
In the meantime, as the Iraq bombing campaign commenced, Leveret, NSC advisor on terrorist states to Powell and Rice, saw offers of help extended from supposedly fanatical terrorist states: Sudan, Syria, Lybia, and Iran. For example, Shortly after 911, Iranian representatives offered Mann, on several occassions, to negotiate "unconditionally"--a primary demand long set out by the Bush people as the prerequisite to progress. The Iranians said they knew 911 was important, and hoped that by negotiating without conditions they could fundamentally alter relations with the US for the first time since 1979. But this offer was ignored by the Bush people.
As a CIA specialist in these terrorist states, Leveritt had concluded that terrorism was employed "tactically", to gain certain objectives, rather than "fanatically", which suggests indifference to incentives. (Incidentally, this distinction does not imply moral neutrality about the evil of murdering innocent people.) So he suggested to Powell that a new list of terrorist states be created, in which states that cooperated with the US, specifically by expelling their terrorist groups and getting rid of weapons of mass destruction, would be taken off the sponsors of terrorism list and engage in mutual cooperation. Powell took this idea to the White House, which immediately shot it down.
Four weeks into the invasion of Iraq, the Iranians made a dramatic offer: "decisive action" against all terrorists in Iran, an end for support of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a promise to end its nuclear program, and an agreement to recognize Israel. As Mann (approximately) expressed it, this was momentous, gigantic, unprecedented. Immediately, the White House communicated that it would ignore the offer, and lodged a protest against the Swiss Ambassador for "meddling". (The US has no US Ambassador to Iran, so proposals and entreaties are routinely made through Switzerland.).
The article contains much more distrubing information about the Bush mindset, which from the beginning has sought war in the Middle East. Aside from the obvious fact that much in the culture of their region is unfriendly to individual liberty and reason, arguments that Iranian Persians, Palestinians, and Arabs are all just fanatical non-human beings, immune to any form of rational persuasion, indifferent to realism, utterly and hopelessly beyond the reach of incentives, is non-sense. More particularly, it is a pack of lies.
Of course, propaganda on behalf of non-defensive wars--like all other statist propaganda--derives power from the willingness of many people to accept incredible claims uncritically. This uncritical acceptance takes the form of refusal to look at inconvenient or discomforting facts.
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