NO TRUCKLOAD OF CARROTS WILL PERSUADE IRAN UNLESS IT'S ACCOMPANIED WITH A TRUCKLOAD OF MISSILES


By Con George-Kotzabasis

A response to:

Talking to Iran is our Best Option
By Ivo Daalder and Phillip Gordon of the Brookings Institution, and advisers to Barack Obama

Washington Post, June 29, 2008

We cannot tolerate the survival of a political system which has both the increasing capacity and the inexorable desire to destroy us. We have no other option but to adopt the strategy of Cato. (Delenda est Carthago)
Raymond Aron

Ivo Daalder and Phillip Gordon, the two savants of the Brookings Institution, have a brief to advise Barack Obama to start “talking to Iran without preconditions”, but they should not allowed to do so at the grief of America’s national interests and the security of the civilized world. The rationale of such advocacy is based in “rescuing a failed policy” of not talking to Iran for 7 ½ years that has made the latter, according to our two analysts, stronger and therefore more intransigent toward American and European demands encapsulated in the precondition that Iran suspends its nuclear enrichment program before any commencement of negotiations between the opposing parties. Further they claim that such diplomatic overture by the U.S. would enable the latter to “test that proposition” of the Iranians, that they “seek only the peaceful use of nuclear energy and the right to nuclear technology”.

It’s almost beyond belief that Daalder and Gordon would be proud to present themselves as the enfants terribles on the stage of diplomacy and in the art of Talleyrand, as their suggestion to “test” this dissembling proposition of Iran behind which is attempting to build its nuclear arsenal, is terribly infantile and politically doltish. It’s like a law officer testing a professional thief whether he has stolen the goods of a house by asking him to show him the master key that has opened the door of the house.

As for their claim that for the last 7 ½ years there have not been any talks with Iran is completely in opposition to the facts. The Europeans, and many of them enunciating and voicing the proposals of their American “ventriloquist”, have been speaking with the Iranians openly as well as sotto voce for a number of years. And have put their own, and indirectly American, proposals before them to no avail. Indeed, Daalder and Gordon concede this by saying that “all of them… [The Europeans] repeatedly presented Iran with a list of benefits Iran would receive if it suspended enrichment”. The latest truckload of carrots were transported to Tehran by Javier Solama, European Foreign Policy Chief few weeks ago only to be turned over and rejected by Iran’s unappeasable Mullahcracy. And this rejection was sealed when Gholam Hossein Elham, a spokesman of the government said that Iran would not comply with Security Council resolutions requiring it to stop enriching uranium.

It’s incomprehensible that Daalder and Gordon do not realize that Iran is undeviating in its goal and determination to acquire nuclear weapons as the latter is the sine qua non of Iran’s leadership of the Muslim people and the implementation of the religious doctrine of the Ninth Mahdi, i.e., the creation of a new world order under the Holy Crescent of Islam. This theological doctrinal lunge for power by Iran cannot be stopped by the humdrum conventional instruments of diplomacy, as the two analysts suggest, but only by diplomacy in the carapace of a bristling hedgehog. And such diplomacy can only be effective by setting certain preconditions at the outset before talks can begin. In the event that such preconditions are unacceptable by the Iranian regime, as presently is the case, then the latter must unambiguously understand that since all roads to diplomacy are closed a bridge too close to war is only open.

Further, Daalder and Gordon seem to be ill-equipped for the art of diplomacy since apparently aren’t aware of some of its cardinal principles. Once one has made strongly clear to his opponent one’s position that the diplomatic avenue can only be opened on meeting certain preconditions to back down from this initial stand is to irretrievably weaken one’s position in the diplomatic stakes as one would give the perception to his adversary that one enters the negotiations with cap in hand. The military analyst Francois Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies comments drily that “dropping a unanimous Security Council condition (stop enriching uranium) would simply be interpreted by Iran and American allies as unconditional surrender”. (M.E.)

Do the two advisers to Barack Obama consider that by such “surrender” in the diplomatic field the U.S. would have a chance to achieve by talks the latter’s primary goal, i.e., to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear arsenal? Moreover, such advocacy for diplomacy rests on the assumption that the present Iranian leadership under Ahmadinejad is a rational actor, and its participation in such negotiations would be well-grounded in its hope to resolve the problems confronting the two parties in a reasonable manner. Such assumption however is contrary to all the evidence as the long-bearded Mullahcracy of Iran continues to load its inter-state relations and actions with the afflatus of millenarianism. This is illustrated both by its annihilation stand against Israel and its apocalyptic confrontation with the West and the Great Satan America. In such a situation for anyone to advocate the wiles of conventional diplomacy as our "best option" that would accomplish a benign turning point in the relations between the American-European condominium and Iran is to have one’s head in the clouds.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now