I dislike lies more than very nearly anything else. Lies murder the truth.
Ray Takeyh is distorting history, and unfortunately, he should know that when you distort history, the future operates off the now distorted view of history (without involving Foucault or ideas that would render history mute), not off the factual events that had occured - the media from the NY Times to left wing losers to any a sundry media forms, will use this article as foundation, politicians will use this in their arguments in defense of Obama, critics will use this when bashing Bush ... all based on the distorted representation of history as presented by Mr. Takeyh.
The Bush administration engaged Iran for over six years in negotiations on low levels. Negotiations were ongoing - about the war in Iraq, about al qaida, about oil, about the nuclear program in Iran (and a few other issues). These negotiations never reached Under-Secretary levels, but it is a lie to represent the Bush administration as not engaging with Iran.
Anyone interested in truth, may go back in the newspapers archives and find the position of the Bush administration vis a vis Iran and nuclear - Iran could build a nuclear plant on every corner on every street in Tehran, as long as the nuclear waste was exported to Russia or France for disposal.
Iran accepted this agreement, for a few seconds until it told the world it had a right to nuclear power and no one could take that right away. Bush was not trying to prevent Iran from producing enough energy from nuclear power to light the Earth, rather he was demanding Iran comply with international standards to ensure that nuclear proliferation does not occur. Iran turned this demand into an attack on its right to possess nuclear energy and they did so with the assistance of the media who did not call them on the slight of hand which occured - no one said they couldn't have nuclear energy, just that they had to export the nuclear waste after they produced that energy, to prevent the construction of weapons.
Iran said no, it wouldn't, because it had a right to nuclear energy.
That is where Bush left it in December 2008. Bush had little room to maneuver between 2006 and 2008 - the Democrats were not willing to allow very much to occur, or lose their wind in the next election. They played politics and Bush was limited in what he could accomplish with Iran. From 2001 until late 2005, the US did engage Iran, and continued even after, despite the deep divisions in this country that made it easier for our enemies to ignore US demands (Amadinejad's position - the US Congress would never permit action against Iran so why even talk to the US, or worry about them).
Every time Iran has been willing to talk, or opened its facilities up to inspection, it drags its feet and wastes time ... the IAEA finally produced a report given to the Security Council members on the status of the nuclear program in Iran, warning that Iran has not complied, and is not forthcoming. Further, that they have the data to make the bomb.
In other words ... Iran has been playing for time.
Anyone who has been paying attention to this issue since Bush took office in 2001, knows this fact ... Iran is playing for time, until it has at least two nuclear weapons assembled, at which point it will no longer be willing to discuss anything.
Mr.Takeyh seems unaware of all this past history, and is in many respects the typical Obama adviser - unaware, unqualified, and wholly misinformed. Possibly because he is too busy re-writing history. There is a great deal more at stake than simply how history views Mr. Obama.
I would suggest these gentlemen get up off their knees and take a look behind Mr. Amadinejad. Their current view leaves much to be desired, and in the end Iran will have nuclear weapons and they will begin the big defense of how they let it happen - it was all Bush's fault.
October 3, 2009
The New York Times
U.S. Wonders if Iran Is Playing for Time or Is Serious on Deal
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON — President Obama got what he said he wanted when United States negotiators met with their Iranian counterparts this week in Geneva: direct engagement, without preconditions, with Iran.
But the trick now for Mr. Obama, administration officials concede, will be to avoid getting tripped up. In other words, is the Iranian government serious this time?
The clearest risk is that the Iranians may play for time, as they have often been accused of doing in the past, making promises and encouraging more meetings, while waiting for political currents to change or the closed ranks among the Western allies to break.
After Tehran agreed to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium outside Iran to be turned into fuel, Obama administration officials were clearly walking a fine line on Thursday between celebrating what could be a possible breakthrough in international efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions and sounding appropriately skeptical that the administration was not going to be played by Tehran.
“Taking the step of transferring its low-enriched uranium to a third country would be a step towards building confidence that Iran’s program is in fact peaceful,” Mr. Obama said Thursday. But, perhaps aware of the country’s history of appearing to make concessions and then backing off, he quickly added: “We’re not interested in talking for the sake of talking. If Iran does not take steps in the near future to live up to its obligations, then the United States will not continue to negotiate indefinitely, and we are prepared to move towards increased pressure.”
It was, in many ways, the exact opposite of what a White House usually does after major international talks. Instead of painting lukewarm concessions as major breakthroughs and going on and on about “warm substantive” meetings, officials were treating a potentially major breakthrough as if it were a suspicious package.
If Iran has really agreed to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium out of the country to be turned into fuel, that is a significant concession, experts said, and much more than the Bush administration ever got over the years of its nonengagement dance with Iran.
“This is actually quite important if it takes place,” said Ray Takeyh, a former Iran adviser to the Obama administration. “If you establish an arrangement whereby Iran’s fuel is exported abroad, then that relieves some degree of your proliferation concern.”
For the administration, though, the problem is that no one is certain that the Iranian government will actually do what Western officials say that it has now agreed to do. In fact, on Friday, less than 24 hours after the talks in Geneva broke up, Iranian officials did not sound as if they thought they had promised anything.
“No, no!” Mehdi Saffare, Iran’s ambassador to Britain and a member of the Iranian delegation to the negotiations, said, according to the Associated Press. He said that the idea of sending Iran’s enriched uranium out of the county had “not been discussed yet.”
This is not the first time that Western officials have left discussions with their Iranian counterparts thinking they had a deal, only to see it melt away. In 2007, European diplomats said they thought they had wrung a concession from Iran on the same issue, enriching uranium outside the country for use in Iranian reactors, only to have Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reject the idea as an infringement of Iran’s sovereignty.
“That’s the big ‘if,’ isn’t it?” a senior Obama administration official said. “Will they do it? No one wants to do a premature victory lap.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.
There are some circumstances that would seem to favor Mr. Obama, analysts said. Fresh from the turmoil in Iran after the disputed presidential election in June that secured a second term for the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian government is “fighting on three fronts,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University. “They’re fighting with the people of Iran, they’re fighting within themselves, and they’re fighting with the international community. They’ve just decided that they can’t fight a three-front war, so they’re trying to lower the tension on the fight with the international community, at least.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Obama has also secured — at least for now — some support from Russia, which emerged after Mr. Obama decided to replace the missile defense program in Eastern Europe favored by President George W. Bush with a version less threatening to Moscow. President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia signaled for the first time that Russia would be amenable to longstanding American requests to toughen sanctions against Iran if the nuclear talks failed.
Still, the administration’s caution is warranted, said Mr. Takeyh, the former adviser on Iran, especially since some Iranian officials in Tehran denied on Friday that they had assured the United States and other major powers in Geneva that they would open a recently disclosed uranium enrichment plant near Qum to international inspectors within two weeks.
This was in addition to the dispute over whether Iran had agreed to send much of its low-enriched uranium, known in the field as L.E.U., to be turned into fuel in other counties.
“You don’t want to go out and celebrate an achievement and then watch the Iranians backtrack,” Mr. Takeyh said. “You have to actually get that L.E.U. on a plane.”
Iran
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