Ask anyone in Washington, London or Tel Aviv if they can
cite any phrase uttered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the
chances are high they will say he wants Israel "wiped off
the map". ...The remarks are not out of context. They are
wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them.
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Original source URL:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1788481,00.html
Comment
If Iran is ready to talk, the US must do so unconditionally
It is absurd to demand that Tehran should have
made concessions before sitting down with the
Americans
Jonathan Steele
Friday June 2, 2006
Guardian
It is 50 years since the greatest misquotation of
the cold war. At a Kremlin reception for western
ambassadors in 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev announced: "We will bury you." Those
four words were seized on by American hawks as
proof of aggressive Soviet intent.
Doves who pointed out that the full quotation
gave a less threatening message were drowned out.
Khrushchev had actually said: "Whether you like
it or not, history is on our side. We will bury
you." It was a harmless boast about socialism's
eventual victory in the ideological competition
with capitalism. He was not talking about war.
Now we face a similar propaganda distortion of
remarks by Iran's president. Ask anyone in
Washington, London or Tel Aviv if they can cite
any phrase uttered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the
chances are high they will say he wants Israel
"wiped off the map".
Again it is four short words, though the
distortion is worse than in the Khrushchev case.
The remarks are not out of context. They are
wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said
them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was
mistranslated. The Iranian president was quoting
an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist
leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that "this
regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the
page of time" just as the Shah's regime in Iran
had vanished.
He was not making a military threat. He was
calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem
at some point in the future. The "page of time"
phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen
soon. There was no implication that either
Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or
Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was
imminent, or that Iran would be involved in
bringing it about.
But the propaganda damage was done, and western
hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler
as though he wants to exterminate Jews. At the
recent annual convention of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobby group,
huge screens switched between pictures of
Ahmadinejad making the false "wiping off the map"
statement and a ranting Hitler.
Misquoting Ahmadinejad is worse than taking
Khrushchev out of context for a second reason.
Although the Soviet Union had a collective
leadership, the pudgy Russian was the undoubted
No 1 figure, particularly on foreign policy. The
Iranian president is not.
His predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, was seen in
the west as a moderate reformer, and during his
eight years in office western politicians
regularly lamented the fact that he was not
Iran's top decision-maker. Ultimate power lay
with the conservative unelected supreme leader
Ayatollah Khamenei. Yet now that Ahmadinejad is
president, western hawks behave as though he is
in charge, when in fact nothing has changed.
Ahmadinejad is not the only important voice in
Tehran. Indeed Khamenei was quick to try to
adjust the misperceptions of Ahmadinejad's
comments. A few days after the president made
them, Khamenei said Iran "will not commit
aggression against any nation".
The evidence suggests that a debate is going on
in Tehran over policy towards the west which is
no less fierce than the one in Washington. Since
2003 the Iranians have made several overtures to
the Bush administration, some more explicit than
others. Ahmadinejad's recent letter to Bush was a
veiled invitation to dialogue. Iranians are also
arguing over policy towards Israel. Trita Parsi,
an analyst at Johns Hopkins University, says
influential rivals to Ahmadinejad support a
"Malaysian" model whereby Iran, like Islamic
Malaysia, would not recognise Israel but would
not support Palestinian groups such as Hamas, if
relations with the US were better.
The obvious way to develop the debate is for the
two states to start talking to each other. Last
winter the Americans said they were willing,
provided talks were limited to Iraq. Then the
hawks around Bush vetoed even that narrow agenda.
Their victory made nonsense of the pressure the
US is putting on other UN security council
members for tough action against Iran. Talk of
sanctions is clearly premature until Washington
and Tehran make an effort to negotiate. This
week, in advance of Condoleezza Rice's meeting in
Vienna yesterday with the foreign ministers of
Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia, the
factions in Washington hammered out a compromise.
The US is ready to talk to Tehran alongside the
EU3 (Britain, France and Germany), but only after
Tehran has abandoned its uranium-enrichment
programme.
To say the EU3's dialogue with Tehran was
sufficient, as Washington did until this week,
was the most astonishing example of
multilateralism in the Bush presidency. A
government that makes a practice of ignoring
allies and refuses to accept the jurisdiction of
bodies such as the International Criminal Court
was leaving all the talking to others on one of
the hottest issues of the day. Unless Bush is set
on war, this refusal to open a dialogue could not
be taken seriously.
The EU3's offer of carrots for Tehran was also
meaningless without a US role. Europe cannot give
Iran security guarantees. Tehran does not want
non-aggression pacts with Europe. It wants them
with the only state that is threatening it both
with military attack and foreign-funded
programmes for regime change.
The US compromise on talks with Iran is a step in
the right direction, though Rice's hasty
statement was poorly drafted, repeatedly calling
Iran both a "government" and a "regime". But it
is absurd to expect Iran to make concessions
before sitting down with the Americans. Dialogue
is in the interests of all parties. Europe's
leaders, as well as Russia and China, should come
out clearly and tell the Americans so.
Whatever Iran's nuclear ambitions, even US hawks
admit it will be years before it could acquire a
bomb, let alone the means to deliver it. This
offers ample time for negotiations and a "grand
bargain" between Iran and the US over Middle
Eastern security. Flanked by countries with US
bases, Iran has legitimate concerns about
Washington's intentions.
Even without the US factor, instability in the
Gulf worries all Iranians, whether or not they
like being ruled by clerics. All-out civil war in
Iraq, which could lead to intervention by Turkey
and Iraq's Arab neighbours, would be a disaster
for Iran. If the US wants to withdraw from Iraq
in any kind of order, this too will require
dialogue with Iran. If this is what Blair told
Bush last week, he did well. But he should go all
the way, and urge the Americans to talk without
conditions.
•••@••.•••
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