Vol. 73/No. 11      March 23, 2009

Washington held talks March 7 with top Syrian officials for the first time since 2005. U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton confirmed the same day that Washington has asked the Turkish government to mediate talks between the United States and Iran.

Daniel Shapiro, a member of President Barack Obama’s National Security Council, and Jeffrey Feltman, acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, met with Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moualem. “We had constructive, comprehensive talks,” Feltman said. “We found a lot of common ground.” These are the first such talks since relations between Washington and Damascus chilled after the 2005 assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. A UN investigation has implicated Syrian security forces in the assassination.

Earlier, John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, met with Syrian president Basher Assad in Damascus. Assad “told me he is prepared to resume peace negotiations with Israel and embrace the Arab Peace Initiative again,” Kerry said March 4, according to the Associated Press. Kerry said Assad recognizes that Syria’s “long-term interests lie not with Iran but with its Sunni neighbors and the West.”

Damascus joined the U.S. imperialist alliance in the first war against Iraq in 1990. It subsequently began negotiations with the Israeli government, offering a Syrian pledge of peace in exchange for a return of the Golan Heights, Syrian territory taken by the Israeli government during the 1967 war. The plan is known as the Arab Peace Initiative.

Clinton has announced that the government of Iran will be invited to a March 31 international conference Washington is planning on Afghanistan.

“In the early days of the military efforts by the United States and our allies to go after the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Iran was consulting with our ambassador on a daily basis,” Clinton noted. “Where it is appropriate and useful for the United States and others to see whether Iran can be constructive, that will be considered.”

Washington-Tehran cooperation was cut short in 2002, when then-president George Bush gave a speech listing Iran as one of three nations comprising an “axis of evil.”

Tehran has been making its own overtures for talks with Washington. These began under the Bush administration. In an interview with the London-based Guardian published February 24, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister of Turkey, said the Iranian government had asked him to arrange talks with Washington that could possibly lead to establishing diplomatic relations. He said he personally conveyed this to Bush.

The Obama administration is trying to see if diplomatic means will be more effective than sanctions and military threats have been in convincing Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. Tehran says it is enriching uranium for peaceful use, not weapons.

Washington sees this as potentially a good time to try to divide the Iranian rulers, many of who would like an end to economic sanctions and other restrictions on trade and financial dealings, particularly with the sharp drop in the price of oil.

Asked on CNN March 1 if Iran had sufficient enriched uranium to produce an atomic bomb, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We think they do, quite frankly.” But on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program the same day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Iran was “not close to a [nuclear] weapon at this point” and that there is still time to try diplomacy, sanctions, and other means to convince Tehran to end its nuclear program.

A top Israeli intelligence official said March 8 that negotiating now with Iran could only give it more time to produce a bomb. Israel Defense Forces Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin reported to the Israeli cabinet that Iran “has crossed the technological threshold.” He told the Jerusalem Post, “Iran is continuing to amass hundreds of kilograms of low-enriched uranium and it hopes to exploit the dialogue with the West and Washington to advance toward production of an atomic bomb.”

In a move to further pressure the Iranian government, a UN Security Council committee charged Tehran March 10 with violating sanctions against the export of weapons. In January a U.S. warship had boarded a vessel sailing from Iran and forced it to dock in Cyprus. According to the government of Cyprus, a search of the ship found weapons that Washington says were destined for Syria, possibly for Hezbollah or Hamas.

The UN imposed the sanctions on Iranian weapons exports in 2006 because Tehran had refused to halt its nuclear program.
 
 
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