On 7/18/06, Robert Naiman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
www.justforeignpolicy.org.
There are still, of course, some glitches and imperfections, which you
are welcome to call to my attention. comments, suggestions, high
praise and gratuitous insults welcome.
Of particular interest (says me): our call for people to ask Congress
to pressure the Bush Administration to take the "Military Option" of a
US attack on Iran "off the table," featured prominently on the home
page; and a page of audio files, reached from "podcasts" on the top
navigation bar (bit of a misnomer at the moment) with 2 entries for
now but more to come: currently consisting of Carl Estabrook reading a
news article about the snubbed Iran 2003 peace proposal and my
interview on WBAI on the Mexican election.
The Web site looks very nice and is easy to use.
While I really like Carl Estabrook, I'm not sure if we can make much
of what is said to be Iran's 2003 "peace proposal." The IPS article
says:
<blockquote>Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and to
cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and pressure
them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel's 1967 borders, according
to the secret Iranian proposal to the United States. The two-page
proposal for a broad Iran-U.S. agreement covering all the issues
separating the two countries, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, was
conveyed to the United States in late April or early May 2003. Trita
Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at Johns Hopkins
University School of Advanced International Studies who provided the
document to IPS, says he got it from an Iranian official earlier this
year but is not at liberty to reveal the source.
(Gareth Porter, "Iran Proposal to U.S. Offered Peace with Israel,"
Inter Press Service, May 25, 2006,
<http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/issues/iran_peace_proposal.html>)</blockquote>
That suggests, at most, that one faction of the Iranian power elite --
most likely the faction led by Rafsanjani -- thinks that Tehran can
make peace with Washington and Tel Aviv. The document was "leaked"
from an anonymous Iranian official to Trita Parsi, the Republican head
of the National Iranian American Council. Given Parsi's stature, the
leak is guaranteed to make news and gives that faction a degree of
prominence in the international media (which may be useful for that
faction at home), but that doesn't mean that there was or is consensus
for that kind of "peace proposal" among the Iranian power elite, let
alone among Iranians in general.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
