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host · 05-27-2006, 01:39 AM

Folks....the U.S. has deliberately sabotaged two seperate opportunities to improve ties with Iran in a spirit of mutual co-operation. The following new article excerpt details how Bush himself ended the first chance to improve relations by adding Iran to his early 2002 "axis of evil" speech, before the effort of potentially promising secret diplomacy with Iran by Powell's State Dept., could result in mutually beneficial improvement of relations.

Quote:

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?...rticleId=11539
Burnt Offering
How a 2003 secret overture from Tehran might have led to a deal on Iran’s nuclear capacity -- if the Bush administration hadn’t rebuffed it.

By Gareth Porter
Issue Date: 06.06.06

......The September 11 attacks created an entirely new strategic context for engagement with Iran. The evening of 9-11, Flynt Leverett, a career CIA analyst who was then at the State Department as a counter-terrorism expert, and a small group of officials met with Powell. It was the beginning of work on a diplomatic strategy in support of the U.S. effort to destroy the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda network it had harbored. The main aim was to gain the cooperation of states that were considered sponsors of terrorism.

“The United States was about to mount a global war on terrorism with complete legitimacy from the United Nations,” recalls Leverett, “and these states didn’t want to get on the downside of it.” Within weeks, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Sudan all approached the United States through various channels to offer their help in the fight against al-Qaeda. “The Iranians said we don’t like al-Qaeda any better than you, and we have assets in Afghanistan that could be useful,” Leverett recalls.

It was the beginning of a period of extraordinary strategic cooperation between Iran and the United States. As America began preparing for the military operation in Afghanistan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Ryan Crocker held a series of secret meetings with Iranian officials in Geneva. In those meetings, Iran offered search-and-rescue help, humanitarian assistance, and even advice on which targets to bomb in Afghanistan, according to one former administration official. The Iranians, who had been working for years with the main anti-Taliban coalition, the Northern Alliance, also advised the Americans about how to negotiate the major ethnic and political fault lines in the country.

The Iranian-U.S. strategic rapprochement continued to gain momentum in November and December 2001. In early December, at a conference in Bonn to set up a post-Taliban Afghan government, Iran pressed its allies in the Northern Alliance to limit their demands for ministerial seats and even made sure antiterrorism language was included in the agreement, according to U.S. Special Envoy James Dobbins. Leverett agrees. “The Bonn Conference would not have been successful without [Iran’s] cooperation,” he says. “They had real contacts with the players on the ground in Afghanistan, and they proposed to use that influence in continuing coordination with the United States.”

The Office of Policy Planning had written a paper in late November arguing that the United States had “a real opportunity” to work more closely with Iran on al-Qaeda. It proposed exchanges of information and coordinated border sweeps, requiring no more than sharing tactical intelligence on al-Qaeda with Iran, with the expectation that even more valuable intelligence would come from the Iranians. That proposal was supported by the CIA as well as from the White House coordinator on counterterrorism, Wayne Downing.

The strategy advocated by Haass and Leverett, with the encouragement of Armitage and Powell, was to use the new desire of states still listed as sponsors of terrorism -- especially Iran and Syria -- to cooperate with the United States to press for larger changes in policy. The idea, Leverett recalls, was to “have broader conversations with them about support for terrorist groups and say, ‘We will take you off the state-sponsors-of-terrorism list if you do the following.’”

With Iran, such discussions would also have to cover the country’s nuclear program. The Policy Planning staff had been putting together options that would revolve around different levels of incentives, ranging from modest benefits such as support for Iran’s membership in the World Trade Organization to a more comprehensive offer that would include security guarantees, according to a source familiar with the proposal. Wilkerson describes the resulting plan for a dialogue with Iran as having “quite a lot of detail.”

Neoconservatives Strike Back

The post-9-11 period was the most promising moment for a U.S. opening to Iran since the two countries cut their relations in 1979. But neoconservatives had no intention of letting the engagement initiative get off the ground, and they were well-positioned to ensure that it didn’t.

The main drama around Iran policy in late 2001 was played out in the White House, where the drafting of the State of the Union message was under way and where the neoconservatives held sway. The inclusion of Iran in the “axis of evil” was at first opposed by then–National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, because, as Hadley told journalist Bob Woodward, Iran, unlike Iraq or North Korea, had a “complicated political structure with a democratically elected president.” But Bush had already made up his mind; regime change was the goal.

A stronger, more self-confident national security adviser would have insisted that an ill-informed President consider the pros and cons of making such a far-reaching foreign-policy decision on the basis of a half-baked concept, and perhaps insist on intelligence advice on the matter. But Rice had already earned a reputation among national security officials for always staying in Bush’s good graces by taking whatever position she believed he would favor. “She would guess which way the President would go and make sure that’s where she came out,” says Wilkerson, who watched her operate for four years. “She would be an advocate up to a point, but her advocacy would cease as soon as she sniffed the President’s position.”

Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld led the neoconservative push for regime change. But it was Douglas Feith, the abrasive and aggressively pro-Israel undersecretary of defense for policy, who was responsible for developing the details of the policy. Feith had two staff members, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, who spoke Farsi, and a third, William Luti, whom one former U.S. official recalls being “downright irrational” on anything having to do with Iran. A former intelligence official who worked on the Middle East said, “I’ve had a couple of Israeli generals tell me off the record that they think Luti is insane.”

In December 2001, Feith secretly dispatched Franklin and Rhode to Rome to meet with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the shady Iranian arms dealer in the Iran-Contra affair, and other Iranians. Administration officials later told Warren P. Strobel of the Knight Ridder media chain that they had learned that among those Iranians were representatives of the Mujahadeen e Khalq (MEK), a paramilitary organization Saddam had used for acts of terror against non-Sunni Iraqis and Iran.

In December, the question of policy toward the state sponsors of terrorism was taken up by the “deputies committee” made up of Hadley, who served as chairman, Armitage, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and a deputy to CIA Director George Tenet. The outcome was already foretold. “It was decided that to engage with these states was a concession to terrorism, a reward for bad behavior,” Leverett recalls. In rules for dealing with Iran and Syria, referred to informally as the “Hadley Rules,” the committee further decreed that there could be no sharing of intelligence information or any other cooperation on al-Qaeda, although the states in question could be asked to provide information or other cooperation unilaterally. The new rules put U.S. policy toward Iran in a straitjacket requiring that Iran could never be treated as a sovereign equal on any issue.

It was clear to State Department officials that no progress could be made toward engaging Iran without a formal Iran policy that would supersede the Hadley Rules. In early 2002, Leverett worked on a draft National Security Presidential Decision (NSPD) calling for diplomatic engagement. But Feith’s staff came up with their own revised version of the draft, which turned into a policy of regime change, according to Leverett. The engagement group wanted Rice to hold an interagency meeting and force the issue, but she failed to do it, according to both Leverett and Wilkerson. The neoconservatives had prevailed through a costly policy default on Iran.

The Iranians Try For A Grand Bargain

Bush’s axis-of-evil speech was followed by public charges and press leaks from the administration that Iran was deliberately “harboring” al-Qaeda cadres who had fled from Afghanistan. In fact, the Iranians had made a serious effort to cooperate with Washington on al-Qaeda, according to Leverett. When the administration requested that the Iranian government send more guards to the Afghan border to intercept al-Qaeda cadres, Iran did so. And when Washington asked Iran to look out for specific al-Qaeda leaders who had entered Iran, Iran put a hold on their visas.

The effect of the Bush administration’s signals of hostility was to discredit the idea of cooperation with Washington as a means of obtaining U.S. concessions to Iranian interests. Reflecting the mood in Tehran, in May 2002, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denounced the idea of negotiations with the United States as useless.

But Iranian calculations were dramatically altered by the impending U.S. attack on Iraq. In late 2002, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad met with Iranian officials in Geneva, asked for assistance for any American pilots downed in Iranian territory, and requested that Iran refrain from putting forces into Iraq. Journalist Afshin Molavi was told by Iranian sources that the Iranians agreed to both requests but insisted on a pledge by the United States not to attack Iran after it had removed Saddam, to which Khalilzad gave an equivocal answer.

Iranian national security officials were convinced that the Bush administration intended to move against their country once the United States had consolidated its position in Iraq. Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who has had extensive interviews with officials of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council as well as the Foreign Ministry, says, “They believed if they didn’t do something, Iran would be next.”

The only way Iranian officials could head off that threat was to offer Washington things it needed in return for things that Iran needed. In early 2003, the Iranians believed they had three new sources of bargaining leverage with Washington: the huge potential influence in a post-Saddam Iraq of the Iranian-trained and anti-American Iraqi Shiite political parties and military organizations in exile in Iran; the Bush administration’s growing concern about Iran’s nuclear program; and the U.S. desire to interrogate the al-Qaeda leaders Iran had captured in 2002.

As the United States was beginning its military occupation of Iraq in April, the Iranians were at work on a bold and concrete proposal to negotiate with the United States on the full range of issues in the U.S.-Iran conflict. Iran’s then-ambassador to France, Sadegh Kharrazi, the nephew of then–Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, drafted the document, which was approved by the highest authorities in the Iranian system, including the Supreme National Security Council and Supreme Leader Khamenei himself, according to a letter accompanying the document from the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, Tim Guldimann, who served as an intermediary. Parsi says senior Iranian national security officials confirmed in interviews in August 2004 that Khamenei was “directly involved in the document.”

The proposal, a copy of which is in the author’s possession, offered a dramatic set of specific policy concessions Tehran was prepared to make in the framework of an overall bargain on its nuclear program, its policy toward Israel, and al-Qaeda. It also proposed the establishment of three parallel working groups to negotiate “road maps” on the three main areas of contention -- weapons of mass destruction, “terrorism and regional security,” and “economic cooperation.”

The document was sent to Washington just in time for a meeting between Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Javad Zarif and Khalilzad in Geneva on May 2, 2003. One copy arrived at the State Department by fax, and a second copy was taken to State in person by an American intermediary, according to a source who has discussed the letter with the intermediary.

The proposal offered “decisive action against any terrorists (above all, al-Qaeda) in Iranian territory” and “full cooperation and exchange of all relevant information.” It also indicated, however, that Iran wanted from the United States the “pursuit of anti-Iranian terrorists, above all MKO” -- the Iranian acronym for the Mujihedeen e Khalq (MEK), which had fought alongside Iraqi troops in the war against Iran and was on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations -- “and support for repatriation of their members in Iraq” as well as actions against the organization in the United States.

At the May 2 meeting in Geneva, a separate proposal involving exchange of information about al-Qaeda detainees and the MEK was spelled out by Ambassador Zarif. According to Leverett, Zarif informed Khalilzad that Iran would hand over the names of senior al-Qaeda cadres detained in Iran in return for the names of the MEK cadres and troops who had been captured by U.S. forces in Iraq.

To meet the U.S. concern about an Iranian nuclear weapons program, the document offered to accept much tighter controls by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for “full access to peaceful nuclear technology.” It proposed “full transparency for security [assurance] that there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or possess WMD” and “full cooperation with IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments (93+2 and all further IAEA protocols).” That was a reference to new IAEA protocols that would guarantee the IAEA access to any facility, whether declared or undeclared, on short notice -- something Iran had been urged to adopt but was resisting in the hope of getting something in return. The adoption of those protocols would have made it significantly more difficult for Iran to carry on a secret nuclear program without the risk of being caught.

The Iranian proposal also offered a sweeping reorientation of Iranian policy toward Israel. In the past, Iran had attacked those Arab governments that had supported the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and Tehran had supported armed groups that opposed it. But the document offered “acceptance of the Arab League Beirut declaration (Saudi initiative, two-states approach).” The March 2002 declaration had embraced the land-for-peace principle and a comprehensive peace with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to 1967 lines. That position would have aligned Iran’s policy with that of the moderate Arab regimes.

The document also offered a “stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad, etc.) from Iranian territory” and “pressure on these organizations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967.” Finally it proposed “action on Hizbollah to become a mere political organization within Lebanon.” That package of proposals was a clear bid for removal of Iran from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

The document appears to have assumed that the United States would be dependent on Iran’s help in stabilizing Iraq. It offered “coordination of Iranian influence for activity supporting political stabilization and the establishment of democratic institutions and a nonreligious government.” In return, the Iranians wanted “democratic and fully representative government in Iraq” (meaning a government chosen by popular election, which would allow its Shiite allies to gain power) and “support for Iranian claims for Iraqi reparations,” referring to Iranian claims against Iraq for having started the Iran-Iraq War.

Finally, its aims included “respect for Iranian national interests in Iraq and religious links to Najaf/Karbal.” Those references suggested that Tehran wanted some formal acknowledgement of its legitimate interests in Iraq as next-door neighbor, and of the historically close relations between the Shiite clergy in Iran and in those Iraqi Shiite centers.

The list of Iranian aims also included an end to U.S. “hostile behavior and rectification of status of Iran in the U.S.,” including its removal from the “axis of evil” and the “terrorism list,” and an end to all economic sanctions against Iran. But it also asked for “[r]ecognition of Iran’s legitimate security interests in the region with according [appropriate] defense capacity.” According to knowledgeable observers of Iranian policy making, the ambition to be recognized as a legitimate power in the Persian Gulf, with a seat at the table in any regional discussions, has been a major motivation for many years for the Iranian national security establishment to reach an agreement with the United States.

Bush Administration Brush-Off

Iran’s historic proposal for a broad diplomatic agreement should have prompted high-level discussions over the details of an American response. In fact, however, the issue was quickly closed to further discussion. Leverett believes the document was a “respectable effort” to provide a basis for negotiations. Yet he recalls that there was no interagency meeting to discuss it. “The State Department knew it had no chance at the interagency level of arguing the case for it successfully,” he says. “They weren’t going to waste Powell’s rapidly diminishing capital on something that unlikely.”

The outcome of discussion among the principals -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell -- was that State was instructed to ignore the proposal and to reprimand Guldimann for having passed it on. “It was literally a few days,” Leverett recalls, between the arrival of the Iranian proposal and the dispatch of the message of displeasure with the Swiss ambassador.

The offer of a narrower deal over al-Qaeda and the anti-Iranian terrorist group touched off a brief period of intensive maneuvering by both sides in the administration over U.S. policy toward the MEK. When the proposed al-Qaeda–MEK exchange of information was discussed at a White House meeting, proponents of regime change sought to differentiate MEK from al-Qaeda. Bush is said to have responded, “But we say there is no such thing as a good terrorist,” according to Leverett.

Although Bush did not approve an al-Qaeda–MEK deal, he did approve the disarming of the MEK who had surrendered to U.S. troops in Iraq, as the State Department requested, and allowed State to continue the talks in Geneva.

But on May 12, 2003, a terrorist bombing in Ryadh killed eight Americans and 26 Saudis. Rumsfeld and Feith seized the occasion to regain the initiative on Iran. Three days later, Rumsfeld declared, “We know there are senior al-Qaeda in Iran … presumably not an ungoverned area.” The following day someone obviously reflecting Rumsfeld’s views gave David Martin of CBS News an exclusive story. “U.S. officials say they have evidence the bombings in Saudi Arabia and other attacks still in the works were planned and directed by senior al-Qaeda operatives who have found safe haven in Iran,” Martin reported.

But in fact U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iranian government was intentionally allowing al-Qaeda to remain on Iranian soil. Contrary to Rumsfeld’s disingenuous statement, U.S. intelligence did not conclude that the government knew where the al-Qaeda members from Afghanistan were located in Iran. “The Iran experts agreed that, even if al-Qaeda had come in and out of Iran, it didn’t mean the Iranian government was complicit,” recalls Wilkerson. “There were parts of Iran where the government would not know what was going on.”

Nevertheless, within a few days, Rumsfeld and Cheney had persuaded Bush to cancel the May 21 meeting with Iranian officials. In a masterstroke, Rumsfeld and Cheney had shut down the only diplomatic avenue available for communicating with Iran and convinced Bush that Iran was on the same side as al-Qaeda................

Here's the background on the target of the May 12, 2003, Riyadh attack. I've included a link that provides background on the Australian newspaper that reported the story. Vinnell was sold by the Carlysle group to TRW, which was then swallowed by Northrop Grumman....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Morning_Herald

Quote:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...885294304.html
Company was a carefully chosen target

By Marian Wilkinson Herald Correspondent in Washington
May 15 2003

The bloody attacks in Riyadh are telling because of their targets, in particular the Vinnell Corporation. The residential compound and the offices used by Vinnell were hit, killing nine of its employees and injuring several others, two of whom are in a critical condition. Seven of the dead were Americans.

Al-Qaeda has a particular hatred for Vinnell because the American company trains the Saudi Arabian National Guard, the country's internal security force and an integral part of the military forces.

The National Guard is supposed to be a mobile and hard-hitting counter-insurgency force and is critical to the security of the Saudi regime.

Vinnell, under contract to the United States Army, employs some 800 people in Saudi Arabia, including 300 Americans. It recently came under the financial control of the giant US military contractor Northrop, which said it was "deeply shocked by this senseless attack and [mourned] the loss of our colleagues".

The death toll at the compound could have been much higher, but about 50 of the 70 residents were out of the city on a training exercise.

Vinnell's relationship with Saudi Arabia over nearly 30 years has been intriguing and controversial. For years it was owned by the Carlyle group, a defence and investment house close to the Bush family. Several former Republican cabinet ministers sat on Carlyle's board.

Dan Briody, author of a new book on the Carlyle group, tells how Saudi Arabia's military dependence on the US can be traced back to 1975, when Vinnell was hired by the Pentagon on a $US77 million contract to train Saudi troops to protect the country's oilfields. Some 1000 US special forces were recruited, Briody reports, most of whom came from Vietnam.

In 1992 Vinnell was taken over by the Carlyle group, whose chairman was Ronald Reagan's former defence secretary, Frank Carlucci. George Bush snr would later act on behalf of Carlyle and in 1993 Mr Bush snr's former secretary of state, James Baker, joined the company.

By then, Vinnell had trained the Saudi National Guard, and had worked alongside it during the first Gulf War, launched while George Bush snr and Mr Baker were still in office. Indeed Vinnell, Briody says, "paved the way for co-operation between the United States and Saudi Arabia during the [first] Gulf War".

It was this co-operation that infuriated Osama bin Laden, who believed "infidels" were being used to defend Saudi Arabia. In November 1995, a car bombing at Vinnell's offices in Riyadh killed five Americans.

In 1997 Vinnell was taken over by the American military contractor TRW, but continued its work for the Saudi Government. Last year, when TRW merged with Northrop, Vinnell found itself with a new owner.

Samer Shehata, a Saudi military analyst at Georgetown University, said the attack on Vinnell indicated serious planning.

"It shows some thinking behind the targets. It's not just Westerners who happen to be there," he said.

"This is the compound that houses these people who do training for the Saudi military, that is, Americans providing security for the Saudi regime. That's really a significant message."

The Mujaheddin-e Khalq or "MEK" is the anti Iranian terrorist organization that the neo-cons armed in late 2001 to signal Tehran that there would be no co-operation between the U.S. and Iran in the "war on terror":

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...7465-2003Sep10
State Questions Military Tolerance of Iranian Dissidents

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 11, 2003; Page A19

The State Department has expressed concern to the Pentagon that the U.S. military appears to have allowed an Iraq-based Iranian opposition group to continue its activities against the Iranian government, including crossing into Iran to conduct attacks, despite an order from President Bush that the group be disarmed, administration officials said yesterday.....

......The struggle over the Mujaheddin-e Khalq has mirrored a larger battle within the administration over policy toward Iran, and also sheds light on the ongoing policy rivalry between the State and Defense Departments. Some State Department officials have pressed for a thaw in relations with Iran, only to meet stiff resistance from Pentagon and White House officials........

...... Despite the group's terrorist designation, the political arm of the group has for years maintained an office in Washington and held frequent news conferences to call attention to allegations that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program. Last month, Powell ordered the office shut down and its assets seized, a move that won rare praise from the Iranian government.

In January, before the war against Iraq was launched, U.S. officials held a secret meeting with Iranian officials and suggested the United States would target the People's Mujaheddin as a way of gaining Iran's cooperation to seal its border and provide assistance to search-and-rescue missions for downed U.S. pilots during the war. In early April, U.S. forces bombed the Mujaheddin camps, killing about 50 people, according to the group, before a cease-fire was arranged on April 15. That was during a period of growing alarm within the administration about spreading Iranian influence among Iraqi Shiites.

The cease-fire convinced the Iranian government it had been double-crossed on the issue of the Mujaheddin. But within weeks, Bush's senior policy advisers reversed course and ordered U.S. forces to disarm the group, secretly telling Iranian officials even before action was taken on May 9.

Since then, however, relations with Iran have soured over continuing revelations about its nuclear program and allegations that it harbors al Qaeda leaders implicated in the May 13 bombings of residential compounds in Saudi Arabia. After the bombings, U.S. officials suspended the secret talks with Iranian officials.

Six months after the May, 2003 Riyadh attack provided an excuse to avoid talks with Iran, it was time for the U.S. to appear to put on it's diplomatic "face", again....to fake a sincere desire for peaceful resolution under the watchful eye of the European community:

Quote:

October 29, 2003
Author: Glenn Kessler; Washington Post Staff Writer

Six months after halting talks with Iran, the Bush administration said yesterday that it is prepared to resume discreet discussions with the Islamic republic over Iraq, Afghanistan and other issues.
"We are prepared to engage in limited discussions with the government of Iran about areas of mutual interest as appropriate," Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said in testimony prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But he stressed that the talks would not be a "broad dialogue with the aim of normalizing relations," which were terminated after the 1979 revolution.

U.S. and Iranian officials had met several times in Geneva both before and after the war in Iraq, with the last session taking place May 3. But the administration halted the contacts after the May 12 bombings of residential compounds in Saudi Arabia, alleging that Iran was harboring al Qaeda operatives responsible for the attacks.

The Iranians have denied the charge and have repeatedly pressed the administration to restart the contacts. Iran, which shares a long border with Iraq, has sought to demonstrate its willingness to cooperate with the administration, including recognizing the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and contributing resources for Iraq at a donors conference last week in Madrid.

The Bush administration has urged Iran to turn over al Qaeda members. Armitage in his testimony linked Iran's cooperation on al Qaeda to better relations with the United States, saying "resolution of this issue would be an important step in U.S.-Iranian relations." But he told reporters that it is not a prerequisite to restarting the talks.

Iran has privately suggested to the administration that it will turn over al Qaeda members in exchange for captured members of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group that had operated out of Iraq. Armitage ruled out such a deal yesterday, "because we can't be sure of the way they'd be treated," referring to the MEK members. He said officials were questioning MEK members to determine who had terrorist connections. "In my understanding, a certain number of those do," he said, adding that they will face charges.

Under questioning, Armitage said it was a mistake for the U.S. military to have arranged a cease-fire agreement with the MEK during the war, a decision that alarmed Iran. "We shouldn't have been signing a cease-fire with a foreign terrorist organization," he said.

Consider who is "in" and who is "out"....in the Bush administration, three years later. Powell is gone, and Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and Hadley are still there.

I doubt that my observation that the U.S. administration appears to have a personality disorder, would be much different from the impression that Iranian political leaders would harbor after watching the Bush administration gradually turn it's own State Department into an irrelevant branch of Rumsfeld and Cheney's DOD. In Gareth Porter's new article, this sums it up:

Quote:

In rules for dealing with Iran and Syria, referred to informally as the “Hadley Rules,” the committee further decreed that there could be no sharing of intelligence information or any other cooperation on al-Qaeda, although the states in question could be asked to provide information or other cooperation unilaterally. The new rules put U.S. policy toward Iran in a straitjacket requiring that Iran could never be treated as a sovereign equal on any issue.

The intent is not the "win the war on terror". It is to win fat contracts for connected contractors, U.S. elections, and pave the way for a corporatist government with a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_Executive_theory">"unitary executive"</a>, unencumbered or restricted by the consitution, congress, the courts, or the common people of the United States.

To an Iranian official, or to anyone else who once perceived the U.S. as a country that could be assumed to act in it's own best interests, all hopes of that happening, appear to be dashed. There was a struggle for power and influence....and the neocons won. The reports of the longterm damage that they are doing to our country's reputation in the world community, and to it's treasury, security, and military capability....will be streaming in far into the future.