Adrian Hamilton: Rhetoric against Iran must be cooled for sake of the Middle East

[IndianaGreen]

Adrian Hamilton: Rhetoric against Iran must be cooled for sake of the Middle East

Saturday, 26 September 2009

Sanctions have achieved nothing with Burma and should be replaced by dialogue, the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said at the start of this week. Sanctions are essential and should be increased on Iran, said President Obama at the end of the week in which it was revealed that the country had established a secret additional site for enriching uranium.

Little could so demonstrate the double standards and the particular distrust with which Iran is treated in international affairs than this contrast. The latest Iranian admission only adds fuel to a furious row of charge and counter-charge that has been busily stoked up by Israel, some of Iran's Arab neighbours and the American right. "Iran's nuclear programme is the most urgent proliferation challenge that the world faces today," said Gordon Brown at the UN on Thursday, adding from Pittsburgh yesterday that there "was no choice but to draw a line in the sand".

Well, even taking into account our Prime Minister's desire to push himself to the forefront of international events to impress voters, this is verging on hyperbole, and will do little to improve the tenor of talks between Iran and the members of the Security Council, plus Germany on 1 October.

The problem is both that Iran is a particularly difficult country to deal with, especially after the re-election of its radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and that its ambitions and its willingness to compromise are so uncertain.

Iran's leaders are adamant on the point that its intentions in developing nuclear technology and uranium enrichment are only for peaceful purposes. It remains a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which allows it to enrich uranium as fuel. It has also accepted, but not given total free access to inspectors from the UN's Atomic Energy Agency.

The West, led by Washington and spurred on by Israel, suspects that all this is just a ruse behind which Iran is secretly planning a weapons programme and it points to evidence from the IAEA that Iran has hidden various developments from oversight.

The admission by Tehran of its covert enrichment facility – incidentally known to Western intelligence for some time and produced at this point presumably with the purpose of loading the pressure on the talks – is certainly an embarrassment to the regime but doesn't prove the case either way.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/adrian-hamilton/adrian-hamilton-rhetoric-against-iran-must-be-cooled-for-sake-of-the-middle-east-1793486.html

[Doctor_J]

1. Hartmann's guest yesterday said that the government in Iran

is very fragile - the people may topple it themselves. OTOH, an attack by outsiders will almost assuredly galvaniz the people behind Ahmadinejad