Iran: not quite so “evil”?

US deputy Secretary of State Rich (“Muscle-man”) Armitage has been telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the administration is now prepared to talk to Iran about matters of common interest, and no longer seeks “regime change” in Teheran.
According to a report on Radio Free Europe, Armitage “told the committee that Washington shares a number of pressing interests with Iran, including the country’s role in Afghanistan and Iraq and its battle with drug smuggling. He said these issues could warrant resuming limited discussions with Iran but not a ‘broad dialogue with the aim of normalizing relations,’ which were broken off after Tehran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution… ”
According to a story in the NYT today, Armitage told the SFRC that,

on the positive side, Iran had supported the American-led ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the formation of the Iraqi Governing Council, whose members were chosen by the American occupation authorities.
Iran also surprised some American officials by showing up last week at the Madrid conference of international donors to Iraq and contributing aid.
The Governing Council is discussing a deal to ship oil to Iran and receive electricity in return, one administration official said, a step that L. Paul Bremer III, the occupation administrator, has not yet sought to block.
Mr. Armitage was asked Tuesday by Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, if “regime change” was American policy in Iran. “No, sir,” Mr. Armitage replied, adding that “our policy is to try to eliminate the ability of Iran to carry forward with disruptive policies.”

This news about the Bushies’ new realism on Iran comes in the wake of last week’s small diplomatic breakthrough by heart-throb Dominique de Villepin and his Euro colleagues, in reaching Iran’s agreement to go along with the EU’s demands on nuclear inspections.
It is also long overdue for the administration to start treating Teheran with more nuance than just being a member of the so-called “axis of evil”. After all, if Americans want a hope in heck of ever getting our 130,000 forces out of Iraq without suffering major, major casualties then cooperation with Iran will have to be a part of that exit strategy.
Uncomfortable thought for some in DC and in the generally anti-Iranian US media? Undoubtedly. But they’re going to have to deal with that.
I mean, did anyone in this administration even bother to look at a map of the Gulf region before they cavalierly sent so many US troops so deep into Iraq?
If they had, they might just have happened to notice a couple of things:
(1) Much of Iraq is desert. But there’s a band of heavily populated areas that runs fairly close to the country’s eastern border.
(2) The other side of that eastern border lies Iran, a huge, well-infrastructured country of roughly 65-70 million people.
(3) Many roads link the two countries. Their people share many attributes (and in some cases come from the same families.)

(4) The USA is an awful long way away from Iraq. Getting American people or American military stuff into Iraq is incredibly difficult: by air, it’s horrendously expensive, by sea/land, it’s incredibly complicated w/ bottlenecks all along the way.
Need I say more?
I guess when they dreamed up this sick adventure, the Wolfies and Pearls and feiths of this world imagined that Ahmed Chalabi was going to take over and run Iraq, seamlessly, based on all the much-vaunted “supporters” he had inside the country. He would then give basing rights to the US military who, instead of having to sit around pacifying Iraq could then proceed with Stages 2 and 3 of their fiendish plan which were directed at effecting “regime change” in Iran and Syria…
Well, it hasn’t quite worked out that way, has it?
Instead of which, the US troops are just sitting ducks there, amidst a “sea” of little-understood and not terribly friendly Iraqis. And the Iranians have been quietly biding their time, waiting for Rich Armitage to come and wave the white flag.
Well, it’s not quite white flag time yet. Soon will be. But that’s what you get when you try to undertake totally ill-informed, aggressively imperial adventures halfway round the world.
How many more people will have to die before the Bushies realize that the only way out of Iraq will be via a UN cover that also involves a very heavy component of expanded Iranian influence?
I try not to see everything in the world through the lenses of my intimate acquaintance with the recent history of Lebanon. (Honest I do!)
But if you think of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 as being like Israel’s ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, then today Iran is playing the same role that Syria played back then. (And don’t for a moment believe that these latter two regimes, which are very close to each other, have not exchanged notes on what worked for Syria back in the 1980s, and what didn’t.)
There are more than a few significant parallels. (I’m going to write about this in my next column for Al-Hayat, so this is my warm-up right here.) One is that back in 1982, Ariel Sharopn also had ambitions beyond Lebanon: he wanted to try to use Israel’s “friendly” base in Lebanon– that slick architect of multiple atrocities Bashir Gemayyel–as a jumping-off point in order to effect real change where it counted, in nearby Syria.
But Sharon got turned back. Read my two books on Syria and Israel for more details. And now, it seems more than likely that Sharon’s acolytes Wolfie and Dougie and Co will get turned back in their copycat venture.
(Seems like the Syrians and Iranians are better at sharing lessons in all this than Sharon and his stateside acolytes.)
Big difference between the two scenarios, though: back in 1982, we were talking about two countries, lebanon and Syria, that though I love them both a LOT and find them fascinating, signifcant places– well, despite that, we weren’t exactly talking about two large countries at the heart of the Middle East oil-producing zone.
This time, no doubt about it, the stakes are much, much higher.