Demonizing Iran threatens success of nuclear talks: article

TEHRAN,July 6(MNA) – Despite Iran’s election of relative moderate Hassan Rohani to be the new president, the demonization of Iran continues, with dubious claims about Iranian-linked “terrorism” against the U.S. and its allies, and this renewed propaganda campaign threatens the success of negotiations with Iran, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar. Pillar, who is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies, made the remarks in an article published on Consortiumnews.com on July 1. Following are excerpts of the article entitled “Demonizing Iran, Again”: Those who endeavor to keep Iran demonized have had to work overtime lately. The imminent departure from office of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad… was bound to be a loss for the demonizers… Their loss was made all the greater when the Iranian presidential election yielded a resounding victory for Hassan Rohani, the most moderate and reasonable-sounding of the candidates. Since then we have seen in Israel and the United States a campaign, by those who would not welcome any agreement with Iran, to throw cold water on hopes and expectations stemming from the election result. That campaign has forged on, seemingly oblivious to (but in reality, perhaps quite conscious of) how U.S. obduracy in the wake of Rohani’s election would send all the wrong kinds of signals to Iran about U.S. intentions. It is such signals, more so than anything having to do with Rohani’s views or political position, that would impede successful negotiation of a nuclear agreement with Tehran. The throwing of water has been accompanied by digging up of dirt on Rohani. One accusation that was seized upon was that Rohani had been part of (the alleged) Iranian decision-making that had led to the bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association building in Buenos Aires in 1994. That incident got back in the news in May when an Argentine prosecutor issued a report that talked about an Iranian presence in the Western Hemisphere that allegedly provides an infrastructure for terrorist attacks to be carried out either directly or by Iran’s ally Hezbollah. The dirt-diggers suffered a setback when the same prosecutor subsequently stated that according to his findings, Rohani was not part of any (alleged) decision-making circle in Tehran connected to the 1994 bombing. Other parts of the prosecutor’s report nonetheless provided some fodder for a larger front in the campaign to sustain alarm about Iran: the idea that the United States is vulnerable to attack through its soft underbelly, from Iranians infiltrating through Latin America. Part of the attraction of this theme is that the threat it postulates is closer and thus scarier than something that might happen on the other side of an ocean. The theme also meshes conveniently with the debate on immigration and specifically with the increased expenditure on border security measures that was a price for securing some of the votes in favor of the immigration bill that passed the Senate. Alarmists recently suffered a setback on this front, too. The State Department has completed a congressionally-mandated report on Iranian activities in the Western Hemisphere. The legislation that required the report also called for a strategy to counter “Iran’s growing hostile presence and activity in the Western Hemisphere” — an example of prejudging conclusions on the very subject the report is supposed to cover. The State Department’s conclusions, to the chagrin of those who called for the report, are said to be considerably less alarmist, pointing to a lack of evidence of active Iranian cells or Iranian plots in the hemisphere. One of the authors of the legislation, Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-South Carolina, is nonetheless not dissuaded, saying that he knows better than the State Department on this subject. A subcommittee, which Duncan chairs, of the House Homeland Security Committee has scheduled a hearing in July on “Threat to the Homeland: Iran’s Extending Influence in the Western Hemisphere.” One of the unhelpful aspects of the demonization efforts… is that they are irrelevant diversions from the actual immediate issues of U.S. policy toward Iran. They tell us nothing about what is likely to work or not to work in terms of negotiating postures, the management of sanctions, or the making of military threats. For some of the most active demonizers, such diversion is the main (but unstated) purpose. The more they can frame the question as one of whether Iranian leaders have been naughty or nice, the more support there will be for the kind of destructive U.S. policies that make a negotiated agreement with Iran less likely. The question for the United States (and its negotiating partners in the P5+1) is not whether Iranian leaders have been naughty or nice. And it is not whether Hassan Rohani deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. It is instead the question of how to achieve a resolution of differences with Iran — especially on the nuclear issue about which the demonizers have been the most vocal — that serves U.S. interests. A negotiated agreement is the only way to do that. Getting to a negotiated agreement means making proposals that use the voluminous sanctions against Iran as leverage rather than as unending punishment, and it means avoiding — especially in the wake of the new Iranian president’s election — piling on still more sanctions and more threats of military attack, which would make the Iranians more convinced than ever that the only real U.S. objective is (the) change (of the government), thereby killing Iranian incentives to make concessions the United States seeks. These are realities no matter what has been the Iranian behavior that we don’t like, and no matter in which hemisphere the behavior has occurred.