Obama’s choice on Iran

TEHRAN,July 28(MNA) – U.S. President Barack Obama who didn’t send a diplomatic note to new Iranian president Hassan Rohani after he won the June 14 election gets another chance in early August -- when he will be inaugurated -- to start engaging directly with Iran, according to an article published on the website of the Nation on July 24. Following are excerpts of the text of the article written by Bob Dreyfuss: Hassan Rohani, the surprise winner of the June 14 presidential election in Iran — and a man who has called for better relations with the United States and a deal over Iran’s nuclear program — takes office on August 4. In anticipation of that event, lots of sensible people in the United States, including members of Congress, former diplomats, and a passel of centrist-realist Middle East experts, are calling on President Obama to do everything he can to reach an accord with Rohani’s new government. Obama should signal immediately that he’ll veto any bill that smells like more sanctions, even though it will be strongly backed by the Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and plenty of neoconservatives and other hawks. As The Jerusalem Post reports happily: With 360 co-sponsors in the 435-member body, the bill will pass, and is expected to be matched in the Senate after Congress’s August recess. According to the Associated Press, the administration isn’t happy about the idea of yet more sanctions, which would be aimed at shutting down Iran’s entire oil and gas industry: The legislation would blacklist Iran’s mining and construction sectors, effective next year… It also would commit the U.S. to the goal of ending all Iranian oil sales worldwide by 2015… This, of course, is piling stupid on top of stupid. As even the AP says: If Rohani is serious about compromise, setting new sanctions in advance of talks risks undercutting him, [a U.S. official] said. If China or Japan, for example, decides to flout the U.S. demand to stop all importing from Iran, the administration would then have to weigh enforcing the law by blacklisting Chinese and Japanese banks and companies at the risk of widespread economic harm—including for Americans. There’s a useful counterpoint to such nonsense, coming from at least 131 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, who’ve signed a letter to President Obama calling on Obama to take advantage of Rohani’s election to seek a new beginning with Iran. Says the letter: “Given the stakes involved for the United States, Israel, and the international community, it would be a mistake not to test whether Dr. Rohani’s election represents a genuine opportunity for progress toward a verifiable, enforceable agreement… “We must also be careful not to foreclose the possibility of such progress by taking provocative actions that could weaken the newly elected president’s standing…” By “provocative actions,” the letter might be referring to additional economic sanctions, but — somewhat lacking in courage — the letter doesn’t say. Meanwhile, let’s be honest here. A letter from a rump group of 131 members of Congress… isn’t going to stop AIPAC’s freight train. But it’s encouraging, and it provides cover for Obama if and when he chooses to veto the bill — which might or might not get through the House this week but won’t get to Menendez Senate until the fall. Meanwhile, an important bloc of Iran experts — including former top military, State Department and intelligence officials — last week called on Obama to “reinvigorate diplomacy” with Iran. They wrote: The election of Hassan Rohani to be Iran’s next president presents a major potential opportunity to reinvigorate diplomatic efforts to resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program. We strongly encourage your administration to seize the moment to pursue new multilateral and bilateral negotiations with Iran once Rohani takes office and to avoid any provocative action that could narrow the window of opportunity for a more moderate policy out of Tehran. Once the new president has been inaugurated, the United States should pursue coordinated multilateral engagement on the nuclear issue through the P5+1. Additionally, the U.S. should prepare to redouble its efforts to pursue direct, bilateral negotiations with Iran… Among the signers: ex-Ambassador Chas Freeman; General Joseph Hoar, ex-commander of Centcom; Larry Korb, former assistant secretary of defense; Ambassador Tom Pickering, a former Under Secretary of State; Paul Pillar, a former top intelligence analyst at the National Intelligence Council; and many others. Two of those who signed that letter — Pickering and Jim Walsh, an Iran expert at MIT, plus William Luers, a Columbia University professor and director of The Iran Project — explain their reasoning at length in a piece for The New York Review of Books. In it, the three experts reject “coercive diplomacy,” and they outline what a deal might look like: