US Should Talk to Iran, Before It's too Late--Clinton should be Amb.

[Gloria]

From the new World Media Watch up now at http://www.zianet.com/insightanalytical
Tomorrow at Buzzflash.com

1//The Independent, UK Published: 18 January 2006

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article339280.ece



COMMENT: US SHOULD TALK TO IRAN, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE

Now is the time to send an ambassador - why not Bill Clinton?



Dennis MacShane

(Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and was a Foreign Office minister 2001-2005.)



There is something of 1914 in the air. The Greys and Poincarés fret as the wheels of conflict trundle inexorably forward. The Iran crisis brings together every world problem: nuclear weapons in the hands of theo-cons who want to exterminate Jews; the economic future of China; and, above all, the inability of a world system or its most powerful state to impose a solution.



Instead of plodding through the rituals of UN Security Council debates with a drift to war, can the United States offer a grand bargain that would transform Iranian politics?



It happened three decades ago when America also faced an ideological opponent whose leaders preached hate of the West and threatened a key US ally across the Taiwan Strait. Yet in one of the boldest strokes of 20th-century diplomacy, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, neither of whom could be accused of liberal soft power modishness, transformed America's and the world's relationship with China.



Diplomatic recognition may seem a fuddy-duddy response to a world problem but a decision by President Bush and his imaginative Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to re-establish diplomatic relations with Tehran or seriously to make the offer would have a transformative impact on the Middle East.



America broke off diplomatic relations after the 1979 overthrow of the Shah and the hostage-taking in the US embassy in Tehran. Now is the time to send an ambassador to Iran - why not Bill Clinton for the first 12 months? - and initiate a new policy of trade, travel, tourism and mass contact between the people of Iran and the West.

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[RC]

1. All we have to do is imprison bu$h, cheney and dumfield.

That will tell the world we are serous with this war on terrorism.