Obama's Feeler for Peace between Iran and the U.S.

neme...
All the Madhab Das, Gobinda Das of ISCKON are basicaly xyz Ford or abc Rockefeller....

Re: # 19
neme...
The current day "Hinus" are mixed of all type of people...
Shudra is not caste, it is group of professions and apart from matrimonials, caste is not an issue. If you claim to be brahmin, who is opposing it?

nemesis3 #21: My job was to get the communal fight going, get some popcorn, sit back and enjoy the show. You put on a good effort, urstruly tried, and laddu played well below what I know he is capable of. But overall, a very mediocre communal fight, like I said. More is expected from you. You can do it!!

Obama's overture to Iran is very simple to understand. The reasons are as follows:

(1) It does not cost much to express goodwill.

(2) No real change in foreign policy is being proposed -- only in the style.

(3) It emphasizes the difference from GWB.

(4) Nothing is lost by doing so.

(5) The Iranians may appear aloof. But, on the inside, they are mollified. Why?! Because they have been the "jilted lovers" for too long. Therefore, now they act like they don't care. But we all know better!

Re: # 19
Nem,
"By the way, hinduism is not a faith like islam or christianity. It is the way of life."

You're confusing faith (a set of beliefs) with 'way of life'. Who told you that Islam means just 'a set of rituals'?

ISLAM means 'complete submission to the Will of the Creator'. If one follows Divine recommendations, one fits into the Divine plan. If one resists or lives in contradiction, then one is surely doomed. Please read for yourself and let me know where a Muslim's life lacks regulatory details, and where he's asked to shut his mind and become a zombie?

Simple!

Iran's View of Obama
March 23, 2009

By George Friedman, Stratfor

U.S. President Barack Obama released a video offering Iran congratulations on the occasion of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, on Friday. Israeli President Shimon Peres also offered his best wishes, referring to “the noble Iranian people.� The joint initiative was received coldly in Tehran, however. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the video did not show that the United States had shifted its hostile attitude toward Iran.

The video is obviously part of Obama’s broader strategy of demonstrating that his administration has shifted U.S. policy, at least to the extent that it is prepared to open discussions with other regimes (with Iran being the hardest and most controversial case). The U.S. strategy is fairly straightforward: Obama is trying to create a new global perception of the United States. Global opinion was that former U.S. President George W. Bush was unwilling to engage with, and listen to, allies or enemies. Obama’s view is that that perception in itself harmed U.S. foreign policy by increasing suspicion of the United States. For Obama, offering New Year’s greetings to Iran is therefore part of a strategy to change the tone of all aspects of U.S. foreign policy.

Getting Peres to offer parallel greetings was undoubtedly intended to demonstrate to the Iranians that the Israelis would not block U.S. initiatives toward Iran. The Israelis probably were willing to go along with the greetings because they don’t expect them to go very far. They also want to show that they were not responsible for their failure, something critical in their relations with the Obama administration.

The Iranian response is also understandable. The United States has made a series of specific demands on Iran, and has worked to impose economic sanctions on Iran when Tehran has not complied. But Iran also has some fairly specific demands of the United States. It might be useful, therefore, to look at the Iranian view of the United States and the world through its eyes.

From the Iranian point of view, the United States has made two fundamental demands of Iran. The first is that Iran halt its military nuclear program. The second, a much broader demand, is that Iran stop engaging in what the United States calls terrorism. This ranges from support for Hezbollah to support for Shiite factions in Iraq. In return, the United States is prepared to call for a suspension of sanctions against Iran.

For Tehran, however, the suspension of sanctions is much too small a price to pay for major strategic concessions. First, the sanctions don’t work very well. Sanctions only work when most powers are prepared to comply with them. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese are prepared to systematically comply with sanctions, so there is little that Iran can afford that it can’t get. Iran’s problem is that it cannot afford much. Its economy is in shambles due more to internal problems than to sanctions. Therefore, in the Iranian point of view, the United States is asking for strategic concessions, yet offering very little in return.
The Nuclear Question

Meanwhile, merely working on a nuclear device — regardless of how close or far Iran really is from having one — provides Iran with a dramatically important strategic lever. The Iranians learned from the North Korean experience that the United States has a nuclear fetish. Having a nuclear program alone was more important to Pyongyang than actually having nuclear weapons. U.S. fears that North Korea might someday have a nuclear device resulted in significant concessions from the United States, Japan and South Korea.

The danger of having such a program is that the United States — or some other country — might attack and destroy the associated facilities. Therefore, the North Koreans created a high level of uncertainty as to just how far along they were on the road to having a nuclear device and as to how urgent the situation was, raising and lowering alarms like a conductor in a symphony. The Iranians are following the same strategy. They are constantly shifting from a conciliatory tone to an aggressive one, keeping the United States and Israel under perpetual psychological pressure. The Iranians are trying to avoid an attack by keeping the intelligence ambiguous. Tehran’s ideal strategy is maintaining maximum ambiguity and anxiety in the West while minimizing the need to strike immedi ately. Actually obtaining a bomb would increase the danger of an attack in the period between a successful test and the deployment of a deliverable device.

What the Iranians get out of this is exactly what the North Koreans got: disproportionate international attention and a lever on other topics, along with something that could be sacrificed in negotiations. They also have a chance of actually developing a deliverable device in the confusion surrounding its progress. If so, Iran would become invasion- and even harassment-proof thanks to its apparent instability and ideology. From Tehran’s perspective, abandoning its nuclear program without substantial concessions, none of which have materialized as yet, would be irrational. And the Iranians expect a large payoff from all this.
Radical Islamists, Iraq and Afghanistan

This brings us to the Hezbollah/Iraq question, which in fact represents two very different issues. Iraq constitutes the greatest potential strategic threat to Iran. This is as ancient as Babylon and Persia, as modern as the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Iran wants guarantees that Iraq will never threaten it, and that U.S. forces in Iraq will never pose a threat to Iran. Tehran does not want promises alone; it wants a recognized degree of control over the Iraqi government, or at least negative control that would allow it to stop Baghdad from doing things Iran doesn’t want. To achieve this, Iran systematically has built its influence among factions i n Iraq, permitting it to block Iraqi policies that Iran regards as dangerous.

The American demand that Iran stop meddling in Iraqi policies strikes the Iranians as if the United States is planning to use the new Baghdad regime to restore the regional balance of power. In fact, that is very much on Washington’s mind. This is completely unacceptable to Iran, although it might benefit the United States and the region. From the Iranian point of view, a fully neutral Iraq — with its neutrality guaranteed by Iranian influence — is the only acceptable outcome. The Iranians regard the American demand that Iran not meddle in Iraq as directly threatening Iranian national security.

There is then the issue of Iranian support for Hezbollah, Hamas and other radical Islamist groups. Between 1979 and 2001, Iran represented the background of the Islamic challenge to the West: The Shia represented radical Islam. When al Qaeda struck, Iran and the Shia lost this place of honor. Now, al Qaeda has faded and Iran wants to reclaim its place. It can do that by supporting Hezbollah, a radical Shiite group that directly challenges Israel, as well as Hamas — a radical Sunni group — thus showing that Iran speaks for all of Islam, a powerful position in an arena that matters a great deal to Iran and the region. Iran’s support for these groups help s it achieve a very important goal at little risk. Meanwhile, the U.S. demand that Iran end this support is not matched by any meaningful counteroffer or by a significant threat.

Moreover, Tehran dislikes the Obama-Petraeus strategy in Afghanistan. That strategy involves talking with the Taliban, a group that Iran has been hostile toward historically. The chance that the United States might install a Taliban-linked government in Afghanistan represents a threat to Iran second only to the threat posed to it by Iraq.

The Iranians see themselves as having been quite helpful to the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as they helped Washington topple both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. In 2001, they offered to let U.S. aircraft land in Iran, and assured Washington of the cooperation of pro-Iranian factions in Afghanistan. In Iraq, they provided intelligence and helped keep the Shiite population relatively passive after the invasion in 2003. But Iranians see Washington as having betrayed implicit understandings that in return for these services, the Iranians would enjoy a degree of influence in both countries. And the U.S. opening to the Taliban is the last straw.
Obama’s Greetings in Context

Iran views Obama’s New Year greetings within this context. To them, Obama has not addressed the core issues between the two countries. In fact, apart from videos, Obama’s position on Iran does not appear different from the Bush position. The Iranian leadership does not see why it should respond more favorably to the Obama administration than it did to the Bush administration. Tehran wants to be very sure that Obama understands that the willingness alone to talk is insufficient; some indications of what is to be discussed and what might be offered are necessary.

Many in the U.S. administration believe that the weak Iranian economy might shape the upcoming Iranian presidential election. Undoubtedly, the U.S. greetings were timed to influence the election. Washington has tried to influence internal Iranian politics for decades, constantly searching for reformist elements. The U.S. hope is that someone might be elected in Iran who is so obsessed with the economy that he would trade away strategic and geopolitical interests in return for some sort of economic aid. There are undoubtedly candidates who would be interested in economic aid, but none who are prepared to trade away strategic interests. Nor could they even if they wanted to. The Iran-Iraq war is burned into the popular Iranian consciousness; any candidate who appeared willing to see a strong Iraq would lose the election. American analysts are constantly confusing an Iranian interest in economic aid with a willingness to abandon core interests. But this hasn’t happened, and isn’t happening now.

This is not to say that the Iranians won’t bargain. Beneath the rhetoric, they are practical to the extreme. Indeed, the rhetoric is part of the bargaining. What is not clear is whether Obama is prepared to bargain. What will he give for the things he wants? Economic aid is not enough for Iran, and in any event, the idea of U.S. economic aid for Iran during a time of recession is a non-starter. Is Obama prepared to offer Iran a dominant voice in Iraq and Afghanistan? How insistent is Obama on the Hezbollah and Hamas issue? What will he give if Iran shuts down its nuclear program? It is not clear that Obama has answers to these questions.

Rebuilding the U.S. public image is a reasonable goal for the first 100 days of a presidency. But soon it will be summer, and the openings Obama has made will have to be walked through, with tough bargaining. In the case of Iran — one of the toughest cases of all — it is hard to see how Washington can give Tehran the things it wants because that would make Iran a major regional power. And it is hard to see how Iran could give away the things the Americans are demanding.

Obama indicated that it would take time for his message to generate a positive response from the Iranians. It is more likely that unless the message starts to take on more substance that pleases the Iranians, the response will remain unchanged. The problem wasn’t Bush or Clinton or Reagan, the problem was the reality of Iran and the United States. Only if a third power frightened the Iranians sufficiently — a third power that also threatened the United States — would U.S.-Iranian interests be brought together. But Russia, at least for now, is working very hard to be friendly with Iran.

#20 Posted by tahmed32

Don't forget to include yourself. You started it all.

Quite mediocre communal fight below. They need to send these damned communalists to boot camp!!

#14 Posted by Urstruly

Just as laddu said in #11, the samskara (or lack of it) is intuiting you to feel 'insulted' at being called a hindu. anyway, no issue. In fact, hinduism has a strange tradition of not admitting the people from other religions into its fold. Which caste would you fit in except a sudra? This was the bane that forced jinnah to hate hinduisim and embrace islam. It is stark contrast with the islam tradition of admitting any joker into its fold and then preventing him from leaving the faith.

By the way, hinduism is not a faith like islam or christianity. It is the way of life.

truly mian,

At the same time the munafiqoons , murtidoons and mushriqoons ahve also become POWERFUL!!

Batiye kya ukhaad lenge aap hum sabka??

Re: # 16

Jihad works and its shows - otherwise you wouldn't be vailing day and night here. It is Divine manadate to put kaffirs (atheists) and Mushriqs (polytheists) in their place and cut them to their actual size; because if we don't, the Divine word is that that, they will.

Jihad is forever and only munafiqs (hypocrites) and cowards are ashamed of it. I would say, what you do is a useless effort now - in the past 8-9 years hypocrites have been separated from the believers and belivers have become a force to be reckoned with. It wasn't possible if Muslims hadn't revert back to the mandate they have been mandated with by Divine.

Re: # 14

"..the greatest curse and unforgivable sin in this universe."

truly mian,

I thought that murder and rapes were the most unforgivable sins on this planet.

I dare you to take out any legislation by any civil society that prescribes punishment for idolatory!!!

Violent Jihad as a subset of murder and rape is infact the biggest sin!!

Re: # 12

"you should have complained about his conversion to islam. why do you think ram created chowk?"

nonnsense tahmedji, I have no complaints about any one converting to Islam after reading Quran and hadith in full.

I have complaints regarding DAWAH using Sword and use of unprecedented violence against non-muslims which most Pakistanis agree to on this site as the best way to evangelize.

Re: # 13

Calling me or any Muslim, a Hindu, is the greatest of all insults. We are Muslims, the Monotheists, not Mushriqs, the polytheists, the greatest curse and unforgivable sin in this universe. We believe in One God, the One and Only; the Eternal, He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten. And He has no likeness.

Please curse us all you want like the only way a Hindu is capable of communicating but do not call us mushriqs. Thanks for understanding.

Re: # 12

Who has converted to What ???

Everyone is a hindu. Including Tahir mian and Ursturly.

laddu: but..as a good hindu, you should have complained about his conversion to islam. why do you think ram created chowk?

I never said anything about his conversion.

Politically he may be aligned with christianity but his shia roots does have influence over him.......

Infact, the Samskara (as we hindus call it) laid in the childhood days have very strong influences on the sub-conscious.

laddu: i hear obama is a convert to islam. he was originally a hindu, but when babar invaded india he became muslim. isnt that outrageous?

I feel Obama's Shia roots are guiding his foreign policy towards Iran.

Sunni Pakistan should now be ware!!!

jeb main hanuman aur bagal meing churri

Gill you back? and lo and behold you produce another master-junk piece. Now this should get me banned for sure, since you're on the chowk "board of directors".

The fact is that Obama's message was cheap, it was insulting with insinuation that Iranians are terrorist thugs and that they should submit to their righful lowly position in the world order. It should have been rejected outright. There was no acknowledgment of US BS in its barbaric dealings with Iran nor of the hypocrisy involved in Iran/Contra on both sides. Now, the purpose of this "diplomacy" is merely to buy time and legitimize their upcoming invasion of Iran after taking over the Quetta region. So the "Tom and Jerry" game continues, where will Al Qaeda hop to next, wherever the Americans want to establish their footprint. It is an age old story that we are seeing a replay of.

TNITC masadi

Obama is doing exactly as expected. And Iran as well. Iran's mullah multi-millionaires have only one aim - to preserve their lifestyle and power. They know that the ONLY way to ensure this is to have the BOMB. So they will use every trick in the book to delay any real negotiations with the West on this issue. They are simply stalling for time, while they feverishly work on the nuclear program in secret. Bush's and the neo-cons' plan from the beginning was to prevent Iran from getting the BOMB. Because this would take away much of their control over the middle-east. But the bad press from the Iraq war messed everything up for them. They could not even okay a last-ditch request from Israel to have a go at Iran's nuclear facilities - Bush was THAT unpopular.

Obama, on the other hand, had won the election by explaining to the American public that it was bad America that was preventing Iran from entering into a non-proliferation deal. Now that he represents "good" values, he HAS to prove that his theory was right. So in spite of direct slaps to his face by Ahmedinejad, he is persisting with his ingratiating tone. He figures that at the end, Iran will start feeling the pressure from the rest of the world for denying such a grovelling advance from the US. But he figures wrong. The Mullahs understand the logic of power. The Bomb will let them cling on to power and keep strangling democracy for the foreseeable future. And that's all they want. So the dance will go on. Obama with his "peace" offensive, and Ahmedinejad effectively slapping him in the face repeatedly.

The results of this will be significant. First, the mullahs will announce the arrival of their Bomb with a test explosion that will decrease Obama's popularity by many percentage points. Second, the red-faced American left who were insisting that the Mullahs are really peace-doves with beards will disappear from the television screens. Third, the right will re-emerge with a vengeance. There will certainly be a new dynamic in the oil market, with US influence diminishing rapidly. Obama will be under intense pressure to show the results of his "green" policies. Because a few years is not sufficient to show ANY appreciable impact on decrease in oil consumption, he will have little to show. America will move even further to the right. Americans like driving their cars. They will forget their high-falutin ideals double-quick when they find they have to pay 10 dollars a gallon at the pump. Once again, the West will launch a war to take by force what other people possess - "it's OUR oil, under THEIR soil" - as it always has, through history. Tahmed would take a long leave of absence from explaining about superior Western morals and values at Chowk.

And the wheel of history would turn again.

"Although the U.S. and Israel have vowed to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power at all costs, it is becoming more and more improbable for them to bomb Iran out of existence.'

You are slightly confused, it was Iran that had threatened to bomb Israel out of existence, not the other way around. No comment on this?

Our Iranian friends appear to have contracted (probably through exposure to those Pakistani friends of ours) the disease of very grudgingly acknowledging the obvious (after denying it a thousand times) under the illusion that it somehow improves their negotiating position when, in reality, it only weakens it by making them appear like chumps!

Obama's address to Iran was anything but concilliatory; au contrair it was quite brazenly insulting. People must understand that Obama is nothing but a black Bush who happens to be relatively eloquent. The thing is that the Christian-Zionist religious nuts the puppetmasters of Bush have put some irreversuble processes in place. Reversing one of these process would mean the collapse of American Empire just like its european colonial predecessors. Americans need a Charles DeGaul or Churchill who could salvage whatever they can - if A US president wont do it then nature will take its course - America's financial bankruptcy is an inevitability that only a miracle can overturn. The moral bankruptcy is always the first to happen. And that has already happen in the last 9 years when Christian-zionist religious nuts flown plane into their own buildings.

Those hoping to hear a conciliatory statement from US should give up because it wont be happening.
The feelers are actually peelers that are meant to remove the skin of and reach deeper into the flesh by removing the peel.

Anything and everything US acts about is in the National & national security interest of the nation and rightfully so, those who have bargained and compromised the interest of their nations do not deserve to be dignified by the history of their nations. Even though they may not have committed acts of treason as defined by the laws of those nations however such acts are in itself an act of treason where the leadership of a country bargains and/or compromises the fate of their people for personal and/or short term gains.

“the message itself was of great historical importance in the last 30 years. President Bush as other presidents also had refused to talk to Iran without preconditions.�

I don’t know why his statement is of great historical importance. President Bush on several occasions used somewhat similar language to address Iran. The last time it was on VOA in 2006.
Does President Obama offers any meaningful change? His statement does not make that case.

John Whitbeck has a good article on the issue at counterpunch. http://www.counterpunch.org/whitbeck03202009.html
He writes: “One may well agree that improving relations between the two countries "will not be advanced by threats", but who has has been threatening whom? Has Iran been threatening a "preventive" (i.e., unprovoked and aggressive) attack on the United States? Has Iran been insisting that "military action" remains "on the table" if the United States does not bow to Iranian demands?�

More questions should be asked to judge the sincerity in Obama’s statement. His FS is a person who during her election campaign “promised to obliterate Iran�.

Mr. Obama appointed Dennis Ross as his Iran advisor. As John Whitbeck points out in his article “Dennis Ross, recently named as Hillary Clinton's special advisor for Iran, is publicly on the record as favoring a brief but visibly intensified "diplomatic" effort to convince Iran to bow to Israeli/American demands -- which would, inevitably and necessarily, be unsuccessful -- before proceeding on to the attack on Iran which he deems essential to protect Israel's security interests.�

Mr. Obama has no realistic chance of improving relations with Iran at least in his first term. He is wedded to the Israel firster lobby and his statement is geared more towards the domestic audience and not to open any new diplomatic avenue with Iran.

The point of the speech pretty much was: "Well, gosh, we did try peaceful means first, after all".

Lets also not discount Shimon Peres the President of Israel’s insulting message to Iran (published in NYT the same day as Mr. Obama’s statement). Sounds like good cop, bad cop strategy and the cautious response by the Iranian shows that they did not believe a word of what Mr. Obama said. Mr. Obama needs to follow words with actions and so far it does not appear that he intends to do that.