GERTZ - ABU DHABI — The United States plans to conduct a strategic dialogue with the Gulf Cooperation Council.The U.S. delegation are attending the Manama Dialogue, scheduled for Dec. 7-9. Gates was expected to be the most senior official to participate in the forum, organized by Bahrain and the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was said to have been invited to the summit.
Yes, he can help us.Are you kidding me?
Gulf sources said Gates was to discuss security threats to the region. They said the secretary would later meet several GCC leaders.
"In response to a question about Iran's threat to destroy Israel, Gates said,"If Iran obtains nuclear weapons no one can promise it would not use them against Israel," but that he felt Iran was only developing nukes as a `deterent'." Robert Gates, Dec 06.
The Manama Dialogue includes all six GCC states as well as Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and Yemen. Sessions would address the U.S. military presence, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and energy security.
"(GATES), along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-headed a task force at the Council on Foreign Relations on US policy towards Iran. One of the findings of the task force was that the US begin a dialogue with Iran."
Gates arrived in the region after the GCC summit, scheduled to take place on Dec. 3-4 in the Qatari capital of Doha. The sources said Iran, nuclear energy and the U.S. military presence would top the GCC agenda.
Former Secretary of State George Schultz (for Ronald Reagan), complained that Gates and the CIA had repeatedly tailored intelligence to fit the policy interests they favored."
"The plan to set up a joint nuclear energy plant for the production of power will top the agenda of the talks," GCC secretary-general Abdul Rahman Al Attiyah said."Is Bob Gates, Richard Haass (Amb. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and former director of policy planning for the Department of State), likely to be more inclusive about who the US talks with. For example: on Iran. Is he not more likely to urge that Iran come into a conversation with the US?
Richar Haass: Well as.... Yogi Berra once said, Predictions are awfully tough, especially about the future. So I don't know if Bob Gates is going to explicitly say that, but all I can tell you is that
1) he's favored supporting a dialogue with Iran
2) I believe it's highly likely that the Baker-Hamilton group will propose some sort of regional forum, akin to existed, if you recall, at the time of Afghanistan where the neighboring countries, the US, and Russia had a standing regional forum.
I think we're probably moving towards some version of that for Iraq with a half dozen or so neighboring countries along with the US, Russia, and Europe -- and perhaps others --would have a regular set of consultations about what can be done to prevent either the breakup of the country or the civil war getting even worse. So I would think this is likely to be US policy and I don't see where people who have not been part of the Administration would have problems, necessarily, with signing on to that."
Sounds like the Congress of Vienna to me ..the outdented material is ALL from late 2006.
2 comments:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/012954.php
Fitzgerald: Carter and Brzezinski, together again at last
Should Carter alone be blamed for the triumph of the Khomeini regime in Iran? Why not the other great architects of the Abandonment of the Shah, and of the Resistible but Hardly Resisted (by America) Rise of Ayatollah Khomeini? Why not bring along Zbigniew Brzezinski, he who loves that word "strategic"? And of course there is the "Iran expert" Gary Sick, author of that absurd book that cost taxpayers millions for Congress to investigate and find completely without merit. Or even Robert Hunter, and don't forget Shirin, now resident "expert" on something -- "terrorism"? "Islam"? "the Clash of Civilizations?" at some think-tankery.
Let’s take Brzezinski for now. The shallow machiavellanism of Brzezinski led him to the notion that Islam was not to be worried about because it was a "bulwark against Communism" and Muslims could help destroy the Soviet Union. As it turned out, the Soviet Union did not disintegrate because of such efforts as these, pace Helene Carrere d'Encausse or Alexandre Bennigsen, or especially Zbigniew Brezinski, but because of the disaffection that extended beyond the highest classes of the intelligentsia to those who were in the nomenklatura. Their children often attended school with the children of dissidents in such prestigious places of higher education as the Institut Vostochnykh Yazykov (Institute of Eastern Languages). Disaffection with Communism extended even to family members of those high in the Party.
And of course there was Reagan's refusal to permanently contemplate mere "co-existence." The attitude of his administration had a galvanizing effect on many in Russia. As for Brzezinski's notion that the "Muslim peoples" would rise up against Soviet power -- there was no hint of it, even if some Muslim soldiers did betray their non-Muslim fellow soldiers in the army in Afghanistan. Brzezinski was not slightly wrong about Islam and about Iran -- he was totally, completely wrong. His mind was incapable of managing to think clearly about Islam; he was a child of the Cold War and possessed a fixation on Russia that went beyond any hostility to or fear of Communism.
Carter was, and remains, a sappy-sentimentalist. He has shown his spots repeatedly, as in his offer to advise Arafat on public-relations, and in his ill-concealed antipathy to Begin, and in his utter inability to empathize with, or even to understand, what the Israelis face, and what worries them. And part of his sappy sentimentalism was his belief -- far more advanced a case than anything that Bush has presented -- that people "of faith" are necessarily good people. As Taheri notes above, "[w]ritten in longhand, it was an appeal from 'one believer to a man of God.'" Yes, that was Khomeini through and through, for Jimmy Carter: a "man of God."
Andrew Young's description of Khomeini as a "20th-century saint" needs no comment.
These were the people in charge of the government of the United States from January of 1977 to January 1981, the period when the Shah fell and Khomeini rose and consolidated his power, and had his Judge Khalkhali start the judicial executions (beginning with prominent Jews and Bahais). He also forced through the legislation that mattered to him most – and what came first was the reduction in the age at which girls could be married (or forced to marry) to nine years, on the model of little Aisha.
That was the man Carter revered as a man of faith. That was how he and Brzezinski saw Iran. And neither one has ever shown the slightest embarrassment, expressed the slightest regret, over their colossal series of errors. Nothing Bush has done, stupid and obstinate as he has been in refusing to recognize the ethnic and sectarian fissures within Iraq as useful, as something to be encouraged, has approached what they did in their four awful years. The sum total of their accomplishments was to force Israel to turn over, in three tranches, the entire Sinai to Egypt (and to confuse Saint Sadat, or the presumed Saint Sadat, with Egypt), and to let Khomeini come to power in Iran. Khomeini had long before set down all his views in writing, but who – Gary Sick? – in the Administration was capable of reading Farsi, or even thinking of getting someone to find out what this Ayatollah was all about? No one did. Yes, and there was one more thing: the oil price rise of 1979, when a leader might have roused the public, might have insisted on a Manhattan Project to find new energy sources and free us from dependence on oil from the Middle East. Carter put on a sweater and gave a fireside chat. His conduct of foreign policy was a series of one disaster after another.
Yet he continues with his holier-than-thou performances, including that visit to North Korea where he cleared up everything for us, didn’t he? Posterity will not be kind to him, or to the egregious Brzezinski, who deserved him, and whom he deserved.
And what do you think of Obadiah Shoher's arguments against the peace process ( samsonblinded.org/blog/we-need-a-respite-from-peace.htm )?
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