27 Year Diplomatic Freeze Between Iran and US Broken Yesterday
The US and Iranian ambassadors to Iraq met for four hours yesterday in the Green Zone, talking about ways to make Iraq safer.
The United States and Iran broke a 27-year diplomatic freeze yesterday with a four-hour meeting on Iraqi security. The American envoy said there was broad policy agreement but that Iran must stop arming and financing militants who are attacking U.S. and Iraqi forces.
Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi said in an interview that the two sides would meet again in less than a month. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Washington would decide only after the Iraqi government issued an invitation.
“We don’t have a formal invitation to respond to just yet, so it doesn’t make sense to respond to what we don’t have,” Mr. Crocker told reporters after the meeting.
Don’t get your hopes up because Iran dismisses US charges they have armed insurgents to fight against the US and Iraqi people in Iraq.
The American envoy called the meeting “businesslike” and said at “the level of policy and principle, the Iranian position as articulated by the Iranian ambassador was very close to our own.”
However, he said: “What we would obviously like to see and the Iraqis would clearly like to see is an action by Iran on the ground to bring what it’s actually doing in line with its stated policy.”
Speaking later at a press conference in the Iranian Embassy, Mr. Kazemi said: “We don’t take the American accusations seriously.”
Mr. Crocker declined to detail what Mr. Kazemi had said in the session, but the Iranian diplomat formerly a top official in the elite Revolutionary Guards Quds Force said he had offered to train and equip the Iraqi army and police to create “a new military and security structure” for Iraq.
Mr. Kazemi said U.S. efforts to rebuild those forces were inadequate to handle the chaos in Iraq, for which he said Washington bore sole responsibility. He said he also had offered to provide what assistance Iran could in rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, which he said had been “demolished by the American invaders.”
The icebreaking session, according to both sides, did not veer into other difficult issues that encumber the U.S.-Iranian relationship primarily Iran’s nuclear program and the more than a quarter-century history of diplomatic estrangement.
But the issues at hand portend a bruising set of talks should the two sides have follow-up meetings.
I imagine this meeting and immediate future meetings, if they are held, will show both sides carefully circling the other to see if they can get a read on the situation.
I’m not so sure having Iran train the military and police would be in the best interests of anyone, since they are suspected of training the Shiite death squads and inflitrating the current Iraqi military and police forces.
According to the report President al-Maliki spoke briefly to the two ambassadors:
He told both sides that Iraqis wanted a stable country free of foreign forces and regional interference. Iraq should not be turned into a base for terrorist groups, he said, adding that the U.S.-led forces in Iraq were only there to help rebuild the army, police and infrastructure.
The United States had no plans to stage a strike against Iran from Iraq, he said.
This is at least a first step. Perhaps it would be better if a predominantly Sunni country, say Egypt, were to try to help the two sides broker a peace agreement.
It’s going to take Shiites and Sunnis of good faith to broker any kind of peace agreement in Iraq.
Written by ~J~
