Posted on 11/27/2007 9:53:29 AM PST by lormand
Iran said on Tuesday that it had invited Palestinian militant factions to a meeting in Tehran aimed at countering a US-hosted Middle East peace conference seeking to kickstart the peace process. "These groups are planning to come to Tehran within the next week or two and they are all the Palestinian groups that are struggling for the freedom of their land," government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told reporters.
Iran is one of the most vocal backers of Palestinian militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad and pledged millions of dollars in 2006 to the then Hamas government crippled by a Western aid cut.
The Islamic republic does not recognise Israel and its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has provoked outrage by calling for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map.
Elham indicated the Tehran meeting would be a riposte to the conference bringing together Israeli and Palestinian leaders which started in Annapolis outside Washington on Tuesday.
"It means that the Annapolis conference is not representing the Palestinians and not talking on their behalf, but on the contrary is moving against their rights," he said.
More than a dozen Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and Iran's top regional ally Syria, have sent representatives, leaving Tehran conspicuously isolated.
On Monday Ahmadinejad told Saudi King Abdullah in a telephone call that he "wished" the kingdom was not taking part in the peace conference.
Tehran's arch foe Washington, which is hosting the meeting, dismissed the Iranian criticism as "not surprising," and charged that Tehran backs the extremists sidelined by the talks.
Iranian peace ping.
Isn’t that nice? It’s a good thing to meet and greet your bankrollers once in a while.
/sarc
I wonder if Carter will attend.
Which congress critters will be attending?
I recommend using about 1000 of these at a minimum.
The MK-82 warhead should be replaced with a B-61 warhead, then produce a thousand of them.
It is a strange and problematic twist of fate that were Iran’s moderates able, between the late 1990s and now, to have continued the gains of those democratic moderates, to the point of having sent the clerics back to the mosgues and out of government, that democratic and moderate Shia Iran would be a much better ally in the region than any Sunni-dominated Middle East country - none of which can be trusted in my book.
While the present leaders of Iran can also not be trusted at this time, their assessment that the conference going on in Annapolis is really about the Sunnis seeking to play-along with the US goal or isolating Iran’s theocratic dictators, for reasons of purely Sunni self interest and ambitions, is not incorrect.
On that basis, and regardless of Iran’s current regime, the US has ZERO long-term interest in seeking to play to purely Sunni interests - as if we have a stake in either party in their global Sunni-Shia contest. We don’t.
If and whenever the democratic moderates in Iran can achieve a new government there, we, again, will not be viewed anymore favorably there than we are now, because regardless of what those democratic moderates in Iran think of their leaders, they know all the Sunni royals, kings and dictators are far worse - yet the US played to their, the Sunni leaders self-interest.
If this conference were really about Israel and the Arabs in Palestine, then only those parties needed to be represented. Worse for Israel is that the over-representation of Arab states in this setting serves only to reinforce Palestinian demands and intransigence and not compromise.
Again, I believe Bush has, like Clinton, put self-interest, in his legacy, ahead of and against our long term interests - against our long term interests because in the present setting and with a demand for a date-certain completion of an agreement, it will be an agreement (like the last one) that will not hold up in time, leading to greater peril for Israel and it will do so when Israel’s options for her survival and our options to help her will all be more problematic and perilous than they are now.
Until the Palestinians accept one thing and one thing alone - that peace is preferable to anything else - then they are not prepared for compromises that will insure Israel’s security. Until they want peace more than they want anything else, there will be no peace for Israel.
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