By Reza Shafa
In an exclusive report, the Associated Press quoted a US official as saying, "The Bush administration has shelved plans to set up a diplomatic outpost in Iran."
The proposal to send U.S. diplomats to Tehran for the first time in three decades attracted attention when it was first floated seriously last summer but has now been placed on indefinite hold as November's election nears and Iran continues to defy demands to halt suspected nuclear activities, officials told the AP.
Obama has called for unconditional direct talks with the leaders of rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea, assuming that groundwork laid by lower-level officials indicated that the top-level talks would be fruitful.
McCain has ridiculed the suggestion as naive.
Thus, opening an interest section or a de facto embassy in Tehran could be interpreted as a Republican president helping a Republican nominee by neutralizing a distinction that might make the Democrat appealing. Or, it could be seen as hurting McCain by leaving him to defend a more hard-line position than the current Republican presidents.
Either way, the administration concluded that now was not the time.
With all the fuss being made over mullahs' expression of interest for having an "interest section" of the US opened in Tehran, it must be clear that the problem with those ruling in Iran is not just a building in downtown Tehran; rather it goes much deeper than that. The clerics in Tehran have been tested time and again by the West in hot pursuit of finding an iota of moderation.
As it was pointed out by the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, on Thursday, he has personally looked for a single moderate mullah in Iran with no success for past three decades and found none.
Thus, this time and with the new subject of opening diplomatic or cultural sections in Iran, some think tanks nostalgic about having lost Khatamei era as the greatest opening of all in US and Iran relations, by simply forgetting what had happened, want to take their chances this time with Ahmadinejad.
But the main problem with the mullahs is not a minor difference between Ahmadinejad and his predecessor; it is the difference between an unbeaten policy and a failed policy followed by the West with respect to Iran; that is the appeasement policy.
What we know for a fact is that the regime in Iran will not change its "behavior." What are we suppose to do? Nothing, we have to do the inevitable which is to follow a policy of regime change.
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Reza Shafa is an expert on the Iranian regime's Intelligence networks, both in Iran and abroad. He has done extensive research on Iranian Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) also known as VEVAK, Intelligence Office of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and Qods Force among others. Currently he is a contributor to NCRI website.
