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Called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," the plan envisioned abandoning "land for peace" negotiations and instead "reestablishing the principle of preemption," beginning with the ouster of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and then tackling other regional enemies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran.
However, to achieve such an ambitious goal -- with the necessary help of American money and military might -- required making traditional peace negotiations appear foolish or impossible and then ratcheting up tensions.
Obviously, with President Bush in the White House and with the U.S. public outraged over the 9/11 attacks, new possibilities opened -- and Saddam Hussein, the first target of "securing the realm," was taken out by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
But the Iraq War didn't go as easily as expected, and President Obama's intentions to reinvigorate the Middle East peace process and to engage Iran in negotiations emerged as new obstacles to the plan. It became important to show how naive the young President was regarding the impossibility of dealing with Iran.
Derailing a Deal
Many Washington insiders were shocked last Oct. 1 when Tehran agreed to send 2,640 pounds (then as much as 75 percent of Iran's total) of low-enriched uranium abroad to be turned into fuel for a small reactor that does medical research.
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, gave Tehran's agreement "in principle," at a meeting in Geneva of representatives of members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, chaired by Javier Solana of the European Union.
Even the New York Times acknowledged that this, "if it happens, would represent a major accomplishment for the West, reducing Iran's ability to make a nuclear weapon quickly, and buying more time for negotiations to bear fruit."
The conventional wisdom presented in the FCM today has it that Tehran backed off the deal. True; but that is only half the story, a tale that highlights how, in Israel's set of priorities, regime change in Iran comes first.
The uranium swap had the initial support of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And a follow-up meeting was scheduled for Oct. 19 at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.
However, the accord soon came under criticism from Iran's opposition groups, including the "Green Movement" led by defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has had ties to the American neocons and to Israel since the Iran-Contra days of the 1980s when he was the prime minister who collaborated on secret arms deals.
Strangely, it was Mousavi's U.S.-favored political opposition that led the assault on the nuclear agreement, calling it an affront to Iran's sovereignty and suggesting that Ahmadinejad wasn't being tough enough.
Then, on Oct. 18, a terrorist group called Jundullah, acting on amazingly accurate intelligence, detonated a car bomb at a meeting of top Iranian Revolutionary Guards commanders and tribal leaders in the province of Sistan-Baluchistan in southeastern Iran. A car full of Guards was also attacked.
A brigadier general who was deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards ground forces, the Revolutionary Guards brigadier commanding the border area of Sistan-Baluchistan, and three other brigade commanders were killed in the attack; dozens of other military officers and civilians were left dead or wounded.
Jundullah took credit for the bombings, which followed years of lethal attacks on Revolutionary Guards and Iranian policemen, including an attempted ambush of President Ahmadinejad's motorcade in 2005.
Tehran claims Jundullah is supported by the U.S., Great Britain and Israel, and retired CIA Middle East operations officer Robert Baer has fingered Jundullah as one of the "good terrorist" groups benefiting from American help.
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