Joschka Fischer on US-Iranian diplomacy

Quoting Joschka Fischer in the previous post reminded me that I haven't been paying close enough attention to his Monday columns on international affairs and German politics.

Having served as German Foreign Minister for eight years, Joshcka Fischer knows a bit about duplicitous diplomacy. Especially the kind in which George Bush and Dick Cheney engage.

So that makes it at least momentarily encouraging to see his hopeful take on recent US-Iranian diplomacy in Großer Satan trifft Achse des Bösen (The Great Satan meets with the axis of evil) Die Zeit 21.07.2008.

Fischer thinks the fact that the US sent an official representative to the negotiations in Geneva with Iran is more important than the fact that the meeting didn't make much technical diplomatic progress. Fischer also sees the opening of an interest section by the US in Iran as a "decisive step" in the direction of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

But he qualifies his assessment:

Für Optimismus ist es im Nahen und Mittleren Osten freilich noch zu früh. In diesen Regionen der Welt gelten andere Gesetze. Wer hier den kürzesten Weg von A nach B wählt, wird scheitern. Alle politischen Akteure verfolgen dort mindestens immer zwei oder noch mehr Optionen gleichzeitig. Und ganz besonders in Iran gilt der bewährte Grundsatz: "All politics is local". Die internen Machtkämpfe in Iran und die bevorstehenden iranischen Präsidentschaftswahlen im Frühjahr nächsten Jahres verkomplizieren die Sache noch erheblich.

[It's clearly still too soon for optimism in the Near and Middle East. In these regions of the world other laws apply. Hre, whoever here selects the shortest way from A to B will fail. All political actors there always follow at least two or even more options at the same time. And very especially in Iran there isi the accepted basic law: "All politics is local". The internal power struggle in Iran and the upcoming Iranian Presidential elections early next year greatly complicate the thing.]

And he's still not ruling out or minimizing the possibility that the Bush administration will go to war with Iran.

Fischer also notes that active diplomacy has been going on between the US and Iran over the past several years, with Iran claiming that there was direct military cooperation between the US and Iran in both the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, "such as the determination of targets for attack".

Referring to the United States as the official occupying power in Iraq and Iran as the unofficial one, he reminds us that a significant part of whatever mitigation of violence in Iraq has occurred over the last year was due to Iran's influence. He mentions Iran's successful insistence that the Maliki government not sign the long-term military stationing agreements that the Bush administration has sought as showing, "In reality, the Iraqi government of Maliki is being steered more by Teheran than by Washington."

This, of course, is the key strategic result of the US invasion of Iraq, removing Saddam's secular Sunni government and facilitating its replacement by a Shi'a government. If this isn't what Cheney and Bush wanted, they shouldn't have invaded Iraq in the first place. (My observation, not Fischer's, though I doubt he would dispute it.)

I like the word Fischer uses in explaining that Iran's Ali Khamanei told Nuri al-Maliki that it was out of the question to make the basing agreement with the US. He says Kahmanei told him it was an "Unding", an un-thing.

Tags: iran, joschka fischer