{"id":2074,"date":"2009-02-01T15:12:22","date_gmt":"2009-02-01T15:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/?p=2074"},"modified":"2009-02-01T18:34:11","modified_gmt":"2009-02-01T18:34:11","slug":"obama-talks-with-syria-begun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/obama-talks-with-syria-begun\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Talks with Syria Begun"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"President

President al-Assad Meeting US Congressional Delegation<\/p><\/div>\n

Obama has begun discreet talks with Iran, Syria<\/a><\/p>\n

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama has already used experts within the last few months to hold high-level but discreet talks with both Iran and Syria, organizers of the meetings told AFP.<\/p>\n

Officially, Obama’s overtures toward both Tehran and Damascus have remained limited.<\/p>\n

In an interview broadcast Monday, Obama said the United States would offer arch-foe Iran an extended hand of diplomacy if the Islamic Republic’s leaders “unclenched their fist.”<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, his secretary of state Hillary Clinton warned that the Israeli-Syrian track of the Middle East peace negotiations took a back seat to the Israeli-Palestinian track, especially because of the recent war in Gaza.<\/p>\n

However, even before winning the November 4 election, Obama unofficially used what experts call “track two” discussions to approach America’s two foes in the region.<\/p>\n

Nuclear non-proliferation experts had several “very, very high-level” contacts in the last few months with Iranian leaders, said Jeffrey Boutwell, executive director for the US branch of the Pugwash group, an international organization of scientists which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.<\/p>\n

Former defense secretary William Perry, who served in Obama’s election campaign, participated in some of these meetings focused on “a wide range of issues that separate Iran from the West: not only their nuclear program but the Middle East peace process, Persian Gulf issues,” Boutwell told AFP.<\/p>\n

The Pugwash official declined to name the other participants, except to say they had considerable clout.<\/p>\n

“We had very, very senior figures from both the Iranian policy establishment and from the US; people who have very close, good access to the top leaders in both countries,” Boutwell said.<\/p>\n

“The Cable,” the blog of the specialist magazine Foreign Policy, said Iran’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (AIEA), Ali Asghar Soltanieh, was “among the Iranian officials who attended the Pugwash dialogues.”<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a group of experts under the auspices of the think tank, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), announced Thursday that they met for more than two hours in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.<\/p>\n

The experts included Ellen Laipson, a former White House adviser under president Bill Clinton and a member of the Obama transition team.<\/p>\n

Assad struck positive notes, the participants in the meeting said during a press conference at the Washington headquarters of USIP, a bipartisan think tank financed by Congress.<\/p>\n

“His phrasing was 70 percent of our interests are potentially shared and 30 percent are not. And he said: let’s work on the 70 percent,” said Bruce Jentleson, who was the disarmament advisor to former vice president Al Gore.<\/p>\n

The Syrian president himself revealed on Monday that “dialogue started some weeks ago in a serious manner through personalities who are close to the administration and who were dispatched by the administration.”<\/p>\n

The United States accuses Syria of supporting “terrorist” groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, of destabilizing Lebanon and of allowing armed men to transit its territory to fight US-led forces in Iraq.<\/p>\n

Washington and Tehran, which have had no diplomatic ties for nearly 30 years, differ sharply over Iran’s nuclear program. Washington charges the program is a covert military one, but Tehran says it is for nuclear energy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elbaradei: Israel violated international law in Syria<\/a>
\nYitzhak Benhorin
\nPublished: \t02.01.09 \/ Israel News<\/p>\n

IAEA chief says that instead of using unilateral force, Jewish state should have provided nuclear watchdog with intelligence on alleged Syrian reactor<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON – Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said Saturday that Israel “violated the rules of international law” by bombing an alleged Syrian nuclear reactor in September 2007.<\/p>\n

Speaking to the Newsweek magazine, ElBaradei said that instead of using unilateral force, Israel should have provided the nuclear watchdog with the intelligence it had.<\/p>\n

Stick and Carrot<\/strong><\/p>\n

US demands Syria cooperate on nuke plan \/ Roee Nahmias<\/p>\n

American ambassador to UN nuclear watchdog says Damascus must decide whether it plans to follow in Iran’s footsteps or cooperate on its alleged atomic program. A failure to do so, he warns, would lead to punishment measures.<\/p>\n

“I have been very harsh on Israel because they violated the rules of international law on the use of unilateral force, and they did not provide us with the information before the bombing (with) which we could have established whether Syria was building a nuclear reactor,” the IAEA chief said.<\/p>\n

In a sarcastic remark directed at the United States, ElBaradei said that the US was also to blame for “sitting on the information” for a year and a half after the bombing.<\/p>\n

“Now we are doing our best to try to see what Syria was doing, but it’s like Iran. I cannot jump the gun and say Syria was building a nuclear facility because what we are doing now is trying to verify what was there,” he added.<\/p>\n

During the interview, which was held at the margins of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, ElBaradei also referred to the Iranian nuclear program, noting that Japan was also advancing a nuclear technology like Tehran.<\/p>\n

The interviewer reminded the IAEA chief that Japan was not threatening to destroy Israel. ElBaradei replied that there had been a lot of offensive statements made by Iran, but that as far as he understood, Iran was interested in a one-state solution rather than in seeing Israel wiped off the map.<\/p>\n

Direct dialogue without preconditions<\/strong><\/p>\n

ElBaradei went on to say that the world was facing a problem because the Middle East had become more extreme and Iran was very popular in the Muslim world. We must bolster the moderates and find a solution, and Tehran could be a very positive element in finding such a solution, he added.<\/p>\n

He said the nuclear issue covered a lot of security-related, diplomatic and economic issue, and that what was needed was a “major deal” like the one US President Barack Obama has been talking about.<\/p>\n

“You’re not going to have trust unless you have a direct dialogue. President Obama right now is saying he’s ready to have a direct dialogue without preconditions, based on mutual respect. I say this is absolutely overdue,” he said.<\/p>\n

“You cannot treat Iran like a donkey, with carrots and sticks. This is a competition for power in the Middle East… It’s a competition between Iran and the West … Iran wants to have its role as a regional security power recognized.”<\/p>\n

A report issued by nuclear monitors in Vienna last November determined that the building destroyed in an Israel Air Force strike in Syria had characteristics similar to those of a nuclear reactor. It also ruled that uranium had been found near the facility, which could have been used for enrichment.<\/p>\n

The report stressed, however, that the findings were preliminary and that additional inspections should be held and Syrian documents should be probed before reaching clear conclusions.<\/p>\n

A week after the report was released, ElBaradei told the Los Angeles Times that Damascus’ request for help in building a nuclear power station did not constitute a threat, and that the West’s efforts to hinder the project threatened to hurt the agency’s reliability.<\/p>\n

The nuclear watchdog chief added that it was too early to judge the Syrian plan, noting that the American claims on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had turned out to be wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A Conversation with Mohamed ElBaradei,<\/a> Sunday, February 1, 2009; B03, Washington Post<\/p>\n

I have said for the past six years that the policy of building trust between the West (and the United States in particular) and Iran has failed completely. We haven’t moved one iota.<\/p>\n

Do you think it is possible?<\/em><\/p>\n

I think it is possible. I have been counseling privately and publicly that this is not going to happen unless there is a direct dialogue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cyprus stops Iranian arms ship to Syria-report<\/a>
\nFri Jan 30, 2009<\/p>\n