Cheney snubbed Iran's offer
"Iran offered the US a package of concessions in 2003, but it was rejected, a senior former US official has told the BBC's Newsnight programme.
Tehran proposed ending support for Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups and helping to stabilise Iraq following the US-led invasion.
Offers, including making its nuclear programme more transparent, were conditional on the US ending hostility.
..... One of the then Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aides told the BBC the state department was keen on the plan - but was over-ruled.
"We thought it was a very propitious moment to do that," Lawrence Wilkerson told Newsnight.
"But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the Vice-President's office, the old mantra of 'We don't talk to evil'... reasserted itself."
Observers say the Iranian offer as outlined nearly four years ago corresponds pretty closely to what Washington is demanding from Tehran now. [..]
Cheney rejected it? I thought Bush was the President? Oh wait, sorry .. silly me.
Come to think of it, I read somewhere that in the beginning Bush wanted to turn Baghdad over to the Iraqis and focus on Anbar, but Cheney talked him out of it .. probably because the Saudi royals wouldn't like it.
Cheney refusing to "talk to evil" just knocks my socks off. What about that special trip in our Boeing 747 to make an oil deal with Kazakhstan's corrupt Karim Masimov? While Kazakhstan's people starved.
What about the Cheney who backed Saddam in the 80's .. selling him WMDs and Haliburton oil extraction equipment?
It sure looks like Cheney wanted us to monopolize world oil supplies by invading Iraq .. that he was prepared to sacrifice American lives to do this and kill thousands and thousands of Iraqi innocents. All under the guise of making Iraq a democracy. And remember that God told George Bush to bring democracy to the Middle East...
Well, it didn't work out as they had planned .. no control of the oil and no democracy yet. My rightie friends like to razz me and ask 'if it was about the oil why am I paying $3 for a gallon of gas?'
I have to explain that he war was not "about oil" in the sense that you'd get cheap gasoline .. it was "about oil" in the sense that the ME is a strategically important region due to oil. Whoever controls it is King of the Hill .. and to keep the world trading in US dollars doesn't hurt.
Also, the Oil Companies don't want us to have cheap gas .. they love that Profit too much.
Bank on this--We would not be there if Iraq had NO oil.
AND, we just may have the true explanation for the Surge or Escalation--the WH needs more time to get the Iraqi parliament to pass a law turning over more control of the oil to us.....
Anyway, it doesn't look like we'll ever control Iraq enough to repair the Infrastructure so we can get the oil out .. because Iraq was using antiquated equipment to pump their oil .. and we'd need to drill wells in the untapped sections. How are you going to do that in the middle of a civil war .. sabotage all around?
Hah! I just remembered how the White House told us oil revenues would pay for the war...
SO .. the families of our Soldiers and Marines killed since 2003 can thank Cheney for turning down an opportunity to talk with Iran .. a talk that might have eased hostilities in Iraq and even made a success of Iraqi Freedom.
See, if we talk to our enemies and make concessions to eliminate the conditions that prolong the war, we get fewer chances to control the oil .. fewer chances for Halliburton et al to rake in billions of dollars in contracts to rebuild Iraq's oil industry and service the US troops.
Instead, we got Halliburton Gone Wild .. cheating our troops and stealing from Americans. Remember the $27.4 million in overcharges for food that was never served to US troops? Halliburton was charging us for 42,000 meals a day and only 14,000 were actually served. We won't go into the filthy mess halls and rotten food .. even a Pentagon audit found dirty and unsafe conditions in four mess halls that Halliburton's KBR operated. But that's another tangent........
Nope, Cheney and the war-hawks had already secretly decided on war and were lining up their cronies to get the profits .. he didn't want no steenkin' diplomacy with Iran. I keep remembering his sneaky face on TV before the war .. telling us almost daily that inspections were not working .. that the UN was irrelevant...
This is the part of the BBC article I can't get over--"Observers say the Iranian offer as outlined nearly four years ago corresponds pretty closely to what Washington is demanding from Tehran now."
