Iran was willing to recognize Israel?

In a recent post, I mentioned a number of articles about US-Iranian diplomacy, including a new article by Gareth Porter talking in some detail about a major diplomatic overture in 2003 from Iran to the US.

Porter has a new report out that offers new detail of that 2003 intiative. In Iran Proposal to U.S. Offered Peace with Israel, Inter Press Service 05/23/06 he writes:

Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and to pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel's 1967 borders, according to the secret Iranian proposal to the United States.

Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and to pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel's 1967 borders, according to the secret Iranian proposal to the United States.

The two-page proposal for a broad Iran-U.S. agreement covering all the issues separating the two countries, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, was conveyed to the United States in late April or early May 2003. Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who provided the document to IPS, says he got it from an Iranian official earlier this year but is not at liberty to reveal the source.

The two-page document contradicts the official line of the George W. Bush administration that Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel and the sponsorship of terrorism in the region.

We're seeing a replay of the buildup to war with Iraq in 2002-3.


Scare talk, exaggerated claims and just plain fake ones, the inevitable Second World War analogies, the use of excessive secrecy to suppress important and relevant information, the disinformation campaign to seed manufactured stories to the US media through the back door: we were here four years ago. The war in Iraq that resulted for that one will probably haunt the US for the next half century.

I don't want to discount the possibility of Iranian disinformation campaigns, either. But Gareth Porter is not just the proverbial "some guy with a Web site". That doesn't mean he gets everything right all the time. But unlike the fantasists of the Christian Right and Republican hate radio, he has a reputation built on being careful with his sources.

He reports further of the 2003 proposals:

Before the 2003 proposal, Iran had attacked Arab governments which had supported the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The negotiating document, however, offered "acceptance of the Arab League Beirut declaration", which it also referred to as the "Saudi initiative, two-states approach."

The March 2002 Beirut declaration represented the Arab League's first official acceptance of the land-for-peace principle as well as a comprehensive peace with Israel in return for Israel's withdrawal to the territory it had controlled before the 1967 war. Iran's proposed concession on the issue would have aligned its policy with that of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among others with whom the United States enjoyed intimate relations.

Another concession in the document was a "stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad, etc.) from Iranian territory" along with "pressure on these organizations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967".

Even more surprising, given the extremely close relationship between Iran and the Lebanon-based Hizbollah Shiite organisation, the proposal offered to take "action on Hizbollah to become a mere political organization within Lebanon". (my emphasis)

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