The policy paper is very frank in its approach, as imperialists usually are among themselves. It argues that Iran is strategically too important to be alienated, and argues that in the absence of a full rapprochement, Iran's leaders will have no choice but to flea to the Russian and the Chinese spheres of influence. Iran's hydrocarbon resources are vast (second in the world, in combined oil and gas), and it's strategic positioning in the Middle East is not something the U.S. can afford to do without for much longer. More importantly, Iran's animosity toward the U.S. can be detrimental to the advance of the American interests in the region. So, the best thing to do is for the U.S. to strike a 'grand bargain' with a regime that has historically proven that it can cooperate with the U.S., but has never been rewarded fully for its past cooperation both in fighting the Taliban regime and their overthrow, as well as in the American military and political designs for Iraq.

The wish list of things to be granted by the U.S. and Iran in such a grand bargain include the familiar demands: Iran is to modify its nuclear program to accommodate western powers' concerns, disavow the 'terrorist' organizations such as Hamas, Hezbullah and the Islamic Jihad, and help stabilize the region for Uncle Sam. In turn, the U.S. is to guarantee that it will not militarily (or otherwise) try to change Iran's borders or its form of government, lift all unilateral sanctions against Iran, and generally play nice.

Of particular interest is the following passage from the policy paper: "During their dialogue with U.S. counterparts over Afghanistan in 2001-03, Iranian diplomats indicated their interest in working with the United States to establish a regional security framework focused on Central Asia. Other senior Iranian officials raised such a possibility with us in 2003-04." Hardly an anti-imperialist stance on the part of the Iranian regime! On the contrary, this is clearly indicative of a regime with ambitions for becoming a cop on the beat (much like the Shah's regime was for the Americans), and wants that role officially sanctioned by the biggest bully on the global beat, the U.S.

These are recommendations of a group of professionals whose bread is buttered by thinking ahead and advising Uncle Sam on the best course of action to take, in order to secure its long-term geo-strategic interests. The analysis provided by the New American Foundation shows that powerful forces within the imperil halls of the U.S. also find the 'cop on the beat' scenario for Iran as something desirable.

This line of thinking is not isolated to think tanks, as attested to by a Time magazine article of 4 October 2008, titled, "Changing the conventional wisdom about Iran." In this Time article, France is portrayed as the key European power to lead the charge for a strategic adjustment of policy as regards Iran.

As reported there: "'The opportunity is there to move past the 30 year-old images of a defiant and frightening revolutionary Iran, and start encouraging cooperative behavior by engaging with Iran as the swiftly-developing nation and regional power it is,' says Bernard Hourcade, an Iran specialist at France's National Center for Scientific Research. 'The key is direct American involvement in relations, because renewed ties with the U.S. is what Iran wants most'."

Further, the Time article reports: "'Iran's biggest strategic concern is obtaining security assurances and accords, and the only nation that can provide those is the U.S.,' says Didier Billion, deputy director of the Institute on International and Strategic Relations in Paris. The logic behind that view is supported by Thomas Fringar, chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council and the senior analyst in Washington's intelligence community."

There have been other indications as well. For one, there have been reports on the volume of U.S.-Iran trade, which have increases ten fold during the Bush administration. Another highly telling development was the plans of Bush administration to open a diplomatic post in Iran (see here). Though the plan was shelved, "in part over fears it could affect the U.S. presidential race or be interpreted as political meddling," other reports indicate that it is still under consideration. If the Bush administration's stated animosity toward Ahmadinejad's administration (or the Iranian regime as a whole) were as deep-rooted as the alarmists have been stating, whence did these considerations of opening a diplomatic post materialize?

The truth is that American imperialism is not on very solid foundations. Besides its military power, which alone does not acquire one an empire, most other aspects of its power are on very shaky ground, as the current financial meltdown has made plain. For its maintenance therefore it requires two things: prevention of other powers from rising, and a host of client states in geo-strategically important regions. The grand bargain discussed here addresses both requirements.

To sum, these are important signs and the writing is on the wall that neither this nor the next president of the U.S. will not be looking at bombing Iran but to offering the regime of the mullahs yet more cakes and the keys to the heavens the mullahs have been asking for.

* * *

For some time now, and particularly since the beginning of this century, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been playing the U.S. left for all it's worth, keeping it off balance by a facade of anti-imperialist rhetoric, which had previously likewise fooled some Iranian leftists, such as the Tudeh Party, who willingly ignored the theocrats' natural disposition dictating a hatred of any atheistic tendencies. These leftists in the process paid a heavy price for their stupidity, with their members' and supporters' imprisonment, torture and blood. Other left organizations that also followed this irrational imbecility likewise paid a heavy price in blood, imprisonment and torture of their members and followers.

The Tudeh Pary leaders latched onto the anti-imperialist facade of the newly formed Islamic Republic regime, reading it as a sign that no matter what the mullahs' attitude towards the socialists, secular liberals and democrats, the leftists had a duty to support a regime that was 'standing up' to the imperialists. This was the line coming out of the Soviet Union communist party at the time, and the Tudeh and smaller political organizations that followed the political positions of the Soviet Union verbatim, blindly followed.

[Later still, the same Iranian and their equivalent western leftists stashed away the Iran-Contra affair in some backroom, 'too embarrassing to mention' corner of their political heads. One is inclined to indulge in fantasy and ask: Can anybody imagine a scenario in which imperial planners in Washington, DC, approached the Sandinistas and offered them a deal in which they would buy American weapons, so that the Americans could use the money to launch a clandestine and overt (through proxies) attacks on Iran? (Assuming the Sandinistas had any such amount of money, in the first place!)]

For the last seven years, and as a result of the aggressive and openly militaristic tactics of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and Afghanistan, a large segment of the American left has fallen for a sorry line of thinking, which actually accepts the Bush doctrine of 'You're either with us or against us', and has decided that whomever the Bush administration shows any animosity towards must be supported by the left.

As a result, in most American leftist media and publications, there has been a complete silence over the horrendous plight of the Iranian people suffering daily under a theocratic dictatorship. All the thousands of Iranian political prisoners, all the assassinations of intellectuals, all the student activists subjected to horrendous conditions in Evin and Gohar-dasht prisons, all the labor activists, most famously Osanloo, and all the women political prisoners whose 'crime' is asking to be treated legally as equal human beings as men, and all the Kurdish activists who get murdered by the state with complete impunity have gotten not a single mention by 'leftist' organizations or publications in the U.S.

Only a very few brave souls have been consistent in giving space and publicity to the plight of the Iranian people and social justice activists, and we salute them!

Some American leftists (some of whom actually call themselves socialists) have been shameless in their deflection of the Islamic Republic's record of human rights. Such 'leftists' should feel shame for their treachery towards fundamental principles of social justice. Additionally, they must feel particularly ignorant and misguided since there has been extensive behind-the-scenes negotiations between the Americans and the mullahs' regime. These leftists of course had plenty of opportunities to re-direct and realize that they had been taken for complete fools (just like the Tudeh Party in Iran, as of 1978-1984); particularly those who, during the 1980s, worked in solidarity with the people of Nicaragua. Even failing drawing lessons from the Iran-Contra connections, those who opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq should have known better, since the Iranian government proved itself instrumental in facilitating the imperialists' destruction of both these countries.

Much to these leftists' chagrin, we are now observing the contours of an imperialist 'grand bargain' with the mullah's regime emerging (along the lines of the deal Nixon struck with China in early 1970s). This line of dealing with the Iranian regime is not surprising at all; Brzezinski, in the late 1970s, regarded the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini as a strategic ally of the imperialists in their efforts to strap a 'Green Belt' (of Islamist states) around the Soviet Union.

In a previous article ("A New Cold War?"; Counterpunch, January 29, 2007), I likened the current relationship between Iran and the U.S. as what in Iran we call a 'Zargari fight', which basically is a verbal back and forth between two parties who have no intention of actually engaging each other in a hand-to-hand. 'Zargar' is an ironsmith, and when two ironsmiths engage is such a verbal fight, the purpose is mostly to gather a crowd, from whose patronage both ironsmiths can potentially benefit.

In that article and more recently, I have argued that the U.S. ruling classes do not want a regime change in Iran at all. On the contrary, they like and appreciate greatly the theocratic setup in Iran, and all they wish is for the mullahs cool it down on the rhetorical front and act differently with regards to a few agenda items dear to Uncle Sam's heart as pertains to the regional setup in the Middle East.

For their part, the Iranian regime has no fundamental animosity with imperialists and has in fact open dealings with European imperialists, the IMF and the World Bank, and would very much like to join the World Trade Organization. As pertains to the Americans in particular, again we remind the reader of the full cooperation forwarded by the Iranian regime in the invasion of Afghanistan (and the installment of Hamid Karzai as a puppet president), as well as with the overthrow of Saddam's regime and the installation of a puppet regime in Iraq.

These are facts. If these were not factual truths, no faction of the U.S. ruling class would be singing the praises of the benefits of engaging the mullahs with a 'grand bargain'. No such grand bargains were ever conjured up with regards to Saddam's regime.

There are, of course, some organizations (e.g., CASMII) whose entire reason for being is to make mountains out of the molehill of the disagreements between the leaders of the two nations, in order to set themselves up with a political trading post, and in so doing they must talk up the imminent threats of war and destruction that is about to rain down on Iran at the hands of the U.S. imperialism, and to justify their lobbying efforts in behalf of the theocratic regime in Iran.

However, such organizations, for example, have no problems with imperialists setting up open and legal shop in Iran, nor have they any objections to U.S. corporations looting our resources openly and legally with the blessing of our own government. Indeed, they consider such 'economic cooperation' as the spirit of our times and a blessing to be sought. And should anybody warn that the economic interests of the imperialists are the real driving force behind political-military actions, that will land you the ready-at-hand label of 'hawkish' and hollow accusations of 'struggling to sow antagonism against Iran'.

As a socialist, I do not reduce imperialism to its military moves. Socialists understand that war is another way of pursuing political objectives, so for those of us who don't put the cart before the horse, it is clear that wars happen for political-economic reasons. Why would imperialists go through the gigantic mess of a war, not to mention carry the even larger financial burdens that currently they clearly cannot afford, when the adversary is willing to accommodate the imperialist's wishes through mere negotiations? All that is required of both sides is to find a solution that leaves both their faces unmarred, one that both can take home to their people as a 'strategic victory'.

The 'grand bargain' is clearly such a solution.

So, the likes of CASMII and their American friends can pipe down on their rhetorical abuses of Iranian socialists, who've been warning about such bargains, and can now fold their tents and go home. Their work is done. They can now register themselves openly as legal, foreign lobbying agents at the service of this theocracy and bring consistency between their speech acts and their political acts. They can stop sounding like Zionists and their supporters, whose most ready-at-hand rhetorical grenade of choice is 'anti-Semitism' -- except, of course, those muddle-heads over at CASMII will call you 'hawkish' or a 'neocon' if you so much as direct any criticism at this theocratic dictatorship. These hard working deflectors can now concentrate on generating actual positive publicity for the mullahs, instead of forever repelling criticisms directed at their beloved paymasters by those who are really fighting for social justice.