US holds Iranians as bargaining chips

If US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were to "bump into" the Iranian representative at the Sharm al-Sheikh conference on Iraq, in President George W Bush's words, "Condi won't be rude". All part of Washington's diplomatic efforts to bend Iran to its will in regard to stabilizing Iraq. Also part of those efforts is the US's continued holding of five captured Iranian officials as bargaining chips, writes Gareth Porter. Not to mention stationing the most powerful naval fleet in history off the Iranian coast, Tom Engelhardt adds in a postscript. Needless to say, Rice and the Iranian did not bump.

By Gareth Porter (with a postscript by Tom Engelhardt)
Asia Times

"......The linkage of the five Iranian prisoners with a strategy to get Iran to use its influence with the Shi'ites, the refusal of the Bush administration to release the five, despite Rice's conclusion that they were no longer "useful", and the administration's pursuit of "dialogue" with Iran and Iraq all suggest that administration hardliners have regarded the Iranian prisoners from the beginning as hostages to be given up in return for Iranian cooperation on Iraq......

Iran has always insisted that the US must signal a change in its policy toward Tehran before any direct diplomatic dialogue could begin. That would mean at least reciprocating Iranian gestures of goodwill, if not acknowledging that the US is prepared to address legitimate Iranian concerns about US policies.

Rice's initial suggestion that the Iranians should be released seems to reflect an awareness on the part of realists within the administration that the US cannot have a diplomatic dialogue with Iran while holding Iranian hostages as bargaining chips - and threatening to take even more. But her cave-in to the hardline position suggests that Cheney still has Bush's ear on Iran policy."

"......But something was missing - as it is regularly from American reporting on the US/Iranian face-off. The Bush administration is, at this very moment, sending a third aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, to the Persian Gulf. Although the three carriers and their strike forces will add up to a staggering display of US military power off the Iranian coast, American journalists aren't much impressed. Evidently, it's not considered off the diplomatic page or particularly provocative to mass your carrier battle groups this way, despite the implicit threat to pulverize Iranian nuclear and other facilities. Journalistically speaking, this is both blindingly strange and the norm on our one-way planet. If Iranians send the materials to make some roadside bombs into Iraq (as the Bush administration, at least, continually claims is the case), it's a huge deal, if not an act of war; but put the most powerful fleet in history off the Iranian coast? No sweat. "