1.

IRAN-IRAQ STATEMENT

Islamic Republic News Agency
May 19, 2005

http://www.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-234/0505190699151718.htm

Iran and the Iraqi transitional government issued a joint statement in Baghdad on Thursday.

Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi arrived in Baghdad Tuesday at the head of a delegation on a three-day official visit to discuss avenues for consolidating friendly bilateral relations with Iraq.

Kharrazi said during his visit to Iraq he held constructive talks with senior officials of the country in a brotherly and friendly atmosphere.

Iran and Iraq stressed the importance of promoting the level of bilateral relations and cooperation in political, economic and security fields due to deep-rooted historical, cultural and religious ties between the two nations.

The sides agreed to set up Iran-Iraq joint high commission to be headed by Iran's First Vice-President Mohammad Reza Aref and Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

Tehran and Baghdad laid an emphasis on Iraq's national unity, territorial sovereignty, stability and political independence and welcomed recent positive political developments in that country including holding broad-based elections, establishment of National Assembly and the transitional government.

They assessed such measures as major steps to establish stability in Iraq and the region and stressed continuation of political and democratic trend in Iraq based on the U.N. resolutions.

Iran welcomed efforts adopted by the Iraqi transitional government in inviting all Iraqi groups and tribes to participate in the ruling and safeguard unity and national solidarity and called for further cooperation and support of the neighboring states to this end.

The two states condemned all terrorist measures in Iraq and rejected efforts to attribute terrorism to Islam and Muslims. They stressed terrorism runs counter with Islamic values and principles.

The two countries highlighted the importance of providing help to the Iraqi people and government to establish stability and security and welcomed expansion of bilateral security cooperation.

They called for holding the second round of talks between ministers of Iraq neighboring states, saying such gesture will be in line with delegating the country's affairs to its forces and accelerating withdrawal of multi-national forces from Iraq in accordance with the U.N. resolutions.

The statement mandates the Iraqi interim government to adopt measures to release Iranian pilgrims who are in Iraqi prisoners upon orders by Iraqi prime minister.

Based on the statement, the sides have pledged to inaugurate the two countries' consul-general offices in Iraqi cities of Basra and Karbala and the Iranian cities of Khorramshahr and Kermanshah in two months.

An Iraqi delegation will be visiting Tehran within the next two months to hold final negotiations with Iranian officials in this regard.

Tehran and Baghdad also stressed trial of former Iraqi regime's officials in a fair court following war and anti-human crimes and military attack on the Iraqi, Iranian and Kuwaiti nations.

The Iranian and Iraqi officials condemned Zionist regime atrocities against the defenseless Palestinian nation and called for more international support to restore the Palestinians' rights.

2.

IRAQI GOVERNMENT, IN STATEMENT WITH IRAN, ADMITS FAULT FOR 1980's WAR
By Sabrina Tavernise

New York Times
May 20, 2005
Page A08

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/middleeast/20iraq.html

[PHOTO CAPTION: Mourners carried the coffin of Mohammed Tahir al-Allaq, a Shiite cleric allied with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who was slain Wednesday.]

BAGHDAD -- In a move that is likely to inflame further Sunni Arab resentments, the Iraqi government publicly acknowledged for the first time on Thursday that Iraq was the aggressor in 1980 when it touched off a bloody eight-year war with Iran.

In a joint statement at the end of a three-day visit by the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, the new Shiite-led Iraqi government said that Saddam Hussein, the overthrown Iraqi leader, and other officials in his government must be put on trial for committing "military aggression against the people of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait," as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes.

It was an effort to bring to a close the bitter legacy of the war in which nearly a million people were estimated to have died and tens of thousands more were displaced as refugees.

An Iraqi Foreign Ministry official who helped write the communiqué, Labeed Abbawi, said the admission was intended not as an acknowledgement of guilt on the part of the Iraqi state or people, who also suffered staggering casualties in the war. Rather, he said, it was meant to lay the responsibility for the war squarely on Mr. Hussein and other leaders of his government, many of whom face trials later this year for their roles in the killing of Iraqis.

"The file of the war, we want to put it behind us," he said. "We want to open a new path of cooperation."

Even so, it was a gesture of warmth toward Iran, which has long sought formal recognition of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against it during the war, and underscored how the political landscape here has shifted, with Iraqi Shiites, many of whom spent years in exile in Iran, now running the government.

The statement is not likely to sit well with Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who ran the country for decades but have been largely left out of the National Assembly, which will draft the new Iraqi constitution, since boycotting national elections in January. Shiites control the government for the first time in modern Iraqi history, and Sunni Arabs, isolated politically, have begun to chafe under their rule.

Sunni resentment has hardened recently, with a leading Sunni cleric accusing a government militia, made up largely of Shiites, of carrying out mosque raids and killings. On Thursday, two Sunni groups called for the temporary closing of dozens of Baghdad mosques as a protest.

"People will not accept it," said Saleh Mutlak, a member of the National Dialogue Council, a coalition of Sunni Arab political leaders, of the admission of responsibility for the war. "It looks like these people want to pay back the favor that Iran did for them," he said, referring to Iraq's new government.

Historians still debate the precise reasons for the start of the war between the two countries in 1980. It began during the Iranian revolution, and some experts say the new Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, agitated for a religious war to incite Iraq's large Shiite population to rebellion.

Others have accused Mr. Hussein of starting the war, saying he was seeking to capitalize on the chaos in Iran to overturn a 1975 agreement that fixed what he considered an unjust border in the Shatt al Arab, the waterway the two countries share at its southern end, and to seize the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan.

A United Nations investigation after the war effectively assigned responsibility for the start of the war to Mr. Hussein, said Farideh Farhi, a professor of Iranian politics at the University of Hawaii, but Iran's claims of huge sums in war reparations unresolved.

Ms. Farhi said the statement Thursday appeared to be directed more at Mr. Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iran, an issue very important to Iranians. As the Iraqis drew up guidelines for the trials of Mr. Hussein and other Baath Party leaders, they decided not to extend prosecution to any crime perpetrated outside Iraq's borders, and Iranians want international recognition that they suffered under Iraqi gas and chemical weapons attacks.

"The issue for Iranians is not whether or not Iraq is identified as the aggressor," she said. "That was something that had been settled before. The issue that is not settled for them is the issue of war crimes. During the time the Iraqis were using chemical weapons on Iran, the international community was not willing to take a side on that issue."

Underscoring Iran's ties to the religious leadership in Iraq, Mr. Kharazi called on the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in the holy city of Najaf on Thursday. The Iranian minister's visit began on Tuesday, just two days after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Iraq.

Meanwhile, in an incident likely to provoke more anger among Sunni Arabs here, eight people, including guards working for a National Assembly member, Sheik Fawaz al-Jarba, were killed in a firefight involving American troops in the northern city of Mosul on Thursday. The American military said in a statement that an American helicopter had been called to the home of Sheik Jarba, and fired at gunmen it described as terrorists on the roof.

A gun battle ensued, the military said, and some members of the sheik's security force were killed. The statement did not say whether the men died in the helicopter fire.

Mr. Jarba said terrorists attacked his house as well as the car of some some relatives traveling nearby, but that in a case of mistaken identity American troops who responded killed three of his own guards.

Mr. Jarba said he did not witness the deaths of those three guards, but that his other guards told him they had been killed by the Americans.

Also on Thursday, a car bomb exploded outside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, killing two Iraqis and injuring six more, an Interior Ministry official said. Earlier in the day, gunmen shot and killed a senior official in the Oil Ministry, another in a series of assassinations.

Three American soldiers were killed, one in an attack on an American base in the city of Ramadi, and two others in central Baghdad, when gunmen attacked their convoy.

In another sign of just how far the relationship between Iraq and Iran has progressed since the administration of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari was sworn in, the communiqué said Iran had agreed to open consulates in Basra and Karbala, Shiite-dominated cities in southern and south central Iraq. For its part, Iraq will open consulates in Kermanshah and Khorramshahr, cities in western Iran near the Iraqi border.

The communiqué pledged border security improvements, condemned Israel and, in a clear appeal to Iraq's Sunni Arabs, called for the participation of all nationalities and sects in the new government.

--Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and an Iraqi employee of the New York Times from Mosul.

3.

Commentary

TKO BY AXIS OF EVIL
By Arnaud de Borchgrave

United Press International
May 20, 2005

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050520-123904-7147r

WASHINGTON -- Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi visits Iraq for the best part of a week, confers with Iraq's new government in Baghdad's Green Zone while suicide bombers wreak havoc outside, then travels to Najaf for an audience with Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's supreme Shiite leader (who has always declined to meet with U.S. officials), and caps things off with a joint Iran-Iraq pledge to respect each other's sovereignty and independence, and reject any link between Islam and terrorism.

Iran and Iraq, now a U.S. ally, also agreed to boost mutual political, security and economic cooperation, and set up a higher joint committee to be headed by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and the First Deputy President of Iran Mohammad Reza Aref.

For starters, Iraq acknowledged it started the war on Iran in 1980, a conflict that lasted eight years and took 1 million lives on each side. The joint Iran-Iraq communiqué also made clear the war criminal was Saddam Hussein.

Iran suddenly seemed to vindicate those who have long argued the main victor of the U.S. invasion would be Iran, not the United States.

Not bad for a charter member of President Bush's axis of evil. Kharrazi, sans helmet and body armor, clearly outshined U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, with helmet and body armor. He also had more meetings with Iraqi topsiders than Rice. And this after 12,000 U.S. casualties, including 1,620 killed, and some $200 billion in U.S. treasure.

[Visit a blog related to this article. blog.wpherald.com/wphblog/?p=25]

The Bush administration has gradually painted itself into a corner in its diplomatic campaign to get Iran to cough up its nuclear ambitions. The trick now would be to leap over the wet paint and alight on a dry spot. But a giant geopolitical leap is required.

Acting as the White House's stalking horses in negotiations with Iran, the EU3 -- France, Germany and the United Kingdom -- never made it out of the paddock. The United States offered to lift its economic embargo on spare parts for Iran's U.S.-made civilian aircraft, as well as to facilitate Iran's membership in the World Trade Organization (normally a 10-year process). Unimpressed, the Iranians answered if the EU3 and the United States were really serious about economic incentives, they would have to forget about trinkets and think big.

In return for allowing international inspection of every stage of the uranium enrichment process, Tehran expects a major incentives package, which, at the very least, should include "10 nuclear reactors." The package, said Hossein Mousavian, a negotiator for the Supreme National Security Council, must include inducements to enhance Iran's security, political stability and economic development.

The U.S. carrot of spare parts for used airplanes was dismissed as a "joke" at the end of three months of negotiations. Iran can get those via the free port of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the most likely candidate to emerge from the June 17 presidential election as Iran's next leader, said he wanted to repair relations with the United States but the Bush administration had to take the first steps to end 25 years of enmity. Considering the alternative, this seemed like the better part of diplomatic valor.

Failing a new approach, the EU3 negotiations with Iran will end deadlocked. Then the United States will ask the U.N. Security Council to vote draconian economic sanctions against Iran -- which Russia or China will veto. Russia because it is making good money assisting Iran with its nuclear power project that Moscow says is carefully monitored to prevent weapons-making capability. China because it is counting on Iranian oil to fuel its vertiginous economic expansion.

Next? The military option to enforce President Bush's pledge to nip Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions in the bud. Experts estimate Iran is between one and three years from being able to produce a nuclear bomb. Israel gives it a much shorter time line and is ready to launch well-rehearsed bunker-busting air strikes against several nuclear facilities, inflicting enough damage to delay Iran's weapons capabilities by five to 10 years.

As Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told Bush in their last tête-à-tête at the Crawford ranch in Texas, Israel would rather the United States took the initiative for pre-emptive air strikes against Iran. In the Arab and Muslim worlds, Israeli attacks against Iran would be viewed as authorized by the United States. Israeli Defense Forces bombers would have to fly over Iraq and Saudi Arabia and call on aerial gas stations on their way to Iranian targets and on their way back to Israel.

The bomb-Iran-now lobby is gathering strength in Washington. The United States must halt Iran's nuclear weapons programs by any means necessary, said the Presidential Study Group, sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an Israel-leaning think tank whose board of advisers includes three former secretaries of State (Alexander Haig, Warren Christopher, Lawrence S. Eagleburger) and such neo-conservative luminaries as Richard Perle, R. James Woolsey, Martin Peretz, and Mortimer Zuckerman.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, many of the same voices pooh-poohed the notion of an Iraqi insurgency following the liberation of the country from Saddam's despotic rule. Now they tend to dismiss Iran's retaliatory capabilities. They believe air attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities would accelerate "regime change."

Yet Iran's counter-attacks could also be devastating. To begin with, Iran, with long common borders with both Iraq and Afghanistan, and assets in both countries, could waste U.S. objectives. Iran also has terrorist assets throughout the Middle East -- and beyond -- that could be activated at short notice.

Perhaps we would be better served by acknowledging mistakes in our Iranian policy half a century ago when the CIA greased the skids under the leftwing Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. He was forced out Aug. 19, 1953. His only crime was to nationalize the country's oil industry. The shah, who had fled to Rome during the demonstrations, was brought back after a 10-day absence. The CIA had purchased a massive pro-shah demonstration -- 100,000 people at $1 a head.

If Iraq, now under U.S. tutelage, and Iran, two countries that warred for eight years in the 1980s, can smoke a peace pipe, why can't the Bush administration?