Yesterday it was Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s turn to patronise the Israel Lobby conference in Washington when she addressed AIPAC delegates [1] calling for “Our partners in Europe and beyond… to exploit Iran's vulnerabilities more vigorously and impose greater costs on the regime, economically, financially, politically and diplomatically”.

What went almost unnoticed was the hint that the time for talk was over – assuming there ever was a time that the US and Israel sat down and talked with Iran; if there was then I must have blinked and missed it. "Diplomacy is not a synonym for talking," Rice told the conference, pushing back against those who are calling for such engagement. "True diplomacy means structuring a set of incentives and disincentives to produce change in behaviour."

Statements like this are designed purely to give the world the impression that Iran has been given every opportunity to capitulate to US demands that it stops doing something that it isn’t actually doing. The US and its allies have no evidence whatsoever to support their claims that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. The reason the US and their allies don’t wasn’t to sit down with Iran is because they know that there isn’t anything to actually discuss. The US and Israel will soon claim that Iran has ‘defied the world’ and has no alternative but to launch an attack against Iran in order to ‘eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat to the world’.

The reality is that what they actually want to eliminate is a regime that stands in the way of Israeli aspirations for a Greater Israel. The Bush administration and the Israeli Zionists know full well that sanctions against Iran are not going to bring about regime change; indeed, such sanctions are more likely to stiffen Iranian resolve to resist US and Israeli demands rather than cause a backlash to the Iranian government’s posture in standing up to the US.

Time is running out for the US and Israel as the US presidential elections roll ever closer. They are becoming desperate to gain public support for an attack on Iran and the ‘Hate Iran Week’ AIPAC conference is their last big chance of swinging the American people behind them to support an attack.


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[1]  http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1212041469503&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull