U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday she believed U.S. talks with Iran on stabilizing Iraq would be "useful." Washington and Tehran have long had hostile relations.

Last November, President George W. Bush authorized his ambassador in Iraq to have talks with Iran in what would be unusual contact between the countries.

Ashraf Qazi, U.N. special representative for Iraq, said both Iran and the United States had an interest in the outcome in Iraq.

"This is an initiative that has been in the works for some time and I'm very glad to see that Iran has responded positively because both the United States and Iran ... have a stake in the outcome of the processes that are underway," he said after giving a speech at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.

"Always it's a good thing for people to talk about issues even if they have their differences. But this is a very positive development."

Iranian officials had previously said Tehran was not interested in discussions before U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq.

The United States, which is leading diplomatic efforts to isolate Iran over its nuclear ambitions, accuses Iran of contributing to instability in Iraq. Iran denies the charges.

Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said Tehran accepted "the proposal to help resolve the problems in Iraq and establish an independent government there."

But the embassy statement responding to his comments said: "The future of Iraq will not be decided by the United States, Iran or any other country. Iraqis will decide the future of Iraq.

It noted U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad had been authorized by the White House to enter into talks with Iran on the issue.

Larijani reiterated on Friday that Iran favored an end to Iraq's occupation by U.S.-led forces as a step toward Iraq's full sovereignty.

"Iran's motivation is to help establishment of permanent security in Iraq and get out of suppression by the occupiers," the official IRNA news agency quoted Larijani as saying.

"We insist to have transparent talks (with Washington) and reiterate once again that we would do whatever needed to aid the sovereign Iraqi government."

Chinese ambassador to UN, Wang Guangya, told reporters before all 15 council members met on the Iran crisis, the report should be given to "both the IAEA and the Security Council" simultaneously.

Wang said Russia and China still had differences with a draft statement backed by the United States, Britain and France that expresses "serious concern" about Iran's nuclear program and asks the IAEA to report on whether Tehran had complied with its demands.

"We need to send a message that the Security Council is supporting reinforcing the role of the IAEA, not to replace or take it over from IAEA," Wang said.

The resolution suggests that a report from IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei on Iran's progress to be sent to Security Council within two weeks. But China, Russia and others say this is too short.

"I think at least four weeks to six weeks," Wang said.

Russian ambassador to UN, Andrei Denisov, told reporters: "The crux of the idea is that the leading agency is the IAEA."
"It must pilot the whole process," while the Security Council should remain "informed," he said.

A statement needs the approval of all 15 council members while a resolution requires a minimum of nine votes and no veto from the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.

Both China and Russia have expressed fears that council involvement could result in a cut-off by Iran of IAEA inspections.

No decision is expected until next week, after senior foreign affairs officials from the five powers and Germany meet in New York on Monday to discuss future strategy on Iran.

In a timeline released by FAS on March 15, and so far reported only by long-time disarmament activist Sanford Gottlieb's op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, Kristensen concedes that the USA may be reducing the size of its huge nuclear-weapon stockpile.

However, writes Kristensen, "Global Strike is first and foremost offensive and preemptive in nature and deeply rooted in the expectation that deterrence "will" fail sooner or later. Rather than waiting for the mushroom cloud to appear, a phrase used several times by the Bush administration, the Global Strike mission is focused on defeating the threat before it is unleashed."

So while the USA stockpile is down to about 5,000 or 10,000 nuclear warheads, Kristensen argues that planners of the new regime in military strategy, "simultaneously have created a new mission that reaffirms the importance and broadens the role of nuclear weapons further by changing or lowering the perceived threshold or timing for when nuclear weapons may be used in a conflict. That threshold must be different than in the past, otherwise why include a nuclear option in CONPLAN 8022?"

CONPLAN 8022 is the Pentagon's contingency strike plan that Kristensen is tracking through freedom of information requests. He calls CONPLAN 8022, "a new strike plan developed by STRATCOM [the Pentagon's Strategic Command, tasked with taking the lead in matters of weapons of mass destruction] in coordination with the Air Force and Navy to provide a prompt global strike options to the President with nuclear, conventional, space, and information warfare capabilities."

Kristensen could have also mentioned that the language and logic of CONPLAN looks very much like the thing suggested in 1997 by a blue-ribbon National Defense Panel (NDP) that included top-level military brass and the now recently departed Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

"Rogue states and terrorists, perhaps armed with weapons of mass destruction, may attempt different kinds of attacks, not only on our forces abroad, but in our homeland, in urban areas and perhaps space," warned the first paragraph of the NDP press release on Dec. 1, 1997. While the NDP report encouraged nuclear disarmament agreements such as SALT III, the framework of diplomacy was presented as a stratagem that would have to make do until the USA achieved technological superiority:

"Given the evolving threat and continued improvement of our missile defense technology, a hedging strategy, rather than immediate deployment of a missile defense system, is a sensible approach," said the NDP report. "But, it is important that we proceed in a way that permits rapid deployment if threats should develop and our technologies mature."

The NDP report encouraged the military to "experiment" with solutions to the "power projection challenge" that would be faced in tough cases of threat by missile, when the USA would not have, in the words of one panelist, "access to forward bases, ports, airfields, facilities." Of course, that was years before 9/11.

Kristensen's timeline marks June 2004 as the point where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld orders its implementation so that the president of the USA could be enabled with, "a prompt, global strike capability." Rumsfeld's order was issued approximately one year before release of the Downing Street Memo alleged that the president of the USA had been fixing his facts to meet the needs of his trigger finger.

Six weeks after Rumsfeld gave the order, writes Kristensen, "on August 17, STRATCOM published Global Strike Interim Capability Operations Order (OPORD) which changed the nature of CONPLAN 8022 from a concept plan to a contingency plan. In response, selected bombers, ICBMs, SSBNs, and information warfare units were tasked against specific high-value targets in adversary countries. Finally, on November 18, 2005, Joint Functional Component Command Space and Global Strike achieved Initial Operational capability after being thoroughly tested in the nuclear strike exercise Global Lightning 06."

What this alphabet soup spells out is a process that brings "Global Strike" into operation through military exercises that confirm the readiness of nuclear missiles launched from land, sea, and air. The next "war game" in this series is scheduled for April.

The release of Kristensen's timeline coincided with a scheduled hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. But the hearing was postponed at the last minute.

Says Kristensen, "Because the question of the scope of and assumptions about nuclear weapons use in the Global Strike mission has profound implications for U.S. military strategy and international affairs, it is vital that the Congress, the media, and the public in general get better answers."

Thanks to the din of Bush v. Iran, however, Kristensen's plea for sunlight has not yet been answered. Meanwhile, a contract for the infrastructure for CONPLAN 8022 is scheduled to be awarded in December.

Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. His chapter on civil rights under Clinton and Bush appears in Dime's Worth of Difference, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be reached at: gmosesx@prodigy.nett

The convoy had been returning from a function honouring religious martyrs and war dead. Reports suggested that as many as 12 others had been kidnapped by the gunmen, who were said to have fled across the border into Afghanistan or Pakistan after a brief armed exchange with Iranian security forces.

Sistan-Baluchestan, one of Iran's poorest provinces, has a large ethnic Baluchi Sunni population, which has long complained of religious discrimination at the hands of the Shia majority.

All the victims of Thursday's incident, the most serious in a spate of recent violent clashes in the province, were Sistani and Shia, official Iranian media reported. There was no claim of responsibility but government officials wasted little time in linking the incident with British and US forces stationed in neighbouring Afghanistan.

"We have information that the bandits had meetings with British intelligence services," Iran's national police chief, Esmaeel Ahmadi Moqaddam, a relative of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told state television. "It appears that a plan to create instability and religious hatred similar to the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra [in Iraq] is being pursued here."

Iranian officials have publicly blamed America for last month's attack on Samarra's golden mosque, accusing it of trying to foment chaos in Iraq.

The foreign ministry in Tehran has summoned the Afghan and Pakistani ambassadors to complain that rebels are using their countries, both US allies, as sanctuaries from which to strike Iran.

"We do not consider this to be a limited regional incident. It is related to the plans that the enemy [code for America and Britain] is launching in the bandits' area," an unnamed interior ministry source told the semi-official ILNA news agency.

The accusation echoed similar claims over a spate of bombings in another Iranian province, Khuzestan, bordering Iraq, which has killed more than 20 people in the last year. Iran has accused British forces in Iraq of training ethnic Arab militants to carry out the attacks in the heavily Arab-speaking province. Britain has vigorously denied the allegations.

The latest violence and resulting war of words come amid a backdrop of impending talks between Iran and the US aimed at bringing stability to Iraq.

Addressing Friday prayer worshippers at Tehran University Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said the talks - breaking what is a taboo for many Iranian hardliners opposed to ties with the US -would be limited to Iraq and would not include Iran's nuclear programme or other issues.

Usama al-Najafi, the Iraqi Minister of Industry and Minerals, has said that about one billion dollars will be invested in a number of projects, namely a car assembly plant, steel and glass industries and the manufacturing of electrical appliances and transformers.

Although Iran will put down all the money for the investments, it will own only one third of the projects and the rest will be owned by Iraq, which will start paying 10 years after the completion of the projects. Interest will be extremely low, reportedly one percent, so as to really help Iraqi businessmen who will be involved in the projects with their Iranian counterparts.

Last year, Tehran pledged to extend to Iraq a credit facility of the order of one billion dollars which will be used to encourage Iraqis buy more Iranian products.

There is a real fear that if Iran refuses to yield to pressure either by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or by the UN Security Council to which Iran was formally referred on March 8 then the US would be left with no other option than to strike. The US may indeed have boxed itself into a corner by its threats, which Iran has scornfully rejected.

The view in Whitehall is that if America attacks Iran, it will have to do so alone or with Israel. In private discussions, British officials have made clear that any sort of military campaign against Iran would be "madness".

Despite its close alliance with the US, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has departed publicly from aggressive statements by senior US officials. He has ruled out military action by Britain against Iran as "inconceivable".

Last week, Britain announced it was pulling 800 men out of Iraq one tenth of its force there. This is seen as a signal that Britain is seeking to limit its involvement in America's wars, rather than take on additional commitments.

Carefully monitoring opinion in Washington, British officials have noted with alarm that the advocates of confrontation with Iran, both inside and outside the administration, have triumphed over the few brave souls who dared argue in favour of dialogue and engagement.

Analysts in London are now convinced that Washington's real aim is "regime change" in Tehran, an ambition which goes far beyond merely delaying or halting Iran's nuclear programme.

The Washington Post reported this week that Iran had moved to the top of America's national security agenda. Quite apart from the large teams devoted to the Iran problem in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, 10 people are now working full time on the Iran desk at the State Department, and an American outpost of Tehran-watchers has been established in the Gulf.

Earlier this month US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared: "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran whose policies are directed at developing a Middle East that would be 180 degrees different from the Middle East that we would like to see develop." In a bid to undermine the mullahs, she is planning to spend $85 million expanding American radio and TV broadcasts to Iran and promote internal opposition.

In a widely reported speech on March 7 to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the main pro-Israeli lobby, Vice-President Dick Cheney declared: "The United States is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the [Iranian] regime? We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

On the same day, General Moshe Ya'alon, a former Israeli chief of staff, told a Washington audience that Israel could launch an attack on Iran in several different ways, not just from the air. This was seen as a reference to Israel's Dolphin class submarines, armed with American Harpoon nuclear missiles, which are thought to be targeted at Iran.

As with the invasion of Iraq, the campaign against Iran seems to be driven by neocons and other pro-Israeli activists. Richard Perle one of the most eager advocates of the Iraq war has been beating the drums of war against Iran, as has the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Even Ze'ev Schiff, a usually sober Israeli defence analyst, wrote last week in Haaretz that intelligence services in the West were convinced that Iran was covertly developing nuclear weapons. "There is a secondary, smaller covert channel that is making steady progress towards creating a nuclear weapon," he claimed.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported on March 10 that "in recent months, IDF officers have visited Washington to offer their support for a military strike should the diplomatic channels fail to bring Iran to heel".

American war fever against Iran seem largely to do with Israel. It includes Iran's support for anti-Israeli militant groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks about "wiping Israel off the map", which most independent observers dismiss as an angry response to Israel's brutal oppression of the Palestinians and not in any sense a realistic threat.

President George W. Bush and his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have accused Iran of smuggling sophisticated road-side bombs and military personnel into Iraq, but General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted this week that the US had no proof of such activity.

In claiming that Iran is developing nuclear weapons the US seems in danger of repeating the mistake it made in Iraq. The evidence against Iran is as flimsy and as unproven as was the charge that Iraq's WMD posed an "imminent threat" to America and the world.

There is no sign, however, that Washington is ready to heed the advice of IAEA chief Mohammad Al Baradei, who urged the US to end the "war of words" with Tehran and "engage in a dialogue".

Russia, too, is anxious to avert the danger of war not least to protect its substantial interests in Iran.

Russia is supplying Iran with an advanced air defence system and has almost finished building Iran's first nuclear power station at Bushehr on the Arabian Gulf at a reported cost of $800 million. Moscow is keen to win more nuclear power contracts in Iran where Energy Minister Parviz Fattah this week announced plans to start building a second nuclear power station within six months.

Russia's Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, described Iran's referral to the Security Council as "too hasty".

"This move is detrimental," he said on Russian state TV. "Not one real problem can be decided with such a move? We don't want to be the ones to remind [everyone] who was right and who was not in Iraq, although the answer is obvious."

A Russian compromise proposal to produce nuclear fuel for Iranian power stations in Russia, while allowing Iran to enrich a small amount of uranium on its own soil, was shot down by the US. "Enrichment and reprocessing on Iranian soil is not acceptable," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.

In confronting Iran, the US may not have fully weighed the possible consequences: the extreme danger to US forces in Iraq; soaring oil prices; and encouragement for the world-wide jihadi movement which is bound to result in terror attacks against US and Israeli interests. It looks as if the US has no coherent policy towards Iran only bluster.

Iran has an "inalienable right" under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to acquire atomic knowledge for peaceful purposes. It has the ability to hit back hard against any aggressor. And, even were it to acquire nuclear weapons a remote possibility several years in the future it could surely be contained and deterred by the immensely greater nuclear arsenals of the US and Israel.

The inescapable conclusion would seem to be that the US should start direct talks with Iran as soon as possible. It may be the only way to defuse the threat of war, to provide the US with an exit strategy from Iraq and to build bridges to an inflamed Muslim public opinion.

(Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs)