US-Iran relations: Heading for confrontation?

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The demonisation of Iran by successive US administrations and the media has been so successful that any attempt at offering a more balanced view of Iran is almost certain to be construed as an apology for a 'backlash', 'rogue' and an 'outlaw' state, words used by US officials to describe Iran. Under the Clinton administration, however, the demonisation process has reached a new height. Its list of the backlash states which 'seriously threaten the democratic order around them'1 are Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Iraq and Iran. James Woolsey, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has described these states in a more colourful manner. Referring to the end of communism, he says the West has 'slain a large dragon', but we live now 'in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes' 2 Of these snakes, Libya appears to have been fairly 'tamed' since the bombing by the Reagan administration of Colonel Gaddafi's headquarters in 1986; Cuba and the United States have in the recent past been successfully engaged in a dialogue on the issue of curbing the number of refugees going to the USA, and Cuba is not seen as a serious threat to the security of its neighbours; the agreement between the USA and North Korea on the nuclear issue has opened the door for cooperation between them; and Saddam Hussein can do no more than rattle sabres. Finally, with the peace agreement signed between Israel and the PLO and with Syria ready to make peace with Israel, Iran is left as the only 'rogue' state capable of threatening peace in the region and beyond. This exaggerated image of Iran as a threat to the security of the Persian Gulf has so seriously and for so long dominated the minds of the top US foreign policy makers that the question of Iran was put on the agenda of the summit talks between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin in Washington in September 1994. In order to put the Americans at ease, Yeltsin felt the need to assure them publicly that Russia had no intention of signing new arms agreements with the Islamic Republic.3 And again in May 1995 President Clinton asked Yeltsin to cancel a $1 billion sale of light water nuclear reactors to Iran. Russia refused to do so, arguing that the reactors were similar to a reactor that the Americans were selling to North Korea. And in June of the same year President Clinton pressed, again unsuccessfully, the Group of Seven (G7) meeting in Halifax, Canada, to follow the US trade embargo on Iran in response to what he called 'Iran's continuing support for terrorism, including support for acts which undermine the