The battle of the marginalized, or the surrender of uranium

At the UN General Assembly, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called George Bush “the devil.” Chavez will be able to scare the world with this “Lucifer” for a couple more years. Until November 2008, when the next presidential elections will be held in the United States.

In four or eight years, history will repeat itself again. Venezuela will have Chavez, and the United States will have a new president. And so on until Chavez either dies of old age or is killed by his military friends or Trotskyist friends. This is true, speaking of democracy...

Still, well done Kofi Annan. What a powerful, well-oiled mechanism he left for the next UN Secretary General. What performance did you organize before leaving? If tickets were sold for meetings of the General Assembly, I think the proceeds from them would definitely cover part of the debt of some long-established developing countries to the UN.

This General Assembly, of course, distinguished itself, judging by external indicators - by the speeches of the leaders of some states, which at first resembled a battle of marginalized people.

I wrote about Chavez above. Putin was not there, and although Lavrov arrived, judging by his speech, he was somehow reluctant. That is, he was bored himself and did not disturb others from yawning. In general, not marginal yet.

But George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seemed to be fighting ideological battles in earnest. What powerful rhetoric these two demonstrated. What deep, fresh and bold thoughts. What reproaches and warnings were put forward? You will listen.

“Your government must abandon uranium enrichment,” the US President explained to the Iranian population. “It’s not for you, the imperialists, to tell us what we need to do,” the Iranian president answered him. At the same time declaring his love for the whole world. Including, by the way, Jews. Ahmadinejad still considers the latter, unlike the Zionists, to be people. Thank you very much, Mahmoud.

However, I don’t want to go into Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israeli rhetoric. Because his words partly remind me of the editorials from the Völkische Beobachter.

I undertake to assert that there was no battle of the marginalized. That is, more than enough marginalized people came to the General Assembly. Take Chavez, for example. But Bush's duel with Ahmadinejad was intended for external use only.

It seems that the outcome in the situation with the Iranian nuclear program is very close. And the solution to the crisis promises to be peaceful. That is, Ahmadinejad surrendered on terms favorable to Iran.

Judge for yourself. As far as I know, French President Jacques Chirac flew to New York just to talk to George Bush about Iran.

Otherwise, why would Chirac need to participate in this horror if the current UN General Assembly was honored by the presence of just over twenty presidents. The Frenchman did not need to see most of them. Not his level. The last General Assembly, for example, was attended by more than eighty heads of state, including the leader of France.

Chirac managed to persuade Bush to give the European trio (Great Britain, Germany and France) time to hold another round of negotiations with Tehran. Let me remind you that the deadline for Tehran’s response to proposals from six countries (Europeans, the USA, China and Russia), which contained a threat to apply sanctions, expired on August 18.

At the same time, White House press secretary Tony Snow avoided answering the question about the time frame set by Bush for European negotiations with Iran.

For the first time in the entire period of opposition to the Ahmadinejad regime, the White House, represented by the same Snow, decided not to comment on the provocative speech of the Iranian president. “If Iran refuses to enrich uranium, we have prepared a lot of favorable conditions for it,” the Administration’s press secretary said significantly.

On the same day, when the Tehran “sage” launched an attack on the imperialists and the world order they organized at the UN, US Undersecretary of State for Policy Nicholas Burns spoke in the Senate.

The head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, called Burns to share the State Department's position on the situation with Iran. It was clear to everyone, including the experienced Lugar, that Burns would not say anything sensational.

The Deputy Secretary of State has never been seen in public revelations. However, after carefully reading his opening statement, I managed to find one key sentence.

“Negotiations with Iran must be approached with patience and persistence,” the Deputy Secretary of State noted. In my opinion, this phrase makes it clear why Lugar called Burns: to declare a change in the military mood in Washington to a peaceful one.

However, there is another explanation for why Bush hit the brakes on the train rushing towards a military solution to the Iranian crisis. Some sources claim that the US President has taken a break because there is a struggle in the Administration between two camps approaching the solution to the Iranian nuclear problem from diametrically opposed positions.

In one of them are the “troops” of the State Department, close people of Bush Sr. and retired generals. The latter actively argue that America is not ready for a war against Iran.

In the other are the people of US Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and some neoconservatives. They believe that Iran is testing Washington's patience and Tehran should make it clear that it is playing with fire.

If Israeli experts on Iran are to be believed, the Bush Administration has no more than two years left to deal with Ahmadinejad in any of the ways offered to him. True, in this case, patience and persistence in negotiations with the “peacemaker” from Tehran may turn out to be a completely unsuitable way out of the current situation.

The author is a special correspondent for Kommersant Publishing House in Washington.