In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,†Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, takes on the contention, by Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders, that Iran had a peace proposal on the table which was ignored by the U.S.
Writes Michaels:Â In “Iran: the enemy that almost isn’t,” (Globe and Mail, Feb. 21) Doug Saunders argued that Tehran could well return to its halcyon days under former president and “pro-Western reformist” Mohammed Khatami, who is again a candidate for president of Iran.
Saunders claimed that in the spring of 2003, Khatami sent a Swiss official to Washington with a “peace offer”: “In exchange for recognizing Israel, cutting off Hamas and proving it had abolished any nuclear-weapons plans, Iran wanted an end to sanctions, normal diplomatic relations with the U.S. and recognition of its role in the region.”
Saunders insisted that the deal was rejected by the Bush administration, because “nobody in the White House thought it would look good to make peace with Iran, a country that only the year before had been made a rhetorical component in Mr. Bush’s ‘axis of evil.’”
In the end, Saunders wrote, “the offer was stuck in a drawer. That diplomatic snub was one of several humiliations, diplomatic and economic, that led to the defeat of Mr. Khatami’s reformists in subsequent elections and the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s neo-conservative [sic] zealots.”
If all this sounds too good to be true, that might be because it almost certainly isn’t true.
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