Is Obama administration trying to reach out to Iran?

US Secretary of State John Kerry’s call for Iran to help end wars in the Middle East could be a deceptive move, but it could also mean the Obama administration is really trying to reach out to Iran in order to resolve the region’s problems, an American scholar and political analyst says.

Dr. Kevin Barrett, editor of We Are Not Charlie Hebdo and scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Friday when asked to comment on Kerry’s statement made on Thursday after the ministerial meetings of the six-nation [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council ([P]GCC) leaders in the Bahraini capital Manama.

Kerry accused the Islamic Republic of being involved in the disruptive activities and “the destabilizing actions” in the Middle East region.

"We call on Iran to constructively join in the efforts to make peace and to help us to resolve Syria and rather than to continue to send weapons to Houthis, join in the effort... to make peace and to work toward a cessation of hostilities," he said.

Dr. Barrett said, “What we are really seeing in the Middle East is that the so-called US allies – which really should be called the regimes propped up by American power, that would fall down if Americans were not propping them up, especially Saudi Arabia and the [Persian] Gulf monarchies, and Israel – these are the countries which are actually responsible for the wars and destabilization of the Middle East. So why is Kerry asking Iran for peace?”

“Well, at one level of course it is a deceptive move to try blame Iran for the fact that the various actors in the Middle East that want sovereignty of their own, that would include the forces in Yemen that are trying to stop the Saudis from essentially colonizing Yemen and building a pipeline across it, which this war is really about, and Hezbollah, and [the government in] Iraq, these are the forces in the Middle East that are trying move toward a non-imperial region, an independent region, and they’re not under the command of Iran by any means. But Iran is offering a certain amount of support and encouragement to some of these forces,” he added.

“So at one level, Kerry is basically lying and trying to blame Iran for the troubles in the Middle East which is not Iran’s fault. It’s simply because the region is undergoing changes and it has been destroyed, or massively damaged, by the 9/11 wars launched by the US on behalf of Israel,” the analyst stated. 

“So along with this deception, a kind of surface level one in which Kerry appears try to blame Iran for situation that is really more the fault of the US itself, and actually Israel more than anybody else, because it was Israel that bombed the Twin Towers on September 11th [2001], blew them up, and launched 9/11 wars, it is also perhaps possible that Kerry referred indirectly the possibility that the US, or at least the Obama administration, is maybe increasingly willing to work with Iran,” he noted.

“We’ll see what happens during the next administration, but there are people in this Obama administration, likely including the president himself, who recognize the folly of the last fifteen years or perhaps decades of US Middle East policy, the folly of the US alliance with Saudi Arabia, and of the US subservience to Israel that has led to these grossly misguided and counterproductive policies. On that level, Kerry is maybe ventriloquizing an Obama administration policy that ‘Hey, let’s work with Iran. The US and Iran need to work together to save the region,’” he pointed out.  

“But of course the first thing that the US needs to do is to read its co-called allies the riot act. The Saudi royals wouldn’t survive 24 hours if the US pulled out all of its support, and backed the forces of freedom and independence in the Arabian Peninsula. It would be gone. It is purely an artificial creation of US power. It has been ever since Roosevelt signed an agreement in 1945,” the scholar said.  

“Likewise Israel wouldn’t last very long without being propped up by US power as well, because it’s not viewed as a legitimate state by any of its neighbors. The people of the region see the genocidal occupation of Palestine for what it is,” he continued.

“So if the US were to become an honest broker in the region, the first country it would work with would be Iran, which is only truly democratic country in the region, a country that has not launched wars on any of its neighbors for centuries,” Dr. Barrett observed. “And it is possible that Kerry’s statement could be interpreted as saying that at some point the US has really to reach out to Iran.”

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