in Israel's hands:
Tuesday's Arab-Israeli peace summit in Annapolis, Maryland, is supposed to be about resolving long-standing Palestinian issues, the Golan Heights, and other contentious matters. But, increasingly, it is framed in the United States and Israeli media as a dual-purpose conference, the other being the containment of Iran.Afrasiabi/AsiaTimes 27.Nov.07
Thus, an editorial in the Jerusalem Post writes that "the process that Annapolis seeks to launch will be inherently conditional on Western success against the Iranian challenge ... The idea that holding an Arab-Israeli peace summit would be a setback for Iran is a valid one." The more liberal Ha'aretz went even further by stating the goal of the Annapolis conference to be the formation of a "global coalition against Iran".
Similarly, in the US a number of pundits have painted Annapolis as a "means of sorts of cementing a coalition against Iran and its allies", to paraphrase Tamar Cofman Wittes of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. According to Cofman and a host of media pundits paraded on American television news programs, Annapolis is President George W Bush's wakeup call to the world on the "Iran threat".
[...]
[The Us has been] relatively blind to what another Tehran analyst, Elias Hazrati, has termed as "substantial reduction of radical and offensive positions in Iran's foreign policy during the past few months". In his "The road for compromise with Tehran is open", Hazrati has, however, placed disproportionate blame, for lack of adequate progress in resolving the nuclear crisis, on the government of Ahmadinejad, without adequately taking into consideration the US's schizophrenic, contradictory, approach that, as in the run-ups to the Annapolis summit, fuels the very Iranian radicalism that it purports to disfavor. This it does by falsely accusing Iran in Iraq and ignoring the impressive results of Iran-IAEA cooperation in a relatively short time.
"We are committed that the IAEA's next report will be even more positive," Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi...
