Eurasia Press & News
TEHRAN (FNA)- Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski urged Washington to establish ties with Iran saying the move would benefit the US.
Brzezinski, a campaign adviser to US president-elect Barack Obama, helped former President Jimmy Carter to open full diplomatic ties with communist China.
He stressed that the US should adopt a similar approach to Iran.
“One of the reasons that I do favor a dialogue with the Iranians, and if it is feasible, the establishment of normal diplomatic relationships, is that I think that would help promote political change in a country which is far less centrally controlled, far less subject to effective state authority than was or is the case in the People’s Republic of China,” The Salt Lake Tribune quoted Brzezinski as saying.
He made the remarks at a forum at the Brookings Institution in Washington marking 30 years since the establishment of formal relations with China, which the US had refused to recognize after the communist takeover in 1949.
The US and China opened embassies in early 1979 to establish official diplomatic ties.
Brzezinski, in an interview with Ha’aretz on Monday, said that a military strike against Iran is not a “real option” for Israel or the US to halt Tehran’s nuclear program.
“(The military option) is not a real option for the US and it is not a real option for Israel because Israel doesn’t have a capability to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities,” he said.
The United States and Iran broke diplomatic relations in April 1980, after Iranian students seized the United States’ espionage center at its embassy in Tehran. The two countries have had tense relations ever since.
Yet, the two countries’ relations specially deteriorated following Tehran’s progress in the field of civilian nuclear technology. Washington and its Western allies accuse Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, while they have never presented any corroborative evidence to substantiate their allegations. Iran denies the charges and insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
Tehran stresses that the country has always pursued a civilian path to provide power to the growing number of Iranian population, whose fossil fuel would eventually run dry.
Despite the rules enshrined in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) entitling every member state, including Iran, to the right of uranium enrichment, Tehran is now under three rounds of UN Security Council sanctions for turning down West’s illegitimate calls to give up its right of uranium enrichment.
Tehran has dismissed West’s demands as politically tainted and illogical, stressing that sanctions and pressures merely consolidate Iranians’ national resolve to continue the path.
Political observers believe that the United States has remained at loggerheads with Iran mainly over the independent and home-grown nature of Tehran’s nuclear technology, which gives the Islamic Republic the potential to turn into a world power and a role model for other third-world countries. Washington has laid much pressure on Iran to make it give up the most sensitive and advanced part of the technology, which is uranium enrichment, a process used for producing nuclear fuel for power plants.