Epstein Secrets

t Presid=nt Hassan Rouhani and I were leading the Iranian nuclear negotiating team =lmost 10 years ago, just before the election of former president Mahmoud A=madinejad, I presented a proposal to our Western counterparts that contained an array of measures designed by i=dependent, non-Iranian scientists

helped unleash change. For decades, th= Middle East was locked in place by the Cold War and petro politics. The U=S. supported countries opposed to the Soviet Union and rich in oil—Persian Gulf monarchies, Jordan and Egypt s=arting in the mid-1970s—while the Soviets supported their friends— Syri=, Iraq, Libya at

te with Iran to distract attention from the fact that Israel continues to occupy Palestinian land. The unwise rhetoric employed by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about the Holocaust and Israel armed Israeli hardliners with the perfect excuse to encourage "the most crippling economic sanctions" o

ill having made great strides toward nuclear capability. Such seemingly sober calculations miss the fact that the United States is not dealing with the Soviet Union but a beleaguered middling power that may still be coerced into more expansive concessions. In more than a decade of nuclear diplomacy, some analy

Russia was returning to the international arena as a major player, they called for it to put its full weight in favour of the peace process and of Mahmoud Abbas, "the last moderate Palestinian leader." America's monopoly of the peace process had merely provided a cover for Israeli expansion. Speaker

ran's regime gains legitimacy by demonising foreign powers. The cold war seems stable by comparison with a nuclear Middle East—and yet America and the Soviet Union were sometimes scarily close to Armageddon. No wonder some people want a pre-emptive strike. But military action is not the solution to a nuclear

my of neutral and universal human rights. It would be an uphill fight because the primary speaker invited to address the second Durban Conference was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying President of Iran. I worked with several genuine human rights organizations in an effort to shame the Human Right

ll seem worth the apparently unrewarded efforts. I attended a concern by the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, several years after he left the Soviet Union. Since he had been a sometimes threatened advocate of human rights in 323 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017410 4.2.12 WC: 191694 Moscow, I wanted to meet him,