Engaging Iran

In less than ten days after his inauguration as 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama has taken certain initiatives that indicate a departure from the policies of his Republican predecessor.
He ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison facility, sent George Mitchell to the Middle East, announced the appointment of Richard Holbrooke as special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan and expressed US willingness to engage Iran in direct dialogue. According to some reports the US officials have already held "discrete talks" with Iran to sound out Tehran for flexibility on issues ranging from nuclear proliferation, Middle East peace process and the Persian Gulf. These overtures have been supported by the US allies and cautiously welcomed by Iran.
US-Iran relations had suffered a lot during the Bush administration due to the intransigent American position on the Iranian nuclear issue. At root was the last administration's mindset shaped by neocon doctrine that portrayed Iran as a hostile country calling it a member of axis of evil along with Syria and North Korea. However, US efforts to isolate Iran globally and regionally met with failure.
Iran's economic and commercial relations with Pakistan, India, China, Japan and Russia witnessed a substantial growth and its role in the Middle East, especially in stabilizing the situation in Iraq has openly been recognized and appreciated. The security environment in West Asia would have been much better had the United States followed a policy of engagement with Iran instead of demonstrating hostility to the strategically located Islamic republic. In order to cover its own failures in Iraq, the United States levelled baseless allegations against Iran for sending arms to the insurgents. The fact of the matter is that Tehran showed great restraint on extremely provocative situation in Iraq despite devastative anti-Shiite bomb attacks in Baghdad and Karbala. In Afghanistan, Iran's assistance has played a critical role in the building of infrastructure and development of the country's economy. On both these issues, Iran's position has proved helpful to the achievement of US strategic goals. However, US hostility towards Iran continued unabated.
The main area of US-Iran contention is, of course, Iran's uranium enrichment programme, which the United States alleges, is a covert attempt by Tehran to manufacture nuclear weapons. Iran is a signatory to nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has insisted that its nuclear programme is only for peaceful purposes.
True, there are certain reservations about Iran's nuclear programme in the west, and these reservations arise from Iranian inability to provide satisfactory answers to some IAEA queries and allow international inspection of its nuclear installations. But, as Mohammad ElBaradei, DG IAEA said in a recent CNN interview, there are two aspects of Iran's nuclear question: one is technical and other is political.