Part 1 - Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khameni has warned the United States against contempleting a military attack against Iran. In a rare appearance to mark the death anniversary of Hazrat Ali al-Mortaza (AS), the Supreme Leader said, If there was a brainy man among the American leaders, which I very much doubt, he would know that an attack on Iran would be to the detriment of the United States and benefit of our revolution.

The Iranian leader declared: Those who believe that Iran will buckle under pressure and threats are badly mistaken. We will not cave in even for as much as the tip of a needle. The United States had threatened Iran to be ready for its military containment. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a beautiful and pleasant land of peace, tranquillity and many fascinations.

It is the true land of the pure and a haven to the faithfuls. Iran is the linchpin of Islamic unity and security. Investors look at Iran as a friendly and hospitable investment destination. This part of the globe is full of promise and has tremendous opportunities, not for the adventurers but for those who love to see that there prevails an atmosphere of peace, amity and brotherhood all over the planet of our living.

Iran, like any other peaceful and democratic state, is avid to see that humankind, and not the military colossus of any nation, is strengthened in all material particulars in the world all over. That is also the demand of all poor and developing nations. There was a time when Charles de Gaulle of France refused to meet a Japanese prime minister, dismissing him as a transistor salesman.

The Westerners hated Chinese people, calling them opium eaters, and Americans would not mind branding the Arabs as savage bedouins. Gone are the days when the United States considered the Shah of Iran as its vassal and claimed Iran as its satellite state set up to harness its militaristic ends and work as a CIA headquarters in the region. Indeed, there was a time when the Soviet Union reigned supreme on the earth.

But times have since changed enormously and the world is a very different place today. The Soviet Union has died its natural death and the threat of communism now exists no more. China is fastly digging its steps to leap forward on the road to becoming, surely, the next super-power in the world in the foreseeable future. Needless to say that China is on track to be one of the world's top three economies and wealthiest countries in the next few years when the oncoming century turns over a new leaf.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution, under the towering leadership of Imam Khomeini, has resurrected Iran into a grand Muslim state, that is now in a position to challange the enemies of Islam anywhere in the world. Times have so changed that in Iran the great Islamic Revolution has brought about a complete overhaul of the corrupt and obsequious elitist system of the Imperial Iran. Now, to all intents and purposes, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a democratic state, independent of all extraneous influences.

The Arab states have now turned into the world's major business hubs. On their oil strength, the Arab states now possess the capacity to upset the balance and cause a nearly infinite international damage. Some of the Southeast Asian states have emerged as Tiger economies. Asian fleets of spacious and widebodied aeroplanes are now spanning the globe. Indeed what a terrific change has befallen the world theater today! Now there looms an air of inevitability that the United States, mired in myriad real crises and swiftly heading towards its moral, economic, political (mainly due to its international confrontational politics) and social disaster, is widely believed to be closer to a final collapse like the Soviet Union in not very distant future.

How dramatically times have changed since General de Gaulle's disdain for Japan and the Western nations' contemptuous opinions about the poor and deprived nations of the East. Now the presidents and prime ministers of all stripes of the West are found doubling around the world as commercial travellers, mostly around those nations they looked down upon and despised. The French prime minister now goes to Tokyo for selling helicopters.

Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor, flies straight to Beijing and settles a stack of Sino-German trade deals. Canada's Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, to the chagrin of the U.S., goes all the way to Cuba and spends three hours with Fidel Castro, agreeing on closer cooperation with each other. British defence secretary flies to oil-rich kingdom of Brunei and secures a multimillion-dollar deal to sell patrol vessels and fighters to Brunei. In short, thanks to the end of Cold War, the developed countries are now vying to go ahead with forging a high-profile partnership and closer ties with the developing states.

They are now pouring vast amounts of public money in Asia's energy, power and telecom projects. The exciting and wonderful global economic transformation has equally struck the United States as well. Now the political leaders of the U.S. are seeking to focus their foreign policy on their trading interests. ecently, Washington has renewed a bilateral textile accord with Beijing that offers Chinese exporters greater access to American markets in exchange for the removal of barriers to imports from the U.S. Needless to point out that China's trade surplus with the U.S. approached $40 billion last year.

President Bill Clinton's recent shift of policy towards the incipient super-power China shows just how hard it is for his government to keep its balance with that country. East is now no more poor East and West has remained no more West superiorly. It is really an irony of fate that the proud Americans along with their Western alies fought in the Persian Gulf War as mercenaries in defence of the same Arabs whom they used to call bloody nomads.

The Persian Gulf Arab states made the huge payments of nearly 200 billion dollars to the U.S.-led allied forces that drove Iraqi invasion-forces out of Kuwait in Feb. 1991. Kuwait, one of the wealthiest countries, was forced to slash its overseas assets of around 100 billion dollars to 40 billion dollars to be able to finance the allied merceneries who fought against Iraq on behalf of the oil-rich Arab states.

Even Japan was begged of by the U.S. to pay $13 billion towards the Persian Gulf War costs since it also imported oil from the area. Iranian political life needed a new look, new indeas, more honesty, more efficiency and better management. But that required to be done from a standpoint of Islamic Revolution. This task was accomplished under the great leadership of the founder of Islamic Republic of Iran, Imam Khomeini. Now, Iran's international standing is solid and strong, full of promise and political stability.

The republic is now in a better position to offer many advantages such as, inter alia, adequate power supply, a sound agricultural base, complete rule of law, free education up to the secondary level, free medicare, and social security for all. The country is known for its disciplined, peaceful and cheap labor force. It offers the largest consumer market in terms of buying power in the country.

Above all, Iran has valorously withstood all kinds of national and international risks and conspiracies hatched against it. The United States, at present, is ruling the roost on the earth uninterruptedly since it has emerged as the only super-power after the demise of Soviet Union in 1989. This superiority of the U.S., however, is not attributable to its moral leadership but it is simply by dint of its military might that it possesses.

The U.S. has always invariably fathered the illegitimate interests of the lone fascist nation of Zionism, Israel, in the world. The U.S., indeed, is the chief sponsor of the Israeli facism and terrorism. Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain, no doubt, may do no wrong to the people at large, but the two great satans, the U.S. and Israel, have got the global licence to perpetrate any kind sof cruel wrongs and terroristic acts they like to choose on the earth, particularly in the Muslim world.

The U.S. abhors to practise vis-a-vis Israel what it unabashedly preaches about Iran, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria. It sounds crazy but it is factually true that the U.S., by all its actions and standards, has virtually proved itself as an uncanny hypocrite. Iran has vigorously become the epicenter of a challange by the United States once again of late.

The U.S. is now consistently notching up propaganda compaign against Iran. The acting CIA chief, George Tenet, has lately told the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee that Iran is building up its capacity to produce and deliver weapons of mass destruction chemical, biological and nuclear and in less than ten years probably will have longer-range missiles that will eneble it to target most of Saudi Arabia and Israel. The former secretary of state Warren Christopher, at his farewell press conference, made three main charges against Iran, namely, (i) development of weapons of mass destruction, (ii) sponsoring international terrorism, and (iii) destabilizing the peace process in the Middle East. Garnishing the wishes of the Zionist state, the United States accuses Iran of its direct involvement in the early 1996 wave of bombings carried out by the militant Palestinian group HAMAS. The U.S. also alleges that Iranian-sponsored groups were involved in killing 19 U.S. servicemen in the Dhahran air-base bombing in June, 1996.

The United States has further accused Iran that its agents delivered at least $500,000 in cash to Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic for his compaign before the last (1996) Bosnian elections. General Binford Peay, U.S. Central Command commander, has said in a rare interview with the editorial board of The Washington Times in January, 1997: The biggest concern we have is the continued support and exportation of terrorism from Iran''. Israel's foreign minister, David Levy, has raised the bogey of Iranian threat during his talks with Chinese Vice-Premier Li Lanqing who visited Israel very recently, alleging that Iran is a major threat not only Israel but to the entire Middle East region''.

The United States has lately issued a diplomatic warning to Russia oer an alleged trensfer of SS-4 missile technology to Iran. The Russian SS-4 missile, which has a range of 2000 kilometers, that is, almost three times greater than any missile now in Iran's arsenal, can carry a standard warhead that is equivalent to 3000 pounds of TNT. The U.S. diplomatic warning reflects broader American concern about the build-up of Tehran's unconventional weapons.

The Iranian leaders have vehemently dismissed all charges as total bull-shit and regard them as part of a vast international plot'' concocted by the United States against Iran. They have publicly denied that Tehran has aggressive intent against any party in the Persian Gulf. Iran has always maintained that its nuclear activitles, activities, meant for civilian needs, are inevitable for a country seeking general socio-economic progress and development and that the same are closely watched by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The major European Union powers - Britain, France and Germany - are convinced that Iran is not directly involved in the HAMAS bombing campaign. Regarding the allegations of Khobar Towers bombing in Dhahran the Saudia's official, no less than Prince Sultan ibn Abdel Aziz (defence minister), himself has said, We have not finished the investigation. We are not pointing fingers yet at anybody''.

The Iranian leaders have charged that it is the United States that is manufacturing egregious subterfuges for entering into militery confrontation with Iran. They have feared that the ghoulish habit of the U.S., oftentimes remaining on a confrontatinoal course with Iran, Syria, Iraq and Libya only for hte sake of protecting the satanic interests of Israel and using the tiny Arab states as a weapon against these countries, may end up hurting the Arab states in the battle, so to speak, of the titans without either side wanting to do so.

The U.S. gibes are beginning to boomerang and its threats are evoking a lackadaisical response from its allies. In other words, the United States is facing mounting hostility from some of its closest allies like Canada, the Carribbean nations, several Latin American countries and the European Union (E.U.) for behaving inconsistently with Iran, Libya, Cuba and China. The E.U.sources have made clear that the E.U. will not bow to the U.S. pressure and abandon its dialogue with Iran. We do not chagne our political position for emotional reasons.

We have to avoid a confrontation with those countries. We have to persuade Iran in theory to cooperate with us''. They have further explained: The Americans believe in imposing even greater sanctions. We believe in dialogue, encouragement of democracy and reform''. Britain is now going ahead with its plans to participate in a trade fair being held in Tehran in April, 1997.

Unlike the U.S., we do not have a trade embargo with Iran and we continue to trade as well as to talk to each other'', said the British minister of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, Jeremy Hanley, during his visit to Abu Dhabi last month. Needless to quote The Economist (Sept. 21, 1996): The United States is unpredictable, unreliable, too easily excited, too easily distracted, too fond of throwing its weight around''.

The main indictment of inconsistency abroad'' is current against the U.S. The United States is too busy hectoring other countries without noticing that it does not have much moral authority itself. It is almost comical how high-handed Washington officials, oblivious to the mess on their doorsteps, recite a laundry list of allegations and dthreaten solo sanctions if other countries do not improve'', says Mahathir Mohammad, Malaysian Prime Minister. Louis Farrakhan, the black American Muslim leader of the Nation of Islam organization in the United States, ridiculed covert operations planned by the U.S. against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and declared that his country (the U.S.) would never defeat a divinely-inspired government (Iran)''.

He was referring to a 20-million-dollar U.S. programme of covert action aimed at moderating and destabilising Iran's Islamic regime. The European Union has now submitted a complaint before the World Trade Organization (WTO) that America's Helms-Burton Act is in violation of the WTO rules inasmuch as it permits sanctions against non-American companies that have invested in Cuba. Attacking foreign firms in pursuit of your own policies is no way to run a trading system.

The excuse of national security'' is indefensible,'' the E.U. official comented. So, the stage is now set for confrontation between America, its allies and the W.T.O. itself. The whole body-politic of the United States is mired in Zionist bias and anti-Muslim sentiments and as such it can hardly claim to be an honest broker or a just referee and arbiter. The worldly nations would like the U.S. to live peacefully, rein in the satanic and fascist derring-does of its chummy parasite (Israel), and let others on this troubled earth dlive in a congenial and fraternal atmosphere.

Common wisdom now demands that the U.S. keeps profound peace with all the Muslim states and abandons its dreamy idea of containing any member of the United Nations, moreso when it does not tire of vowing to keep peace all around. A good global system works best with a good and harmonious interaction and relationaship between the states, not by aggressive confrontation but by a mutual dialogue.

For war gets you nowhere and peace can take you almost anywhere. Indeed, today, peace is the best policy. Greatness in a nation, in fact, lies in its faith to keep peace on this planet and not in its determination to exterminate the social fabric of the mankind on this earth. Iran believes in peaceful co-existence with its neighbours. Pakistan and Qatar have always appreciated Iran's efforts to preserve peace and stability in the region.

Iran is determined to strengthen relations with its Arab neighbours across the Gulf. It has shown readiness to provide its neighbours with technical and industrial assistance. In an obvious reference to the U.S. and its Western allies, President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has warned in a statement recently that the enemies of peace are constantly trying to prevent sdevelopment of ties between the Arab countries.

By making unfounded accusations against Iran, these oppressive powers aim to justify their illegitimate presence in the Persian Gulf and control the region's arms market''. Needless to say that Iran is strongly opposed to the presence of Western forces in the Gulf and has urged its Arab dneighbours to expel them. The United States, in the wake of changing global priorities and the importance of complex strategies, has realised in the long run that in international politics there are no permanent friends or permanent foes but, pure and simple, permanent interests.

Two former U.S. policy-makers in the Carter, Reagan and Bush administretion, Paul B.Henze and S.Enders Wimbush, have strongly advocated reshaping of the American foreign policy to reflect the new realities swith particulare emphasis on Middle East. In their detailed analysis the U.S. experts make out a strong case for Washington to re-examine and re-define its policy towards Tehran, maintaining that it is failing and no other country is willing to go along with it any more.

Saying that revenge for the 1979 hostage crisis is da poor basis for calculating the national interests, Henze and Wimbush have rightly questioned the Clinton adminstration: why should Israel's opposition to Iran should be seen as an irremedialble genetic condition any more than it was for Egypt, Jordan or the Palestinians''. Hence, the U.S. experts have asked the Clinton administration to eschew its ostracising Iran'' policy and pursue one of more constructive engagement'', noting that much of our anti-Iran policy seems to be based on memorise of the late 1970s.'' Even otherwise, the United States has, now, no objective basis in the Middle East for the military containment of Iran obviously on its earlier pattern of the cold War with the Soviet Union. The Arab sdstates would like to have an American presence only in the diplomatic and economic fields so as to ensure that the U.S. remains aware of their fate.

But, to be sure, the Gulf states would refuse to base their policies on hostility to Iran, which is dtheir immediate next-door brotherly Muslim state and has no expansionist designs to nourish in the region. It appears that a sconfrontational American policy, woven with biased and distracted Jewish hands, is likely to drive the Arab states, now living in dreary delusions, away from the United States and towards nationalism and neutralism.

It goes without saying that the recent U.S. veto of a U.N. resolution that denounced as illegal Israel's plans for a new Jewish neighbourhood in the disputed east Jerusalem would be a fresh lesson for the Arab states to learn from the unpredictable and unreliable United States. Stressing that the United States needs access to the Caspian Basin, which is the most promising source of energy in the 21st century, the U.S. experts on the Middle East feel that Iran is ideally placed geographically to provide such an access which America needs.

They have advised the Clinton administration to embark on the right course, which is to deal with Iran as it is and not as what the U.S. would like it to be. The relationship of each country with another being always multifaceted, the U.S. must be prepared to look at each facet separately and avoid linking one to the other. The atmosphere of misunderstanding, suspicion and hostility now existing between Tehran and Washington must be replaced by one of mutual understanding and tolerance.

It is, therefore, advisable on the part of the U.S., in the best interests of a comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East,'' to devise a formal review of its policy of isolating Iran particularly now when the Arab states have acqired a global vision to track down stark unrealities lurking around them. If President Bill Clinton believes that he is trying to sort out all the world's problems and to do what I can to organize the world, so that we can avoid the 20th-century problems that caused so much madness and loss of life, and so that we will be well-equipped to manage the security problems of the 21st century'', then it should be possible for the U.S. to make nation-against-nation conflagrations a policy of the past not only in the non-Islamic but the Islamic world also.

It is tims that the U.S. meets the challange of history and works to take an honest initiative and bring a healthy U.S.-Iran relationship into the 21st century, as history has given the U.S. a lot of opportunity, at this century's tailand, to recreate and reanimate the spir it of cooperation with all the countries in the world. President Bill Clinton is reminded of the Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy in which he had outlined the stakes and declared: To-day, man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.

A long twilight struggle remains to be fought against the common enemise of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself''. It is most heartening that Bill Clinton has vowed in his State-of-the-Union address on Feb. 4,1997 that education would be his No. 1 priority of the next four years.