[continued from previous message] 
  
 department has been involved since 2003 in back-channel approaches and 
 meetings involving Iranian officials and members of the Bush administration 
 or individuals close to it. But when last year the Iranian president, 
 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent a letter as an overture, the state department 
 dismissed it within hours of its arrival. 
  
 Support for negotiations comes from centrist and liberal thinktanks. Afshin 
 Molavi, a fellow of the New America Foundation, said: "To argue diplomacy 
 has not worked is false because it has not been tried. Post-90s and through 
 to today, when Iran has been ready to dance, the US refused, and when the US 
 has been ready to dance, Iran has refused. We are at a stage where Iran is 
 ready to walk across the dance floor and the US is looking away." 
  
 He is worried about "a miscalculation that leads to an accidental war". 
  
 The catalyst could be Iraq. The Pentagon said yesterday that it had evidence 
 - - serial numbers of projectiles as well as explosives - of Iraqi 
 militants' 
 weapons that had come from Iran. In a further sign of the increased tension, 
 Iran's main nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, cancelled a visit to Munich 
 for what would have been the first formal meeting with his western 
 counterparts since last year. 
  
 If it does come to war, Mr Muravchik said Iran would retaliate, but that on 
 balance it would be worth it to stop a country that he said had "Death to 
 America" as its official slogan. 
  
 "We have to gird our loins and prepare to absorb the counter-shock," he 
 said. 
  
 War of words 
  
 "If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our 
 troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly." -George Bush, 
 in an interview with National Public Radio 
  
 "The Iranians clearly believe that we are tied down in Iraq, that they have 
 the initiative, that they are in position to press us in many ways. They are 
 doing nothing to be constructive in Iraq at this point." -Robert Gates 
  
 "I think it's been pretty well-known that Iran is fishing in troubled 
 waters." -Dick Cheney 
  
 "It is absolutely parallel. They're using the same dance steps - demonise 
 the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use 
 proxies. It is Iraq redux." -Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter- terrorism 
 specialist, in Vanity Fair, on echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq 
  
 "US policymakers and analysts know that the Iranian nation would not let an 
 invasion go without a response. Enemies of the Islamic system fabricated 
 various rumours about death and health to demoralise the Iranian nation, but 
 they did not know that they are not dealing with only one person in Iran. 
 They are facing a nation." -Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 
  
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