[Peace] for Previews of Coming Attractions, tune in Tues at 9

[Jenifer Cartwright]

This airs 9p Tuesday the 24th, repeated 1 and 3a Thursday. Thanks for letting us know about this, Barbara.
   
  Jenifer

  Barbara kessel <barkes at gmail.com> wrote:
  FRONTLINE presents
SHOWDOWN WITH IRAN
Tuesday, October 23, 2007, at 9 P.M., on PBS, WTTW, Chicago

www.pbs.org/frontline/showdown

As the United States and Iran are locked in a battle for power and
influence across the Middle East -- with the fear of an Iranian
nuclear weapon looming in the background -- FRONTLINE gains
unprecedented access to the Iranian hard-liners shaping government
policy. In Showdown with Iran, airing Tuesday, October 23, 2007, at 9
P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE examines how U.S.
efforts to install democracy in Iraq have served to strengthen Iran's
position as an emerging power in the Middle East.
"You will not find a single instance in which a country has inflicted
harm on us and we have left it without a response," deputy head of
Iran's National Security Council Mohammad Jafari tells FRONTLINE in
his first television interview. "So if the United States makes such a
mistake, they should know that we will definitely respond. And we
don't make threats."
There are increasing signs that the Bush administration is seriously
considering military action before it leaves office if Tehran
continues to defy U.N. demands that it cease enriching uranium for its
nuclear program -- a program the Iranians insist is for peaceful
purposes. "The president has said repeatedly that it is unacceptable
for Iran to have nuclear weapons," former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton
tells FRONTLINE. "If action is not taken in terms of regime change or,
if need be, the use of military force, the question of when Iran
achieves nuclear weapons is entirely in Iran's own hands. And that is
extraordinarily undesirable."

But Richard Armitage, President Bush's former deputy secretary of
state, warns, "It would be the worst of worlds for an outgoing
administration to start a conflict."
After 9/11, the Bush administration hoped to drive a wedge between
Iran's people and their Islamic rulers by installing democracies on
two of Iran's borders. "If things had gone better in Iraq," says
Hillary Mann, the Iran expert on the National Security Council during
the run-up to the war, "then yeah, I think Iran was next."

"I think Iran is more secure now, courtesy of the United States,"
Bolton says. "We have removed the Taliban regime from Afghanistan,
which they viewed as a mortal threat. We have removed Saddam Hussein
in Iraq, which they viewed as a mortal threat."
Before invading Iraq, the Bush administration rebuffed a series of
overtures from Iran's reformist government -- among them offers to
help the U.S. stabilize Iraq after the invasion -- which culminated in
a secret proposal for a grand bargain resolving all outstanding issues
between the U.S. and Iran, including Iran's support for terrorism and
its nuclear program. The U.S., which had branded Iran part of the
"axis of evil," decided on a confrontational approach.

Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival, believes the Bush
administration's confrontational approach discredited Iran's
reformists and inadvertently helped bring the new hard-line government
of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. "The wars of 2001 and 2003
have fundamentally changed the Middle East to Iran's advantage," he
says. "The dam that was containing Iran has been broken."



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