Is anyone around here interested in peace?

Updated 3/18 and reposted

Call me naive, but what seems to me an important overture from Mohammad Javad Larijani, Secretary-General of Iran's Human Rights Council and, according to Christiane Amanpour, a key foreign policy advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei, isn't getting much media attention -- certainly way less than all the saber-rattling at AIPAC earlier this month.

In an interview with Amanpour, Larijani said that Iran is "ready to go to full transparency" and allow "permanent human monitoring" of its nuclear sites in exchange for what he called "cooperation." Here is Amanpour's summary:

Mohammad Javad Larijani, who serves as Secretary-General of Iran's Human Rights Council and key foreign policy advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei, said the West should sell Iran 20 percent enriched uranium and provide all the help that nuclear nations are supposed to provide to countries building civilian nuclear power plants. He also said the U.S. and the West should accept his country's right to continue what Iran calls its peaceful nuclear program. In return for cooperation from the West, he said, Iran would offer "full transparency."

Recognizing that Iranian pronouncements can't be taken at face value, and that policy is often pulled in multiple direction in internal struggles, the following assertions by Larijani should not be fully be discounted, either:

Gideon Rachman on Richard Milhous Obama

Gideon Rachman levels a serious (if slightly conditional) charge against Obama and his AfPak policymakers:

"When western politicians talk about “credibility” in Afghanistan, it is often their own credibility they are worrying about most."

Rachman compares the US approach to Somalia, where the "central government controls little more than a few blocks around the presidential palace in Mogadishu and the airport," and implicitly suggest that the US should

apply the Somali model to Afghanistan. That would mean accepting that outside military intervention is often counter-productive, that its human costs are too high, that state-building is unlikely to work and that the west should concentrate on bottling terrorism up, rather than trying to defeat it on the battlefield.