US: Upcoming Mideast conference not aimed at demonizing Iran

The United States says today an international conference next month to promote peace and stability in the Middle East is not aimed at demonizing Iran.

US deputy ambassador to the UN Jonathan Cohen told the Security Council that the conference in Warsaw on February 13-14 sponsored by the United States and Poland is also not aimed at discussing the merits of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal known as the JCPOA, which US President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018.

Cohen’s comments follow a tweet by the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif who denounced the upcoming conference as America’s anti-Iran “circus.”

Cohen called the ministerial meeting a brainstorming session to “develop the outline of a stronger security architecture” in the Mideast with sessions on the humanitarian crises in Syria and Yemen, missile development, extremism and cybersecurity. “It’s also important to state clearly what this ministerial is not: It is not a forum to re-litigate the merits of the JCPOA. While we’ve made our concerns with the JCPOA clear, we respect other states’ decisions to support it,” he says. “It is also not a venue to demonize or attack Iran.”

Cohen says Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “has outlined a clear strategy to reach a new comprehensive deal with Iran built on the shared global understanding that Iran must cease its destabilizing activities.” But the US envoy says the conference will acknowledge the need for action against Iran’s missile program, Iranian proxy Hezbollah’s tunnels from Lebanon into Israel, and the “unacceptably provocative act by the Iranian and Syrian regimes” in launching a rocket from Syria at Israel over the weekend.

Cohen says these activities, among others, are “drivers of instability in the Middle East, but the scope of the discussion will be much broader than any one country or set of issues.”

— AP