What happens at the NAM summit will be the world's last chance to avoid World War III

It's extremely hypocritical that the MSM is avoiding talking about this summit which is starting this week  and only because it's taking place in Tehran.  Does the place matter or do human lives?  Isn't it better to try and negotiate even with the devil(s) in order to keep our Earth in one piece?

Vijay Prashad writes:
Next week, representatives  from one hundred and eighteen of the world’s one hundred and ninety two states will gather in Tehran, Iran for the 16th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit. Created in 1961, the NAM was a crucial platform for the Third World Project (whose history I detail in The Darker Nations). It was formed to purge the majority of the world from the toxic Cold War and from the mal-development pushed by the World Bank. After two decades of useful institution-building, the NAM was suffocated by the enforced debt crisis of the 1980s. It has since gasped along. In the corners of the NAM meetings, delegates mutter about the arrogance of the North, particularly the US, whose track record over the past few decades has been pretty abysmal. Reagan’s dismissal of the problems of the South at the 1981 Cancún Summit on the North-South Dialogue still raises eyebrows, and Bush’s cowboy sensibility still earns a few chuckles. But apart from these cheap thrills, little of value comes out of the NAM. Until the last decade there have been few attempts to create an ideological and institutional alternative to neoliberalism or to unipolar imperialism.

With the arrival of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in the past few years, the mood has lifted. The much more assertive presence of the BRICS inside the NAM and in the United Nations has raised hopes that US and European intransigence will no longer determine the destiny of the world. At the 14th NAM summit in Cuba (2006), the world seemed lighter. Chávez’s jokes went down well; Castro was greeted as a titan. This seemed like the old days, or at least Delhi in 1983.

NAM summits typically go by without fanfare. The Atlantic media rarely notices its presence. But this year, because the summit is to be held in Tehran, eyebrows have been raised. The US State Department’s Victoria Nuland hastened to condemn the location, “a strange place and an inappropriate place for this meeting…Our point is simply that Tehran, given its number of grave violations of international law and UN obligations, does not seem to be the appropriate place” for the NAM summit. The US government is particularly chafed that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is making his pilgrimage to the NAM. (The Secretary General has attended every NAM summit since 1961, when Dag Hammarskjöld left Belgrade to his death over African skies.) Nuland notes that the US has expressed its “concern” to Ban. Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was plainer: “Mr. Secretary-General, your place is not in Tehran.”.

Israel has been playing a peculiar game these past few months. Netanyahu and his coterie are the mirror image of the clownish behavior of Iran’s President Ahmedinejad: both have a fulsome sense of themselves, preening before cameras with bluster. Sensational bulletins come from their mouths. The fear is that Netanyahu is playing chicken with the US. He wants to either bait President Obama to ratchet up the sanctions and fire off one or two missiles, or else to let loose his own hawks, flying twice the distance that they flew to Osirak in 1982 to bomb Bushehr now. Netanyahu’s pressure startled his own President, Shimon Peres, who hastened to note, “It is clear that we cannot do this single-handedly and that we must co-ordinate with America.” All this is a game of Chinese whispers, with so little clarity about what anyone is actually saying and a great deal of anxiety about the exaggerations that have overwhelmed any capacity for mature discussion........