October 15, 2006
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the perspective brought through letters
Last Saturday I was driving down the street at 4 am, going to my
job to fix a problem that I could not fix at home due to newly
implemented security measures. I am so glad I had to go to work that
Saturday! You see had I not I would never have heard the BBC news
program during which I learned a little something about Iran-US
historical relations that is simply never discussed in the US media and
is rather hard to find.You see in this story they mentioned a letter written by Iranian
officials to the US in May of 2003. This letter was written prior to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s
presidency, but after the Axis of Evil speech and after the build up to
war in Iraq. The letter is quite simply astounding. In it, the Iranian
leadership was willing to put everything the US had ever asked for on
the table. They were willing to completely open their nuclear program,
help assist in the reconstruction of Iraq, help disarm Hezbollah, and
end all support of Palestinian militant groups. To put it another way,
they were totally willing to start negotiations were in they were fully
willing to give in to absolutely everything that the US had ever asked
of it and more besides.Why did they want to do this? What did they want? The answer is
even more shocking than what they were willing to give up. You see
their primary demand according to this article was simply to not be
considered a part of the Axis of Evil. In other words they wanted the
US stop being so hostile toward them and not to attack them. They
wanted to be, if not our allies, at least not direct enemies. They
wanted to be treated by the US like any other state, rather than be
thought of as some fringe fanatical regime of the likes of Saddam
Hussein and Kim Jong-il.How did we respond? According to the story, we sent a message
lecturing Iran for sending us letters like this. Basically we
completely rebuffed it. We weren’t willing to even seriously respond to
any of the content of the letter let alone acknowledge its existence.
It should be no surprise at all really that after that the Iranians
changed their tune.What strikes me the most about this story is that I had never heard
it before. I still haven’t heard any mention of it outside of that
single broadcast. This makes no sense. Whether you think the Iranians
were serious about this offer or not and whether you believe that we
are justified in taking a hard line approach to Iran or not, this is
hardly an “irrelevant detail” to be ignored. There is simply no
rational justification for simply ignoring this letter. The
possibilities it could have opened are extraordinary. Perhaps they
would not have panned out but there can be no doubt that would have
been in a stronger diplomatic position than we are in now had we
pursued peaceful negotiations with Iran at that particular moment in
history wherein Iran was at a turning point and the US was at its most
influential. Now things are different, Iran holds many more cards and
we are being weighed down by the burden of Iraq.This has made me doubt even more the regularly asserted theory
that Iran is “evil” and lead by a mad totalitarian Hitler-like
religious leader who hates all Americans and Jews. Everything as always
is far more complex than that. Iranian has moderates and extremists
like everywhere else. Iran has reasonable, rational thinkers like
everywhere else. Iranians can learn about the world and form coherent
decisions based on facts and reason just like everybody else. There’s
no reason to believe they are evil. Not when you consider that 60,000
Iranians help a moment of silence for the dead of 9/11, and many more
took to the streets in candlelight vigil for the same event, and also
not when the Iranian government assisted us in our war against the
Taleban in Afghanistan. And also not when great strides in human rights, literacy, and education have been made in that country over the last twenty years. One wonders when taken as a whole what
exactly must governments like Iran’s do in order to be counted amongst
the good guys? Are they destined to forever be evil? OR must they give
up all of their independence and grovel at the feet of the US before we
will acknowledge them? If there is something they can do and which we
will accept as adequate we really do need to make it very clear to
them what it is and how to go about doing it and then we have to stick
with it and reward any action that moves them closer to the ends we
desire. At least that way another opportunity like the one that passed
when this letter was transported to us is less likely to slip through our fingers.The great irony perhaps is that actions like the ignoring of this
letter and many other insults and rebuffs of a like kind may have or
ultimately will create an enemy truly worthy of our disregard. There
are more anti-US elements in power in Iran now post-letter rebuffing
than there was before. The utter failure of the moderate approach was
justification for the extreme approach. The louder we yell and the more
frequently we refuse to listen or treat them seriously the more they’ll
get their back up, the more angry they’ll become and the more likely
they’ll be to hate us and refuse to do anything that is even remotely
in our interest. This is not a stable situation.
And we the people are kept totally ignorant of these realities.
Unless we stumble upon them, as I did, we lack the basic facts needed
to formulate the context through which we can form rational opinions.
Instead we are told to hold simple views of Iran as “evil” and the US
as “good” without any need of knowing any more.There has to be a better system than this.
