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Stalin, Mao And … Ahmadinejad?
We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country's vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003.
The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush's representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that "the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for." Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, "looked down and rustled his papers." No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They're mad.
Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.
© 2007
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Member Comments
Posted By: TheVigil @ 07/04/2008 4:49:38 PM
Comment: Those comments have all been translated ridiculously poorly by our media. There is no phrase translating to "wiped off the map" in Farsi; what Ahmadinejad actually said was closer to "the current expansionist regime in Israel must come to an end".
Why don't you try learning something about these cultures you so roundly condemn before you start thinking you know what's going on?
Posted By: TheVigil @ 07/04/2008 1:59:23 AM
Comment: As an American, I want to say that I'm not fooled by neoconservative and media rhetoric about the dangers of Iran. I think this is another dangerous flight of fantasy that the overgrown boy in our Oval Office is undertaking, living out childish fantasies of saving the world from evil, and in reality murdering thousands upon thousands of people while never taking responsibility for his own actions. It's fueled by American hysteria, paranoia, and ignorance and promoted by an Israeli lobby who are ignoring their own moderate population as badly as we are ignoring ours.
Invading Iran would be a brutal act of warfare by the U.S. and probably completely collapse much of our economy to boot. It would be a moral, economic, and strategic mistake of unprecedented proportions. As a patriotic American, I urge my people back into sanity and away from this dangerous rhetoric.
Posted By: TheVigil @ 07/04/2008 1:44:33 AM
Comment: We have so badly mistranslated just about every Persian statement that Ahmadinejad and Khamenei ever made that I would not trust the literacy of any Western media news report on them. Ahmadinejad did not state that "Israel should be wiped off the map". His words were closer to "I hope that the expansionist regime in Israel ends". This is more akin to an American saying "I hope the next president is less warlike than Bush" instead of "my countrymen should be killed because of who they are". It's one of the most dangerous mistranslations I've ever seen.