Washington, D.C. -- Last month, unnamed U.S. diplomats met privately
in Europe with officials from Iran. According to Peter Slavin of the
Washington Post, the Bush administration wanted to convey several requests:
that Iran "will stay out of the way" if U.S. forces invade
Iraq; that Iran would aid search-and-rescue missions if American planes
came down over Iranian territory; that Iran would give them "humanitarian
help;" and that Iran would "deny haven to fleeing Iraqis who
might cross into Iran."
Such appeals are routine if made to countries considered neutral. The
government of Iran, however, has repeatedly been denounced by President
Bush as "evil," as one of the three members of his imaginary
"axis" of evil: Iraq, North Korea, and Iran. Saddam Hussein's
secular tyranny and Iran's fledgling democracy have no sympathies for
each other; and both states have few if any contacts with the Stalinist
regime in North Korea. After Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, they battled
each other for eight years with huge losses on both sides.
Most Iranians resented U.S. support for the intolerant late Shah and
his police state. When, however, in 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini's Shiite
movement overthrew the Shah, then seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran,
and kept 62 Americans hostage for 400 days, U.S.-Iranian relations reached
an all-time low. The Iranians also had reasons to be hostile. American
companies sold Iraq chemicals Saddam used for the production of the
poison gas that killed hundreds of Iranians. In 1988, a U.S. warship
shot down an Iranian airliner with 280 persons aboard. That, however,
was two decades ago.
Already in 1998, when Christiane Amanpour interviewed Iran's current
president, Muhammad Khatami, he rejected the warning of the late Ayatollah
Khomeini that it was unseemly for Iran and America, "the lamb and
the wolf," to have contacts with each other. Far from referring
to the United States as the "great Satan," Khatami expressed
regret about the seizing of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and taking its
employees hostage. For Khatami to seek any kind of rapprochement with
America remains fraught with grave political risks because Iran's supreme
religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and many Shiite clerics still
refuse to normalize relations between Tehran and Washington. Yet, in
opposing Khatami's course, the hard-line clerics dare not ignore that
the voters elected him with a majority of almost 70 percent.
Today millions of Iranians, particularly the more educated men and women
under age 50, are openly yearning for more personal freedom and more
openings to the world. Yet, the official U.S. position toward Iran has
remained rigidly hostile. In the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996,
Congress charged the Iranian government with support of terrorism, undermining
the Middle East peace process, meddling in the affairs of neighboring
countries, as well as producing and spreading weapons of mass destruction.
The State Department's response to Khatami's initiative was noncommittal:
"We welcome the fact that he wants a dialogue with the American
people and welcome his appreciation of the fundamental principles that
form the foundation of our nation. Ultimately, real improvement in the
relations between our two countries will depend not upon what the Government
of Iran says but what it does."
The Khatami administration has a similar view. When President Bush equates
Iran's democracy with Saddam's and Kim Jong's tyrannies and refuses
to end U.S. sanctions, he shows that he is obviously not ready to discuss
his misgivings with any Iranian official. When he now asks Khatami to
assist the U.S. against Saddam, he proves for all to see the impracticality
and counterproductivity of his rigid policies. To get out of this unproductive
impasse, both sides will have to make a leap of faith: the U.S. by lifting
its sanctions, and Iran by joining the war against terrorism.
International relations differ little from interpersonal relations:
Only if you treat people the way you wanted to be treated, are you likely
to get the response you hope to gain.