Opportunity wasted: The US could have opened a dialogue with Iran in 2001

[BurtWorm]

just after 9/11. Remember that the very day after 9/11, Iranians filled a soccer stadium, bearing candles in a show of solidarity with Americans. What a wasted opportunity! Imagine if, instead of ignoring Iran until the State of the Union address, when the Bush boy famously included its government in the axis of evil, the US had immediately extended an offer of detente between the two nations. A very careful game could have been played, opening American universities to Iranian scholars and our theaters and cultural centers to Iranian performers and artists, using soft power (as head of the Kennedy School Joseph Nye defines it) to seduce the people of Iran, gently, with the power of open, secular society. We know the Iranians were ready for it. Recall the demonstrations of the late 1990s early 2000s in favor of moderates and liberals in government and academia--demonstrations that resulted in martyrdoms for the cause of secular democracy.

What a waste!

It gets worse when you think about the opportunity--to be crassly realpolitikal about it--to use a burgeoning relationship with the people of Iran to indirectly influence the Shiites of Iraq toward secular democracy. In this way, Saddam could have seen his influence shrink within his own country, if the cards were played subtly and well. There would have been no need to waste the billions and billions in dollars and the tens of thousands of lives--for what? For a worse situation now than in 2001?!

What a waste!

[wli]

1. more proof of the idiocy of the Iraq war n/t