Giving Iran a Chance

I was 12 years old in 1979 when the US Embassy employees were taken hostage by the Iranian "students."

That, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan were arguably the first two world events of which I was conscious.

I would argue that they indelibly marked me and influenced how I would perceive world affairs for the rest of my life.

First, I learned from both those events that governments lie to their citizens. The Russians lied about why they went in to Afghanistan (they were invited) and the US lied about the relationship it had with the Shah and his impact on his own countrymen.

A destroyed Mujahideen Village

All, in order to make themselves look like the victims and sympathetic to the rest of the world.

I think that we're barking up the wrong tree in our current relationship with Iran. Granted, they injured and humiliated the US in 1979 and we have long memories. But, these are countries, after all. Our interests change and we have to allow our policies to change to match those interests.

Seems that we have changed our interests in the Middle East and need to have our policies agree with that change.

As George Bush said, he wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East and the invasion of Iraq would liberate the first Middle Eastern country and, using the moribund Communist domino theory, he asserted that Iraq would be the first domino for the Middle East as it becomes a democracy.

Did we pick the wrong country? Maybe. As far as I know, the only Middle Eastern country, other than Israel, that has any history with democracy, is Iran.

In the 1920s, it was a burgeoning democracy, one that Russia put an end to after World War II and that the US continued to supress with the ascendancy of the Shah.

In my years long study of political systems, totalitarian, authoritarian, and democratic systems, I have come to the conclusion that societies pick the type of government that they have a proclivity for.

Now, that may seem obvious, but, think about it. What I'm saying is that the people pick the system. Someone imposing that system upon them are rare to the point of that elusive snipe one may hunt for (Japan, is an obvious exception).

For a society to be truly democratic, it needs to have a civil society that supports the notion of democracy. It took hundreds of years in the West for this kind of society to develop and, ultimately, influence the development of democratic governments.

Iran has, in the past, created a rudimentary civil society that supported its democratic government. And, though we see it as a theocratic oligarchy now, we need to realize that Iranians DO vote. They may vote for candidates who have a limited political view, but, even better than the Soviet Union, the offices are in contention.

On this basis, maybe the US should reconsider whom is its friend and, at the very least, recognize that Iran has a heritage the US can appreciate and support. A heritage that is far more in line with the US' political heritage than the Shah that the US once supported.