The subject heading of one of the e-mails in my inbox this morning read, “What did you think of Obama’s Nowruz message?” And because the note was from a friend who is a leading American foreign policy expert, I felt compelled to watch the video message.

Tweet

Email

Print

It has the expected references to the recent unrests and homage to the sacrifices of ordinary Iranians since the last elections in June. But the main theme, the one on which it begins and ends, is an invitation for engagement with Tehran. What is missing from this message is, ironically, captured in the proposition President Obama puts to Iran’s regime: We know what you are against. Now tell us what you are for.

Much of the democratic policy toward Iran, especially that of the last decade, ought to be put to the same test. Democrats successfully, and rightfully, opposed the war-drumming Republicans during the Bush years. But beyond their official praise for Iran’s ancient civilization and implied apologies for past U.S. meddling, they have not forged an effective approach to the 30-year-long predicament.

To begin with, President Obama’s Iran policy, if he has ever had one at all, does not appear to be informed by that of his democratic predecessor. During the presidential debates, Obama often seemed to suggest inventing the wheel that President Clinton already had. He strikes a cosmopolitan pose when he ends his remarks with the words “Happy New Year” in Persian. But even that gesture is not an original act. Ten years ago, the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, delivering a message to the American Iranian Council in Washington, DC, made her own attempt to utter the very same words in Persian on the very same occasion.

Albright expressed the same concerns back then that President Obama expresses now, beginning with the threat of Iran’s efforts to “develop nuclear weapons,” (which, in its tenth year, is redefining the word imminent). She even went further by lifting the sanctions on the import of dried goods from Iran, a token apology and peace offering for “the setback the Eisenhower Administration delivered to Iran’s political development,” an allusion to the infamous coup of 1953.

Those were the days the Clinton administration had extended not one hand, but all its limbs, to Tehran and believed it was only a matter of time to win over the regime. The world was hailing what seemed to be a major sea change in Iran. The UN named the smiling President Khatami an undersecretary of sorts for the Dialogue Among Civilizations. Short of diplomats, Washington was exchanging everything with Tehran—from librarians to soccer teams. Every encounter between the visiting Americans and Iranians had a happy ending, rife with symbolic camaraderie and spirit of bygones are bygones.

A groundbreaking message would have had to acknowledge these prior efforts, reflect on them, illuminate the viewer on the reasons for their failure, before proposing more of the same: Renew the offer for talks with Tehran. Without it, Americans are asked to behave as amnesiacs: Forget history to simply follow our leader, blindly, and to applaud him when he calls the old stale things, new and historic.

But if Tehran were to accept President Obama’s offer to “unclench its fist” and shake Washington’s hand, what then? America is still apologizing for its role in the coup of 1953, as if it were a finite matter spanning over a few hours or days. In truth, the more lasting and serious grievance of Iranians has always been about the greater problem of which the coup was only a symptom: The U.S.’s lack of regard for their suffering under the Shah.

Is Washington also prepared to renew apologies and self-flagellate in, say, 2020, for its disregard of the people’s suffering today by shaking the very hand of the apartheid rulers that is dripping with the blood of Iran’s children? Will the U.S. turn its back once again on Iranians to befriend their oppressors? Will the U.S. cast itself in the image that the regime has been peddling to its own citizens and the downtrodden of the third world for three decades—that of a purely self-interested evil power, which, without any qualms, is always ready to crush anything to make itself richer?

Or will America use hindsight, the lessons it has learned in Iran since 1953, to illuminate the future? Will it choose the road that Iran claims America never has and is not capable of traveling—the road Iranians have taken, the one to the Middle East’s truly home-grown democracy. If America chooses the latter, it will be the first and most serious mark of the dawn of a new era in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. If it chooses the former, it will undoubtedly prove itself a glutton for punishment. The seeds of a new wrath on the part of a new generation will be planted.

Iran’s regime cannot afford to normalize relations with the U.S. because if it ever did, it would be writing itself out of the dramatic script it has spent 30 years penning. But if the unlikely were to occur, and a new embassy were to open in Tehran, those seizing it this time will not be the burly radicals of 1979, but a new generation of democratic-minded Iranians who will have their own reasons for mistrusting America. By then, if I’ve any breath left, I, too, may be among them, scaling the walls.