Iran: The Next Quagmire

The most effective diplomats, like the most effective intelligence officers and foreign correspondents, possess empathy.  They have the intellectual, cultural and linguistic literacy to get inside the heads of those they must analyze or cover.  They know the vast array of historical, religious, economic and cultural antecedents that go into making up decisions and reactions.  And because of this—endowed with the ability to communicate and more able to find ways of resolving conflicts through diplomacy—they are less prone to blunders.

But we live in an age where dialogue is dismissed and empathy is suspect.  We prefer the illusion that we can dictate events through force.  It hasn’t worked well in Iraq.  It hasn’t worked well in Afghanistan.  And it won’t work in Iran.  But those who once tried to reach out and understand, who developed expertise to explain the world to us and ourselves to the world, no longer have a voice in the new imperial project.  We are instead governed and informed by moral and intellectual trolls.

To make rational decisions in international relations we must perceive how others see us.  We must grasp how they think about us and be sensitive to their fears and insecurities.  But this is becoming hard to accomplish.  Our embassies are packed with analysts whose main attribute is long service in the armed forces and who frequently report to intelligence agencies rather than the State Department.  Our area specialists in the State Department are ignored by the ideologues driving foreign policy.  Their complex view of the world is an inconvenience.  And foreign correspondents are an endangered species, along with foreign coverage.

We speak to the rest of the globe in the language of violence.  The proposed multibillion-dollar arms supply package for the Persian Gulf countries is the newest form of weapons-systems-as-message.  U.S. Undersecretary of State

R. Nicholas Burns was rather blunt about the deal.  He told the International Herald Tribune that the arms package “says to the Iranians and Syrians that the United States is the major power in the Middle East and will continue to be and is not going away.”

The arrogant call for U.S. hegemony over the rest of the globe is making enemies of a lot of people who might be predisposed to support us, even in the Middle East.  And it is terrifying those, such as the Iraqis, Iranians and Syrians, whom we have demonized.  Empathy and knowledge, the qualities that make real communication possible, have been discarded.  We use tough talk and big weapons deals to communicate.  We spread fear, distrust and violence.  And we expect missile systems to protect us.

"Imagine an Iranian government that was powerful, radical, and in possession of nuclear weapons; imagine the threat that would pose to Israel and to the American-led balance of power, which has been so important in the Middle East since the close of the Second World War,” Burns said in a speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston last April 11.  “That is our first challenge.”

"Our second challenge is that Iran continues to be the central banker of Middle East terrorism,” he went on. “It is the leading funder and director of Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine general command.  Third, Iran is in our judgment a major violator of the human rights of its own people; it denies religious, political, and press rights to the people of a very great country representing a very great civilization.  And so we see a problem that is going to be with us for a long time, and we are trying to fashion a strategy that will work for the long term.”