Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Headlines: U.S. Tells Iran to "Suck it"

I just finished finals, so I'm not really in any mood to rant about this, but I'm going to give it a try. Recently, Iran's President, an archconservative who, arguably, was elected in response to our asshole foreign policy, wrote a letter to President Bush. This if the first correspondence between the U.S.-Iranian Presidencies in twenty-seven years. An unofficial translation may be obtained here. How would our President respond? True to form, his administration dismissed the letter as irrelevant. However, Bush still claims to support a diplomatic solution to Iran's continued pursuit of a nuclear program. Basically, he's saying he'll listen to Iran when Iran says what he wants to hear. Or, as Iranians are coming to understand it, Bush's concept of diplomacy involves Iran unconditionally surrendering to the demands of the West, specifically, the demands of America.

Granted, the letter is quite possibly nothing more than a political maneuver intended to paint the U.S. as the bad guy in this tense situation. However, it seems to me that the only way it could do that is if we rejected it outright. Which we did. Because we're morons.

What would we have lost by responding to this letter? What prevented us from using this as an opportunity to open a direct dialogue with the Iranian President about the nuclear program, besides our President's inability to pronounce the word correctly? And for that matter, why not take the opportunity to answer some of those questions, to address the people of Iran directly? I guess he figures since he doesn't have to answer to the American people anymore, he certainly doesn't have to answer to the people of Iran. I can only imagine that he's equating President Ahmadinejad with Saddam Hussein, which is a terrible mistake. In so many ways.

Anyway, enough for right now. I'm curious about Iran, and thankfully, Yahoo links to a series of articles by a guy who travelled to Iran looking for just the kind of information I most want to know. Kevin Sites in the Hotzone is a series of articles straight out of the conflict zones in the news today: not only Iran, but Haiti, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and so on. His articles on Iran are dated from January of this year, and give you some perspective on life in Iran. The difficulty facing an Irani metal band in a country that bans Western music, for instance, or the steps being taken to combat drug abuse and HIV, which so often go hand in hand. There are some disturbing similarities between our country and Iran when it comes to dealing with HIV. While these articles may or may not shed some light on the current situation or on the President's letter, I found them very interesting. I wish there were more of them.

I guess there's no reason the President should listen to what a hardline religious zealot has to say, but by that reasoning, why should anyone in the world listen to President Bush?

Oh, right. We already have nukes.

1 Comments:

At 6:54 AM, Blogger Trouble said...

I'm sure "Suck it" was meant in the nicest, most affectionate sort of way.

Gosh, if I got offended at every guy who'd ever told me to suck it....



oh, nevermind.

 

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