ASIA TIMES: US misunderstanding on Iran lingers
...But much of the attention in Washington and elsewhere in the US is often misplaced, misguided, or completely detached from the realities currently embroiling Iran in its most significant crisis since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. United States diplomatic relations with the nascent Islamic Republic were severed after a hostage crisis, when a group of Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and held many of its occupants hostage for 444 days. Since then, few significant steps have been taken towards repairing relations, and the remaining contacts between the US and Iran atrophied as US experts with firsthand knowledge of Iran grew older and their knowledge grew more obsolete...
...The resulting knowledge deficit has haunted attempts at easing relations, as when president former president Bill Clinton's secretary of state Madeline Albright waited outside a conference room at the United Nations. As a gesture, Albright planned to catch her Iranian counterpart on the way out and shake his hand. But the Iranian foreign minister wouldn't shake a woman's hand, nor did he want pictures of him with a high-ranking US official to get back to Iran...
...Many pundits and politicians in the US view the current crisis as an opportunity to instigate a regime change in Iran, projecting their own aspirations on those of the demonstrators and supporters of the ostensible loser of Iran's election, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi...Undeterred by those realities, or perhaps unaware of the dynamics, US commentators continue to present the protesters as opposed to the system of the Islamic Republic. For example, widely read New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman seized on the Mousavi campaign's green color scheme and declared the movement "Iran's Green Revolution to end its theocracy"...
But the most glaring misunderstanding of Iran seems to come from US neo-conservatives and their right-wing allies, who have called on Obama to make broader efforts at democracy promotion in Iran and stronger denunciations of the Iranian regime in light of the maltreatment of peaceful protesters. But Maloney, mirroring Mir's comments, contends that a pro-democratic faction already exists in Iran, but the US doesn't understand or know much about it...
..."It's offensive, even to an Iranian American like me," said Majd. "There are people who would have actually preferred to have Ahmadinejad as president so they could continue to demonize him and were worried, as some wrote in op-eds, that Mousavi would be a distraction and would make it easier to Iranians to build a nuclear weapon. And now all a sudden they want to be on his side? Go away."...(Asia Times).
Full Article: http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF27Ak03.html
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