The Letter From Iran

Recently the leader of Iran sent Bush a letter. As the news has endlessly pointed out this letter represents the first official communication between these two leaders since the Carter administration. Granted its not like Iran and the US have not had any dialog over the years but sometimes the distinctions are important. In this case we are being told the Letter is meaningless and had no import. I would like to be able to judge that for myself. Where are the translations for the public to read? What did this man feel compelled to break a 27 year 'official' silence to say? Inquiring minds want to know. Redact the damn thing if you have to but let us see what the guy had to say. From the initial dismissal it sounds like they could release the whole thing as it has been called irrelevant.

The rhetoric surrounding the Iran situation sounds familiar as I am sure many have noticed. After the last intelligence debacle regarding the so called WMD threat posed by Iraq I am going to be far far far less willing to take this administrations say so on what they THINK are Iran's intentions. Rice has accused the letter of not dealing with the US request to cease Enrichment. Well I personally am not sure the US has delt with why Iran should not be allowed to enrich or just why the US thinks that is not all they intend to do. Suspicion that they MIGHT do something wrong is not valid justification for invading a country. You know that whole Innocent until proven guilty thing can be a bitch when it gets in the way of getting what you want. And pre-emptive strikes only carries weight as a rational reason for waging war if it turns up ye olde smoking gun. They tried this mess with Iraq and the smoking gun didn't turn up. That means WE made a bad choice and WE have a poor track record of this kind of assesment and WE should have to explain ourselves. And most importantly its means WE shouldn't be rushing off the DO IT ALL AGAIN.

Now don't get me wrong. If Iran so much as blinks wrong in terms of what they are doing with their program I am all in favor of "Shock and Awe II: Steel Rain over Tehran". We really really really do not need a country with an idealogical leader who doesn't have a whole lot of problem with bringing about the appocalypse pointing Nuclear weapons at folks. But frankly I think the next invasion of a soverign nation over the possibility they pose a threat to world stability should be a decision made by the world. IE the UN without coercion by the US or under threat of veto or being over ridden by the security council should decide that invasion is the proper course of action. And if the world decides it is not called for THEN THE US SHOULD ABIDE BY IT. That is what it means to have an international demmocractic system of justice. Again we must practice what we preach. And sometimes that means that our desires get over ridden.

As the pre-eminent power the US has a difficult role to fill. In the end we have to do it better. We have to be cleaner. And with our ideals we HAVE to practice what we preach. Right now we are not doing that. For example take Guantanamo. We are holding folks outside our system of law because of a technicality and because it is conveinient and it does not look good. We invaded a country because we felt the regieme needed to be changed due to the fact it represented a potential threat. That Saddam was a rabid dog that needed dealing with is not in doubt. But we dealt with him poorly starting way the hell back when we backed the guy in his bid for power in the first place. And to top it all off we made the decision unilaterally. If we had turned up smoking guns we would have looked great... the saviours of the world. Instead we are the nation that cried wolf and who is embroiled in a NASTY occupation effort that could take decades to sort out. If we continue in this vein then sooner or later we are going to be seen as a mad dog much like Germany was around WWII. They too were mighty. They too had no single peer militarily in the world. But history has shown again and again that no nation is so mighty that it cannot fall once it oversteps its bounds.

Bush aint Hitler... and the Republicans aint the Nazi's. But I have a harder and harder time beliving that the US has not begun to seriously overstep its bounds. After all the road to hell is paved with good intentions and it doesn't matter if you get there through trying to be evil... or if you do it by accident. In the end we are going to be held accountable for our deeds and at the moment the ledger isn't looking so hot.