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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 1/05
A Possible Path to Change in US-Iran Relations
Mark Edmond Clark
December 2004
Abstract
In 1999, I visited Belgrade one month before the start of Operation ALLIED FORCE as a guest of the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs to hear the perspectives of key officials on the possibility of a conflict between Yugoslavia and NATO. I heard a singular perspective that NATO would not use force and threats to do so were used only to get the regime of Slobodan Milosevic to respond to diplomatic efforts by the US and EU. There was simply a refusal to recognize that the threat of attack from NATO was real.
This past September, I visited Iran for two weeks as the guest of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs to get an idea of where key Iranian officials stood on the idea of war with the US over its energy program. It is true that its religious leadership is conservative on external and internal affairs and gives considerable weight to government hard-liners on foreign and security policy, but they do listen to moderate officials who want peace. Indeed, moderates even have the ear of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the final arbiter on all matters. As Ali Jafari, of the Institute for Political and International Studies stated, “The Guide provides audiences for all who can contribute on important issues.” Unlike Yugoslavia, a true dichotomy of opinion exists among officials on the nature of the current crisis with the US and, to some extent, the EU. Iran certainly is not the fundamentalist, Islamic monolith that it is portrayed to be.
By reviewing conservative and moderate views of officials in Iran on issues pertaining to US-Iran relations this duality in thinking is illustrated. Further, such a review would seem to support the idea that through the establishment of a positive dialogue with moderate decision-makers and scholars in Iran, and the support of some of their initiatives, it may yet be possible to break the current crisis.
