The Human Lessons of Iran

Plenty has been said about Iran, and I can only say that there are many angry blogs offering solutions, and making demands, and calling names.

I won’t be doing that. I’ll observe, though, that the US is now in a strange place. We, in the US, backed Saddam Hussein all those years before we attacked him, and at that time we helped to fund his war against Iran. This was because we still backed the deposed Shah, and so the enemy of our enemy was our friend. Now, that is a realm of strange double-speak, obviously, but it gets worse.

The protesters in Iran, some of them at least, seem to be asking for some sort of US intervention. Yet we can’t do that without immediately causing a huge backlash of suspicion against the US, and against anyone who wants to side with Iran’s former ‘enemies’ - the ‘great satan’ - as we are called.

We’re in the position of a person who has a life vest, who is being asked to throw it, knowing that doing so will result in the struggling swimmer being dragged to shore by others and killed, whereupon the killers will turn on us.

This didn’t have to be this way. This no-win situation for the protesters, and for us, could have been very different if the US had acted honorably, decently, and with humanity many years ago when we first upset a precarious emerging democratic country and installed the Shah.

The lesson is one for all of us. Behave decently and respectfully all the time, for we never know what the future may hold.1