Iran: American responsibility

Submitted by Kent Sensenig on October 22, 2007 - 4:51pm.

One of the key points of Glen Stassen (and company's) peacemaking proposal to the National Association of Evangelicals (which he shared about in our last Beatitudes Society gathering) is that the US ought to directly engage Iran in peacemaking talks. The US has refused to talk with Iran since the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.

That traumatic experience obviously highly colors American images of Iran. Given the just peacemaking practice of "acknowledging one's responsibility for conflict, repenting, and seeking forgiveness," Americans might be edified by awareness of the traumatic national experiences that color Iranian perceptions of the USA. Two significant memories of Iranians that most Americans do not even know about are:

1) the CIA engineered a coup that overthrew the democratically elected,
social justice-minded president of Iran (Mossedegh) in 1953 and helped place in power the "Shah." The Shah (which means the same as "czar" or "caesar") dynasty ruled Iran as a monarchy/dictatorship/police-torture
state for the next 25 years (but was anti-Soviet, pro-Western corporations). A people's revolution led by Khomeni in 1979 overthrew this deeply unpopular tryant (using largely nonviolent direct
action) and installed a Shia-dominated Islamic state.

2) Saddam Hussein's Iraq attacked Iran the next year, in 1980, and fought a brutal/bloody against them for 8 years (periodically using poison gas). There were more than 1 million Iranian casualties from this terrible war. Strangely enough, the Reagan administration supported Saddam's human-rights-violating aggression against Khomeni's Iran (“the enemy of my enemy is my friend” theory!) Even more strangely, the US eventually also backed Iran in the fight, as the Iran-Contra scandal reveals -- which bizarrely sought to
illegally shuttle weapons from Iran to the terroristic Contras in Central America! The current Prez of Iran (Ahmadinijad, who Glen questioned in NYC) is a veteran of the US-fueled Iran-Iraq war and it no doubt deeply shapes his worldview.

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