Georgie Anne Geyer

by Georgie Anne Geyer

What do Yasir Arafat, Shimon Peres, Anwar Sadat, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi and the Ayatollah Khomeini have in common? They all have been interviewed by Universal Press Syndicate foreign correspondent GEORGIE ANNE GEYER. For nearly 40 years, Geyer has delivered distinctive foreign commentary from an impressive variety of fronts. Geyer's intuition, backed by her knowledge of five languages, worldwide contacts and voracious historical research, distinguishes her as a foremost authority on global politics.

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WARSHIPS IN THE PERSIAN GULF ARE EMPTY EXERCISES OF POWER

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has announced it is sending a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf. As I'm writing, I see it on CNN, steaming ominously into that strategic body of water entered through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, to scare Iran out of its wits so that it will behave!

At the same time, the U.S. military is saying that it has found caches of newly made Iranian weapons in Iraq, leading Pentagon officials to believe that Tehran continues to funnel arms to the Shiite militias in Iraq. This marks a further hardening of U.S. rhetoric on Iran.

Now, if I were the admittedly strange Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would I be scared? Or if I were an average Iranian person? Are you kidding? I'd dance around the table and have some caviar! What better event could an Iranian who already hates the United States -- or, more important, those who remain undecided -- possibly expect?

For American warships, as impressive as they have been for certain historical purposes, do not in the slightest meet the Iranian "threat" head on. They do the reverse: They strengthen the most radical mentalities of ancient Persia that remain locked in the memories of the country's history. In fact, they only strengthen perfervid anti-Western feelings.

So maybe it's time to start at the core of the problem and wonder why exactly we have such an obsession with this faraway country that, unfortunately, our leaders and thinkers seem to know so little about.

First, Democrat Hillary Clinton's words. "The fighter" minces none. Asked what she would do if that 3 a.m. call to the White House in her ads broke the story of a nuclear attack on Israel, she told ABC television: "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran. We would be able to totally obliterate them."

Moreover, we would also offer a security umbrella to moderate Middle Eastern regimes against Iran. "We will let the Iranians know that, yes, an attack on Israel would trigger massive retaliation," Clinton said, "but so would an attack on those countries that are willing to go under the security umbrella and forswear their own nuclear ambitions."

Republican candidate John McCain has even sung about it, crooning, "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." His foreign policy centerpiece would be that of "rogue-state rollback, if you will" -- that of "supporting indigenous and outside forces that desire to overthrow the odious regimes that rule these states." Iran, of course, sits at the top of the list of those odious regimes.

Democrat Barack Obama, not surprisingly, stands as the single moderate and thoughtful voice on the Iranian question. Asked whether U.S. policy should be to treat an Iranian attack on Israel as if it were an attack on the United States, he responded carefully.

"As president, I will personally present Iran with a choice," he said in a policy statement. "Stop your dangerous behavior and there will be political and economic incentives; continue doing what you're doing and you will face further isolation. We do not accept Iran's support and encouragement of sectarian violence in Iraq. We do not accept their sponsorship of terrorism throughout the Middle Est. And we are outraged by President Ahmadinejad's vile statements, from his denial of the Holocaust to his declaration that Israel should be 'wiped off the map.'

"We also need to match our words with policies that pressure Iran to change its behavior. It is time for tough, sustained and direct diplomacy -- backed by real pressure -- from the United States, our friends and allies, and the United Nations. And the Iranian people must know that we have no quarrel with them; we seek a future in which their aspirations for peace and opportunity are enabled by their government, not obstructed."

Obama's policy is clearly the only rational one, if it does not offer the immediate gratification of bombing and obliterating another people. It does not mean that Iran's leadership is not dangerous, as it clearly is; it means that we should use power carefully, so that, in the long run, we win and not lose -- as we have been doing, thanks to our misunderstanding of the uses of power in today's bifurcated world.

We must bring to bear sophisticated and diverse mechanisms to meet the Iranians' complex and often contorted mentality -- honed, not incidentally, by years of repressive British colonialism -- that confronts us to fight in the back alleys while our grand ships sail fruitlessly around the Gulf. We must respect their extraordinary culture, perhaps returning some ancient artifacts or making some gesture of respect, thus slowly turning around their memories of us as the descendants of the imperialists.

Talk to their leadership? Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote recently in The Washington Post of this question. He said that, of course you negotiate even with "evil" governments because "their followers are not monolithic. It's almost always worth exploring the cracks and crevices for people who are disillusioned, tired or just plain ambitious. Even devils have interests other than threatening the United States. Simply put, if you won't deal with bad guys, don't go into the foreign policy business."

But our military and our leadership never gets into understanding the mind-set of these peoples or their genuine interests in their own "neighborhood," even as we deeply involve ourselves in their affairs. So we send warships to threaten a country that can close the narrow Strait of Hormuz at any moment, thus barricading the ships inside the gulf, or attack them with suicide bombers in small, fast boats. And all we can answer with are threats of obliteration worthy of Genghis Khan?

Warships today are merely big, clumsy displays of power that provoke more of the behavior that we want to change. That age is past; the new age requires our understanding and the intelligent engagement that at least some of our leaders are thinking about.

COPYRIGHT 2008 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

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