Richard Jeffrey Newman

This is from a recent op-ed in the New York Times, “How to Talk to Iran,” by Seyed Hos­sein Mousa­vian and Moham­mad Ali Sha­bani:

For thou­sands of years, Per­sian cul­ture has been dis­tin­guished by cus­toms that revolve around honor and esteem. Pre­serv­ing one’s aberu [sav­ing face] is tan­ta­mount to main­tain­ing one’s dig­nity. There are almost no instances in mod­ern Iran­ian his­tory when masla­hat [expe­di­ency] has trumped aberu. The West has poorly under­stood these con­cepts. This was par­tic­u­larly true under Pres­i­dent Bush, who rewarded Iran’s tacit accep­tance of the Amer­i­can inva­sion of Afghanistan by label­ing Iran a mem­ber of an “axis of evil.”

Fol­low­ing the 2003 allied inva­sion of Iraq, the Swiss ambas­sador to Iran reached out to Wash­ing­ton with an unof­fi­cial out­line for a “grand bar­gain” with Tehran that would cover every­thing from Iran’s nuclear pro­gram to its sup­port for mil­i­tant groups in the region. Despite this bold step, Iran was left out in the cold. Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney is said to have dis­missed the ini­tia­tive, report­edly assert­ing that “we don’t talk to evil.”

We now know, thanks to a recent mem­oir by the for­mer Iran­ian nuclear nego­tia­tor Has­san Rowhani, that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion reached out to Tehran a year after dis­miss­ing the pro­posal. Not sur­pris­ingly, partly because of the blow to its pride, the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment rejected the offer of direct, high-level talks as insin­cere. In the nine years since, Iran’s nuclear pro­gram — a major sym­bol of pres­tige for Ira­ni­ans — has grown immensely. Things have got­ten a lot more complicated.

I don’t care what you think per­son­ally about Iran, Ira­ni­ans, Shi­ite Islam (the dom­i­nant form of Islam that is prac­ticed in Iran), Ahmadinejad’s anti­semitism, or any­thing else Iran­ian for that mat­ter, if your goal is to reduce ten­sions sur­round­ing Iran’s nuclear pro­gram, while at the same time reduc­ing ten­sions in the region and specif­i­cally between our two nations, then you have a respon­si­bil­ity not to assume that the Ira­ni­ans will nego­ti­ate on your cul­tural terms alone. You need to be able to  talk and respond to them in ways that respect who they are and where they come from – just as you would expect them to do with you. It’s worth read­ing the entire op-ed.