The letter hailed as a potential breakthrough in the Iranian nuclear impasse turned out to contain no new initiatives towards a resolution to the crisis, according to various news reports quoting Condoleezza Rice and a number of unnamed sources within the administration. In fact, it never mentioned Iran's nuclear program directly, instead attempting to give George Bush a perspective on history from an Islamist perspective.

The New York Times reports that the letter didn't make much of an impression:

The letter, described in Tehran as the first direct communication from an Iranian leader to an American president since 1979, was said by the spokesman to analyze "the roots of the problems" with the West. But American officials said it was a meandering screed that proposed no solutions to the nuclear issue. ...

American officials said the letter, which was not released, was 16 pages in Persian and 18 pages in an English translation that Iran provided. The officials said the letter offered a philosophical, historical and religious analysis of Iran's relationship to the West, and asked questions about the cost to the world of the establishment of Israel, while another section asserted that Western-style democracy had failed humanity.

In fact, the letter did more than discuss the costs of Israel; according to the Post, Ahmadinejad questioned why a Christian would support Jews at all. The Iranian leader and messianic Muslim took it upon himself to school Bush, a devout Christian, about the tenets of Christianity:

In the letter, Ahmadinejad sharply criticized Bush on a broad range of fronts, suggesting that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, abuses of detainees in U.S.-run facilities from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and support for Israel were inconsistent with Bush's Christian faith.

"Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ, the great Messenger of God . . . . But at the same time, have countries attacked: the lives, reputations and possessions of people destroyed," read the letter, which was delivered by Swiss diplomats, whose embassy received it in Tehran from Ahmadinejad's foreign minister.

The AP does not report on specifics, but includes more of the general points Ahmadinejad tried to hit in his omnibus screed:

The letter from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made only an oblique reference to Iran's nuclear intentions. It asked why ''any technological and scientific achievement reached in the Middle East region is translated into and portrayed as a threat to the Zionist regime.''

Otherwise, it lambasted Bush for his handling of the Sept. 11 attacks, accused the media of spreading lies about the Iraq war and railed against the United States for its support of Israel. It questioned whether the world would be a different place if the money spent on Iraq had been spent to fight poverty.

''Would not your administration's political and economic standing have been stronger?'' the letter said. ''And I am most sorry to say, would there have been an ever- increasing global hatred of the American government?"

In a show of the looking-glass world in which the Iranian government appears to live, their chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani called the letter a "diplomatic opening", despite the complete lack of any proposals, new or old, to resolve the impasse. The Iranian diplomatic corps somehow considers an arrogant letter from Muslims attempting to teach Christianity an invitation for more conversation. The letter did not even contain any invitation for further talks, instead limiting itself to a written lecture on how Ahmadinejad sees the world -- a perspective that the Iranian president has already made clear in his frequent and well-publicized diatribes on Israel and the West.

Ahmadinejad has his reasons for this tactic, and most of them have to do with internal Iranian politics and his own messianic version of Shi'ism. Ahmadinejad has tried to wrap himself in the mantle of the Ayatollah Khomeini much more than his predecessor Rafsanjani, and this effort duplicates one by the leader of the Islamic Revolution, who wrote a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev urging the Soviet leader to study Islam. It also hearkens back to the Prophet himself, who often wrote letters to his enemies while he prepared to destroy them militarily, in an effort to demonstrate mercy by offering them the chance for conversion first.

This will play well on two levels with the Iranians. The state-controlled media will spin this into a grand offer of friendship and understanding -- perhaps Ahmadinejad even sees it that way -- designed to appeal to the devout and the secular alike. The latter may see this as an attempt to open a diplomatic channel for the resolution of the conflict, in the manner of Khomeini. The devout will appreciate the allegory and homage to Mohammed, cementing Ahmadinejad's claim to be a true follower of the Prophet and convincing them of his ability to best the Great Satan in this crisis.

The US, so far, has taken the correct tone. Until Iran offers a real solution to their repeated violations of the NPT, or at least starts to discuss the problem seriously, then historical lectures are meaningless. There is no interest in Ahmadinejad as a lecturer in history or Christianity, and the issue at hand is not the Iraq War. The State Department should consider releasing its contents in order to demonstrate the lack of substance within the document. This effort doesn't even qualify as a speed bump in the progression of efforts to hold Iran accountable for its nuclear program and uranium enrichment.

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry is