20 March 2009

Obama's Nowruz message: Arrogance Is Us

Judging by the comments on youtube, Obama's imaging staff seems to have succeeded with the latest installment of the new prez' video appeals. Taken at face value, sure, how nice indeed that the US president took time out of his busy schedule to wish the persian world a happy holiday. He even said this in farsi, which has got to be a first, although the excitement over that little tidbit in and of itself shows how conditioned the world (or maybe just americans) has become to a US leader ignoring everyone else's cultural universes. i can't remember the last time people anywhere went gaga over a national leader from, let's say the Middle East, speaking english. In fact, i can't remember ever meeting an iranian who didn't speak english and probably knew our grammar structure better than the previous president (honest disclosure: i've never been to Iran). Yet i'm not sure that persians and others celebrating Nowruz (see my previous post) need to be told "you're just like us" when coming together for the new year. That message needs to go out to Obama's own constituency, the american public, which especially since 9/11 has come to fear or even hate muslims a whole lot more than the reverse.

Sorry to be a party pooper at the Obama Love Fest. Some of what he said just struck me as incredibly arrogant, so i won't sully my otherwise outstandingly ethical blog by posting the video, but here's the link in case you haven't seen it. i imagine people across the Middle East watching this message and thinking, "Which country is a threat to its neighbors and world harmony? Which country needs to reformulate the way it deals with the rest of the world?" For one thing, consider this from allacademic.com: "Since the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran has hosted the largest refugee population in the world. The Iranian experience with hosting, maintaining, and repatriating this large refugee population represents a significant position in the region, yet under-examined, dimension of contemporary Middle Eastern affairs." While it's true that Iran is trying to get the afghan refugees repatriated now, they still took them in which is a lot better than the US performed after creating nearly 4 million displaced people in Iraq, about half of whom left the country. Likewise, people in the muslim world have seen Israel remain the top recipient of US military aid for decades, while the US continues to criticize the iranians for supporting Hezbollah and Hamas in arming themselves against israeli aggression. (Yes, it's true that in Lebanon things are never simple, but if we look at the over-arching scope of destablization of foreign governments, Iran can barely hold a candle to Israel or the US - especially the US!)

Actions always speak louder than words, even if they're pleasantly spoken and carefully crafted. If Obama wants the iranian people to support their government's engagement with the US, then for starters he needs to put the reigns on Israel's invectives against Iran by immediately cutting the amount of money handed over the Tel Aviv. He also needs to stop with the double standard of criticizing the iranian nuclear power program as a threat to global stability (there are plenty of other reasons to criticize this program) and demand that Israel sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. As an iranian acquaintance of mine has often pointed out, everyone knows that Iran has at least a couple former-soviet nukes stashed away somewhere and this is probably true of other countries in Central Asia as well, e.g. Uzbekistan. None of these countries is going to come clean on sequestered nukes at a time when Israel is constantly threatening to attack them, and itself refuses to participate in IAEA monitoring regimes. (Duh.) Lastly, as Iran's influence in Iraq becomes both undeniable and substantial, Obama has to stop jerking his policy around in terms of troop presence and troop mandate.

These issues are really just the tip of the iceberg. Iranians know that US influence is far-reaching both behind and in front of public view. Iran's ties around the world are also vast yet in most cases, non-problematic politically from the perspective of those countries with which it cooperates, at least outside the region. Does this mean they have no agenda? Of course not. But here's perhaps the crux of the problem. The US has got to accept that its vision of who gets to do what, where, is not always (rarely?) in sync with other peoples' visions. Until someone gives me a good reason to see the american superpower model as inherently, intrinsically superior, then i'm not able to see it that way. Obama's message to iranians just seems like more of the same: act the way we want you to act, interpret the world the way we interpret it, and all will be well. Continue to pursue your own model for global engagement and... well... don't say we didn't warn you.

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