And how the world powers should benefit from it
Diplomacy has proven its worth twice in the last few days. First the Syrian standoff de-escalated after the US agreed to resolve the matter through negotiations and now there is another news of the same proportions, if not bigger: the US president talked with the Iranian president over the phone, something they haven’t done in the past 34 years. Hailed as “a diplomatic leap forward”, this really opens up avenues for a number of possibilities that can lead to a rapprochement between the two states and ideally lead them both to join hands in bringing peace to the Middle East.
The US and Iran have not been at the best of terms ever since the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. In fact, their relation deteriorated after Iran decided to pursue a nuclear path, claiming it to be for peaceful civilian purposes, a right protected under the UN Charter, but which the US, on insistence from Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, considers not to be so. The US has stated many times that it won’t allow a nuclear Iran, which sounds good if we look at the larger picture, but how Washington has stifled Tehran from getting nuclear capabilities for peaceful purposes makes one suspect America’s intentions. Former Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s fiery and often controversial statements didn’t help the matters as well. The incumbent Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s statement that ‘the US is a great nation’ is a clear departure of how the Iranian leaders have often portrayed the US as ‘a great Satan’. Ahmadinejad was also insensitive in his remarks about Holocaust, even calling it a ‘myth’, but which Mr Rouhani condemns as a reprehensible crime. That really is a change of heart in its true sense, a flexibility that Pakistan can also benefit from. Instead of portraying the US, or for that matter any country, evil, diplomacy and negotiations should be given a chance, for they sure can remove any misperceptions and do away with wrong assumptions about countries.
Now that the world powers are trying to find a diplomatic solution for the Iranian situation, it is no time to sit idle. Instead it is time to do quite the opposite. It may be ‘a week of seismic shifts in the relationship’, every effort should be made to make it last for more than a week. Both sides should be congratulated on how they tackled the issue through diplomacy, the focus should instead be on the talks in Geneva scheduled on Oct 15-16, where Iran is expected to present a more detailed proposal. There are still obstacles, some of technical nature and others of diplomatic, but the process to bring peace should not suffer, not now.
