When the Process Doesn’t Work

The unfolding of great historical events never fails to provide a few delicious examples of irony. Perhaps the best I have encountered, though, was French Prime Minister Leon Blum’s remarks to a visiting German minister in 1936. While talking to the ambassador of an ideology that would, in the near future, invade his country and butcher millions of his coreligionists he said: “I am a Marxist and a Jew, but we cannot achieve anything if we treat ideological barriers as insurmountable.”

With our perfect historical hindsight we can, of course, smirk at poor Mr. Blum’s naiveté. How could he think that you could do business with a Nazi? How could he think he was dealing with a rational actor? Shouldn’t he have realized that he was dealing with evil incarnate? What a fool!

Well, unfortunately for Mr. Blum and the rest of Europe, evil is generally quite talented at hiding itself, or at least contorting itself into something unrecognizable. It is easy to forget that the Nazis did not make their genocidal designs the main basis of their foreign policy. Nazi ministers to England, France, and Russia didn’t say, “Ok, so what we really plan to do is start a Second World War, invade your countries, and systematically kill tens of millions because of their religious and ethnic identity. Oh, and we’re going to do this really soon.” Rather, they focused on the treatment of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty, and other “legitimate” grievances that any respectable nation can have.

This is why I find the current situation in Iran to be so truly troubling. President Ahmadinejad in particular seems to have been reading his history books; the vocabulary of legitimacy and sovereign rights figure prominently in his pronouncements defending Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. These sort of relativist arguments are plausible on one level—we have nuclear weapons after all—but fall apart when one notes the extreme paranoia and totalitarianism prevalent in the Iranian regime.

Despite the opinions of much of the media, the UN, and most of our European allies, I would suggest that a political system as diabolical as Iran’s is not actually capable of holding any sort of “legitimacy” whatsoever. A nation that beheads gays, proclaims America “Great Satan,” and considers Jews to be sub-humans worthy of nuclear extermination is not worthy of respect, and should be shown none. Rather, it should not be allowed even the barest tatters of international legitimacy, and should be excoriated, openly mocked, humiliated, and systematically excluded from even the most basic functionings of the international system until it is universally recognized as the pariah and outcast it truly is.

It seems very clear that the Iranians really don’t want to negotiate, and that some sort of different tactic is necessary. Because the Iranians have diffused their nuclear enrichment operations in numerous different sites, a military solution seems unlikely. However the United States can, and should, do a far better job of encouraging domestic opposition to the mullah’s theocracy. There is substantial opposition to the Islamic republic, especially among the younger generation that constitutes the majority of the Iranian population. Despite the popular conception of Iran as a nation of frothing America-haters, Iranian youth are surprisingly pro-America and pro-democracy. Indeed, Iran’s democratic opposition continues to exist despite a massive state security apparatus and unceasing propaganda that seeks to paint the United States as the “Great Satan.” The United States can benefit from this opposition and do the people of Iran a service by helping ease its current regime onto history’s ash heap, but not if it remains dogmatically wedded to the current program of negotiations.

Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.