LETTER FROM EUROPE: Ich Bin Ein Iranian
Gedmin, Jeffrey
LETTER FRO UR PE JEFFREY GEDMIN Ich Bin I Iranian FIRST MET SHERRY, my Iranian taxi driver friend, a few years ago at my Berlin office. It's located on the Wannsee, the beautiful lake where...
...That would be just as dangerous...
...The probe failed...
...SO BACK TO CHRIS PATTEN...
...These Berliner Iranians, best I can tell, also have something else in common...
...Appeasement never works...
...Earlier in the day he had heard a radio clip from a speech by former Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a speech my institute had hosted that morning at the Adlon hotel...
...If you think that's too much, too soon after Iraq, then get used to the idea of the Mullahs with the Bomb...
...You can't avoid people like Sherry and the Iranian exile community either...
...I had ordered a taxi and Sherry rolled up, brimming with enthusiasm...
...The EU's experiment started in 1992...
...Majid is always eager to introduce me to friends, who brief me on the status of Iran's democracy movement...
...I gather it is pretty much the same if you travel to Iran...
...You cannot escape history in Berlin...
...The building itself stands on the property once owned by Joseph Goebbels...
...Do we instead—as one or two American spokesmen have suggested recently—seek to isolate Iran in the hope the regime comes to its senses...
...What's clear is that neither the American hard-line nor endless EU coddling will work...
...Russia, China, and Pakistan have been eager to help them, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that the so-called international community will have the nerve to enforce its own rules...
...They loathe the European Union's "Critical Dialogue" with the Mullahs...
...Patten asks...
...What does he think Europe (and the West) should do...
...When I heard the director of the Aspen Institute was calling for a taxi," this gregarious, balding 50-something fellow told me, "I insisted that I take the call—we need to talk...
...An estimated 100,000 Iranians live in Germany...
...It can be dangerous work...
...I'd say start simply by listening and supporting unambiguously the people of Iran...
...Chris Patten, the outgoing EU commissioner for external relations, calls Iran's "backward movement" on human rights 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2004 and its unwillingness to come clean on its nuclear program one of the biggest disappointments of his career...
...In April 2000, the Heinrich Boll Foundation, the political foundation arm of Joschka Fischer's Green Party, invited Iranian moderates to a Berlin conference...
...Berlin has long been a home and meeting place for Iranian dissidents...
...Ronald Reagan tried it in the mid-1980s—as he put it, "because of Iran's importance and its influence in the Islamic world...
...But even EU types no longer deny the policy has failed...
...Last year, German authorities nabbed the Iranian manager of a popular cafe on the Kurffirstendamm for spying on oppositionists...
...It's located on the Wannsee, the beautiful lake where Hitler's executioners plotted the Final Solution...
...It also turns out that Sherry is wildly anti-Mullah and solidly pro-American...
...The Iranians I meet here are generally all the same—anti-Mullah and pro-American...
...Regime change again...
...Do we simply walk away...
...Sometimes you do not have to go far to find them...
...The Iranians attended, dialogued, returned home, and were promptly jailed...
...Engagement has indeed been a flop...
...He's like Majid, the softer-spoken Iranian journalist and university lecturer whom I often meet at a Starbucks in Mitte...
...Trade, aid, credits, and lots of cooing about a dialogue between civilizations...
...Throughout the last dozen years of EU-sponsored detente the Iranians have continued their relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons, lying about their programs virtually very step of the way...
...In response, Iran has murdered dissidents at home and abroad, sponsored terrorism from Turkey to Buenos Aires, harbored Al Qaeda operatives, and meddled in post-Saddam Iraq...
...It turns out that the opinionated Sherry is not a Bibi fan (nor terribly fond of Sharon either...
...A German court found the regime in Tehran directly culpable...
...Meaning: It is time for the regime to go...
...Well, obviously, more of the same...
...How do we accomplish such a thing...
...A dozen years ago, four members of Iran's Kurdish opposition were machine-gunned in a Greek Berlin restaurant...
...044 Jeffrey Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin...
Vol. 37 • October 2004 • No. 8
