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Obama Offers Iran New Relationship

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The New York Times

Published: March 21, 2009

Invoking art, history and "the common humanity that binds us," President Barack Obama offered a new day in the United States' relationship with Iran, using a videotaped message released on the Internet to make an unusual appeal directly to Iranians for a shift away from decades of confrontation.

Also, Israel's president, Shimon Peres, issued an audio statement Friday appealing to "the noble Iranian people on behalf of the ancient Jewish people."

Both messages suggested there is a place for Iran as an equal in the international community. Obama warned Iran's leaders that their country's access to what he called its "rightful place in the community of nations" will not be advanced by threats or by "terror or arms but rather through peaceful actions."

As they have in the past when confronted with conciliatory words from Washington, Iranian officials welcomed the overture but stressed that it needs to be followed up with concrete action to address past grievances such as the downing of an Iranian airliner in 1988.

Al Akbar Javanfekr, a high-ranking adviser to Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, praised Obama's effort to reach out to Iranians but asked for practical steps by the United States to change its orientation toward Iran.

"This cannot only be done by us; we cannot simply forget what the U.S. did to our nation," he said. "They need to perceive what wrong orientation they had and make serious efforts to make up for it."
Western experts long have pointed out that to a regime steeped in anti-Americanism, where "Death to America" is still chanted at Friday prayers, the prospect of warming relations with Washington poses a fundamental threat. The leadership in Tehran, they say, is far more comfortable with confrontation and raises the issue of past grievances to prevent any meaningful progress toward reconciliation.

Obama's message was released on YouTube and the White House Web site with Persian-language subtitles on the occasion of Nowruz, the Persian new year and start of an annual two-week spring holiday.

The message echoed sentiments in Obama's first televised interview from the White House in January in which he hinted at a new openness toward Iran. That message seemed more explicit in this video broadcast, in which the president urges Iran to discuss "in mutual respect" the gamut of issues that has cast Iran and the United States on opposite sides of a gulf splitting the region.

Those issues include Iran's nuclear ambitions, its attitude toward Israel and what the United States considers Tehran's support for elements of the insurgency in Iraq.

IRAN AND THE UNITED STATES

President Barack Obama's message to Iran comes almost 30 years after the United States broke off diplomatic relations with the country when militant students, empowered by the Islamic revolution, took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held more than 50 people hostage for 444 days. In the revolution, the pro-U.S. shah was toppled and a government of Islamic clerics gained power.

•The United States cooperated with Iran in late 2001 and 2002 in the Afghanistan conflict, but the promising contacts fizzled - and were extinguished completely when Bush branded Tehran part of the "Axis of Evil."

•Iranian Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has criticized Obama, saying he would continue the policies of former President George W. Bush.

•President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Iran would welcome talks with the United States, but only if there is mutual respect. Iranian officials say that means Washington must stop accusing Iran of seeking to build nuclear weapons and supporting terrorism, charges Tehran denies.

•Iran has been the target of three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions, which the United States backs, for refusing to halt uranium enrichment. Iran says that it is only enriching uranium to low levels to produce fuel for its nuclear reactors. Highly enriched uranium could be used for making nuclear weapons.

•Iran's grievances against the United States include its support for a 1953 coup and the 1988 downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf, support for Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and for the People's Mujahedeen, a group of dissident Iranian exiles long-based in Iraq that has given the West information about Iran's nuclear program.

•Iran calls the American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq the "only source of instability in the region."

A wire report

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