Should Iran negotiate with Obama?

How Iranians see America's new president

Obama “is offering the hand of friendship” to Iran, said the Tehran E’temad-e Melli in an editorial. According to reports in American newspapers, Obama plans to make good on his campaign promise to break with eight years of belligerence and isolation, and negotiate with Iran “without preconditions.” His early actions indicate that this new president is indeed someone we could talk to. He has already ordered the closure of the horrid Guantánamo prison camp. In his first foreign interview, which he gave to an Arab network, he emphasized “mutual interests and mutual respect” as a basis for dialogue with Muslims. And, tellingly, his inaugural address did not mention Israel at all—probably “the first speech made by an American president during the past couple of decades that makes no mention of support for Israel.”

Not so fast, said Ja’far Golabi, also in E’temad-e Melli. Obama also failed to condemn Israel’s attack on Gaza, an inexcusable omission. True, Obama was not yet president when that travesty occurred, but still, “he might at least have expressed concern as an American citizen over continuing violence in the Gaza Strip and stressed the need to respect human rights there.” So it remains unclear whether Obama’s approach to the Middle East really will be fundamentally different from that of George W. Bush. Still, at least he seems sincere about pursuing American policy through diplomacy, rather than “militarism” and war. “While the shift is entirely calculated and political, a world hungry for humanity can use it and turn the world into the realm of the meeting of ideas, opinions, cultures, and writing.”

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