A Must-Read Report from Iran

It always annoys me when Americans - including Democrats - treat Iran like some scary, evil, insane threat to all mankind. It's a nation of 70 million mostly decent people, ruled by a government that has far more in common with George W. Bush and Pat Robertson than anything else. The thought of turning them into targets for bombs and missiles should cause all of us to become physically ill.

The only way to combat those who would make useless and criminal war on these people is to humanize those people. To show Americans that Iran is a nation not so different from any other - with its problems and its promises, its wonderful people and its thugs.

And so that is what Rick Steves has done with his trip to Iran. His reports, soon to become a PBS special, should be required reading for all of us.

From today's  entry on the Esfahan war cemetery:

My visit to the cemetery drove home a feeling that had been percolating throughout my trip. There are many things that Americans justifiably find outrageous about the Iranian government — from denying the Holocaust and making threats against Israel; to oppressing women and gay people; to asserting their right to join the world nuclear club.

And yet, no matter how strongly we want to see our beliefs and values prevail in Iran, we need to understand the 70 million people who live here. What if the saber-rattling coming out of Washington (and the campaign trail) doesn't coerce this country into compliance? In the past, other powerful nations have underestimated Iran's willingness to be pulverized in a war...and both Iran and their enemies have paid the price.

In the coming months and years, I believe smart and determined diplomacy can keep the Iranians — and us — from having to build giant new cemeteries for the next generation's war dead. That doesn't mean "giving in" to Iran...it means war is a failure and we need to find an alternative. If this all sounds too idealistic, or even naive...try coming to Iran and meeting these people face-to-face.

I can't top Rick Steves' brilliance so I'll just try and explain why this matters. Steves has hit upon the same important insight Barack Obama has - that to get anything of value done in this world you must meet people face to face. Even those who you consider your enemies. Especially those you consider your enemies.

Steves has been critical of the Iranian government in all his posts, but he also reminds us that the Iranian govenrment is not synonymous with the Iranian people. Surely we who have suffered under 8 years of Bush can understand the point. And Steves explains the stakes so brilliantly - our goal is not domination, but peace. We want no more cemeteries. We want no more aerial sorties. We want no more death.

Peace used to be a winning word in American politics. Eisenhower, Kennedy, even Nixon all understood the importance of playing to the public's desire for a better, more peaceful world. Since the days of Reagan, however, politicians and their compliant media allies have denounced peace and the desire for it as somehow naive, foolish, ignorant. Even though most Americans fervently desire peace, our politicians and our media prefer to stir up war and hate. It brings in money and viewers, even though it leaves all of us poorer and less safe. Steves understands this, as shown in a post last week on Friday prayers:

I realized that the Muslims I’d seen worshipping on TV may have been edited by film teams with an agenda to make the fervent worship of non-Christians look threatening. I made a point to see it as if it were my own church just north of Seattle....

Leaving the mosque, we considered the clips we just shot and pondered how they could be cut and edited to appear either menacing or heartwarming — depending on our agenda. We considered how what we had just shot could be edited with guerillas leaping over barbed wire and so on to be frightening, and how our film crew would instead focus on the men with warm, cute faces praying with their sons at their sides, and the children outside scrambling for mulberries.

It occurred to me that the segregation of the sexes — men in the center and women behind a giant hanging carpet at the side — contributes to the edginess of it (and the fear and anger many Western Christians feel toward Islam). Then I considered how male-led Christian services could also be edited to look threatening. At important Roman Catholic Masses you’ll see a dozen priests — all male — in robes before a bowing audience. The leader of a billion Catholics is chosen by a secretive, ritual-filled all-male gathering of guys in strange hats and robes with chanting and flinging of incense. It could be filled with majesty or menace...depending on what you want to show and what you want to see.

It's a brilliant point. Many Americans - especially those in the amorphous middle, those who seem most likely to be swayed by McCain's warmongering, are fed nothing but a steady diet of images portraying all Muslims as bent on killing every last one of us. Rick Steves' show on PBS won't have the same reach as CNN or Fox News, but it at least provides some opportunity to have an honest and reasonable discussion of Iran. Much better than what McCain offers - as Rick Steves explains:

Bombast hogs the headlines, skewing understanding between the mainstream in each country. If the typical American knows anything about the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad (whose name I cannot pronounce), it’s his recent comments about gays and the Holocaust (which, I would imagine, was designed to shore up his political base). The buzz lately in Iran about the American election is what McCain (who famously rewrote the lyrics of the Beach Boys classic song, "Barbara Ann," to become "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran") or Hillary (who recently said she would annihilate Iran if it attacked Israel) would do if elected president.

Steves pulls no punches here, and in the rest of that post, a fascinating discussion on the role of political propaganda, national hatreds, and the simple kindnesses of strangers, says more intelligent things about US-Iran relations than 30 years of punditry.

His other posts are worth reading, from his outrage at the stilled and censored atmosphere at a university to his trip to Persepolis. Ultimately it's a tale of the importance of humanistic values. Rick Steves travels not as an American, not as a travel author, but as a humanist. It suffuses everything he does. His goal is not just to experience new countries and new adventures, but to meet people, connect with them as human beings. He is outraged at the attack on female rights in Iran as he is at McCain's warmongering or the idiotic US drug war.

It's not the only example of humanistic contact with Iran that's available. It may not even be the best. But it's something that more Americans need to see and contemplate. Iran isn't an enemy, it's a nation, a place of 70 million human beings. Perhaps, for once in our horrific 21st century history, we might actually remember that fact.

Rick Steves' Blog