Dan Rather
Is this how the United Nations was supposed to work? With world leaders trading broadsides this past week, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez going so far out of bounds as to refer to President Bush as "The Devil," one has to wonder. Sure, this was the one-time site of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's shoe-banging, 'We will bury you' act, but given how that threat turned out, you'd think that the nations of this world would have learned a thing or two through the years.
What was meant to be a forum for member states to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" is one in which, during U.N. Week, President Bush, leader of the Earth's sole superpower, took pains not to have either a scheduled or chance meeting with Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. On personal grounds, who can blame President Bush? Ahmadinejad's stateside charm offensive aside, the Iranian leader gives every indication of being a loathsome and disingenuous regional provocateur, one whose combined zeal for denying the Holocaust and developing nuclear "energy" (while sitting atop the world's third-largest oil reserves) is deeply troubling, at the very least.
But we're not talking about personal grounds here. We're talking about two powers that some observers see as on a collision course to war. We're talking about 'the more hopeful future' that, to use President Bush's words at the U.N., is 'the great challenge of our time' and 'the calling of our generation'.
If we can contemplate war with Iran and other "Axis of Evil" charter members and wannabes, can we also contemplate diplomacy? Considering what may be at stake, one might also ask whether this is a baseline responsibility.
Face-to-face meetings
When people who call for diplomacy do so, they generally do not mean ultimatums or backdoor channels. They mean face-to-face meetings that will provide both a direct airing of grievances and, perhaps inevitably, a modicum of compromise.
But how can one justify sitting down to talk with the leaders of "evil" states? Doesn't that just serve to legitimize their regimes? By way of answer, one might refer to the more than 40 years of post-World War II summitry with the Soviet Union, engaged in by five Republican and four Democratic presidents. Summitry that, yes, continued even after President Reagan got down to brass tacks by calling the U.S.S.R. an 'evil empire'.
Talk did not hurt us or weaken our stance then. What it did do was make the world a quantifiably safer place. And in the end it played a role in exposing the Soviet empire for the Potemkin village it was.
Keeping safe
Words alone cannot keep us safe, a point that is brought home when one peers out into a U.N. General Assembly that is still comprised of too many despots. But, unlike so many other nations, the United States has a proud tradition of using arms only as a last resort. Such is the way of a secure democracy, one symbolised by an eagle that clutches in its talons not only arrows but an olive branch as well.
As flat-out wrong as it might seem that a nation such as Iran can lay claim to being a regional power, it has become one by dint of oil wealth and the strengthening of its hand through the Iraq War. Iran and other dangerous states across the globe know the Eagle's arrows retain their sting, but they also know there are only so many arrows to go around. It's something that the citizens of America, with the human element of its armed forces stretched paper-thin, might realize as well. Thus does ideology give way to diplomatic necessity.
Dan Rather is an American television broadcaster
