Guest lecturer suggests friendly relations with Middle East
“Not only is there no reason for us to be enemies, Iran and the United States, but there are many reasons, and some of them are critical and important for us?” Col. Lawrence Wilkerson said Thursday. | Mary Dahdouh/The Daily Cougar
Chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, explained to a group of UH students Thursday that, in regards to the United States and Iranian relationship, “we need not be enemies.”
Many college students were in elementary or middle school when 9/11 ignited the War on Terror. As this generation has grown older, the situation in the Middle East has grown worse and it’s a world issue that has been inherited.
“We have a significant and immediate problem confronting us,” Col. Lawrence Wilkerson said. “I really feel like my generation has bequeathed on your generation, the young people, a real mess, and I don’t see you being able to get it in hand and fix it unless you really know what you’re doing.”
In his lecture, Wilkerson showed how American relations with Iran have changed considerably in the last few decades.
“How do we get from the point where I, as the captain, am sitting in a helicopter with an Iranian teaching him how to fly that helicopter to the point today where we don’t even talk?” Wilkerson said.
“Where, for example in Washington, the secretary of state tells her diplomats, ‘I’m sorry, but you are absolutely forbidden to talk to your counterpart in Iran upon penalty of being guilty of material support of terrorism.’ How do we do that? How do we make such a transition? Well painfully, and over time and delusion marks it all.”
For 26 years, Iran was an ally but now the situation in the Middle East has become a power-play and a battle for security, Wilkerson said.
“Iran is another traditional power, especially in that region,” said Cyrus Contractor, political science professor.
“I think if you remove a lot of those characteristics — it being a Muslim country and particularly a Shiite Muslim country — you can remove all that rhetoric and, in the end, what are they trying to do? They’re trying to secure their borders and have safety and also to win, when necessary and beneficial, an extension of power just like any other country would do if they have the means to do it.”
According to Wilkerson, war is not the answer. He suggested compromise and building trust.
“Wars cause instability in the regions, humanitarian crisis and harm the U.S. reputation worldwide,” said Amir Shiva, a second-year law student.
“As an American, I expect my government to look at war as the last resort, when every solution fails. As an Iranian, wars only encourage radicalism and justify the government’s anti-democratic actions under the label of national security concerns. War brings no good.”
Compromise and diplomacy are the keys to reconciling with Iran. Even though compromise means some kind of sacrifice, lives must not be sacrificed.
“When you’ve negotiated peace, you’ve won. It doesn’t matter the way you got that peace,” Wilkerson said. “It’s an exquisite part of diplomacy. Then you go home, you have your Jack Daniels at 5 o’clock in the evening and you say, ‘Won that one,’ and you haven’t killed anybody, you haven’t murdered any people lately and peace and stability are restored. That’s what negotiation — that’s what diplomacy — is about.”
Through his lecture, Wilkerson explained that, not only must peace be negotiated with Iran for a potential ally, but the U.S. must also bring an end to, and avoid, war.
“We have no existential (terrorist) threat today and yet we’re spending more money than we did in the Cold War. It does not make sense,” Wilkerson said.
“Thirteen years now we’ve been at war, and frankly there’s no end in sight for the global War on Terrorism. Look at what we’re doing to ourselves, all created in the fear of 9/11 and fewer Americans have been killed in our history — colonial and national — by terrorism than are killed in a single year by automobile accidents and we spent $2 trillion in Iraq, $1 trillion in Afghanistan and killed probably over 500,000 people. That doesn’t work out.”
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