I was asked to appear on Alhurra’s “Thirty Minutes” program this afternoon to talk about today’s big meeting between John Kerry and Mohammad Javad Zarif in Vienna. The expectation was that they’d be announcing that we’d reached Implementation Day, and that sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program were being lifted. So we were going to talk about that. Also on the agenda was going to be talk of the US-Saudi-Iran relationship and the naval incident in the Persian Gulf that took place earlier this week.
The only problem is that the big meeting hadn’t happened by the time I got to the studio, and in fact it doesn’t actually seem to have happened yet, although it’s apparently coming soon:
However, another US-Iran story happened this morning that gave us something else to talk about:
Iran released Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian and three other detained Iranian Americans on Saturday in exchange for seven people imprisoned or charged in the United States, U.S. and Iranian officials said, a swap linked to the imminent implementation of a landmark nuclear deal between Tehran and six world powers.
Hours after Iranian officials said Rezaian, 39, was freed from Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison after 18 months of captivity, and after a planned ceremony on the nuclear accord in Vienna was repeatedly postponed, the Post journalist and the other Americans remained in Tehran, waiting to be flown out of the country aboard a Swiss plane.
This is just fantastic news (for a personal perspective, you might try Max Fisher at Vox, who knew Rezaian and is understandably very happy to see him freed). The other three prisoners who were freed along with Rezaian were missionary Saeed Abedini (and it’s truly remarkable that he, a convert from Islam who was caught trying to convert Iranians to Christianity, was freed), former US Marine Amir Hekmati, and businessman Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari. None of these four men ever should have been imprisoned in the first place, and it’s important to remember that, but remembering it shouldn’t diminish the fact that they’re finally free. In return for the release of these four, the Obama administration agreed to release/drop charges against six people accused of violating US sanctions on Iran and one Iranian student accused of trying to hack an aerodynamics company to steal software and send it to Iran.
Later, a fifth American, student and writer Matthew Trevithick, was also released after spending 40 days in Evin Prison. His release does not appear to have been directly related to the prisoner swap.
There are other Americans unjustly being held in Iranian custody, like businessman Siamak Namazi and former FBI agent Bob Levinson (whose whereabouts aren’t entirely clear, since Iran officially denies having him in custody), and for all we know there may be more Americans arrested in Iran down the road. But like Wednesday’s release of those US sailors in the Persian Gulf, made possible in part by some quick diplomatic exchanges between Kerry and Zarif, it seems unlikely that today’s news could have been realized absent the diplomatic channels that were built during the nuclear negotiations. The release of Americans being held by Iran was reportedly a topic of discussion on the sidelines of those talks. And because of those channels, there’s suddenly hope that more Americans, like Namazi and Levinson, may also be freed soon.
People who are reflexively opposed to diplomacy are undoubtedly seething right now under their thin veneer of feigned happiness for the freed men. But, you know, screw them. These are the same people who are angry that President Obama didn’t start a war on Tuesday over those sailors, never mind the fact that the sailors were released less than a day later. For anybody who isn’t a sad shell of a human being with a giant political axe to grind, this is a good day. It’s a good day made possible by diplomacy, by communicating even–especially–with your “enemies.” I’m not saying that there’s never a time for war, for anger and hostility, but if we value peace and stability in the world, then we have to exhaust every option before we resort to violence.
I went ahead and did the TV program. I was on with Mohammed Bin Abdullah Al Zulfa, a member of Saudi Arabia’s advisory Shura Council, and Hassan Hani Zadeh, editor-in-chief of Iran’s semi-official Mehr News Agency. The juxtaposition of the two of them was more illustrative than anything any of the three of us said. I didn’t get to talk that much, but instead I got to watch two adult, educated, important men accuse each other’s country of being the new Great Satan, the font of all that is evil in the world. I watched these two men, when asked about the future of the Saudi-Iran relationship, throw the discussion back to 2011, then the 1980s, then 1979, then the seventh century, because neither one could drop his historic grievances and talk about where we can go from here.
This is what comes of not talking to one another, or of demanding that the other side capitulate entirely before you’ll deign to have any contact with it. It’s short-sighted and self-defeating, but it’s easier than diplomacy, which is difficult, complicated, and often unpopular at home. It’s basically the relationship that America and Iran had from 1979 through 2013, and in that case it accomplished far less in 34 years than genuine diplomacy has managed to accomplish in a single week.
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