{"id":13074,"date":"2012-12-06T13:47:38","date_gmt":"2012-12-06T18:47:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=13074"},"modified":"2012-12-06T13:55:21","modified_gmt":"2012-12-06T18:55:21","slug":"mr-president-tear-down-this-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2012\/12\/06\/mr-president-tear-down-this-wall\/","title":{"rendered":"Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Nation of Change<\/em> has published the Pepe Escobar article Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the obvious but important: on entering the Oval Office in January 2009, President Obama inherited a seemingly impregnable three-decade-long \u201cWall of Mistrust\u201d in Iran-U.S. relations. To his credit, that March he\u00a0directly addressed<\/a>\u00a0all Iranians in a message for Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, calling for an \u201cengagement that is honed and grounded in mutual respect.\u201d He even quoted the thirteenth century Persian poet Sa\u2019adi: \u201cThe children of Adam are limbs of one body, which God created from one essence.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, from the start he was crippled by a set of Washington misconceptions as old as that wall, and by a bipartisan consensus for an aggressive strategy toward Iran that emerged in the George W. Bush years when Congress ponied up\u00a0$400 million<\/a>\u00a0for a set of \u201ccovert operations\u201d meant to destabilize that country, including cross-border operations by special forces teams. All of this was already based on the dangers of \u201cthe Iranian bomb.\u201d<\/p>\n

.
\n.
\n.<\/p>\n

With an Obama 2.0 administration soon to be in place, the time to solve the immensely complex Iranian nuclear drama is now. But as Columbia University\u2019s Gary Sick, a key White House adviser on Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979-1981, has\u00a0suggested<\/a>, nothing will be accomplished if Washington does not start thinking beyond its\u00a0ever-toughening<\/a>\u00a0sanctions program, now practically set in stone as \u201cpolitically untouchable.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reading this full article might get you thinking outside the box in which the administration seems to be locked.<\/p>\n

Many of you will probably react with anger over the mild suggestions in this article, possibly due to the propaganda you have been fed by our own mefdia and politicians.<\/p>\n

I am not naive enough to think that Pepe Escobar may not have his own agenda. Yet, long before I read this article, I have been thinking that the U.S. position on Iran has been unnecessarily and unproductively\u00a0 bellicose. This article just explains the reasons why I have felt the way that I have.<\/p>\n

I do not want you to think I am hiding anything here, so I will feed you some information that may reinforce your biases.\u00a0 But remember that what is being reinforced for you may be a bias.<\/p>\n

According to TomDispatch.com<\/strong><\/a>, where I think this article may have first been published:<\/p>\n

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for <\/em>Asia Times<\/em><\/a>, an analyst for al-Jazeera and the Russian network RT, and a <\/em>TomDispatch regular<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> His latest book is <\/em>Obama Does Globalistan<\/a> <\/em>(Nimble Books, 2009).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation of Change has published the Pepe Escobar article Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall. Let\u2019s start with the obvious but important: on entering the Oval Office in January 2009, President Obama inherited a seemingly impregnable three-decade-long \u201cWall of Mistrust\u201d in Iran-U.S. relations. To his credit, that March he\u00a0directly addressed\u00a0all Iranians in a message […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13074","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13074"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13081,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13074\/revisions\/13081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}