Good Intentions, Hidden Agendas, and the Unintended Consequences

[VDB]

Un-named United States congresswomen have reportedly put forward a request to hold a meeting with female members of Iran's Majlis (parliament). More >

"US congresswomen have requested a meeting with female members of Iran's Majlis," a member of the Parliament's National Security Commission, Hossein Taqavi, told Fars News Agency on Wednesday.

It's the un-named part of this report that is especially troublesome for me. Is it even true? Who is pulling whose string here? The stakes are way too high for this kind of muddling and meddling. Or is this merely propaganda?

[VDB]

In another related development as reported by Fars News Agency (FNA):

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is likely to meet with the presidents of 6 US universities who are currently on a tour of Iran.

The trip by the US deans is viewed as the latest in a series of exchange visits involving senior academics and scientists. The American academics include the presidents of Cornell, Carnegie Mellon and Rice Universities.

"We believe it is important to maintain and renew academic ties between our two countries as a means of laying the groundwork for greater understanding and rebuilding what was once a very healthy collaboration in science and higher education," said Robert Berdahl, the president of the Association of American Universities which organized the tour.

I am reminded of the similar "well intended" trips made by people such as Charles Lindbegh to visit with Adolf Hitler in the later 1930s. This trip was used for propaganda purposes by the Nazis in Germany and their sympathizers - and there were many of these - in the United States. I am referring to the Noninterventionist movement and America First Committee prior to the start of World War II.

Drawing on his experiences and observations during four or five years abroad (1935-1939) in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Charles Lindbergh provided Americans with a portrait of the European war that differed substantially from the one conceived by the Roosevelt administration and by so-called interventionists in the United States. He did not see the conflict as basically a war for democracy or morality. He was skeptical of the ideology and moral righteousness of the British and French. He conceived of morality in international affairs as relative to time, place, circumstances, and power. His approach was, in effect, more understanding of the Germans (without approving of what they did) and more skeptical of the Allies than the conventional view in the United States. Lindbergh saw a divided responsibility for the origins of the European war, rather than an assignment of the total blame to Hitler, Nazi Germany, and the Axis states. He did not view Germany, Britian, and France as implacable foes with irreconcilable differences that could be resolved only by war; he saw them all as parts of Western civilization. And he conceived of the European war as a fratricdal struggle (like the wars between Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece) that could destroy Western civilization. Conceptions of race were conspicuous in his analyses, as were his concerns about the challenge of Asiatic hordes to the survival of Western civilization. Like later American "realists," Colonel Lindbergh attached great weight to the role of power in international relations and in prevailing definitions of morality.

* Source: Wayne S. Cole's, Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II

Hermann Goering presents Lindbergh with a medal on behalf of Adolf Hitler; Anne Lindbergh is far left. Photo taken on July 28, 1936.

Lindbergh was a well-intentioned but bigoted and misguided Nazi sympathizer whose career as the leader of the isolationist movement had a destructive impact on Jewish people. I am suggesting a similar charge may be leveled some day toward those traveling to Iran and giving that anti-Israel regime an air of legitimacy during this critical time.