Letters and places

From Iran, With Something Less Than Love

Elaine Sciolino in the Times: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran wrote a letter to President Bush last weekend — the first formal letter from an Iranian leader to an American president since Iran's Islamic revolution of 1979. The letter has a familiar ring. In tone and structure, it is eerily reminiscent of a letter sent in January 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran's revolution, to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the leader of a collapsing Soviet Union.

Certainly the historical context is different. Ayatollah Khomeini was convinced that Communism was dead and the only worthwhile system of government was one based on religious truth. He was advising the Soviet leader to study the Koran. Mr. Ahmadinejad, for his part, has set out to lecture Mr. Bush on the immorality of the war in Iraq, the confinement of prisoners at Guantánamo, the United States' support for Israel, and other aspects of American foreign policy that he doesn't like.

And the letters differ in style. Ayatollah Khomeini, a revered clerical scholar, filled his letter with Koranic references and elaborate footnotes. Mr. Ahmadinejad, a mere layman, repeatedly invoked the name of Jesus Christ and the Old Testament prophets, alongside Koranic verses. But rather than footnotes, he filled his letter with taunts.

Still, the letters share something basic — a tone of pure effrontery. Both include heavy doses of lecturing and use religious knowledge with an air of moral superiority. The tone is highlighted by repeating the recipient's name again and again.

It's impossible to know whether Mr. Ahmadinejad's letter is an act of homage to the Iranian revolutionary leader, who died in June 1989, but it certainly is an imitation.

It is also an act of breathtaking audacity — Mr. Ahmadinejad dares to cast himself as the great Islamic scholar's stand-in. And Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ayatollah Khomeini's official successor as "supreme leader" of Iran, has let him do it.

Ah, yes--pure effrontery! How dare these ragtag third world leaders address these first world potentates!

Heck, only America's allowed to lecture other nations, and use religious knowledge with an air of moral superiority.

Besides which, aren't these guys supposed to be terrorists? How come they're writing?!

Sheesh... Sciolino should really have a better understanding of Iranians and the context for the letters. Both times the leaders were writing from what they saw as a position of strength, vis-a-vis their adversaries. Hence, the lack of kow-towing.

And both wrote to countries that in their eyes at least might see the light and thus become partners of the Islamic Republic. I'd say that's a good thing. For all the enmity on the part of the old USSR toward Iran, and for all the harm America's done Iran, it's interesting that both times the Iranian leader at least made the gesture of reaching out.

I think Sciolino's problem is that the letters are coming from them to us; the natural order of things in her view and that of many others if for the letter and lecturing to flow the other way. Hence....

When a Diplomat Plays Postman , a Times piece in the same section as Sciolino's article that looked at how the Iranian letter got to the White House (essentially via Swiss diplomats).

The second part of Joel Brinkley's piece probably restores the natural order of things for Sciolino and her ilk:

There are more high-tech ways to send letters these days, as the State Department demonstrated last week in Africa. Robert B. Zoellick, the deputy secretary of state, was in Abuja, Nigeria, trying to persuade Darfur rebel leaders to accept a peace treaty. The rebels weren't budging. So President Bush wrote personal letters to two of them, urging them to sign the agreement.

These letters were converted to a digital graphic format and sent from Washington as e-mail attachments. When they were printed in Abuja and presented to the rebels, they had an immediate effect. The rebels' jaws dropped, and one of them signed the treaty. Meanwhile, Olusegun Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria, was heard to complain throughout the day, "I want my own letter from the president."

Uncredited UPI file photo of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini via the Times.