Gerecht discusses the story of "Haleh Esfandiari, an American citizen and the director of the Middle Eastern program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, [who] has been jailed in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since May 8."
He goes on:
The clerical regime doesn’t play fair: A 67-year-old woman who has over the years shown Iran’s representatives in the United States and other visiting Iranians, including esteemed clerics, the utmost kindness and respect is a perfect target to show the regime’s distaste for Iranians who want to build bridges.
[...]
Mrs. Esfandiari’s arrest is what you could call “clerical engagement”: Iranians and Americans are meant to (re)learn that the ruling clergy exclusively defines the terms of engagement. “Mutual interest,” something Mr. Hamilton repeatedly insists the United States and clerical Iran share, isn’t a phrase I’ve seen used by Ali Khamenei, Iran’s virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic ultimate leader. Messrs. Hamilton and Baker raised the fearful (to the clerical regime) specter of an America eager to embrace the Islamic Republic. The mullahs, in a very personal, Iranian way, have replied.
Gerecht concludes by advising the Western powers that
...they should recall that Ronald Reagan’s finest moments came when he saw that the struggles of Soviet dissidents should be at the forefront of American-Soviet relations. The liberation of one individual should sometimes define a nation’s foreign policy.
It would be nice to believe that the Western Powers will do so, and recall that Reagan's policies helped end the USSR. Or, will the policy also know as appeasement continue to drive large numbers of otherwise intelligent, normal, thoughtful human beings to deny what is plainly before their eyes in the hope of avoiding today what they can confront tomorrow?
Sadly, we've been here before. Andrew Roberts, writing a chapter called "Hitler's England: What if Germany had invaded Britain in May 1940?" in Niall Ferguson's conterfactual history "Virtual History," writes about the all-to-real mood and history of the later 1930s in Britain that existed at the time (before he lays out his counterfactual history of a Britain defeated by Germany):
The Majority of voters had had enough of war.... Nor was it just the Labour Party which adopted a pacifist position summed up by its leader George Lansbury's pledge 'to close every recruiting station, disband the army and disarm the Air Force' - short to 'abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war.' Liberals like John Maynard Keynes and even former wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George now regarded the Great War as having been a waste of young lives: the result of diplomatic blundering in 1914 which had done nothing to diminish Germany's claim to European predominance and everything to aggrieve the German people. A great many Conservatives shared that sneaking sympathy with postwar Germany which was in many ways the foundation of appeasement.
To a great extent, the desire to avoid war was understandable. The apparently futile slaughter in the trenches had provoked a deep-rooted reaction against the whole idea that it was noble to die for one's country - once the motto of a generation of brave (and short-lived) public-school-educated officers. In addition, there was a fear that technological advances would make any new war far more costly in terms of civilian lives than the First World War had been.
Are we in the 1930s again? I don't know, but the similarities are far too many to ignore. As Glenn Reynolds says, "read the whole thing"
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