Two of a Kind

Ed Kinane, back from Iran: “When U.S.
citizens meet with citizens of a nation that’s been demonized, we
generate understanding.” MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTO

Kinane was in Iran from Feb. 28 through
March 13 as part of a Friendship Delegation of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization founded in 1915. FOR has
sent teams of civilian diplomats like Kinane to hot spots around the
world, including Iran and Iraq. Rosen spent 444 days as a captive in
the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and 1980, and has been persona non
grata in the country ever since. He is now the executive director for
Public Affairs at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of
the City University of New York.

“Even if I was invited to Iran, I’d be
very cautious,” said Rosen, who lately has been on CNN with Larry King
and Anderson Cooper talking about the detention of the British troops.
“There are so many separate groups running the show in Iran. You might
be invited there by the Foreign Ministry, but be killed by the
Revolutionary Guards.”

Speaking from his Manhattan office,
Rosen posited that the Revolutionary Guard is responsible for the
taking of the Brits, who maintain they were in Iraqi waters under a
U.N. mandate. Their detention may be a flashpoint for a conflict Kinane
said has been made more tense by the U.S. threats and the decision to
send Navy battle groups to the Persian Gulf. Both the United States and
the United Nations have threatened sanctions to stop the possibility of
nuclear proliferation in Iran.

{mospagebreak} 

Kinane, a longtime peace activist from
Syracuse who spent five months in Iraq around the time of the 2003 U.S.
invasion, said before leaving for Iran that he hoped the United States
would make it clear that an invasion of Iran wouldn’t happen. He fears
that the Bush administration is hunting for a pretext to invade. 

“Bush is very low in the polls,” noted
Kinane, 62, “and he may think that if he goes to war it may raise his
rating. Iraq was kind of a distraction war, distracting the public from
his failures. I think that the way Bush looks at the world he thinks he
has nothing to lose. I think he is amoral, and the loss of life means
nothing to him.”

Kinane’s group toured Tehran, Shiraz,
Isfahan and Qom, a holy city for Shia Muslims. They held meetings with
academic and religious leaders, and met with Iranian Vice President S.
Rahim Mashaee. “We had a series of questions prepared, and he responded
with lofty rhetoric.” 

To Rosen, who in an earlier life was a
Peace Corps volunteer in Iran, the Iranian vice president, and the
president he serves, are mere figureheads. “{Iranian President Mahmoud}
Ahmadinejad is not significant in the leadership. He is a good front
man, who has no power at all over the military. Ahmadinejad is a
populist born and bred in the early days of {Ayatollah} Khomeini,
trying to bring things back to the good old days.” Many hostages
reported that Ahmadinejad was among their captors, although Rosen does
not recall personally seeing him. 

Kinane views the current threats against
Iran as “a form of terrorism on a global scale.” He wants the Bush
administration to take steps to defuse the crisis. “They could withdraw
the battleship groups, tone down the rhetoric, stop lying about Iranian
mischief, and make a public apology.”

While he does not agree with each
particular, Rosen lauded the efforts of his fellow Maxwell grad. “I
admire anyone who is trying to bring peace and civility. It’s one of
the reasons I went to Afghanistan. {Rosen spent two years helping
prepare textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren.} As long as they are
careful not to get people hurt. They’ll leave Iran and if someone is
suspected of working with them, they can go to jail. You don’t want to
see people go to jail.”

Rosen has some firsthand knowledge of
what can happen to Iranian dissidents. In 1997, he held a meeting in
Paris with Abbas Abdi, one of the Iranian students who held him captive
18 years earlier. Abdi had already spent nine months in solitary
confinement in an Iranian prison publishing pro-democracy commentaries
during a brief political opening after the election of Mohamed Khatami
that same year.

Abdi and Rosen found common ground in
their talks in Paris. “He personally expressed his regret to me and my
wife and family. I introduced him to my son and reminded him that he
could have grown up without a father if things had turned out
differently.” Abdi has remained active in Iranian politics, and in 1998
his name appeared on a death list compiled by the Ministry of
Intelligence. Five writers on the list were killed. 

{mospagebreak} 

Kinane sees in U.S. policies an economic
incentive to invade Iran. “There is enormous pressure from the
profiteers. The big prize is the gas and the oil in Iran. If they can
control that they have much greater power over the price of oil. For
the neocons, the way to global hegemony is to control the oil.” 

Rosen doubted an invasion is in the
offing. “For one thing, we’re stretched too thin. Even if we had the
audacity to enter Iran, it would only be through air power to attack
the oil fields, and that hurts us. I don’t see it unless something
happens to spiral out of control—something like the British sailors
{taken hostage for allegedly entering Iranian waters}, which I think
will resolve itself.” He sees much of the Iranian posturing as threats
made for domestic consumption. 

The two agree on this: The war in Iraq
was an unnecessary disaster. “I indict the Bush administration,” said
Rosen, “for the murder of more than 3,000 U.S. troops, the wounding of
tens of thousands more, and for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis. We have unleashed a civil war which means the Sunnis and Shia
will no longer be able to live together.”

Kinane has been touring and speaking in
places as far as North Carolina and New York City, pleading with
activists to pay more attention to the danger of war with Iran. He
hopes that his citizen diplomacy will do some good. “When citizens of
the United States meet with citizens of a nation that’s been demonized,
we generate understanding; we come back with motivation to help make
U.S. foreign policy more humane.”

—Ed Griffin-Nolan