Unwilling to forgive or forget
NATIONS, ethnic groups, and individuals can find the road to compromise and accommodation blocked by "a chosen trauma" -- a fixation on particular grievances that makes it impossible to see another point of view. Groups can "seize upon a wrong to the exclusion of any wrongs committed by themselves," is the way Vamik Volkan, political psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, explains it.
The United States and Iran have their chosen traumas that makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to find common ground. For Iran it started in the 1950s with the CIA-engineered coup against Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran's elected leader. Mossadegh had nationalized Iran's oil industry, antagonizing the British and the Americans, and so the CIA, along with British intelligence, got rid of him and restored the shah to his throne. The shah would protect Western interests, it was believed.
Those Iranians who hated the shah never forgave the United States, and this led to America's chosen trauma in 1979: the 444-day hostage crisis, which began when Iranians took over the American embassy in Tehran after overthrowing the shah. American diplomats were kidnapped and threatened with death in a crisis that mesmerized the American public. A failed rescue attempt in the Iranian desert effectively ended Jimmy Carter's chances of re election. These two traumas stand in the way of any meeting of minds between Iran and the West.
Britain's former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, could be quite sympathetic to Iran's historical grievances, and that may have been part of the reason he lost his job when Tony Blair last reshuffled his cabinet. Sympathy for "the other" is not appreciated in the West or in Tehran, and it is one reason President Bush is likely to turn down the Iraq Study Group's sensible recommendation of a face-to-face encounter with Iran to find common points of interest in preventing chaos in Iraq.
History is full of such chosen traumas. In Cyprus, Turkish Cypriots dwell on the 1960s, when they were rounded up and persecuted by Greeks, while Greek Cypriots focus their grievance on the Turkish invasions of the '70s. Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland nurse their historical grievances like treasured memories, leading wags to suggest there will be no future for Northern Ireland until both sides can be assured of a better past.
In hindsight, without excusing the coup against Mossadegh, one can speculate that his florid nationalism and rhetoric did him no favors. Likewise, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's assertions that Israel should be wiped off the map, and his absurd Holocaust conference, are formidable obstacles on the path of any understanding with the West.
Iranian journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi probably got it right when he told the Financial Times that the conference is an attempt to "court the masses" throughout the Islamic world. Many Muslims believe that the Palestinians are paying for the sins of Nazi Germany -- and that Europeans in particular are hypocrites for saying that freedom of expression allows for cartoons mocking the Prophet but lands you in jail if you deny the Holocaust.
The conference also helps Ahmadinejad with his "radical supporters who have seen their president fail to deliver on promises such as fighting poverty, corruption, prostitution, inflation, and unemployment," Zeidabadi said. Denouncing Israel is a time-tested way to draw attention away from domestic failures in the Middle East.
Ahmadinejad's course is extremely dangerous, however, especially when Iran is embarked on a nuclear program that smells so much like a bomb project. Until quite recently, I would have said that there was about a 50-50 chance the Bush administration would bomb Iran before the end of its term. I think that threat has lessened now with the departure of Donald Rumsfeld and the lessening of Vice President Dick Cheney's power, but it is still not out of the question.
As for Israel, Ahmadinejad's Holocaust conference is treading on the toes of the biggest chosen trauma of all -- the attempted extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis. That trauma is deeply felt. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's mentioning the unmentionable the other day, that Israel has its own nuclear arsenal, may have been a Freudian slip. But no Israeli leader can simply brush off Ahmadinejad's behavior as just pandering and posturing.
Iran's clerics, who hold the real power in Iran, would be wise to muzzle their obstreperous president before he lands Iran in real trouble.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
