It was a wonderful opportunity to show our young servicemen and servicewomen, the human side of Iran with Jahangir’s inspiring and award winning film and the message that working together we can cut across national boundaries and ethnic barriers to discover our common humanity.
At a time when our government deems Iran the enemy and three US aircraft carriers and their supporting vessals are positioned in the Gulf, it is critical that we recognize our common humanity and that diplomacy has a chance to succeed where wars fail.
When a person signs up for military duty they more or less relinquish the right to question authority and therefore it becomes incumbent upon us civilians to pressure our elected leadership for better foreign policies and to keep our young military personnel out of unnecessary harms way.
The cadets were very appreciative of our insights about Iran. They had studied about Iran under the tutelage of Ambassador Limbert who had been their history professor at Annapolis prior to his reappointment to the State Department. He reminded them of the last question he had asked them on their final exam which was:”Can you think of any reason why Iran and America shouldn’t be friends?”
