Bush, Blair should apologise to Iran: French professor

canadian · **Joined:** Jul 29th, 2006 **Posts:** 3

Quote:

US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair should drop their confrontational policies and apologise to Iran to resolve the current stand-off over its nuclear programme, according to Professor Jean-Pierre Lehmann.

"Ideally, Mr Blair and Mr Bush should go to Tehran, ask the Iranian people for forgiveness, and then, as they say, take it from there," said the French-born Professor of International Political Economy.

"This will be infinitely more effective than sanctions, let alone warfare," he said in a letter to the Financial Times published Friday.

Lehmann, who is a founding director of the Lausanne-based Evian Group, an international coalition of corporate, government and opinion leaders, was writing about the roots of the crisis in the Middle East caused by interference by western governments.

"The interventions and impositions by the 'west,' both Europe and the US, in the Middle East have been almost invariably negative, both in their motivations and in their consequences," he suggested.

"While we (rightly) urge the Japanese to apologise to the Chinese, Koreans and other victims of the Pacific war and Japanese imperialism, the west owes profound apologies to Iran, the Iranians and the Arab people and societies of the Middle East," he said.

The 60-year old professor said the Bush administration sermonises about freedom and democracy to Iran, but it "should it not, at the very least, acknowledge that democracy in Iran was aborted by the UK and the US in 1953 with the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh." "The US-UK then imposed and strongly supported the dictatorial monarchical rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah of Iran until he was finally overthrown by the Iranian people in 1979," he said.

I would have to agree with that. There is too much confrontation and interference in the world today. Especially from the US.

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