In the Trenches: Dear Chancellor Schroeder

Dear Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder,

You billed it as a private visit to Iran.

But, as a media-savvy former chancellor of Germany, Europe's largest and most powerful country, you had to know that your recent trip to Teheran wouldn't go unnoticed, especially when you opted to meet with Iran's notorious president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Why would you see him?

Why would you choose to confer legitimacy on him by the very fact of the get-together and the photo op it provided?

Why, just months before an Iranian election, would you allow him to use the meeting as evidence of his standing in the international community?

Was there something so vitally important to discuss?

You're the chairman of a major pipeline project whose majority stakeholder is Gazprom, the state-owned Russian energy giant. Were you in Teheran to discuss energy deals that would, in the end, strengthen Iran's global position? Or maybe the prospect of a Russian-Iranian gas cartel?

Or was it a private chit-chat about the wives, kids, favorite vacation spots and admired sports teams?

Or did you actually think that you would have an impact on the way Ahmadinejad sees the world, unlike absolutely everyone else who has tried so far?

Whatever the explanation, frankly speaking, it won't wash.

Your place, Mr. Chancellor, should not have been there alongside Ahmadinejad, but rather with those who stand against him - and everything he represents.

You have said that you do not believe in sanctions to change Iranian behavior. And, as chancellor, you took the same approach with other pariah countries. Rather, you believe in engagement and trade as tools of foreign policy.

But what happens when engagement and trade result not in opening up nations like Iran, but instead reinforcing their existing - and ominous - policies?

And what happens when you downplay reality - say, by calling Russian leader Vladimir Putin "a flawless democrat" or the massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square an "incident of the time" - in an effort, seemingly at all costs, to keep commercial relations on an even keel?

Is Ahmadinejad, too, "a flawless democrat," and are Iran's current policies mere "incidents of the time"?

Of course, when you were Germany's leader - and, importantly, a leader who assisted Israel, opposed anti-Semitism, and set up a fund for World War II-era slave laborers - you made one very public exception.

In 2003, Italy's minister of tourism, Stefano Stefani, said nasty things about Germans. As a result, you cancelled your traditional summer holiday on Italy’s coast and stayed home.

Stefani was wrong in what he said. Indeed, his comments were outrageous.

But frankly, they don't hold a candle to what Ahmadinejad has said [about Israel]. And while Stefani was all words and nothing more, Ahmadinejad is all action.

You might respond that you're no longer chancellor, and therefore things are different.

I would disagree.

Even if many questioned the propriety of your arrangement with Gazprom after leaving office in 2005, you remain a statesman and a respected international figure.

In that spirit, respectfully, you should have followed your own example from 2003 and stayed home - or else planned your itinerary in Iran very differently.

Yes, you used the occasion of your visit to Teheran to tell an audience that the Holocaust was fact, not fiction. Had that been the sole purpose of your trip, it would have been worthy of praise.

Indeed, had you gone a step further and said that, as a German leader, your reason for going to Iran was to tell its officials that their repeated calls for a world without Israel were repugnant and their support for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hizbullah unacceptable, then you would have deserved a standing ovation.

Had you added that as long as Iran blatantly violates UN Security Council resolutions on its nuclear program, which, according to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff,
 now includes sufficient uranium for at least one bomb, thumbs its nose at the International Atomic Energy Agency and continues to develop ballistic missiles, there can be no business as usual, you would have demonstrated exemplary leadership.

And if you had used your time in Teheran to meet with the beleaguered Baha'i community, seven members of which were recently arrested on trumped-up charges, or with the families of imprisoned students, journalists and politicians whose only "crimes" were opposition to the regime, and with gays who don't exist in the eyes of Ahmadinejad, you would have deserved a Nobel Prize for Moral Courage.

But alas, that was not your agenda in Teheran. You have claimed that "rituals" regarding human rights are not your cup of tea. What a pity!

Imagine the power of even one, much less all, of those "symbolic acts" - another term  you've regrettably said you don't care for.

Imagine how the regime's victims would have felt strengthened by your solidarity, rather than neglected or abandoned.

Imagine how shaken the Iranian authorities would have been by your principled stance.

At a recent international parliamentary conference on anti-Semitism in London, US Congressman Chris Smith spoke movingly of having visited a camp in the Gulag during the Soviet era. His hosts were not at all happy, but he stubbornly insisted.

In doing so he bore witness to injustice and gave hope to the imprisoned.

In effect, Chancellor Schroeder, you had the chance to do the same thing.

You had the opportunity to identify with the victims, not the perpetrators, of Iran's policies. Now it is lost. As a result, sad to say, we all become the losers.