More than any other country, Iran is in a position to help prevent a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the rest of the world and seems inclined to do so, according to a UN envoy.
"Iran is potentially in a position to make a major contribution to avoid this clash of civilizations" that some fear is developing after the Sept. 11 attacks on the US, Giandomenico Picco said on Thursday.
PHOTO: AFP
Picco, a special envoy to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for a "dialogue among civilizations" program, said he was not speaking in an official capacity. He was a senior UN official a decade ago and negotiated the release of Western hostages in Lebanon.
He told the Atlantic Council, a trans-Atlantic group promoting a new US relationship with Iran, that Iranian leaders seem to have decided not to allow extremists behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to isolate Iran and other Islamic nations from the rest of the world.
"Various power centers [in Tehran] have realized that the greatest danger is marginalization," he said.
He called Iran's offer to cooperate with the US if any US plane crashes inside inside Iran during military operations in neighboring Afghanistan a "significant" signal in the diplomatic "ballet" between Tehran and Washington.
And implying another positive signal, he said the pro-Iran Hizbollah group, which Washington includes on its terrorism list, "launched no operation against Israel" in the past year -- a claim US officials later disputed.
Iranian leaders have strongly condemned last month's deadly suicide attacks in New York and Washington, raising cautious expectations of better relations after 22 years of hostility.
But Iran has publicly opposed the US-led military strikes in Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban has harbored the Saudi-born Islamic militant Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept 11 attacks.
Picco said the hijackers who slammed commercial jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were "pushing the Islamic world and in particular the Arab world into a possible ghetto, isolated by everybody else."
He predicted one outcome could be that two years hence, China, which has backed the US-led anti-terror effort, would become the ninth member of the group of leading industrial nations while Islamic nations remained on the sidelines.
Faced with this, "Iran in my view is now ready to play a role which until now it has not played," Picco said.
Iran, which has been trying to integrate with the West and improve its economy, "has no intention of being isolated from the international community ... has no intention of being taken down by those who hijacked Islam and the Arab world" with the US attacks, he said.
Iran could help stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, contribute intelligence to the US-led anti-terror effort and indirectly assist military operations, he said.
The US has not had official diplomatic ties with Iran since the Islamic revolution of 1979 when student revolutionaries seized the US Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
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