WASHINGTON (AFP) — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday she was "heartened" by the release of US-born reporter Roxana Saberi from a jail in Iran, but again attacked her conviction for spying.
"Obviously we continue to take issue with the charges against her and the verdict rendered, but we are very heartened that she has been released and wish her and her family all the very best," Clinton told reporters.
She said Saberi's release had been confirmed to the US government by the Swiss embassy in Tehran, which handles US interests in Iran in the absence of diplomatic ties between the two nations. [my em]
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While the buzz on the networks is it is a bid by Iran to decouple negotiations over Saberi's incarceration (and possible execution) from the nuclear talks, this, I believe, is a message to the American people, just as Obama's Nowruz message was meant to tell the Persian people that we are turning over a new leaf from the Bush administration. This says that Iran is not the heartless, hard-line Islamic state that most Americans think they are.
While Iran has far to go in terms of human rights, especially in their treatment of gays (after Bush, we're no shining examples of morality either), this is a response, albeit small. It is an invitation to continue dialogue, and, as someone famous once said, "if they're talking, they're not shooting". We have a lot to learn from them (their culture is thousands of years older than ours) and they from us (our American ideals, when we decide to practice them) and any attempt to diffuse the tension in that part of the world is a good thing. It's not a breakthrough, merely a small step in a long negotiation. It's what diplomacy is all about.
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