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(#) A symposium on “Dialogue among Civilizations” was held at the UNESCO Headquarters, inviting the Iranian President Mohammad Khatami as one of the keynote speakers. President Khatami is said to have asserted the necessity of dialogue between different civilizations from the standpoint of the preamble of the UNESCO Constitution.

(#) I have once visited Tehran, the capital of Iran, for the construction of power boilers in the country. It was during the time of the Iran-Iraq War. In 1980, Saddam Hussein of Iraq had launched an invasion of Iran, which was then under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. It was only shortly after the Iranian Revolution (often called the Islamic Revolution), and Hussein tried to take advantage of Iran’s unstableness to expand its territory and, at the same time, to prevent the revolution from spreading to his own country. The war lasted until 1988.

(#) In the meanwhile, the United States had to secure its oil rights in the region to maintain a stable economy. Soon after the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution, in the name of containing fundamentalist Islamic revolution, the United States started to provide a huge amount of military aid to Iraq, by logic of “my enemy's enemy is my friend.” Ever since, up until Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the US is reportedly to have exported 1.5 billion dollars worth of weaponry and military technology to Iraq, including biochemical weapons.

(#) A noted critic and philoso- pher Shunsuke Tsurumi says, “The United States is blind to how it is looked upon by those who are targeted and killed. It is completely at loss, because it has broken the mirror to see its own reflection.”

(#) If that is the case, our hope is that the United States will see ‘dialogue’ as its new mirror, and take a good look into it to find its way out.

(Y. Shimosato)