In the early afternoon of Monday, 8 May, a sealed A4 envelope was delivered by the Iranian Foreign Ministry to the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. The wire agencies were told that it contained a letter from Iran's president, intended for his US counterpart. The news travelled fast. Ahmadinejad had written a letter. Might this be a turning point in US-Iran relations? The US denied any knowledge of it, while the Swiss merely confirmed its arrival and said that it would be sent on 'as soon as possible'. That turned out to be pretty soon, because before senior representatives of the UN Security Council sat down to dinner in New York that evening, for sea bass at the Waldorf Astoria, Condoleezza Rice had been apprised of its contents. On its arrival in Washington, presumably after having been tested for anthrax, the letter was rapidly translated from the Farsi and judged for the purposes of public pronouncements to be 'rambling', empty of concrete proposals, and - to cap it all - 18 pages long.

LRB 25 May 2006 | PDF Download