I love my mother.

I know it’s not the most masculine thing I could ever say, or even the best way to start a column, but I love my mother.

I am the youngest of three children, and when my older brother went away to college, I was the only child left around the house. I spent a lot of time with both my parents, but especially my mother.

I talk to her almost every day and I tell her all that’s going on with my life. It will always be that way.

So why do I start this column about Iran by discussing my relationship with my mother? Transparency.

It may not be what most college students do. Many college students may enjoy the fact that they are away from home and don’t have to deal with their parents all the time. They enjoy the independence of not having to share every little thing they do.

I use this small example as a metaphor for the importance of transparency in the Middle East right now. Iran has been in the news a lot because President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his country will be enriching enough uranium to potentially build a weapon of mass destruction.

As much as I want to believe the reports out of Iran that the enrichment is just for medical and energy purposes, the lack of transparency out of Iran makes it difficult.

I’m very pro-Israel, and the fact that Iran could potentially create weapons of mass destruction is scary to me. But I honestly feel like there is a way around this. Ahmadinejad said that they might build these weapons if world powers ‘continue playing games’ with Iran. Ahmadinejad also followed that by saying that the country is ‘still interested in cooperation with the west,’ according to an article in The Economic Times Feb. 8, 2010.

I think the international community fully understands that Iran containing nuclear weapons is not a game. As unpopular as it may be in Iran, just as it’s unpopular for college students to have open communication with their parents, the country needs to be transparent. There is no reason that this issue cannot be resolved peacefully.

Proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East could be dangerous, not because of the governments of the Middle East, but rather the radical factions that exist within some Middle Eastern countries that could potentially get their hands on these nuclear weapons.

I think the way to relieve this tension through ambiguity is for the Iranian government to state its intentions with the further enrichment of uranium or the rest of the world will be left no option but to assume the worst.

Adversity can lead to improvement. This may be a signal for the international community to listen to Iran and try to understand the specifics involved with these so-called ‘games’ Iran feels the rest of the world is playing.

Ahmadinejad has publicly stated that he wants Israel ‘vanished from the pages of time,’ and the time to find a peaceful solution may be running out. We just need to know exactly what Iran is doing and where it’s coming from.

David Kaplan is a sophomore broadcast journalism and political science major. His column appears weekly, and he can be reached at dhkaplan@syr.edu.

Published on February 8, 2010 at 12:00 pm