With more than 25,000 bodies retrieved since the earthquake struck Bam, Iran, on Friday, a spokesman for the American State Department yesterday filled reporters in on what we’ve been doing to help. The spokesman, Adam Ereli, spoke of 84 Americans arriving in Iran yesterday. They included 11 members of the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue Team and 66 medical experts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mr. Ereli said. Eight U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo planes have landed in Iran as part of the relief effort, the Associated Press reports.

Mr. Ereli told reporters in Washington about a phone call that the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, made from Washington Friday night to the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, who was in Tehran. “He noted that this was a humanitarian tragedy that transcended political considerations,” Mr. Ereli said.

We can only hope that Mr. Armitage was trying to live up to the famous definition of a diplomat as someone who is sent abroad to lie for their country. For if Mr. Armitage or his bosses, Secretary of State Powell and President Bush, genuinely believe that the earthquake at Bam transcends political considerations, they are so naïve as to be incompetent.

Iran is by the State Department’s own account the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, at a time in which America is engaged in what it purports to be a global war on terrorism. “Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2002. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence and Security were involved in the planning of and support for terrorist acts and continued to exhort a variety of groups that use terrorism to pursue their goals,” the State Department wrote in its most recent report to Congress on patterns of global terrorism. “Iran provided Lebanese Hizballah and Palestinian rejectionist groups — notably HAMAS, the Palestine Islamic Ji had, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command — with funding, safe haven, training, and weapons. Tehran also encouraged Hizballah and the Palestinian rejectionist groups to coordinate their planning and to escalate their terrorist activities against Israel.”

Iran is also a country teetering on the brink of social and economic collapse. This can be gathered even by reading the Islamic Republic’s official press. The Islamic Republic News Agency, for example, reported on December 3 that the government was considering gasoline rationing. If Iran, which sits on some of the world’s largest petroleum reserves, is even thinking about rationing gas to its citizens, it must be in rough shape. Other press accounts speak of rising numbers of deaths owing to malnutrition, and of women and girls turning to prostitution in an effort to support themselves.

The need of Iran to seek international aid for earthquake recovery only underscores for Iranian citizens the regime’s failure to provide adequately for them. By providing aid that is clearly labeled as coming from America to the Iranian people, Washington has an opportunity to win friends in Iran and build a distribution network that could be used in the future for delivering supplies essential to spreading freedom — things like copy machines, laptop computers, cell phones. The relief organizations will no doubt shriek about endangering all aid workers by politicizing humanitarian work. But they are ignoring the humanitarian crises in Iran, in Israel, in the West Bank, and in Gaza that result from the persistence in power of the Iranian regime, a charter member of the axis of evil. Mr. Armitage famously told a Senate committee that it wasn’t American policy to seek a change in regime in Tehran. If America ignores the opportunity the Bam earthquake presents to advance our political objectives of spreading freedom and fighting terrorism, it will be one step further along in implementing the Armitage policy.