The reader gives his thoughts on the matter of the Iranian deal and President Obama:
If you give away the store to Iran now for the short-term “look good” your long-term legacy is going to look awful, as the flaws will certainly show up in the next 5 years. I don’t think Obama or any politician would want to risk that, even as strange as politicians are.
The GOP is currently quite short-sighted.
Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiators, outlines the problems Iran has with the United States & the West in this article for AL Monitor. He covers 19 complaints, and while I’m not an expert on the history of the United States and Iran, many of them are familiar incidents and make sense as complaints. A sampling:
1. Western governments staunchly opposed Iran’s efforts to nationalize its own oil industry in the early 1950s. The United States and the United Kingdom even referred Iran to the UN Security Council as a “threat to international peace” for having the audacity to wrest control of its resources from foreign companies.
4. Since the revolution, the United States’ core policy toward Iran has been centered on regime change through coercive means such as sanctions, isolation and support for opposition groups — which have at times engaged in terrorism. A rethinking of this strategy only began during the 2nd term of US President Barack Obama’s presidency.
5. After the revolution, many Western countries unilaterally withdrew from numerous contractual commitments they had with Iran and left the country with tens of billions of dollars of already paid for but unfinished industrial projects.
10. During the era of moderate Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani in the early 1990s, Iran welcomed the “goodwill begets goodwill” proposal of the George H.W. Bush administration and demonstrated it by facilitating the release of American and Western hostages in Lebanon. Paradoxically, the United States responded to this goodwill by increasing pressure and hostility toward Iran.
Also mentioned is the Shah fiasco, the airliner we shot down, and concerns about general treatment of Iran, particularly since the revolution. Whether these are all true or not, they have no doubt entered the Iranian collective consciousness as truths that will impact negotiations. It might also not hurt to have the American public become aware of them, evaluate them for truthfulness, and perhaps learn from them – whether it’s learn not to trust foreigners (a poor lesson, yet always worth keeping in mind), or that mistreating other nations in the name of corporate greed can have karmic results which we’d really rather not experience.
