This could be the worse deal Obama ever made cow tailing to the Iranians....To make a deal like this you have to trust them.
I don't know enough of the details to have a solid opinion either way. That said, pursuing peace is probably a good idea.
Relations with Iran are complex. Many people do not know this but in large part the volatility and hostility surrounding Iran is of our own making. A brief history of modern Iran:
- I'll spare you the ancient stuff going back thousands of years and focus on factors that affect their attitudes today. Like most of the world outside of the Orient and Europe, Iran was stripped of its sovereignty and colonized by foreign entities to seize its natural resources aka to promote freedom.
- After WWII probably morally convicted by the aggression of the Nazis toward them, Great Britain granted Iran its independence and the people there formed Iran's first democratically elected government under the leadership of moderate Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq.
- Shortly after the Mosaddeq administration took power, their government looked at the country's fiscal situation and determined they essentially have two natural resources to develop Iran into a prosperous nation. 1. Sand
2. Petroleum.
However there were a couple of problems: sand had no value and the Iranian oil fields were owned by western oil companies who maintained control of their oil despite being granted "independence." The Mosaddeq government made the difficult decision to take back Iran's oil fields from the west in their own financial interests.
- Shortly thereafter US President Dwight Eisenhower ordered a covert operation to overthrow the administration of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq specifically to maintain ownership of the Iranian oil fields by western oil companies, the genesis of America's oil addition and the first punch made in radcial Islam's war with the US; yes, we started it I'm sad to say. After Mosaddeq was deposed, we installed a young Iranian dictator who would live a long life and insure unfettered access by the west to Iran's oil for decades to come aka Making the World Safe for Democracy, while rewarding the Shaw and his family with a life of opulence most people could never dream of.
- Our puppet dictator, the Shaw of Iran ruled Iran with an iron fist, banned civil liberties and killed off any opposition for about 30 years; a lifetime appointment with no term limits
. This was all seen as American brutal colonial rule over Iran by proxy over the Iranian people as well as many in the surrounding Islamic Middle East.
- In 1979 the people of Iran led by the Ayatollah rose up and deposed the then ailing Shaw who fled in exile to Canada for medical treatment taking with him the sum total of all the cash in the government's bank account. Some speculate that if we would have respected Iran's sovereignty in the 1950s, they would have had a friendly moderate, democratic government but instead they argue we drove them to a theocratic dictator.
- To receive advanced medical treatment, The Shaw was allowed into America from Canada. Like a lot of long-haired hippies in the US at the time, the young people of Iran were also on a huge protest kick but with a more aggressive leaning. Angry college students driven by emotion over reason and fully aware of their history, of which many Americans had no idea, rioted after the the US allowed the Shaw into the US and stormed the US embassy taking the entire US embassy staff hostage, an international crime. They agreed to vacate the embassy under 3 conditions they likely expected the US to agree to, after all Mr. Niceguy Jimmy Carter was President.
1. Publicly apologize for the US overthrow of their first ever democratically elected government in the 1950s.
2. Send the Shaw back to Iran to face trial.
3. Freeze the money the Shaw stole from the Iranian treasury and return it to the Iranian government.
Carter refused all three.
- After Carter was defeated in his re-election bid, at the moment Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, the hostages were released unharmed physically, although emotionally it had to be torturous. Maybe they were hoping for better relations with the US under Reagan.
- Under the Reagan Administration the US starts to really buddy up with Iran's neighbor to the west Iraq who eventually starts a war with them. This was seen as a US war with Iran by proxy by many Iranians. The war included the use of chemical weapons and although there is no evidence indicated we gave Iraq the chemical weapons they used on Iran as well as the Kurds within Iraq, it is bedeviled by the Iranians that we did.
- In order to fund the overthrow of yet another democratically elected government in Nicaragua that congress had refused to fund, the Reagan Administration secretly sold missiles to Iran at a profit to be used to fund the Nicaraguan overthrow; the same Iran that held American hostages for over a year. Once it was exposed and the players were brought before the people's representatives in congress to explain themselves, one administration official said "it was a neat idea."
- Supporting both sides of a war between two Islamic countries, nearly the entire Middle East true or false (I personally think false) thinks we pushed Iraq to start probably played a role the formation of Al Qaeda.
- Fast forward to 2009 and one of the first acts of international diplomacy our new President, who is probably more informed than most of this and similar late 20th century less than admirable US interventions in what many consider a true act of humility, courage and Christianity; traveled around to world to both express regret over our past misdeeds and signal a new era of cooperation based on mutual respect. Many in the America condemned it as the unpatriotic, weak, apology tour.
Bottom line today is Iran does not trust us and many feel they never planned to use them but wanted to have a deterrent in consideration of past actions. I don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons one bit. I think the entire Middle East is a powder keg filled with bat crazy people who think killing their own family members is honorable. The only reason we've been so entangled in the region is due to our addition to the oil monopoly. In crack addition, everybody becomes the bad guy; the dealer and the addict. Building ow own crack houses is not the answer. I doubt it will happen but I hope for peace in the middle east. I especially don't want American troops in the middle of it if its not obtainable. I also think we're ditching intellectual honesty and any hope at coming to a peaceful outcome if we utterly and arrogantly refuse to try to see things from any side other than our own.
