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You Cannot Make a Deal with a Regime that Uses Lies as a Strategic Weapon
(Times of Israel) Marziyeh Amirizadeh - I have been watching reports of negotiations between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran with anguish. I want to believe that President Trump understands what I know as the truth about the Islamic Republic: that you can never negotiate with them, and they will always lie and do anything to stay in power. I have lived inside this regime's cruelty. I have suffered in its prisons. I have witnessed friends, and my husband, tortured and executed. And I know, with every part of my being, that a deal with the Islamic Republic is not a path to peace. It is a gift of time to an evil regime. What I learned inside its prison walls is the same thing the world keeps refusing to learn outside them: this regime does not negotiate in good faith. It negotiates for survival. Lying - taqiyya - is its religiously sanctioned strategic weapon. Western leaders consistently make the same mistake. They look at Iran and see a government with factions - "reformists" and hardliners. They conclude that the "reformists" represent a genuine alternative. They do not. The "reformist" and hardliner structure is a performance, a deliberate good cop, bad cop strategy designed to give Westerners the illusion that progress is possible. Both serve the same system. The Islamic Republic regime is centered around an extremist Islamic ideology. Leaders have changed but the ideology's goals do not change. From the beginning, that goal has included the export of revolutionary Islam, the destruction of the U.S. and Israel, and the subordination of every nation to an Islamist vision of global order. The Islamic Republic leaders understand that American presidential terms end. Policies shift. A deal signed today can be quietly undermined tomorrow, and an administration that championed it may no longer be in office to notice, or care. The ideology that drives them and the hostility toward the U.S., Israel, and the West is written into their founding documents. But none of it will appear on any negotiating table. There is no real victory and no deals to be had for America while the Islamic Republic remains in power. They will never let go of their plans to achieve nuclear weapons and are willing to make a deal now and wait until Trump's successor is looking the other way to break out to a weapon. No deal will change this reality. The writer is an Iranian American who immigrated to the U.S. after being sentenced to death in Iran for converting to Christianity.