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Source: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-lie-at-the-heart-of-the-iran-memorandum/
The U.S.-Iran Memorandum Leaves Out the Iranian People
(Times of Israel) Catherine Perez-Shakdam - The U.S.-Iran memorandum leaves out the one thing that ought to sit at the center of any serious agreement: the Iranian people. The regime in Tehran has been a machine for humiliation, coercion, and fear. It has jailed journalists for telling the truth, hounded women for refusing to submit, broken students for speaking too freely, and treated protest as a crime against the state. Its morality police have marched into ordinary life with the zeal of inquisitors. It has beaten, disappeared, and executed opponents with the solemnity of a system that believes repression is a duty. These horrors are lived. They begin with surveillance and end with graves. They pass through prison cells where dissidents are interrogated, isolated, and abused. They move through public squares where fear is staged as order. They reach into homes where families wait for sons and daughters who may never come back. They have included the crushing of protests with live fire, the arrest of lawyers, the silencing of artists, and the routine reduction of citizenship to obedience. A regime that has spent decades perfecting intimidation does not suddenly become respectable because diplomats have drafted a careful paragraph about stability. That is why a memorandum that leaves the Iranian people nearly invisible cannot be treated as a triumph of statecraft. It asks the world to ignore the space where human beings ought to be. The writer is Executive Director at the Forum for Foreign Relations and an associate scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.