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The Iran Deal and the Rut of History

(Atlantic) Leon Wieseltier - The Iranian worldview was founded in large measure on a fiery, theological anti-Americanism, an officially disseminated view of Americanism as satanism. The adversarial relationship between America and the regime in Tehran has been based on the fact that we should be adversaries. What democrat, what pluralist, what liberal, what conservative would want this Iran for a friend? Obama likes to think, when he speaks of Iran, that he speaks of its people, but in practice he has extended his hand to its regime. With his talk about the Islamic Republic becoming "a very successful regional power," he has legitimated a regime that was more and more lacking in legitimacy. (There was something grotesque about the chumminess, the jolly camaraderie, of the American negotiators and the Iranian negotiators.) The text of the agreement states that the signatories will submit a resolution to the UN Security Council "expressing its desire to build a new relationship with Iran." Not a relationship with a new Iran, but a new relationship with this Iran, as it is presently constituted - that is to say, theocratic, oppressive, xenophobic, aggressive, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and homophobic. In his recent Iranian New Year message, Obama exhorted the "people of Iran...to speak up for the future [they] seek." The last time the people of Iran spoke up to their government, they left their blood on the streets. If I could believe that the agreement marked the end of Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon, I would support it. I do not support it because it is only a deferral and a delay. Every pathway is not cut off. Moreover, if even a fraction of the revenues returned to Iran are allocated to its vile adventures beyond its borders, the U.S. will have subsidized an expansion of its own nightmares. As long as Iran does not agree to retire its infrastructure so that the manufacture of a nuclear weapon becomes not improbable but impossible, the U.S. will not have transformed the reality that worries it. We will only have mitigated it and prettified it.
2015-07-28 00:00:00
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