The Iran Agreement
There is apparently an agreement on the Iran nuclear program that the negotiators are presenting to their governments for approval. There are several outright lies being spread in the media coverage.
The first lie is that the people making comments about the agreement, politicians mostly, have actually read the entire agreement. These statements were prepared long ago and have nothing to do with the actual agreement.
Bibi Netanyahu was the first politician to condemn the agreement, but Bibi has been warning that Iran was building a nuke since 1992, and has rather obviously been wrong for decades. Part of his status is the lie that Israel is an ally of the US. The only actual ally that the US has in the Middle East is Turkey, which is a member of NATO, and has fought along side US troops in multiple conflicts. Israel has made no commitment to defend the interests of the US, despite all of the assistance that the US has provided.
The US is responsible for encouraging Iran to have a nuclear program, and Iran has signed and is in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The areas that Iran has denied inspectors access to are the result of exceptions to the inspection protocols inserted in the Treaty at the insistence of the US and the USSR.
While it is totally unscientific, an Internet poll by one of the US media conglomerates [MSNBC, I think] showed that more than 85% of Americans believe that Iran can be trusted to abide by the agreement. That’s about the same percentage of Americans who don’t trust Congress.
Finally, this agreement has the potential to bring down the cost of gas to under $2/gallon. The sanctions against Iran have beem keeping the price elevated by reducing the supply of crude oil on the market.
2 comments
The reality is that while Iran is not on “our side” — they’re only on their own side — they are also the enemy of our enemy. Both ISIS and the Taliban think that the Shia are heretics who should be exterminated, and of course Iran is the world’s only officially Shiite state. The enemy of our enemy is not our friend, but they’re someone we can work with. The fat lazy corrupt old ayatollahs are griping because they can’t get the luxuries to which they’re accustomed because of the sanctions, so they have a decided incentive to go along with the deal.
It’s not as if they wanted nuclear weapons in the first place. What they wanted, was for the United States to not invade them, a US invasion being even more disruptive to fat old corrupt ayatollahs’ lifestyle than sanctions (hiding in caves is *not* how they want to spend their elder years!). Now that it’s pretty clear that the US public has no stomach for invading Iran, well.
ISIS, on the other hand… if we continue letting them have a de facto nation state, complete with petro-dollars, they *have* declared that they intend to strike the United States. Yeah, I think we can work with the Iranians there….
The Iranians were willing to work with the US to eliminate al Qaeda and The Shrubbery just wouldn’t even thank them for all of the al Qaeda operatives they arrested.
Iran is like Cuba, a state that is hated even though it has never been at war with the US. Iran has been wronged by the US multiple times, but they have never attacked the US, or anyone else for the last three centuries.