Wednesday 16 May 2018

Iran Deal

The USA had a big investment in the Shah's Iran, so they were terribly shocked by the Iran hostage crisis in 1979-81, When revolutionary students broke into the embassy and held its personnel hostage. It probably cost Jimmy Carter his re-election and ended on the day Reagan was installed, suggesting that the Republicans made a secret deal (cf the pact with North Vietnam which enabled Nixon to defeat Humphrey in 1968). But that doesn't explain why the US still has a fixation on Iran 36 years later. In fact, Iran does not threaten any vital American interest - unless Israel is considered an interest rather than a drag on US foreign policy. The influence of Iran on Iraq was brought about by the US-UK invasion of 2003. Its presence in Syria is widely misunderstood as support for a 'Shia government'. In fact the Assad regime is secular, based on the Baath ideology, but Iran is more afraid of extreme Sunni militancy than of secularism (and so should the US be). Saudi Arabia hates Iran because Wahhabism holds that all Shia are enemies, to be fought against wherever they are found. As for Bahrain, it is a Sunni tyranny dominating a Shia majority. There remains Israel, which has a pathological fear of Iran, based on Iranian rhetoric about 'removing Israel from the map', but that does not mean nuking Israelis - and countless Palestinians; Israel has had nuclear weapons for fifty years, and there is no reason to believe that Iran's leaders are suicidal. In fact a one-state solution for Palestine would remove Israel from the map and replace it by a secular state with equal rights for all its people, but for that Israel would have to abandon its 'racially' based nationalism (although there is no Jewish race; that was a fiction invented by European anti-Semites). And what if Iran did re-start its nuclear programme? America made no effort to stop Pakistan from getting the bomb, although India already had it, and Pakistan is a much more unstable country than Iran. For seventy years the logic of MAD (mutually assured destruction) has prevented nuclear war. If US aggressiveness made Iranians re-start their nuclear programme, it would apply to Iran too. But perhaps Trump is too mad for MAD.

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