Monday, November 24, is the deadline for the negotiations between Iran and the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China regarding its program to build its own nuclear weapons to conclude. At this writing, whether the negotiations will be extended or not is unknown, but it seems unlikely.
President Obama has been obsessed with Iran, seeking to change its hostility by finding an answer to the problem its nuclear weapon program represents. That is typical of his “magical thinking” whereby something he wants is automatically assumed to be accessible. In the case of Iran, it has been hostile to the U.S. since its revolution in 1979 and remains so today.
Iran has cause. As Marin Katusa, a leading energy investor, explains in his book, “The Colder War”, the U.S. was instrumental in overthrowing Mohammad Mosaddegh, an Iranian prime minister who set about nationalizing its oil industry. The U.S. stagied a coup in 1953 and reinstated the pro-U.S. shah. “Post-coup, the shah grew increasingly authoritarian and, in 1979, the Iranian revolution forced him to flee.”
Katusa reports what followed: “The U.S. government judged it futile to try to reinstate a pro-Western regime. So it turned its back on the shah and encouraged an invasion of Iran by Iraq. Saddam Hussein, the secular Iraqi dictator, went to war against his neighbor, supported by money and weapons courtesy of the United States.” The war last eight futile years and cost both nations hundreds of thousands of lives. No need to wonder why Iran hates and distrusts the U.S.
The essential problem of a nuclear Iran is that it has been an extremely aggressive nation since 1979. Iran is widely regarded as the primary supporter of terror in the Middle East. It sponsors two Palestinian organizations, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Iran’s support for bombings and other acts of terror would fill a book.