{"id":5681,"date":"2015-09-20T14:04:10","date_gmt":"2015-09-20T19:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5681"},"modified":"2015-09-19T16:09:18","modified_gmt":"2015-09-19T21:09:18","slug":"risky-business-with-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5681","title":{"rendered":"Risky Business With Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not feeling entirely optimistic about the Iran nuclear deal. Sure, there are a lot of good things to be said about it; avoiding a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East would be quite an accomplishment for civilization (the word “holocaust” itself has its ultimate origins<\/a> in the ancient Middle-Eastern Hebrew language, i.e. “olah” meaning burnt offering). Still, I wish that Obama, Kerry and the Dems were totally honest about what the JCPOA agreement with Iran<\/a> ultimately is: i.e., a huge bet that politics in Iran are going to fundamentally change over the next decade, such that the pro-western urban secularists will take charge as the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard fade into a genteel irrelevance, sort of like the British monarchy. Unfortunately, we’ve been waiting for an Iranian regime change to happen since the last days of Jimmy Carter. <\/p>\n

My heart really hopes that Obama is right and that an opening to the urban secularists by the USA will finally put them over the top in Tehran. But my head and my knowledge of history, however limited, is a bit more cynical — it’s a big crap shoot, a real “Hail Mary” pass. I guess that we shall find out how it goes. <\/p>\n

The JCPOA has a lot of very optimistic supporters in the liberal big media, not surprisingly. A typical supporter is Tom Friedman of the NY Times, who focuses on the Middle East. I must give Friedman credit for hinting in one of his recent articles that he too realizes that Iranian regime change is a necessary condition for the agreement to really work as the Obama Administration hopes. Friedman was in a bit of a whimsical mood recently (hey, you need a sense of humor to survive when you focus on Middle Eastern issues), and so he issued a “report card”<\/a> to some of the key players in the deal, as if from a 6th grade teacher. Here’s a quote from his grading of the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:<\/p>\n

Hat\u2019s off, Ali, you\u2019re good. When I sell my house, could I give you a call? But here\u2019s a note to his parents: \u201cAli got an A, but he has a tendency to get cocky. He is confident that he can pull off this deal without any transformation in Iran\u2019s domestic politics. I suggest you buy him a good biography of Mikhail Gorbachev.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good point, Tom . . . but are you really willing to follow that analogy into the present? I mean, with Vladimir Putin now firmly in charge, did Russia really change all that much? And can Iran?<\/p>\n

Another recent report<\/a> in the NY Times indicates that Iranian politics are up for grabs right now, with the old clerics and the Revolutionary Guard trying to keep the anti-America sentiment going, while the modernizers trying to reach out to the west without getting purged. The Times is fairly optimistic, but a Palestinian analyst writing in Al Jazeera is a bit more circumspect<\/a> about political change in Iran. A writer in the Foreign Policy Journal is even more dubious<\/a> about the internal effects of the nuclear deal, saying that “one of the founding principles of the Islamic Republic of Iran was resistance to U.S. domination of the region. The U.S. and Iran are fundamentally at odds over the geopolitics of the Middle East.”<\/p>\n

Personally, I would not recommend holding your breath awaiting the fall of the Supreme Leader, Guardian Council and Assembly of Experts in Iran. As with Russia and China over the course of their 20th Century revolutionary history, there will be incremental changes allowing greater interaction with the world economy over time. The JCPOA negotiations (which, from the Iranian perspective, accomplished their primary objective in the dismantlement of harmful international economic sanctions) are indeed an example of this. But as to any major Iranian policy and attitude shifts towards Israel and the US, akin to what happened in Egypt and Jordan in the 1970’s and 80’s, I personally doubt if that is “in the offing”. Nuclear weapons are definitely NOT out of the Iranian picture; at best they have been moved out of the center and into a corner, for the time being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not feeling entirely optimistic about the Iran nuclear deal. Sure, there are a lot of good things to be said about it; avoiding a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East would be quite an accomplishment for civilization (the word “holocaust” itself has its ultimate origins in the ancient Middle-Eastern Hebrew language, i.e. “olah” meaning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5681"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5684,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681\/revisions\/5684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}