It’s interesting how many people are slamming the Obama Administration’s diplomatic efforts with Iran before the deal is even signed.
So far, the intense negotiations are at the tentative “agreement” stage. A final pact, if one is even arrived at, won’t be signed until June.
In the meantime, members of the U.S. Congress – on both sides of the aisle – are carping about the initiative, which is backed – as some people conveniently like to forget – by several other nations.
This is not to suggest any sort of agreement should not be scrutinized. It certainly should, and it certainly will be – by Congress and others. In the meantime, these naysayers so eager to pounce on the pact, including Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, should hold their fire to find out more details about what such an agreement might entail.
So far, according to these nonstop spoilsports, the deal would be a big giveaway to untrustworthy, devious, terrorist-trending Iran. All that country wants, they claim, is for economic sanctions to be lifted so the Iranians can pretend to stop trying to make nuclear bombs while their economy comes back up to snuff.
Advocates of the deal claim it’s better to open communications with Iran while the United States and other countries attest to a verification process, including on-site inspections, to be assured Iran has ceased preliminary processes in making nuclear weapons. If that promise is broken, economic sanctions could once again be applied.
Both sides of this issue have raised plenty of good questions. However, when all is said and done, it all comes down to this: Should the United States and the rest of the world continue to give cold-shoulder hostility and threats to Iran, or should the world at least open up lines of communication – if not an olive branch – to that country?
Some who are opposed to any sort of treaty with Iran apparently think there is only one solution possible: a military attack against nuclear-development sites in Iran. That seems to be the intransigent stance of Netanyahu.
Treaty defenders maintain diplomatic efforts hold open the possibility of positive progress, which is much better than a hostile stand-off bound to lead to inevitable war. That latter argument, a “give peace a chance” approach, seems to make sense.
Many people do not know in Iran today, the vast majority of its citizens are young people, well under the age of 30. Most of them are fond of Western ways and basically pro-American, no matter what the religious extremists tell them. Hope for the future resides with those young people. One reason the Soviet Union dissolved is because the young people in that country were fed up or just plain bored by hearing outdated, dreary, stupid communist propaganda.
A treaty with Iran will give that nation’s young people hope they can communicate openly with the rest of the world, that extremists in Iran will have to compromise with the secular geo-political realities around them. The forces of democracy are definitely brewing under the surface in Iran. There will come a time when the old mullahs and their medieval mindsets will have to give way to an Iran that is more modern, more open, more democratic. In fact, that conflict between neo-medieval extremist rigidities and secular, open-minded modernity is what is causing so much cruelty and suffering in the Middle East today.
This diplomatic initiative, whether it is ratified or not, could be a force for nurturing the forces of democratization, perhaps as bold and historic as was President Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China.
In any case, time will tell. Why squash the egg before it has a chance to hatch?
