‘Biden must tackle the country’s human rights violations, its regional belligerence, its support for terror and funding of proxies that undermine Iraq and Lebanon.’
There is more chance of Corbyn becoming leader of the Conservative Party than there is of Biden tackling Iran’s human rights violations. His party will be too busy with their own human rights violations against Trump supporters. As for tackling Iran’s support for terror, when Trump did this he was accused of starting World War III.
Then we have the usual stuff about Iran being a 5,000 year old civilisation. You might as well say the same about Greece or Egypt. As far as I can tell, it is hundreds or thousands of years since Iran embodied any form of advanced civilisation. Essentially it’s just a very large Islamic dystopia that keeps its own people in misery and would happily impose that misery on the rest of the world if possible.
How about France though. The writer says Khomeini was from a small town… Bur really he was from France, where he was courted by the intellectuals for his talk of peace and love and Sunni/Shia brotherhood and so on, during his 10 years in exile there before he was airlifted in to take over the revolution. France and Islam is always crazy, they have a natural instinct to get them wrong.
When ever I read of the past I usually find France in the background instigating all the crazy disasters, every time. I think the French just cannot help being such a thorn in USA and UK, it just is an instinct with them, that they will always mess things up.
I actually blame the entire Iraq disaster on them. They (with the German sidekick trouble makers) refused to join the entire free world in pursuit of Saddam’s WMD hunt. This emboldened Saddam to refuse the inspectors, and when the fight began they just kept back being against everything emboldening the opposition to keep fighting, and then gave succor to Syria, their old friend, and kept Syria being a huge thorn by allowing the Iraqi ‘freedom fighters’ to escape across the border to Syria and refuge – and I think were instrumental in what later went on there, and on and on, and do not get me talking of WWI, WWII, Vietnam,,,,,
Iranians are a great people, and a proud people, and they are still the same people who had greatness in the past. Iranians are not Arabs, but Persians, or Aryans.. They are intellectual, the best art, poetry, literature, architecture of the region came from them. They always revered education and intellectualism, and have been great immigrants in the West.
One point is very true above – The Iranian people always liked and admired America, and so the Religious tyrants had to keep at eternal war with USA so any public display or positive attitudes to the West could be stamped out violently as being traitorous. This antipathy to USA is manufactured, and is not what the people feel, or wish.
Mossadegh being displaced by voting irregularities by the wicked Dulls Brothers in 1953 has been a very effective tool to hit USA and UK with (and is poetic that Biden is tainted by many Americans by this same issue, ha), and the Embassy disaster is one we beat them with – but time is long past to get over this.
Iran and USA need to be friends. We are natural friends, I hope USA really makes Iran the top priority in reconciliation, but the tyrants in power, what to do? My guess is just to give in pretty much to them and soon normalization will cause them to lost power like Castro because the people are sick of being outcasts in the world – they are lost if the state of war is over.
Shia/Sunni? Iran wanting to dominate the region? I think again normalization may be the best thing. Get them back to being members of the civilized world, where they belong, by getting the actual citizens holding democratic power. When MacArthur had absolute power in occupied Japan he had Americans write them a Constitution (in 9 days) and forced the Japanese to accept it, one of the main things forced, and resisted, was giving women the right to vote (which was unimaginable to them). MacArthur did it because he said if women can vote Japan will never be a warlike place again, it would calm their aggression instincts. Iranian women vote, and hold a fair bit of power, professionally and so on, but giving the people the power instead of the tyrants will stop them being such a militant force, as the citizens just want peace and prosperity, not this war and hostility and oppression. If the tyrants have no war to keep themselves in power I would expect the citizens will vote in peace and prosperity instead of militarism.
Time to turn the other cheek and welcome Iran back into the civilized world.
We are constantly being told that Iranians are a great people – and I agree that Iranians do great things when they come to the West. But if they are so great why did they fall for all the nonsense and evil of Islam?
m pathy
3 years ago
I read this article wondering how the US needed Iran. 5000 years of civilisation and a nice people whom you cannot leave out of conversations was what I got. Oh, and the US must resume being the ME’s policeman. It must stop Iran’s human rights abuses (how?), solve regional instability (the recent historical record of that is abysmal) and build its shattered economy(why?).
Ridiculous crap. I saw absolutely no benefit for the US. What I read was a plan as shortsighted and naive as Obama’s to entrench a regime that caused all those problems in the first place. A regime that its own people despise. The concerns of a number of US allies – sunni muslim states and Israel – over a US-Iran rapprochement were not addressed. The fact that the mullahs are not good faith actors was not addressed. Iranian nuclear ambition will have to be stopped by force, the US just needs to look away.
In fact the post- pandemic period is a good time to watch Teheran carefully for cracks in its power structure and to if not aid, then not to hinder the uprising that will follow.
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
Biden must tackle the country’s human rights violations, its regional belligerence, its support for terror and funding of proxies that undermine Iraq and Lebanon. Sure. That’s what we can count on Biden to do. Are you familiar with Joe Biden and his near half-century record of mostly leeching from the public trough?
Carter was another weak man and he poured gas on it. But then Reagan poured more gas on it because he thought all foreign peoples were Americans inside just waiting for a chance to get out. This curse in thinking has been the West’s greatest problem. The failure to know different peoples and cultures are not like us and have different values and wishes and thinking.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
‘Biden must tackle the country’s human rights violations…’
I have remarked on these words below, as indeed have others. But sit back and think just how utterly disconnected from all reality you must be to have written them. It has become obvious over recent years that many of the journalists and commentators are as dumb and deluded as the politicians. And it is nonsense like this that has driven so many of us away from the MSM, certainly to the extent that we will no longer pay for it.
I disagree sort of. They need to be part of the entire dialogue, but I think they cannot be what stops actual rapprochement, because the best way to stop them is removing the state of war footing the Theocratic tyrants use to keep their people crushed. As long as Iran is in a state of war, anything not on the side of the war is treason.
The old thing of ‘The beatings will continue till moral improves’ is at play. ‘Human Rights abuse will continue till you stop trying to get human rights’ is the current paradox. 1984 had the state of war as fundamental to Big Brother holding absolute authority.. Stopping the state of war is likely to break the tyrant’s power, or so I would guess.
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
Does the US have to worry about Iran if it keeps feeding Saudi Arabia and Israel with arms and expertise?
yes. The Iranians are really smart and determined people. They need to be brought into the civilized world or they will always be up to no good because they are smart and determined. One main problem with them is their innate respect for authority though. The entire history of Iran, and the entire ME is all the towns, land, buildings, industry was always owned by the select aristocracy. They have been feudal from Islam beginning to, say, the 1970s.
The farming people were not peasants but tenant farmers ( peasant means small landowning farmer, the evolution from serfs to peasants created the West, the end of the feudal, and created us, in Russia the Kulaks were peasants, and so Stalin genocided them as a necessity for his communism collectivizing)) . (5 part tenant farming was the ME norm, land owner, draft animal owner, seed owner, labour, and irrigation, who ever provided each got a 1/5 th share in the crop)
The villages and towns were owned by the feudal master, it was all like this even in the last Shah’s days – he tried to modernize, but too fast. What I am getting at is the Islamic people are respectful of authority as it is fundamental to their past and culture, as are authoritarian overlords. From what I see, even under the repressive and brutal Theocracy the people are getting more Western in thinking, and may be ready for democracy and freedom if the tyrants can be broken by peace, by stopping this endless war-footing and fighting, and the people be let to pick better leaders, ones not so warlike.
ar.khosravi2000
3 years ago
The article seems very well researched but there is one (pedantic) error that it described the nationalist leader in 1953 who was toppled as Iran’s President, whereas the fact is that he was a Prime Minister and that Iran had never had a president until 1980. Also, it simply looks over the US response to Khatami’s talk of dialogue between civilisation, without mentioning that the Bush administration really stupidly antagonised the Iranians by including Iran in his Axis of Evil speech, when there was a genuine opportunity as the Iranian regime had weirdly shown some solidarity with the US after 9/11 not to mention Qassem Souleimani’s covert cooperation with the US military in Afghanistan I think
1980 was a longtime ago. The Republicans and the Mullahs had a mutual fear of the communists then. The whole Afghan adventure the Americans embarked on then still has them mired 40 years on.
Right…”the enemy of my enemy is my friend”…for the time being, but then there was that Marine barracks thing-hard to forget. Oh, and the peaceful nukes. The one real chance was the Green Revolution, but we know where Obama/Biden came in on that, don’t we?
stephen f.
3 years ago
Truly Biden has the opportunity to be the next Jimmy Carter.
Ian Black
3 years ago
“but it paved the way for Obama’s success”… I must have missed something. What ‘success’?
Persia/Iran along with most of Islam gave up thinking about nine centuries ago, with the publication of the ‘Incoherence of the Philosophers’ by one Al-Ghazali of Tus,(northern Iran). This work totally rejected any engagement with the philosophy of Ancient Greek and Rome. Advocating instead the primacy of the Koran.
Four to five centuries later there was a brief moment of hope with the emergence of the Shi’ite Safavid dynasty, but that quickly faded only to leave us with the beautiful city of Isfahan.
My theory is China did this 2500 years ago with Confucius. Once all was known, to be a perfect and harmonious society, there was nothing new needed to know, and new thinking would just undermine the perfection. So they made study focus on just that perfection, and basically made thinking outside the box, like philosophy, be a crime, and so it stayed.
Yes, I completely agree. Each dynasty was a Confucian clone, and even the famous competitive ‘Mandarin’ examinations were solely about Confucian philosophy almost to the end of the Qing, the last dynasty.
patrick o’leary
3 years ago
” Ever since the Hostage Crisis, America and Iran have been waltzing together, locked in each other’s arms, but always out of step.” What an ignorant and historically uninformed statement. How about “Ever since the coup of 1953, orchestrated and funded by the UK/US, resulted in the toppling of the democratically elected government of Iran … you can guess the rest.” Maybe read a little history before you blather on about “an event 40 years ago that changed history in the Middle East.” The UK/US have been changing history in the Middle East a hell of a lot longer than that, always to their own benefit. I’ll make it easy for you, just watch the film Coup 53, but only if you want to know the true story.
‘Biden must tackle the country’s human rights violations, its regional belligerence, its support for terror and funding of proxies that undermine Iraq and Lebanon.’
There is more chance of Corbyn becoming leader of the Conservative Party than there is of Biden tackling Iran’s human rights violations. His party will be too busy with their own human rights violations against Trump supporters. As for tackling Iran’s support for terror, when Trump did this he was accused of starting World War III.
Then we have the usual stuff about Iran being a 5,000 year old civilisation. You might as well say the same about Greece or Egypt. As far as I can tell, it is hundreds or thousands of years since Iran embodied any form of advanced civilisation. Essentially it’s just a very large Islamic dystopia that keeps its own people in misery and would happily impose that misery on the rest of the world if possible.
I’d say a fair few decades since Iran was a civilisation. Under the Shahs it was actually quite active as a civilisation.
Well, yes, to some extent, but under the Shah it was not democratic, and he oversaw a brutal and repressive police/army.
How about France though. The writer says Khomeini was from a small town… Bur really he was from France, where he was courted by the intellectuals for his talk of peace and love and Sunni/Shia brotherhood and so on, during his 10 years in exile there before he was airlifted in to take over the revolution. France and Islam is always crazy, they have a natural instinct to get them wrong.
When ever I read of the past I usually find France in the background instigating all the crazy disasters, every time. I think the French just cannot help being such a thorn in USA and UK, it just is an instinct with them, that they will always mess things up.
I actually blame the entire Iraq disaster on them. They (with the German sidekick trouble makers) refused to join the entire free world in pursuit of Saddam’s WMD hunt. This emboldened Saddam to refuse the inspectors, and when the fight began they just kept back being against everything emboldening the opposition to keep fighting, and then gave succor to Syria, their old friend, and kept Syria being a huge thorn by allowing the Iraqi ‘freedom fighters’ to escape across the border to Syria and refuge – and I think were instrumental in what later went on there, and on and on, and do not get me talking of WWI, WWII, Vietnam,,,,,
Country was still
Relatively modern etc. Democracy isn’t always necessary for modernity.
Will he deal with China’s human rights violations when he has sorted out Iran?
He’s dealing with China’s human rights violations next week, Iran the week after that. Happy days!
Iranians are a great people, and a proud people, and they are still the same people who had greatness in the past. Iranians are not Arabs, but Persians, or Aryans.. They are intellectual, the best art, poetry, literature, architecture of the region came from them. They always revered education and intellectualism, and have been great immigrants in the West.
One point is very true above – The Iranian people always liked and admired America, and so the Religious tyrants had to keep at eternal war with USA so any public display or positive attitudes to the West could be stamped out violently as being traitorous. This antipathy to USA is manufactured, and is not what the people feel, or wish.
Mossadegh being displaced by voting irregularities by the wicked Dulls Brothers in 1953 has been a very effective tool to hit USA and UK with (and is poetic that Biden is tainted by many Americans by this same issue, ha), and the Embassy disaster is one we beat them with – but time is long past to get over this.
Iran and USA need to be friends. We are natural friends, I hope USA really makes Iran the top priority in reconciliation, but the tyrants in power, what to do? My guess is just to give in pretty much to them and soon normalization will cause them to lost power like Castro because the people are sick of being outcasts in the world – they are lost if the state of war is over.
Shia/Sunni? Iran wanting to dominate the region? I think again normalization may be the best thing. Get them back to being members of the civilized world, where they belong, by getting the actual citizens holding democratic power. When MacArthur had absolute power in occupied Japan he had Americans write them a Constitution (in 9 days) and forced the Japanese to accept it, one of the main things forced, and resisted, was giving women the right to vote (which was unimaginable to them). MacArthur did it because he said if women can vote Japan will never be a warlike place again, it would calm their aggression instincts. Iranian women vote, and hold a fair bit of power, professionally and so on, but giving the people the power instead of the tyrants will stop them being such a militant force, as the citizens just want peace and prosperity, not this war and hostility and oppression. If the tyrants have no war to keep themselves in power I would expect the citizens will vote in peace and prosperity instead of militarism.
Time to turn the other cheek and welcome Iran back into the civilized world.
We are constantly being told that Iranians are a great people – and I agree that Iranians do great things when they come to the West. But if they are so great why did they fall for all the nonsense and evil of Islam?
I read this article wondering how the US needed Iran. 5000 years of civilisation and a nice people whom you cannot leave out of conversations was what I got. Oh, and the US must resume being the ME’s policeman. It must stop Iran’s human rights abuses (how?), solve regional instability (the recent historical record of that is abysmal) and build its shattered economy(why?).
Ridiculous crap. I saw absolutely no benefit for the US. What I read was a plan as shortsighted and naive as Obama’s to entrench a regime that caused all those problems in the first place. A regime that its own people despise. The concerns of a number of US allies – sunni muslim states and Israel – over a US-Iran rapprochement were not addressed. The fact that the mullahs are not good faith actors was not addressed. Iranian nuclear ambition will have to be stopped by force, the US just needs to look away.
In fact the post- pandemic period is a good time to watch Teheran carefully for cracks in its power structure and to if not aid, then not to hinder the uprising that will follow.
Biden must tackle the country’s human rights violations, its regional belligerence, its support for terror and funding of proxies that undermine Iraq and Lebanon.
Sure. That’s what we can count on Biden to do. Are you familiar with Joe Biden and his near half-century record of mostly leeching from the public trough?
Yes and then there is that midnight pallet of money…
Carter was another weak man and he poured gas on it. But then Reagan poured more gas on it because he thought all foreign peoples were Americans inside just waiting for a chance to get out. This curse in thinking has been the West’s greatest problem. The failure to know different peoples and cultures are not like us and have different values and wishes and thinking.
‘Biden must tackle the country’s human rights violations…’
I have remarked on these words below, as indeed have others. But sit back and think just how utterly disconnected from all reality you must be to have written them. It has become obvious over recent years that many of the journalists and commentators are as dumb and deluded as the politicians. And it is nonsense like this that has driven so many of us away from the MSM, certainly to the extent that we will no longer pay for it.
I disagree sort of. They need to be part of the entire dialogue, but I think they cannot be what stops actual rapprochement, because the best way to stop them is removing the state of war footing the Theocratic tyrants use to keep their people crushed. As long as Iran is in a state of war, anything not on the side of the war is treason.
The old thing of ‘The beatings will continue till moral improves’ is at play. ‘Human Rights abuse will continue till you stop trying to get human rights’ is the current paradox. 1984 had the state of war as fundamental to Big Brother holding absolute authority.. Stopping the state of war is likely to break the tyrant’s power, or so I would guess.
Does the US have to worry about Iran if it keeps feeding Saudi Arabia and Israel with arms and expertise?
With regard to “expertise” and Israel, it’s probably the other way around.
yes. The Iranians are really smart and determined people. They need to be brought into the civilized world or they will always be up to no good because they are smart and determined. One main problem with them is their innate respect for authority though. The entire history of Iran, and the entire ME is all the towns, land, buildings, industry was always owned by the select aristocracy. They have been feudal from Islam beginning to, say, the 1970s.
The farming people were not peasants but tenant farmers ( peasant means small landowning farmer, the evolution from serfs to peasants created the West, the end of the feudal, and created us, in Russia the Kulaks were peasants, and so Stalin genocided them as a necessity for his communism collectivizing)) . (5 part tenant farming was the ME norm, land owner, draft animal owner, seed owner, labour, and irrigation, who ever provided each got a 1/5 th share in the crop)
The villages and towns were owned by the feudal master, it was all like this even in the last Shah’s days – he tried to modernize, but too fast. What I am getting at is the Islamic people are respectful of authority as it is fundamental to their past and culture, as are authoritarian overlords. From what I see, even under the repressive and brutal Theocracy the people are getting more Western in thinking, and may be ready for democracy and freedom if the tyrants can be broken by peace, by stopping this endless war-footing and fighting, and the people be let to pick better leaders, ones not so warlike.
The article seems very well researched but there is one (pedantic) error that it described the nationalist leader in 1953 who was toppled as Iran’s President, whereas the fact is that he was a Prime Minister and that Iran had never had a president until 1980. Also, it simply looks over the US response to Khatami’s talk of dialogue between civilisation, without mentioning that the Bush administration really stupidly antagonised the Iranians by including Iran in his Axis of Evil speech, when there was a genuine opportunity as the Iranian regime had weirdly shown some solidarity with the US after 9/11 not to mention Qassem Souleimani’s covert cooperation with the US military in Afghanistan I think
1980 was a longtime ago. The Republicans and the Mullahs had a mutual fear of the communists then. The whole Afghan adventure the Americans embarked on then still has them mired 40 years on.
Right…”the enemy of my enemy is my friend”…for the time being, but then there was that Marine barracks thing-hard to forget. Oh, and the peaceful nukes. The one real chance was the Green Revolution, but we know where Obama/Biden came in on that, don’t we?
Truly Biden has the opportunity to be the next Jimmy Carter.
“but it paved the way for Obama’s success”… I must have missed something. What ‘success’?
Check his wealth out.
Ah! ‘That’ success… silly me.
Persia/Iran along with most of Islam gave up thinking about nine centuries ago, with the publication of the ‘Incoherence of the Philosophers’ by one Al-Ghazali of Tus,(northern Iran).
This work totally rejected any engagement with the philosophy of Ancient Greek and Rome. Advocating instead the primacy of the Koran.
Four to five centuries later there was a brief moment of hope with the emergence of the Shi’ite Safavid dynasty, but that quickly faded only to leave us with the beautiful city of Isfahan.
My theory is China did this 2500 years ago with Confucius. Once all was known, to be a perfect and harmonious society, there was nothing new needed to know, and new thinking would just undermine the perfection. So they made study focus on just that perfection, and basically made thinking outside the box, like philosophy, be a crime, and so it stayed.
Yes, I completely agree.
Each dynasty was a Confucian clone, and even the famous competitive ‘Mandarin’ examinations were solely about Confucian philosophy almost to the end of the Qing, the last dynasty.
” Ever since the Hostage Crisis, America and Iran have been waltzing together, locked in each other’s arms, but always out of step.”
What an ignorant and historically uninformed statement. How about “Ever since the coup of 1953, orchestrated and funded by the UK/US, resulted in the toppling of the democratically elected government of Iran … you can guess the rest.” Maybe read a little history before you blather on about “an event 40 years ago that changed history in the Middle East.” The UK/US have been changing history in the Middle East a hell of a lot longer than that, always to their own benefit. I’ll make it easy for you, just watch the film Coup 53, but only if you want to know the true story.
https://coup53.com/
Islam has been changing the Middle East for quite a bit longer, and is not finished…with the ME, or us.
America “needs” Iran like a hole in the head. Read Bret Stephens, esp. part 3:
https://www.commentarymagaz…
How relevant can this article be given that there isn’t a single reference to Israel in it., despite several references to the JCPOA. Ridiculous.