(July 24, 2015 at 11:54 am)Parkers Tan Wrote: The biggest problem Westerners seem to have in our relations with Iran is understanding that they are masters of Realpolitik. Mullahs though they are, their religious beliefs do not cloud their diplomatic and political interactions with the world.
And unfortunately, we -- our "leaders" and the electorate at large -- are piss poor at Realpolitik, which is a strange and potentially dangerous disability for a nation as significant in world affairs as the U.S. I suppose our lack of finesse at playing the game has to do with our toxic 24-hour news cycle where everything is react, react, react!. Regimes like Iran (and China, to take another example) can play the long game because people aren't constantly running for re-election. This shouldn't be construed as me endorsing autocracy. I just wish we could pull it together enough to look down the road in terms of decades rather than election cycles. If we were able to do that, we just might understand what motivates regimes such as Iran -- a rather obvious precondition for any meaningful and fruitful negotiations but a point seemingly lost on many, including members of Congress. Rather than baying like trained dogs every time Netanyahu plays the 'existential threat' card, we might see past the regime's sabre rattling for what it apparently is: a long-term strategy designed to affect the balance of power in the Middle East in favor of the Shia versus the Arab countries. Since I consider the Arabs to be fair-weather friends at best, I think it's wise for us to consider strengthening ties with Iran -- at the very least to leave the door open to continuing a dialogue with them. We may not be able to do much about some of their more troubling behavior in the short to intermediate term. But I guarantee we will be even less effective if our every impulse is to threaten to bomb the shit out of them (or to allow our Israeli proxies to do so) every time they displease us.
Consider the following: if we hadn't orchestrated the overthrow of their regime in the '50s to install the Shah, if we hadn't tacitly encouraged (and actively armed) Hussein to attack them in the '80s before cynically playing both sides against each other in that ghastly war, if we hadn't stabbed the Iraqi Shia in the backs at the conclusion of the Gulf War, and if we had eschewed the endlessly stupid "Axis of evil" rhetoric of the Bush years, we might have been poised -- post-911 -- with a more friendly and pliant Iranian regime bordering Afghanistan and Iraq. Who knows? Things in both countries might have turned out quite differently.
We were attacked by Saudis associated with al-Qaeda, a Sunni movement. ISIS is a Sunni movement. It was Arabs who went to war with our ally Israel. Yet we continue to look under our beds for the Persian bogeyman.
