A Possible Triumph of Reason over Hysteria: Iran Edition

by Errington C. Thompson, MD

Sometimes, when you sit back and look at politics, the amount of pure, raw, knee-jerk emotion that triumphs over rational thought is overwhelming.

Take, for example, a law that sailed through both the House and Senate in Indiana. This law basically stated that on religious grounds you could discriminate against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender Americans. (And anyone else, really: what if your devout little sect of believers insists that interracial marriage is sinful? Can they refuse to rent hotel rooms to a mixed-race couple? What if someone truly believes that God opposes women travelling alone? Can a restaurant refuse to serve a single mother and her children?)

Let’s think about this. Why would anybody take the time to write a law that basically states it is okay to discriminate against certain Americans if you believe in your prejudices strongly enough?

As usual, this law, like many others, carries a misleading title, Religious Freedom Restoration Act. But it isn’t about religious freedom at all. It’s about persecution. It’s about a place called Memories Pizza whose owners actively want to discriminate—based on their “biblical values.”

Now, when I sit down and read the Bible, I simply don’t come away with an overwhelming sense of, “Let me discriminate against certain people.” No, when I read the Bible it seems to me that Jesus has a simple message—love thy neighbor as thyself. Nowhere does it say, “Let’s discriminate against gays and lesbians.”

Go ahead, read the New Testament. I think that you’ll find the Bible’s overwhelming message is about love, not discrimination. So I would invite the guys at Memories Pizza to actually read the Bible—and focus on the New Testament, since that’s the part written for, by, and about Christians. I think they’ll find that the “Christian” thing to do is to serve a tasty pizza to everyone. And if they’re really “good” Christians, at the end of the day, they’ll serve their leftover pizzas to the homeless.

This brings me to Iran. The amount of hyperventilation, vitriol, and downright hysteria over Iran has been plenty shocking to see.

Let’s just, for a moment, pretend that we can step back and rationally look at what’s going on with Iran and its nuclear program. Remember that the mistrust between the Iranian government and our government goes back to 1953, when we, the birthplace of democracy, supported and overthrew a democratically elected Iranian government. We didn’t like Iran’s politics, so we engineered a coup d’etat, deposing Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and installing the Shah. And a generation later, in 1979, along came the Iranian revolution, which deposed that same Shah and was followed by the Iranian hostage crisis. Retaliation? Payback? Turnabout is fair play? You decide.

There is deep mistrust on both sides of this contentious relationship. President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, in which he labeled Iran (along with Iraq and N. Korea) part of the “Axis of Evil,” took the contentious relationship from bad to worse. Following that speech, Iran began taking steps to pull out of the international nuclear nonproliferation agreement. They began to build nuclear facilities and to acquire centrifuges as well as uranium (the centrifuge process is key to purifying uranium enough to make a nuclear weapon). Over the last decade, Iran went from operating a few hundred centrifuges to nearly 20,000.

Make no mistake that Iran is a huge problem in the Middle East. Iran has backed terrorist groups like Hezbollah, and funded and gave technical assistance to Al Qaeda in Iraq. By no means is Iran an innocent bystander; I would argue that they are an active agitator in the Middle East.

So, what are we to do? What do you do with a country that is slowly but inevitably marching its way toward developing a nuclear weapon? A government that has stated on a number of occasions that Israel does not have the right to exist?

Well, it seems to me that there are only three possible avenues for us. First, we could continue to ignore Iran and continue isolating it from the international community. We can hope that the European Union, along with Russia, helps us with this isolation strategy.

Our second alternative would be to follow the advice of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and our former UN ambassador, John Bolton, who regularly assert that Iran cannot be trusted under any circumstances. These two men are hawks from the most far-right wing of their parties—Bolton, a Republican, and Netanyahu, the Likud—and insist that the only way to stop Iran’s inevitable march toward a nuclear weapon is with military means. As John McCain said in 2008, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” It is hard for me to imagine that bombing Iran would not lead to all-out war—World War III.

The third and final alternative would be some sort of negotiated settlement in which we, the United States, along with our international allies, figure out a way to ensure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon. And that, at the same time, if Iran meets its obligations, we could slowly but surely reverse crippling international sanctions.

Last week, after years of negotiation, a tentative agreement was announced with Iran. Basically, Iran stated that they would give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons in exchange for being invited back into the international community and the lifting of crippling international sanctions. Of course, this is a preliminary agreement: details still have to be worked out. Yet it looks hopeful. It appears that we can avoid all-out war in the Middle East, at least for now. It appears that this isn’t some pie-in-the-sky agreement but instead is something that can be completely verified.

(It is important to put our involvement in the Middle East, and our relationships with nations there, in context. For example, we should remember that former Bush administration officials Bolton, VP Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and others claimed that containment policies had failed in Iraq. Their insistence that the Iraqis were cheating on their agreements was one of their main rationales for invading Iraq: “We can’t trust them under any circumstances, so we have to invade.” Sound familiar? So of course we invaded Iraq and discovered that the sanctions had been working: the Iraqis were not working on a nuclear weapon after all.)

It’s also important to remember that, vis a vis Iran, if the newly reached agreement doesn’t work, the military option is still on the table. The U.S. won’t have given up its weapons, Israel will still own its own nuclear arsenal, and the rest of Europe will still be our allies against Iran.

In the current political climate, it’s also useful to consider how much of the opposition to the agreement is generated by people who will do anything to keep President Obama from achieving a major foreign policy goal. Domestically he brought us out of the Republican recession and muscled the Affordable Care Act into life. Internationally, he’s already reversed a relationship with Cuba that had shown not a single successful result in more than 50 years, and, after 20 years of failure by his predecessors, he’s reset China’s willingness to work with us on environmental issues. How much greater will his stature and achievements be if he re-establishes a working relationship with Iran—one of the world’s most ancient civilizations—after 61 years of enmity!

This seems to be a win for the United States, a win for Iran, and a win for the international community. If this deal goes through, isn’t it a win for rational thought over hysteria?