Interesting piece in the NY Times by Vali Nasr:
If this history is anything to go by, Ayatollah Khamenei will not retreat, let alone surrender. He has, for now, accepted a cease-fire with Israel — but only because he is confident that Iran held its ground in the face of U.S. and Israeli strikes. In the past, too, he has made concessions when necessary. Tehran entered both the 2015 nuclear deal and the most recent round of nuclear negotiations with the United States in order to relieve economic pressure.
Ayatollah Khamenei is uninterested in making compromises that could fundamentally change Iran’s trajectory. He is wary of even appearing open to compromise, which he believes the United States would interpret as weakness. “America is like a dog,” he told his advisers in a meeting over a decade ago. “If you back off, it will lunge at you, but if you lunge at it, it will recoil and back off.”
Iran’s supreme leader has instead sought an equilibrium that can be summarized as “no war and no peace.” He wants neither confrontation nor normalization with the United States. What he wants is for Washington to stop containing Iran, unshackle its economy and allow Iran to embrace the status of a regional great power.
Ayatollah Khamenei believes that Iran can achieve this goal in time. If Tehran perseveres, he thinks, it can outlast Washington and Israel’s appetite for a fight.
As a minimal sort of strategy, this is plausible, but it ignores the vast gains Iran could achieve by actually making peace.
1 comment:
As a minimal sort of strategy, this is plausible, but it ignores the vast gains Iran could achieve by actually making peace.
...unless Iran simply doesn't believe in said gains. Then their position makes perfect sense.
Remember, we're talking about a country that was ruled by a brutal dictator whose regime the US propped up to secure cheap oil while its citizens starved in the streets and were disappeared for daring to dissent.
That sort of thing doesn't get forgotten or forgiven while there are still people alive who remember it - and often not even for a long time after that. We proved to the Iranian people that we will actively work to see them suffer and die, if only it profits us, and do so gladly. We proved to them that we are not to be trusted - CANNOT be trusted, ever.
You have previously posted on this blog about African American distrust of the American medical system, and I tried to explain to you then the same underlying problem. You couldn't seem to wrap your head around the idea of people refusing to go to doctors in the modern day, despite all the empirically proven benefits, just because of awful things happened when they went to doctors in the past.
But when an entire group of people is subjected to not just injustices, but actual acts of evil like with the Tuskeegee Experiment, or with US backing of the Shah's bloody regime... you lose their trust forever. And you never, ever get it back. Not until the evil deeds leave living memory, and people grow up without a personal connection to that trauma and the fully deserved stain on your reputation.
And every time we bomb Iran, we reset the clock. Every time we freely support Israel's murdering of prominent Iranian leaders, we reset the clock. Every time we contribute help toward violating their sovereignty, bombing their cities, killing their citizens, or even just humiliating them on the global stage, we remind them that we. CANNOT. Be. Trusted. Ever.
A long time ago, we thoroughly convinced them that we are The Shaitan - and every time there is any chance of them reconsidering, we go out of our way to remind them why they shouldn't.
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