Messing With Iran

THE IRANIANS are deliberately violating the nuclear arms agreement they signed in 2015 with the United States, France, Great Britain, Russia, and China. They are enriching, rendering more potent, radioactive metal, uranium, from its normal five percent, roughly, the process which is necessary to render the metal sufficiently explosive to make weapons out of it. A considerable increase in explosive capacity is necessary, upwards of a ninety percent increase. The Trump administration, which precipitated the problem by removing the U.S. from a perfectly good nuclear arms treaty, and initiating what amounts to economic warfare with Iran, including trade sanctions and embargoes, has already and will doubtless continue to rant, rave, and complain vociferously. Phrases like "playing with fire" are already coming forth from the head of state who was recently confused about the origins of aviation. Most people already know all this. Most people also are aware that building nuclear weapons is a skill any graduate student in physics can explain. All that is necessary is the mechanical and technical infrastructure, which Iran, and many other countries have. What most Americans seem unaware of is the chaotic treatment of Iran by the United States over the past one hundred years. Early in the era of oil the U.S. and Great Britain gained access to Iranian oil fields, then lost access when an election in Iran brought to power a government which nationalized Iran's oil, and left the western powers high and dry. The western powers responded by removing Iran's government, and replacing it with one amenable to western exploitation, a standard mode of operation for the United States. For several decades the United States strongly encouraged Iran to become a nuclear power, welcoming Iranian nuclear physics students to American college campuses. Then, it didn't. When the Iranian revolution of 1979 again brought to power a government resistant to American imperialism, the empire abruptly changed course, and suddenly it became verboten for Persia (Iran) to have nukes. The United States, beginning early in its history, took it upon itself to decide which nations could do what, economically, politically, internationally. It is a heavy burden, that of empire, not without unintended consequences. The United States, in its unquenchable thirst for expanding markets, resources, and wealth, has always messed with other nations. the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which has always been unenforceable and still is, commanded that no nation other than the United States would be allowed to have influence in the affairs of any Latin American country. American foreign policy and practices can change, and always have changed with dizzying speed, depending on world events and the vicissitudes of American corporate demands and desires. When a world power initiates, engages in, and completes a treaty with several other nations, then abruptly abandons the treaty, the world power loses credibility. Under Trump, the United States has turned peace into approaching war, losing its credibility in so doing, and the most tragic aspect of this is that it isn't even the greatest crime so far committed by the Trump administration, and by the United States under it.