TW: Our relations with Iran have been a mess for decades. The Iranians are going to obtain nuclear weapons unless we decide to engage in full out war to prevent it. Put yourself in their shoes would not you wish the security of nuclear weapons? Obtaining nuclear weapons will be hugely risky on their part as any future nuclear attack would likely be attributed to them regardless of the circumstances there by risking devastating retaliation.
To me Iran is a country with a brittle but hard thin crust of mullahs capping a populace bristling with opportunity.
From Roger Cohen:
"...Iran, on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, is full of defiance and suspicion of President Obama's motives in reaching out to Tehran. But it is equally full of longing. Most people are under 30 and, like these soldiers, they thirst for contact with the outside world and, above all, an America that looms with all the power of myth
...The revolution freed Iranians from the brutality of the Shah's secret police, Savak, and delivered a home-grown society modeled on the tenets of Islam in place of one pliant to America's whim. But like all revolutions, it has also disappointed. Freedom has ebbed and flowed since 1979. Of late, it has ebbed.
...Competing pressures bear down on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and behind him the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They know that with unemployment at 14 percent (and rising), inflation at about 25 percent, oil revenues set to plunge by about two-thirds this year, and the country's oil and gas infrastructure in desperate need of modernization, opening to the West and its technology makes sense.
They also know Iran is composed of two worlds: the surface and the subterranean. The former is placid; the latter is hungry for more of the freedom the revolution promised. This, too, speaks for an engagement that might over time end Iran's bipolar state.
...On the other hand, a revolutionary government that deprives itself of its great enemy is one that has lost the core of its galvanizing propaganda. Opening equals risk.
..."The Arabs are chickens," he said. "Just look at what Egypt did about Gaza. Those big-bellied Arabs, you take up a stick and they run away."
Scratch the surface and there's no love lost between Persians and Arabs, another reason to be careful in distinguishing Iranian rhetoric, which can seem monolithic, from Iran's many-shaded reality.
...A few days after this meeting, I found myself on the Tehran subway. A bunch of youths started smiling and pointing. "This guy's an American!" they exclaimed. There was no menace, only curiosity...."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/11/opinion/edcohen.php
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