Skip to main content

The Year of Bushehr

By


A little over a year ago Benjamin Netanyahu made this memorable display in front of the UN assembly and ever since has been pushing hard and heavy for the Obama administration to drop the bomb on Iran.  So, imagine Bibi's surprise when the US brokered a historic peace agreement that would curb Iran's nuclear weapon development and bring Iran back into the international fold.

Republicans don't know quite how to react to the deal, which is still being worked out.  What began as shuttle diplomacy evolved into face-to-face talks between American and Iranian foreign representatives for the first time in over 30 years.  It seems the specter of the infamous 1980 hostage crisis may have been finally lifted.

This isn't the first time Iran has approached the US and vice-versa.  Back in 1998, the US and Iran had a friendly soccer match and Presidents Clinton and Khatami seemed to be reaching out to each other before the Monica Lewinsky dominated the headlines and led the House Republicans to impeach Clinton.  While Clinton managed to survive this political shit storm, any attempt to normalize relations with Iran was lost and the development of the Iranian nuclear program was restarted after having been put on hold for many years.  Ironically, the Iranian nuclear program was initiated by the United States back in the 1950s as part of the Atoms for Peace program commemorated in this stamp.


Even more ironic, the Ayatollah Khomeini considered such weapons an affront to Muslim ethics and jurisprudence and signed international treaties repudiating such weapons, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  It wasn't until the 1990s that Iran approached Russia to help complete the reactor begun during the Shah's regime.  Work began in 1995, moving forward in fits and jerks, before the reactor was finally completed in 2010, which was officially declared the Year of Bushehr, much to the chagrin of the international community which had made every effort to stop the project, fearing Iran would have the ability to enrich uranium for military purposes.

It seems we need our bogeymen, and certainly former President Ahmadinejad fit the bill.  Since the election of the more moderate Rouhani as President, the world appears to be looking at Iran in a better light, but of course Israel still views Iran as international enemy no. 1.


Comments

  1. James FergusonDecember 4, 2013 at 2:36 PM

    It seems no one questioned the Shah's motives,

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shah_of_Iran_building_two_nuclear_plants.jpg

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more