Peace in Our Time?

47 years of the same message from Iran

Last night the president announced that peace may now be at hand. The U.S. and Iran have reportedly agreed on a basic memorandum of understanding for a peace deal between them. One that would immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restore the free flow of oil that Iran has blocked since the beginning of the war. That blockade is why fuel prices have risen to near unprecedented levels and continue to climb, along with the price of food.

The war against Iran is highly unpopular among the American people, mostly because of how negatively it has affected their pocketbooks. I can’t say I blame them. Except that most Americans seem oblivious to the fact that a nuclear-armed Iran is a mortal danger to the entire free world.

When a fanatical religious regime has been screaming “Death to America” from its very inception, the U.S. would certainly be in its crosshairs sooner or later. Once they have nuclear weapons, preventing a nuclear catastrophe would become infinitely more difficult. And when religious fanatics have their hands on the nuclear button, they will surely have no compunction about using it.

And this doesn’t even address the mortal danger a nuclear-equipped Iran would pose to one of America’s most important allies: Israel.

Sadly, politics have played a nefarious role in the rhetoric surrounding the war against Iran. Supporters of the 2015 JCPOA (Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran) argue that a deal was already in place that would have prevented exactly that - a nuclear-armed Iran. They say that the president’s decision to tear up the deal is why Iran came so close to acquiring a nuclear weapon in the first place.

What they don’t say is that the deal had a ten-year expiration date, that Iran was discovered to be cheating on it anyway, and that the agreement did not include stopping Iran’s ballistic missile program or preventing it from arming terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, most of whom were aimed at Israel. That support is what enabled Hamas to carry out the October 7^th attack, which precipitated the chain of events leading to where we are now.

The president’s stated goals are to ensure that Iran never acquires nuclear capability, halts its ballistic missile production, and stops spreading terror through its proxies. Those goals are supported by America’s ally, Israel, which is why the war effort against Iran became a joint effort with Israel.

Sadly, isolationists on the right and Democrats on the left in Congress share the belief that the president was dragged into the war by Israel’s prime minister — a narrative that smacks of antisemitism and one they continue repeating despite denials from both Israel and the United States.

So here we are now, with a deal apparently at hand, the details of which we know next to nothing about.

A number of media pundits who tend to agree with the president’s critics are already saying the deal will probably resemble Obama’s JCPOA agreement. The obvious message being that had Trump not withdrawn from the deal in the first place, we could have avoided the war, preserved the economy, and spared countless lives. They argue that the regime is now even more hardline than before, making this a net loss for both the United States and world security.

I always find it remarkable when people who know virtually nothing about the details of an agreement - one that is far from being finalized - somehow already know exactly what it entails and how it should be judged.

We do not yet know what this deal says… 

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