The Nuclear Deal Makes America Complicit in Iranian Crimes
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a debate about whether to stay in the Iran deal. Read the other entries here.
The fundamental question when discussing a nuclear deal with Tehran is this: Are you prepared to fight over it? If not, then any deal is a good deal. This willingness to go to the mat also affects whether you are prepared to push back against the clerical regime in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iraq, and even whether and how you are willing to advance a regime-change policy—regime change, incidentally, being what an increasingly big and vocal slice of the Iranian people want. Westerners should appreciate the religio-political evolution of the Islamic Republic. The rebellion against an Islamist clerisy ought to ring our inner chimes and make us realize that the Western and Islamic worlds share a lot of intellectual property, that they are, as V.S. Naipaul astutely noted after traversing the Middle East and landing at Bombay, two branches of the same family.
But the debate over the deal illuminates much about the debate over differing approaches to the Islamic Republic. In a recent , Phil Gordon sums up the things I wouldn’t concede to the regime as if those demands were unreasonable: Absolutely, I would never concede advanced centrifuges, long-range ballistic missiles,
