Dear President Trump: Iran Is A nation of Peace-Loving People!

Human Wrongs Watch By Catherine Shakdam*

In February 2017, political analyst Robert Inlakesh, responded to Washington’s anti-Iranian rhetoric by saying: “labeling Iran as the biggest problem and the biggest cause of terrorism in the world is complete lunacy.”

It is because Iran’s new leadership evaporated America and Britain’s financial and military monopoly in the region that its government, political system, and ideology were vilified to the extent Tehran became the West’s very Eye of Sauron.

Let us not allow history to be re-written so that tyrants could claim holy ground on account they can put ink to paper. Enough already with the “notices” and “there’s a new president in town” tirades.

Let me put it to you differently: If US officials can bring themselves to mingle with sword-wielding, raging radical Wahhabist Royals in the name of “collaboration,” why can’t they hop across the Persian Gulf and sit through a cup of tea with Iranian dignitaries whose robes are not dripping with the blood of the innocent?

Ask yourself this: what made Iran’s Shah such a treasured friend and Iran’s Ayatollahs such dangerous enemies if not the latter’s desire to stand free in the face of imperialism?

Can we be rational here?

Under the brutal rule of the Shah, Iran was a grand favorite, home to dizzying natural resources and one pliable autocrat whose taste for gold was only thwarted by his political narcissism; Tehran was Western capitals’ very own Garden of Eden.

If America and its allies in the Greater Middle Eastern region – namely Saudi Arabia, had no qualms mingling with the Shah of Iran, a man whose taste for bloody repression would make any grand war criminal blush, all did recoil at the idea of a Republic on Asia’s doorstep. Why if freedom and democracy are the names of the game?

Seriously, though: WHY?

Are we all having a laugh? Pardon the informality of my speech, but one would have to have had drown oneself in the infamous Koolaid not to understand that Iran’s bad guy image comes right of out McCarthy’s playbook.

Iran is no more bad than America is exceptional. Iran, like any other nation, is a work in progress.

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There is a lesson in there somewhere!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. Nor do they necessarily represent those of Human Wrongs Watch.