“For the United States to sit and talk and come to an agreement with a nation it has been antagonizing and demonizing since the dictator it installed in 1953 was overthrown in 1979 is historic and, I hope, precedent setting.”   —David Swanson

ACTION: Tell Your Congressional Representatives to Vote in Favor of the Agreement with Iran

Women Against Military Madness Newsletter
Volume 33  Number 4 Summer II 2015

There is no evidence anywhere that Iran had, has or will have a nuclear weapons program.  Mere enrichment of uranium—something 19 other non-nuclear weapons countries do without any complaints from the US—is not tantamount to weapons manufacture. The inspections regime negotiated in the Vienna accords is quite incredible–the most serious ever enacted anywhere. Essentially we are going to have inspectors running around 24/7 looking at nothing for eternity just to satisfy an American horror fantasy about Iran dropping bombs on Tel Aviv and New York (as AIPAC has claimed in some of its apoplectic videos)

—“The Iranian Nuclear Deal Is Overkill,” Huffington Post. William Beeman, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology University of Minnesota, has lived and conducted research in Iran for over 40 years. His 2008 book, “The Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other, shows how the current nuclear crisis arose.

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“U.S. sanctions legislation demanded that every country in the world participate in a blockade of Iran or face severe U.S. penalties and be cut off from the vast network of U.S. banking, loans and credits…The greatest hypocrisy was that of countries with stockpiles of nuclear weapons sanctimoniously lecturing and wringing their hands at Iran’s development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes…It is the hawks like Sen. John McCain, funded by powerful U.S. corporations with a profitable stake in war and militarism, that are determined to sabotage even this short-term agreement. These are the hawks who have lined up a series of right-wing and reactionary think tanks to mobilize a multi-million dollar campaign to defeat the agreement in Congress and possibly to incite military provocations.”

—Sara Flounders, “Nuclear Agreement-an Historic Moment for Iran,” Workers World, July 16, 2015. Sara Flounders is the coordinator of International Action Center

“The most important story of the agreement itself, moreover, is how the Obama administration, supported by its European allies, tried to maintain the sanctions for as long as possible in the implementation process. But in the end US negotiators finally gave up that objective, even though, as Iranian diplomats told me in Vienna, they found the American “emotional attachment” to sanctions still manifesting itself in the last days of negotiations in the language of the UN Security Council resolution.

“The basic inequality of power of the two main protagonists, which would normally have allowed the United States to prevail on the issue, had been reduced dramatically by two factors: the lifting of sanctions was so central to Iranian interests that its negotiators would undoubtedly have walked away from the talks if the United States had not relented, and the Obama administration had become committed to completing the negotiations simply by virtue of having made such an agreement its central foreign policy initiative.”

—Gareth Porter, “How a Weaker Iran Got the Hegemon to Lift Sanctions,” Middle East Eye, July 15, 2015 Gareth Porter is the author of Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Books, 2014). He has covered the P5 + 1 negotiations with Iran since the beginning, traveling from Washington, D.C. to Tehran to Vienna

“While the Iranians will not give up their strategic ties with Russia, they will work in their best interests and hope for a balanced strategic partnership with Moscow. Tehran seeks a balanced approach with Russia in a mutually beneficial relationship with the Russian Federation that does not reduce Tehran to becoming subordinate to Moscow. Iran will engage Western European and U.S. businesses, and make deals with them in place of Russian businesses where it is needed and deemed appropriate. Despite any blossoming of trade with the U.S. and Western Europe, Tehran will maintain its strategic depth in Eurasia. This is why the Iranians have lobbied and applied for Iran to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization alongside Russia and China. Moreover, Tehran does not trust Washington.”

—Mahdi Darius Nazemoaya, “Analysis: America’s New Deal with Iran May Leave Russia Out in the Cold,” MintPress News, July 17, 2015

“For the United States to sit and talk and come to an agreement with a nation it has been antagonizing and demonizing since the dictator it installed in 1953 was overthrown in 1979 is historic and, I hope, precedent setting.”

—David Swanson, World Beyond War, July 14, 2015

Compiled by Mary Beaudoin, Editor, WAMM Newsletter

© 2015 Women Against Military Madness. 

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