GUEST BLOG: Iran – There has to be a better way
by - 11th March 2015
THE TALKS taking place in Switzerland between Iran and the P5 + 1 group are not as the Republican Senator Tom Cotton describes them in his letter to the Iranian government. They are not an executive agreement waiting to be rubber stamped by Congress. Such an agreement is not what any of the parties to these discussions is seeking because the near impasse situation which faces them calls for something more, given that past agreements have done nothing to strengthen trust or to further the cause of peace.
The situation at present is the ultimate test of whether the renewal of human relations on a world scale is actually possible.
If trust is essential to any agreement, executive or otherwise, it suggests that the resolution of the current diplomatic crisis depends on the relinquishing of fear.
Isis and its lookalikes wield fear in both the right hand and the left, to abstract inversely from a Pauline epistle. They wield it as the raw threat of terror ultimately sanctioned under some form of law which will be enforced without deviation or mercy, and Isis uses that same threat to seduce, in the way only evil can seduce, disaffected young people both here and abroad.