Iran Deal: The Great Bamboozle Festival

by Douglas Murray • July 18, 2015 at 5:00 am

A generous person might say that this is unimportant -- that in Iran, chanting "Death to America" is like throat-clearing.
Surely only an uncharitable person would wonder why Iran's rulers are buying the technology they would need to repel any attack on their nuclear project at the same time as they are promising the Americans that they are not developing nuclear weaponry.

Participants in Tehran's Quds Day rally burn U.S. and Israeli flags, on July 10, 2015. (Image source: ISNA)

What exactly is it that the Obama administration thinks has changed about the leadership of Iran? Of all the questions which remain unanswered in the wake of the P5+1 deal with Iran, this one is perhaps the most unanswered of all.

There must, after all, be something that a Western leader sees when an attempt is made to "normalize" relations with a rogue regime -- what Richard Nixon saw in the Chinese Communist Party that persuaded him that an unfreezing of relations was possible, or what Margaret Thatcher saw in the eyes of Mikhail Gorbachev, which persuaded her that here was a counterpart who could finally be trusted.