Obama Thinks Iran Is ‘Rational’

In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, President Obama has launched a fresh tirade against Israel, criticising it for comments Prime Minister Netanyahu made during the recent Israeli election, and articulating his personal agenda to “remake the world”. Here is an excerpt:

“I care deeply about preserving that Jewish democracy, because when I think about how I came to know Israel, it was based on images of… kibbutzim and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir, and the sense that not only are we creating a safe Jewish homeland, but also we are remaking the world. We’re repairing it.”

However, the most interesting point reported by The Times of Israel, is Obama’s opinion of the Iranian regime.

Goldberg asked Obama if the fact that the Iranian regime is anti-Semitic, and thus possessed of a warped view of the way the world works, shouldn’t preclude a negotiating strategy that treats Tehran as a rational player. But the president replied that the regime’s survival instinct is more powerful than other calculations, including its hatred of Jews and imperialist aspirations.

“Well, the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival,” he said. “It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”

Tehran, he continued, won’t make irrational decisions — an apparent reference to the regime breaking away to a nuclear weapon or attacking another country — that would threaten its very survival. “What we’ve been very clear [about] to the Iranian regime over the past six years is that we will continue to ratchet up the costs, not simply for their anti-Semitism, but also for whatever expansionist ambitions they may have,” he said.

Obama is right. Iran is suffering severe internal problems. Rampant, out of control drug abuse, obscene levels of corruption, and severe economic problems are tearing at the foundations of the Iranian tyranny.

According to the Daily Mail, around seven per cent of Iran’s population remain addicted to hard drugs. On top of Iran’s already hideous problems with the flood of dirt cheap opium and heroin pouring out of Afghanistan, Iran has lately acquired a dangerous taste for crystal meth.

Iran is facing a female drug-abuse crisis as the number of young, well-off and well-educated women using substances continues to rise. At least six million of Iran’s 77.7 million population have drug related problems, according to official reports. And addiction, especially to Shisheh – a high-purity form of crystalline methamphetamine – is increasingly spreading across all social classes.

The Western experience of addiction to drugs like crystal meth is that no level of society is immune. With a general addiction rate that high, many members of Iran’s ruling elite must be addicts – suffering heroin and meth induced psychosis, exhibiting drug induced paranoia, rage and irrational behaviour. In the West, many drug users are addicted to both drugs, using crystal meth to wake up, using heroin to “come down”, living in a state of mind completely detached from anything most people would regard as normal.

For all we know, the Supreme Leader of Iran himself could be a meth addict – suffering drug induced psychosis, paranoia, experiencing drug induced delusions about his own mission to remake the world, lusting for the destructive might which nuclear weapons would grant to his addled megalomanic fantasies.

Hitler was a well known meth addict  – under the influence of meth, he ordered the commission of irrational atrocities, such as the infamous Nero decree, Hitler’s order to destroy everything of value which might be seized by advancing Russian soldiers. The Nero decree was not executed – Albert Speer, in the final days of the war disobeyed Hitler, and refused to pointlessly destroy the infrastructure of Germany. But an occasional outbreak of reason was more the exception than the norm, in Hitler’s meth fuelled Reich.