Iran has become a focal point in Asia since Obama ran for the Presidency in 2008. He declared in his speech in Sderot, Israel in 2008:
“I will take no options off the table in dealing with this potential Iranian threat. And understand part of my reasoning here. A nuclear Iran would be a game changing situation not just in West Asia, but around the world. Whatever remains of our nuclear non-proliferation framework, I think would begin to disintegrate. You would have countries in West Asia who would see the potential need to also obtain nuclear weapons. Many of these countries, including Iran, have ties to terrorist organizations. Which means that suddenly you could have loose nuclear materials falling into the hands of terrorists. That is our single- most important threat both to Israel but also to the United States of America. And so this is something that we're going to spend a lot of time working on.”
While Iran has been on the US foreign policy agenda for more than three decades, Obama’s two terms as President have seen it become a regular fixture in the American press as a place beyond caricature with characteristics of governance, leadership, and development. It’s finally been provided a greater degree of complexity in its political and social identity, even though still limited to fit a more policy driven rhetorical representation befitting its more center left hawkish view, that wasn’t available beforehand. However, that re-framing is still within the context of Iran's military capabilities and nuclear ambitions as seen here on CNN. If you Google Iran, there will be little else to read about. This in contrast with alternative Iran news sources such as Payvand which provides broad coverage of the Iranian country similar to that which you'd see of the US from American news sources. Once again, it's the politics which frame the reality. This all following the history of the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 where Iran was largely represented as a barbaric nation descending back into the 17th century.
Instead of looking holistically at what led to the largest revolution in world history involving 10 million plus Iranians, the country was framed as a threat to American's security. The day to day non-stop coverage sensationalized and excluded real insight into the country’s motivations and thinking. Iranians in the U.S. were isolated, similar to circumstances of both Japanese Americans in World War II and Arab Americans after 9/11, by the Reagan administration. Iranian students at American universities had their school financing frozen, punishing a domestic population not responsible in any way directly for the taking of the conflict’s hostages. In 2003 PBS ran a program on Iran called "Forbidden Iran" re-establishing these same long held tropes surrounding the country.
These approaches create a binary where Iranians are contradictory without fluctuation to what America is by default. It fails to distinguish between the diverging viewpoints of Iranians or the existence of any secular society within the country. It makes their Iranian blood a distinguisher of their violence and anarchy, instead of providing rational arguments involving the impacts of social and political events. This not only harmed generations of Americans in their understanding of Iran, a country rich with knowledge, philosophy, and hospitality, but also created a marginalization of those more aligned to more democratic ways of thinking inside Iran. They were re-enfranchised into the Iranian theocracy by American media. That oversimplification and prejudice began to finally erode and shift in the past eight years.
In Obama’s speech he acknowledges that Iran is not the only country in the region with ties to terrorist organizations, however this continues the "language of terror" used repeatedly and interchangeably beside the names of nations in Western Asia which continues to project ideas of certain places primarily breeding terror. Yet the same arguments of ties to terrorism can be lodged against the US, with a history of involvement with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other rebel groups such as those in South America. If any US partners were to describe the US as such it would be cause for serious and immediate divisions.
Obama frames his argument for addressing Iran's nuclear program as a means to maintaining a nuclear non-proliferation agenda worldwide. The American multiculturalism movement of the nineties, a movement to present the US in the world as a more inclusive place to justify its direct involvement abroad, can be seen as influencing this re-envisioning of message-making and directly leading to the contemporary election of the first African-American President of the United States of America, the leader of the free world.
President Obama also uses the security of Israel as reasoning for action, without mentioning that Israel itself has nearly four hundred nuclear weapons. This obfuscation of one significant part of the political reality of West Asia is reminiscent of long held American themes of Israel as a battle field for the Good Fight, projecting American power as a means towards maintaining the greater good. The Good Fight sees the failures in Vietnam not as a cautionary tale but as indicating a need for the realigning of American foreign policy to more closely match Israel’s own, reflecting from the Israeli victories during the Six Day War as a starting point. This provided a rationale for the growth in deployment and implementation of US military power globally.
In recent weeks, amid a growing rift between Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, a pending Freedom of Information Act request has ended, after years in litigation, in release of certain confirmation of Israel’s nuclear program. However, this isn’t the first time that such information has been released. The Bush Administration was also forced under a similar request to declassify documentation that alluded to the existence of an Israeli nuclear weapons program. Israel does not publicly acknowledge or refute the existence of its nuclear weapons capabilities. It doesn’t allow international inspections of which Iran has been subject to over seven thousand mandatory inspections to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the past ten years, an unprecedented amount in world affairs.
Iran is also a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that governs the international norms of nuclear weapons. Israel is not. It's an international agreement where nations commit to non-proliferation, disarmament, and the right to peacefully use nuclear technology. Israel is given exception in how and what it can do with its program, while Iran must demonstrate unequivocally that its program isn’t violent. One possible motivation for Israel not being party to the agreement is that it doesn’t want to open up its nuclear program to any degree of international transparency and it continues to further arm instead of disarm.
It could also be a reason why we see the US aligning more with Iran to better balance the political climate in the region, so there are greater consequences implied to the potential use of Israel’s nuclear weapons, or any other nation that decides to go down a similar path. Although Iran is framed as the threat, in fact our very own allies may be a challenge to American hegemony. Saudi Arabia has threatened to develop its own nuclear weapons program, and Republicans in the US Congress continue to suggest an agreement with Iran will only be an insincere pretext to war.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/us/politics/23text-obama.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/03/world/meast/isis-iran-airstrikes-reports/
http://payvand.com/news/
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iran/thestory.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/08/tom-cotton-iran-several-days_n_7026180.html
While Iran has been on the US foreign policy agenda for more than three decades, Obama’s two terms as President have seen it become a regular fixture in the American press as a place beyond caricature with characteristics of governance, leadership, and development. It’s finally been provided a greater degree of complexity in its political and social identity, even though still limited to fit a more policy driven rhetorical representation befitting its more center left hawkish view, that wasn’t available beforehand. However, that re-framing is still within the context of Iran's military capabilities and nuclear ambitions as seen here on CNN. If you Google Iran, there will be little else to read about. This in contrast with alternative Iran news sources such as Payvand which provides broad coverage of the Iranian country similar to that which you'd see of the US from American news sources. Once again, it's the politics which frame the reality. This all following the history of the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 where Iran was largely represented as a barbaric nation descending back into the 17th century.
Instead of looking holistically at what led to the largest revolution in world history involving 10 million plus Iranians, the country was framed as a threat to American's security. The day to day non-stop coverage sensationalized and excluded real insight into the country’s motivations and thinking. Iranians in the U.S. were isolated, similar to circumstances of both Japanese Americans in World War II and Arab Americans after 9/11, by the Reagan administration. Iranian students at American universities had their school financing frozen, punishing a domestic population not responsible in any way directly for the taking of the conflict’s hostages. In 2003 PBS ran a program on Iran called "Forbidden Iran" re-establishing these same long held tropes surrounding the country.
These approaches create a binary where Iranians are contradictory without fluctuation to what America is by default. It fails to distinguish between the diverging viewpoints of Iranians or the existence of any secular society within the country. It makes their Iranian blood a distinguisher of their violence and anarchy, instead of providing rational arguments involving the impacts of social and political events. This not only harmed generations of Americans in their understanding of Iran, a country rich with knowledge, philosophy, and hospitality, but also created a marginalization of those more aligned to more democratic ways of thinking inside Iran. They were re-enfranchised into the Iranian theocracy by American media. That oversimplification and prejudice began to finally erode and shift in the past eight years.
In Obama’s speech he acknowledges that Iran is not the only country in the region with ties to terrorist organizations, however this continues the "language of terror" used repeatedly and interchangeably beside the names of nations in Western Asia which continues to project ideas of certain places primarily breeding terror. Yet the same arguments of ties to terrorism can be lodged against the US, with a history of involvement with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other rebel groups such as those in South America. If any US partners were to describe the US as such it would be cause for serious and immediate divisions.
Obama frames his argument for addressing Iran's nuclear program as a means to maintaining a nuclear non-proliferation agenda worldwide. The American multiculturalism movement of the nineties, a movement to present the US in the world as a more inclusive place to justify its direct involvement abroad, can be seen as influencing this re-envisioning of message-making and directly leading to the contemporary election of the first African-American President of the United States of America, the leader of the free world.
President Obama also uses the security of Israel as reasoning for action, without mentioning that Israel itself has nearly four hundred nuclear weapons. This obfuscation of one significant part of the political reality of West Asia is reminiscent of long held American themes of Israel as a battle field for the Good Fight, projecting American power as a means towards maintaining the greater good. The Good Fight sees the failures in Vietnam not as a cautionary tale but as indicating a need for the realigning of American foreign policy to more closely match Israel’s own, reflecting from the Israeli victories during the Six Day War as a starting point. This provided a rationale for the growth in deployment and implementation of US military power globally.
In recent weeks, amid a growing rift between Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, a pending Freedom of Information Act request has ended, after years in litigation, in release of certain confirmation of Israel’s nuclear program. However, this isn’t the first time that such information has been released. The Bush Administration was also forced under a similar request to declassify documentation that alluded to the existence of an Israeli nuclear weapons program. Israel does not publicly acknowledge or refute the existence of its nuclear weapons capabilities. It doesn’t allow international inspections of which Iran has been subject to over seven thousand mandatory inspections to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the past ten years, an unprecedented amount in world affairs.
Iran is also a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that governs the international norms of nuclear weapons. Israel is not. It's an international agreement where nations commit to non-proliferation, disarmament, and the right to peacefully use nuclear technology. Israel is given exception in how and what it can do with its program, while Iran must demonstrate unequivocally that its program isn’t violent. One possible motivation for Israel not being party to the agreement is that it doesn’t want to open up its nuclear program to any degree of international transparency and it continues to further arm instead of disarm.
It could also be a reason why we see the US aligning more with Iran to better balance the political climate in the region, so there are greater consequences implied to the potential use of Israel’s nuclear weapons, or any other nation that decides to go down a similar path. Although Iran is framed as the threat, in fact our very own allies may be a challenge to American hegemony. Saudi Arabia has threatened to develop its own nuclear weapons program, and Republicans in the US Congress continue to suggest an agreement with Iran will only be an insincere pretext to war.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/us/politics/23text-obama.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/03/world/meast/isis-iran-airstrikes-reports/
http://payvand.com/news/
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iran/thestory.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/08/tom-cotton-iran-several-days_n_7026180.html
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