The visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity.
The Iranians are very skilled terrorist, and we'd have to expect that they'd hit at us as hard as they could. Especially in Iraq, where they have a great deal of power and influence.
Saddam Hussein had nerve gas and used it against his own people, he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and he almost had a nuclear bomb in 1981 and in 1991. And he had been caught with anthrax in 1995 by the UN inspections after denying that he had it.
There's no embassy for the United States in Iran. So, Iranians process those in other countries.
There is nothing to encourage. The Iranians should just stay away from us.
Too much under the thumb of the Iranians.
I don't see that there is a credible threat for American action - the rhetoric of the U. S. President is too vague, very amorphous. I don't see that Obama's words will be translated into more tangible intentions and therefore this is probably why the Iranians don't take it seriously. They speak out against it and they dismiss it.
We've said to the Iranians all along. . . we still remain open to diplomacy. But it's been very clear that the Iranians don't want to engage with us.
If the Iranians were to have a nuclear weapon they could proliferate.
If the Obama administration is this afraid of Glenn Beck, how do they deal with the Iranians?
Throughout our history, there has been a long list of those we've been conditioned to hate. The British, French, Spanish, Germans, Japanese, Russians, Communists, Northern Koreans, Vietnamese, Iranians, Taliban, and both northerners and southerners in America are some of the people we've been encouraged at various times to call enemies and to hate. The list is long, and as time passes, those we were assigned to hate we later were told should be removed from our hate list. The enemy is obviously hatred itself. Have empathy for your assigned enemy.
America was cool with Saddam Hussein when he was killing Iranians.
In the United States, Iran is nothing but a whipping-boy. Few Americans have any real use for Iran. Most of us, what we know and remember about Iran are things like the hostage crisis in 1980, or they think about the Iranian attacks in Lebanon, or on the Khobar Towers. So you don't get a whole lot of political mileage in the United States by going out and advocating better relations with the Iranians.
Iranians defend and present their Islamic and Iranian identity to other people worldwide.
The Kurdish minority has been cozying up to the Iranians and given the traditional hatred between the Iranians and the Iraqis, maybe Saddam Hussein sees this as a threat to his dominance of the Kurdish area north of the 36th Parallel.
The Obama administration announced a deal with Iran that would prevent the Iranians from making a nuclear weapon. In exchange, we're giving the Iranians Netflix.
The legitimacy of the leadership depends on what that country thinks of its leaders. When we lay off, more and more Iranians tend to be critical of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The more abusive we are and the more pressure we put on them, the more nationalism fuses with fundamentalism in Iran.
We have to create a process which has legitimacy for the people of Syria. And we have to have a process where the Russians and the Iranians and the neighbors - all of them, Saudis, Turks, Qataris, a very complicated brew - that you have to bring them together and they can find agreement. That's the fundamental premise of the Geneva Communique that you will have, by mutual consent, a process of transition.
The Iranian government has become pretty open about the drug problem in recent years. Opium use is a very traditional, cultural thing in Iran, so the government is actually more open about it than they are about some of the other ills in society. They just don't want to talk about things that might relate to a Western lifestyle even though they know that Iranians indulge. Because there is no real public life left in Iran - people go and have dinner and then everything retreats behind these Persian walls.
In terms of how Iranians see the U. S. government, that's a difficult question. But in terms of how Iranians see Americans, there is a very good mutual belief that they have so much in common with American people and they feel totally related to them. In terms of government, definitely there are some hardcore hardliners who hate the U. S. government, but at the same time, there are some more moderate.
