another concern, funding of terrorism

Submitted by Richard Stoecker (United States), Sep 25, 2013 at 10:23

If we targeted Iran with a nuclear strike, we should know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iran had nuclear weapons and planned to use them against either Israel, the U.S. or both, and sources disagree about how close Iran really is to developing and using such weapons. But Iran has been a concern to the U.S. for another reason: I have heard that Iran funds more terrorism than any other government. The complication here is that even among Arab governments more or less allied to the U.S., some within those governments have also aided terrorists. The new president of Iran may well turn out to be different from the previous in one in style more than in substance, but I don't think President Obama can be faulted for wanting to talk to him; in the worst moments of the Cold War high-level discussions were held between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.

President Nixon met with Mao even though Mao was so extreme he preferred Stalin to Krushchev because he thought Krushchev was too conciliatory toward America, about whom Mao had little to say of a friendly nature, to say the least. Conflicts between the west and radical Islam cannot, unfortunately, offer us the hope we had during the Cold War, when we were dealing with people who, however unreasonable, were not willing to kill themselves to kill us. If only a drop of oil had never been discovered in Saudi Arabia: that is where so much of the power of radical Islam comes from.

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