There is a crazy lag

For decades, the Iranian regime has repeatedly declared itself an enemy of America, openly acting in violence against our citizens. We’ve known it since the clerics and their supporters took our embassy staff hostage in 1979. We’ve known it in the form of multiple Tehran-backed attacks on Americans since: 1983 in Beirut where we lost 241 people in a bombing; 1985 when TWA 847 was hijacked by Iranian-trained Hezbollah fighters and we lost a Navy diver; 1996 at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia where we lost 19; the list goes on. We’ve heard their message: “Death to America.” There is no negotiating with mad men.

We overthrew Iran's secular democratic government back in 1953 . The Shah's Savak destroyed the secular opposition, leaving only the clergy in opposition. We attempted to implement the PNAC's plans back in 2001-2, pincering Iran between our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. By demonizing Iran as part of the 'Axis of Evil', we encouraged both Americans and Iranians to assume the worst about each other’s intentions. We treat Pakistan as a valued ally although they've developed nuclear weapons and provided them to states even more unsavory than they themselves are. We are blind to the plight of the Palestinians, whom much of Iran's citizenry have a natural empathy for since the Palestinians’ experience is an echo of their own: subjugation, humiliation and disenfranchisement by a western power. We accept Israel's right to a nuclear deterrent but not Iran's, although Iran has not been a military aggressor since the invasion of India in 1738, and Israel was an unprovoked aggressor in the 1956 Suez crisis. We sanctioned India's violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. We manufactured what has proven to be false premises to justify our aggression against Iraq. We awarded the Legion of Merit to Capt. Rogers of the USS Vincennes, after he killed 290 people when he shot down an Iranian airliner; Newsweek’s reporters claimed that the shooting was provoked by an irresponsible commander who was seeking a confrontation. If we’d court-martialed Rogers his apparently criminal acts would've remained no more than that; however by decorating him we implicitly sanctioned his actions, turning a crime into an act of state terrorism. We lecture Iran about human rights, but practice torture and rendition. We ignore the far greater oppression of our ally Saudi Arabia. Given these facts, how else can Iran defend itself against the capricious hostility of the rogue power that we’ve become?