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And the Taliban never would have spent 20 years in the wilderness (or Pakistan, anyway) if they hadn't chosen to antagonize the United States (when it was at its least tolerant) in the first place. The terrorist-to-statesman pipeline is an old and honorable one, achieved mostly through winning, as Paul Revere, Samuel Chase, and John Hancock could tell you.
If Iran had settled down into being an ordinary dictatorship after the revolution, they'd probably have relations with the US no worse than e.g. Vietnam does today. I don't know why they chose to stick with the whole "Death to America, Death to Israel" thing -- my guess would be their religious fanaticism is absolutely genuine -- but that's what led to today's situation.
I agree with this take. In general I find that Westerners usually fail to model the thinking of dictators because they assume that all dictators are motivated by personal enrichment or ego, rather than by genuine belief in a totalizing ideology. While naked self-interest is a useful framing for the tin-pot dictators of, say, Latin America or Africa, it’s often a poor fit for the motivations of the rulers of civilization-states like Russia, China, and Iran.
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I agree, which is why it is strange
No doubt mostly true, but so is the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Lebanese etc. And they have more national interest at stake. The Shia are not more religiously extreme than the Sunni, much the opposite. It is Sunnis who invented and funded 99% of what we think of as "muslim terrorism". It is the Sunnis who funded and produced the anti-semitic propaganda taught to schoolchildren all over the middle east. Iran got on this "terrorism" thing late and most of the terrorists they fund are Sunnis.
So why is it easier for them to climb down than it is the Iranians? Weird, right?
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