The Iran deal -- irrationality in foreign policy discourse

It took two years of intense negotiations, travel by diplomats equal to 16 aroundthe-world trips and thousands of pages of position papers to solve a problem that never existed: "It is not hard to argue that, had there been no diplomatic rupture between Teheran and Washington for so long, many of the upheavals in the region would have been avoided.It is also not hard to argue that there would have been no 'manufactured crisis' about Iran's nuclear programme, had the two countries remained friendly after the Iranian revolution in 1979.And, finally, there would have been no occasion for an historical breakthrough." 1 Intelligence services of major powers, such as the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, repeatedly concluded that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. 2 Crude attempts to plant intelligence and raise the spectre of the bomb were no more credible than earlier claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.As we know, that false intelligence led Western powers to attack and devastate Iraq.The emergence of the terrorist Islamic State, or Daesh, is one of the consequences of that attack.Hundreds of thousands of casualties and millions of refugees from the war is another.Partly because of the lamentable U.S. experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, an attack on Iran has so far been prevented but threats of an attack continue to be voiced in Israel and in the United States.This is why it is instructive to look at the origins of "the Iranian threat", the effects of Western and Israeli punitive actions on Iran, the process that led to the signing of the Vienna agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) and the resulting state of international relations.