Since 1953, when the U.S. covertly overthrew democratically elected Iranian President Mohammad Mossadegh, relations between the U.S. and Iran can be described as troubling, to say the least.
In recent years, there has been much conjecture as to whether Iran is enriching uranium for peaceful purposes.
Numerous media outlets proposed that the Iranian authorities have harmful intentions, while American intelligence agencies argued to the contrary.
The Ayatollah Khamenei denounced the use of nuclear weapons in a press conference last month.
This would be a great statement in the face of international pressure, if only the ayatollah were a credible source.
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report last month that declared that Iran had more than once refused inspectors entry to a military site known as Parchin.
The ayatollah, who directly oversees foreign policy, along with President Ahmadinejad, has a specific disdain for Israel.
The president seeks to “wipe Zionism off the pages of history.”
Perhaps by saying this he hopes to justify Iran’s funding of Hezbollah, a militant Islamic group committed to destroying the state of Israel.
This militant group, along with right-wing Israeli officials, is one of the obstacles standing in the way of a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine.
An armed nuclear Iran could only mean catastrophe in the Middle East.
As the sectarian rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran intensified last October, two Iranians were arrested for plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.
One of the men was linked to the Qods force, an operational division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
The religious right in Iran has also been responsible for the murder of Jewish community organizers in Argentina, the issuing of a religious fatwa calling for the death of a British novelist and assassination of Kurdish opposition leaders in Berlin.
This regime sunk its theocratic claws into the heart of a young, educated and democratic society by enforcing a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
This allowed the government to persecute religious minorities and treat homosexuality as a crime.
The true victims of this situation are the Iranian people.
They live under a brutal theocratic regime and are now being starved by economic sanctions put in place by some of the world’s superpowers.
It’s utterly embarrassing that some of those among us support the clerical authorities’ defiance of international law as a way of promoting their own anti-American imperialism agenda.
Remember that in 2009 many Irannian citizens gave their lives to challenge the legitimacy of their government.
While war between Israel and Iran is undesirable, the harsh reality is that Iran hasn’t shown the international community that it has the moral responsibility to pursue a nuclear program.
There is no doubt that the intentions of the Iranian people are honest and just.
But the representative government of Iran has displayed its willingness to trample on democracy and human rights time and time again.
We only have one planet, so the international community must agree that arming a theocratic regime with nuclear power that can annihilate cities within minutes is an experiment not worth running.
Richard Vieira is a political science junior and Jikky Thankachan is a microbiology freshman at UF.
