Iran nuclear understanding shows White House shifting alliances in Mideast: US journalist

A landmark nuclear understanding with Iran shows that the Obama administration is shifting its alliances in the Middle East, American journalist and writer Dean Henderson says.

Iran and the P5+1 group – the US, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany – reached a framework understanding in the Swiss city of Lausanne on April 2.

If a final deal is reached by a July 1 deadline, it would lift all international sanctions imposed against the Islamic Republic in exchange for certain steps Tehran will take with regard to its nuclear program.

The nuclear understanding “indicates shifting of alliances in the Middle East or at least a desire to do so, on the part of some people within the Obama administration,” Henderson told Press TV on Friday.

“Not only should we not undo this deal, but we should go further and we should really reexamine our relationship with Saudi Arabia and with Israel,” he stated, adding that the US should “work more and more with Iran in dealing with the things in the Middle East.”

“We should be on the side of Houthis in Yemen, we should be friends with Hezbollah in Lebanon, we should not be friend with all these single-family monarchies” of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council, where there are no elections, and women have no rights, he said.

 “It’s time to move on to be friends with allies in the region where [they have] democracies and have elections, like Iran, like Syria, like Lebanon,” he stressed.

“Foreign policy is the area where the United States really needs to reexamine all of its friendships” and this is from where it should start, said Henderson, who has written several books, including Big Oil and Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families and Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics and Terror Network.

He made the remarks while commenting on President Barack Obama’s statement on Tuesday in response to remarks by Wisconsin governor and potential presidential candidate Scott Walker who vowed to undo the nuclear agreement with Iran if he would be elected president in 2016.

Obama said revoking a nuclear agreement with Iran following his second term in the White House by another president would be “foolish.”

Henderson also slammed Republicans in the US Congress for opposing the Iran nuclear understanding, saying “they are from a different planet. I would not pay much attention to anything they say, because there’s nothing they can do about it.”

He noted that “Obama has already said that if they tried to overturn this deal with Iran” he would veto their legislation.

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