Letters to the Editor: Ease Iran sanctions during coronavirus pandemic. It’s what a Christian country should do

To the editor: Although I try to be a person of faith, I have little faith in the current administration’s receptivity to calls from former leaders of both parties and columnist Doyle McManus to ease sanctions against Iran during this global health crisis.

Still, I’ll hope that some trusted advisor to President Trump or Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, fresh from celebrating the spiritual renewal of Easter or Passover, will appeal to the wisdom of acting on our professed Judeo-Christian values with generosity toward fellow humans suffering from the pandemic that plagues us all.

Easing sanctions to allow for medical relief would remind the world who Americans are; we might even remind ourselves.

Carol Flint, Santa Monica

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To the editor: McManus sheds virtual crocodile tears, conveniently disregarding his own admission that “when Trump offered publicly to send U.S. aid to Tehran, nobody was surprised when Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said he didn’t want American help.”

Writer McManus acknowledged that “this is a poisonous relationship, and both governments are behaving badly.”

So, why then, should the focus be solely on the actions (or inaction) of Trump? Iran’s leadership is quite obviously its own worst enemy and, as President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel famously entreated, no good crisis should go to waste.

Jim Gordon, San Diego

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To the editor: McManus is right to support COVID-19 aid for Iran.

More than that, we should end all U.S. sanctions now against Iran, re-enter the 2015 nuclear deal and begin to tell the truth about what went wrong in U.S.-Iranian relations as well.

Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was blowback from the CIA-backed coup against its elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953.

U.S. foreign policy has been egregious throughout the post-World War II, Cold War era, and continues to be so. Pompeo’s claim that the U.S. is the “leading light of humanitarian goodness” in the world is grotesque.

Rachel Bruhnke, San Pedro