It's Monday, April 13, 2006. I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Well, as we went into the weekend, of course, we all knew the big story was going to be the talks between the United States and Iran, and those talks were designed

in order, number one, to make certain that the current ceasefire is real and might hold,

and then secondly, hopes that there could be a negotiated more lasting peace, some at least lessening

of the hostilities between the United States and Iran. Israel, of course,

being a related party as well. But as we now know, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance spent hours

upon hours in conversation with senior Iranian officials, and the bottom line is that they made

no apparent progress. Now, I want to put that into an historical context for just a moment.

When you're talking about two belligerents in a military action like this,

you're talking about an incredibly high level of hostilities,

and those hostilities are not merely military hostilities.

They're also social and communication hostilities.

Furthermore, when you look at Iran, you have to date those or post-date those hostilities all

way back to 1979.

So we're talking about generations involved here.

We're talking about no one alive, basically involved in this process.

And that includes the president of the United States, who, though, of course,

alive at the time, was not a part of any of those deliberations back in the 1970s into the 1980s.

No, the fact is that there is a lot of bad blood, a lot of bad history between Iran and the United

States, not to mention again, putting Israel in the picture. And so no informed person in terms of

international diplomacy in the history of world affairs could have expected that all of a sudden

there was going to be a news conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, and you'd have the U.S.

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