I grew up in Iran with two very different grandmothers. As a young girl, I took at face value the fact that one of my grandmothers was a devout woman who never left her home without wearing a head scarf, and the other was a Western-educated progressive-minded woman who didn't think twice about swimming topless in the family pool. Yet both women were forces to be reckoned with and by no means subservient.

While Iran has a long way to go, it's hard to take the view that what America needs to do to meet its vital national interests is to strengthen the Saudi hand in the world while keeping Iran isolated. So as president Obama quoted Yitzhak Rabin "You don't make peace with friends." You make it with very unsavory enemies."

Iran is changing. The behavior of the people today would have not been tolerated 35 years ago in the immediate post-Revolutionary period. The cumulative effect of these behavioral and cultural changes is a transformation of Iranian society that will likely never be reversed.