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Monday, July 20, 2015

The Nuclear Deal with Iran



The deal signed on July 14, 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 (The USA, Russia, China, France, Britain plus Germany) is not dissimilar to the deal recently signed by Greece to “save it” from default and bankruptcy.  In both cases it is the people who have suffered at the hands of their leaders. In both cases it is the people that elected their leaders and have continued to do so even as their own personal situation deteriorated.  In both cases there were no responsible leaders in power to share the consequences of their chosen path with their people, no one willing to compromise, no one capable of sharing responsibility for the future.

Any voices that were raised against the leadership were not encouraged by the international community who prefer the devil they know to the devil they do not, no matter how evil they may be and how much it means their own people continue to suffer.  But for now let us concentrate on Iran because while what has happened to Greece seriously affects the rest of Europe and therefore, the world community, it is Iran that continues to represent the true threat to global peace.

Regime change has its dangers – for instance the continuing break up of Syria and the failed status of Libya, Iraq, Sudan and Somalia hardly inspire confidence for long term security.  And the contagion of violence in failed states does encourage a certain sick kind of individual to identify with that violence.  Both Islamic State and al Qaeda are products of a prejudiced theocracy that encourages its followers to equate a better life with hating the other; and to view violence and terror as legitimate means of achieving global domination for the Islamic faith only.

The systemic failure in the Iran deal is that it does not address the philosophy of violence that feeds the soul of Islamic fundamentalism. The difference between IS in Syria, Iraq and Libya - and The Islamic Republic of Iran is that one is a “non-State” collective of brutal murderers motivated by their Muslim faith to conquer the globe for their faith, to establish a global Islamic empire while the other, (Iran), is a State run by brutal murderers who are motivated by their Muslim faith to establish a global empire ruled by them.  To the massacred, where-ever they may reside, the minutiae of their theological differences are simply irrelevant.

Both are worthy successors to the Crusaders of yesteryear, neither is qualitatively different in the means they employ to achieve their pernicious aims.

In 1095 Pope Urban II set upon a path of bloody mayhem a Christian hoard led by aristocrats and followed by knights and peasants in a bloody onslaught that would not abate for almost 500 years. It was called the Crusades and millions of people died with the name of their god on their lips, martyrs and their murderers both.  In the mid 18th Century Britain exercised increasingly greater control over India. The Mughal Empire was already in terminal decline by the time the British arrived in the sub-continent. Nevertheless ‘Muslim India’ associated Western expansion with the downfall of a Muslim governed nation. The Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and greater Syria contributed to that feeling of bewilderment.

At its core, Islam’s understanding of world history is flawed in the centrality it provides to the Islamic angle in everything. It demanded and to this day demands an explanation for how a Muslim polity could be simply swept away and what can be done to once more regain that control. Introspection and flawed logic calls for separation, militancy and war against the infidel.

That militant, murderous fanaticism has neither abated nor developed towards any understanding of a shared humanity.  The same poisoned narrative of revenge and conquest informs and feeds every debate about the Caliphate and its return to the global stage, from contemporary times down to the 18th Century and beyond.

Today it is al-Qaeda and Islamic State that are the new Crusaders.  And what we are experiencing is what many people refer to as the Third World War.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is an expressly racist, malevolent political entity.  It is to be given a $100 - $150 billion lifeline without any expectation that it rein in its military adventurism and its encouragement of a genocidal Jew hatred.  This is rewarding terrorism and encouraging an evil regime to ever greater heights of barbarism against its own citizens and outside its own borders. 

It should not surprise us.

During the 1990’s France and Russia profited by at least $100Billion by exploiting the Oil for Food Program – thus ignoring the embargo on trade with Iraq.  By undermining the trade embargo Saddam Hussein’s government was empowered to continue to oppress his own people and to internationally export terror.  By creating an unequal sanctions regime France and Russia may well have facilitated 911 and all that followed from that terrible day’s events.

In the 1990’s both George Bush the First and Bill Clinton attempted to make peace between the US and Syria by negotiating with the tyrant dynasty of the Assad family. The US surreptitiously negotiated with the Syrian regime for over a decade while it ignored Syria’s crimes against Lebanon and its international support for terrorism.  Israel was never the issue. Senior American negotiators were visiting Damascus as a massive car-bomb tore apart 23 bodies in Lebanon on 14th February 2005.  Rafiq al-Hariri was the primary target, assassinated by the Syrian regime.  Only then, in response, did the USA withdraw its ambassador from Damascus.  Bashar al-Assad to this day stands accused of murdering the former Lebanese Prime Minister, as well as the twenty-two other people who died that day. 

No-one pointed out the direct correlation between negotiation with terrorists and the crimes they are encouraged to commit. Nor that it made the negotiators complicit in the war-crimes committed during that period of negotiation.  According to Lee Smith (“The Strong Horse”) the problem was that the Arab – greater Muslim world now had over a decade of American appeasement of terror and appeasing the sponsors of terror. The message that the State Department sent out, by its actions, was that if a regime sought to gain the attention of global leaders, terrorism and mass killing worked and had no negative consequences. Failed policy is nevertheless a kind of policy that is highly effective for non-state and aspiring, state players.

President George Bush the Second kept open his options on Syria even as he withdrew his ambassador in the wake of the Hariri assassination. And President Obama made it a cornerstone of his foreign policy to re-engage with regimes that are hostile to America and Western democracy even as he supported his VP in his outrage over the announcement of further construction in Jerusalem of 1,600 apartments on the day that VP Biden arrived for talks (in 2010).  So Israel is globally condemned while the world continues to keep largely silent as hostile Muslim regimes routinely murder their own people as well as the people of nations, distant from their own borders.

While silence is always viewed as acquiescence, even as approval for terrorism, the debate over one person’s terrorism being another’s freedom fighter is a mere distraction. If our enemy has a vision of his or her society that is diametrically opposed to everything good that we stand behind then we are either for ourselves or for our enemy. There is no middle ground.

The difference between liberty and licence is the contempt with which the latter reacts to the former.

So I do not see that embracing the evil Iranian empire empowers Near-Eastern moderates or that it tames the Iranian beast.  The public murder of gays and other minorities in Iran will not dissipate, if anything it will escalate.   The current US Administration and other appeasers have told us that we should not look at rhetoric but at the actions of the regime. The hate that spews from the lips of The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his cohorts in government is not meant to mollify us; it is the abuser acclimating us to our abuse.

In a conference that President Obama gave on 15th July 2015 he admitted that “this deal is not contingent on Iran changing its behavior.” This is the day the President of the United States of America disclosed that an unrepentant tyranny has received international validation and legitimacy.