Today, November 24, is a day of reckoning with the most actively dangerous
regime in the world. For years, this regime has waged a bloody, undeclared war
against the West and western liberalism. It has engaged in a real war with its
neighbouring rival. And it is utterly committed to obtaining nuclear weapons.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a jihadist theocracy that has dragged Iran
into economic depression while routinely executing, imprisoning and
intimidating its domestic opponents.
It helped instigate the bloodbaths in Syria and Iraq by supporting the
Shia-dominated regimes in both countries which oppressed their large Sunni
populations. Both countries are now in sectarian civil war. The most loathsome
expression of the Sunni insurrection is the group Islamic State.
Iran is far more dangerous than Islamic
State, which is no longer fighting a useless army of Iraqi conscripts and is
now taking heavy attrition from US air power and Shiite militias trained and
financed by Iran. Jihad has met counter-jihad.
Yet the
West, led by US President Barack Obama, has equivocated and appeased this
regime for years over nuclear weapons. The West has imposed economic sanctions
but allowed the Iranians to talk and talk while they build and build their
nuclear program. The Iranian regime knows that every hour it can spend
negotiating brings it closer to the point of no return, acquiring nuclear
weapons capacity.
So steadfast
is this nuclear ambition that the Iranian theocracy is willing to depress the
Iranian economy in the cause, which means the Iranian people bear the burden of
the regime's nuclear obsession.
For 12
years, the International Atomic Energy Agency has been expressing concern about
the nature of Iran's nuclear research program. For the past four years, a group
of six nations – the US, China, Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom and
France – have been negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program.
Iran has yet to make a single major concession amid a shower of minor ones.
As of today,
Iran is supposed to have agreed to cap its nuclear fuel production capacity,
and commit to reducing the 10,000 centrifuges it is operating. It also must
answer a number of questions about the extent of its nuclear weapons research.
It must accept stringent transparency conditions.
It has met
none of these demands. Nor was Iran ever going to meet this deadline. It has
been willing to participate in formal negotiations because the process offers
the illusion of progress, while buying time to build.
On November
11, two weeks before today's deadline, Russia and Iran announced that Russia
would build as many as eight nuclear power plants for Iran, with two firm
commitments and options to build a further six plants.
The Russians
claim this will curb Iran's nuclear weapons program because the agreement
stipulates that Russia supplies the reactor fuel for the power plants, which
negates Iran's argument that it needs to develop its own uranium enrichment
program.
The deal has
not negated this ambition. The Iranians are refusing to scale back their
uranium enrichment program even at the risk of incurring further sanctions.
This goes to
the intrinsic core of the Islamic Republic. It is a state that supports
jihad and aims for more than domestic power. That is why Iranian meddling can
be found among the origins of the bloodshed in Syria, Iraq, Gaza and Lebanon.
Iran
supported the disastrously divisive Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who
lived in exile in Iran for eight years during the Saddam regime in Iraq. After
moving to Syria he worked closely with the Iranian surrogate, Hezbollah.
Iran has
intervened directly in Iraq since the collapse of Iraqi unity and the
subsequent power vacuum exploited by Islamic State. It has sent Iranian
Revolutionary Guard personnel, elite Qods Force teams and ground-attack
fighters to confront Islamic State.
Iran has
long supported Syrian dictator President Bashar al-Assad and when Syria
descended into civil war along the Sunni-Shia divide, it deployed Revolutionary
Guards and Hezbollah militia to prop up the Assad regime's brutal suppression
of the insurgency.
Iran has
sponsored terrorist attacks throughout the region, and beyond, for more than 30
years, since the 1983 suicide bombing in Beirut by Islamic Jihad, which killed
and maimed hundreds of American and French soldiers, for which Iran built a
monument celebrating the attack.
Iran funded
and trained insurgents killing US and allied forces during the occupation of
Iraq.
Iran armed,
trained, funded and directed Hezbollah, which has created a Shia state within a
state in southern Lebanon. It has supplied Hezbollah with military expertise
and thousands of missiles, which have been fired into Israel or stockpiled for
future attacks.
Iran
provided thousands of rockets that Hamas has launched from Gaza into Israel
(even though Hamas is a militant Sunni group).
Iran has
promised to supply similar rockets to Palestinians on the West Bank.
Iran is the
great destabiliser of its region, even more so since the ultimate single act of
destabilisation, the 2003 decision by US President George W Bush to invade and
occupy Iraq. (I was highly critical of it at the time and have remained so.)
Now Bush's
successor, President Obama, is facing the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran with
a commitment to jihad, a long history of sponsoring terrorism and a Persian
imperial impulse. This would present a more unstable and volatile nuclear
threat than the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China at the height
of the Cold War.
President
Obama, though possessing a far more subtle and worldly understanding of foreign
affairs than his Texan predecessor, would thus leave a potentially even worse
legacy in the Middle East than President Bush if he appeases Iran's nuclear
brinkmanship.
No comments:
Post a Comment