Forward To The Second Level...
When talks and reasoning don't prevail to encourage recalcitrant states to come around to the broad thinking of their collectively more biddable contemporaries, one searches out other means of persuasion. Incremental persuasion.Despite the egregiously fearsome determination of a state to act decisively in its own interests, so clearly detrimental to other states in its intent, those states who take it upon themselves to act as leaveners on behalf of all, must take steps not to betray their last and lethal option.
So it is that the United States - in the face of prodigious UN efforts to entice Iran to cease and desist in its quest for nuclear power as an obvious front for the attainment of nuclear arms - has advanced to step number two.
Imposing sanctions on Tehran's theocratic government through the naming of its country's armed forces as terrorist-inspiring-and-encouraging enemies of peace. Naming the Revolutionary Guards thus also enables the imposition of financial sanctions on the country.
Earlier unheeded sanctions have already left the country struggling to meet its internal commitments. But funds to finance ongoing nuclear commitments are somehow found, regardless. Not enough, it seems, to satisfy the debt Iran owes to Russia for its nuclear infrastructure, scientific assistance and needed materials, but the resolve to forge ahead remains undiminished.
Through the targeting of the Revolutionary Guards who own and control signal business interests spread throughout the world, bringing in ready and needed financial assistance to the country, yet another avenue of revenue has been truncated.
The proud, playfully plaintive words of Iran's spokesperson that "The hostile policies of America against the respectful Iranian nation and our legal organizations are against international regulations and have no value", strike a particular chord.
Iran respectful? Toward whom exactly? The international community which, through the United Nations has indicated Iran's aspirations makes them extremely nervous? The UN's International Atomic Energy Commission, interested in Iran's nuclear ambitions and whose inspections the country has spurned?
Ah, of course, it's the respect that Iran demonstrates toward other UN member-states of which he speaks. Particularly that of the State of Israel, against which Iran's president has iterated and reiterated the respectful intent of personally obliterating.
"Against international regulations", has a particular ring to it, reminiscent most latterly of Iran's defiance against UN requests that it cease and desist in its nuclear search. "Against international regulations" should refer to Iran's position of arming and instigating terrorism.
They obviously see things differently. But then, they would; they are different. Public hangings as public spectacles for entertainment. Or, mayhap, as rather unsubtle warnings to those segments of its population chafing under the country's Islamist dictatorship.
Above all, the country's and its forces' support for its proxies and terror-affiliated friends like Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the PFLOP. Busy-busy. And the United States in particular is rather annoyed at its Shia-led support of terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, targeting U.S. forces quite particularly.
Lest we overlook Iran's military intent - their unswerving interest in surface-to-surface missiles; their lofty claims that their Shahab strategic missiles have a wide range, capable of reaching a very wide swath of Europe - should also be taken into account. As well as their ambitious chemical and biological weapons programme.
Most compelling for an avowedly peaceful state in a real nutcracker of an environment. All in honour, needless to say, of Allah. For did not the Supreme Ayatollah proudly announce to the world at large, holding up a vial of enriched uranium, that this is Iran's right as a sovereign state in a modern technological world?
Iran's destabilizing influence within the Middle East, in encouraging Hezbollah to provoke and attack Israel alongside its wider provocation within Lebanon a case in point. Iran's encouragement of Syria to try for its own nuclear emplacements with the assistance of their good friends from North Korea, another.
And then there's the little matter of its human rights abuses, again. It's an internal matter that Iran brooks no interference with. If the administration wishes to brutalize those within its population who will insist that they confusedly practise a gay lifestyle, if they choose to punish political dissenters, women who refuse to decently garb themselves, they will.
They have their own powerful supporters after all, in China and Russia. And there is that nice, reliable middle-power, good old Canada, asserting its undiminished outrage at Iran's murder of one of its own Canadian citizens, trying once again as in previous years to amass sufficient votes to exact yet another UN condemnation of Iran for its human rights abuses.
Poor Iran, so embattled. So misunderstood. So undeserving of all this censure.
Labels: Political Realities, Terrorism, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Friday, October 26, 2007
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