generalspeaking

Scruples There Are None

While the geopolitical world looks on nervously at the activities surrounding the Islamic Republic of Iran in its stated journey toward nuclear sufficiency, there are other political and geographical considerations that lift the situation into an altogether new realm of potential danger. Iran - though it has its many detractors, those who fear and abhor its ferocious agenda entirely disruptive to the world at large - also enjoys the helpfulness of its friends.

Friends who just happen to reflect some of the very similar values and moral imperatives, and see value in assisting Iran's aspirations. Friends who find themselves listed as human-rights-abusing nations whose activities are directly harmful to their populations and promise to do great future harm to the world surrounding them. Their adverseness to the social order of decency and care for others stands them apart from the democratic nations of the Globe.

Pakistan's sinister nuclear weaponry expert saw fit to ensure that unfit countries shared the critical knowledge it had attained to enable it to produce nuclear armaments. North Korea, which starves its people, and lavishes funding on nuclear development and arms acquisition, proved a great help to Iran and Syria in spreading nuclear know-how.

And Russia, not to be outdone, has encouraged Iran in its manifest destiny. Helping it materially, scientifically and diplomatically, to defy world order and United Nations' sanctions, in its trajectory toward nuclear self-fulfilment.

The Kremlin, and specifically Vladimir Putin, has been outraged at the desertion of its former partners in the dissolved U.S.S.R. Their cleaving to Western notions of democratic governance, and aligning themselves with the European Union and NATO has caused a friction of unappeasable ferocity between them and Russia.

The decision of the United States - in the face of Iran's aspirational goals and its loudly expressed and direct threats to its neighbours - to place anti-missile sites close to Russian borders in former allies' geographies has infuriated Vladimir Putin, who sizzles with white-hot anger. Russia's newly rediscovered allies in Venezuela and Cuba serve as counter-measures to restoring its pride.

As does its assistance to Iran in providing it with its own advanced anti-missile apparatus, now in the process of delivery, to confront and challenge the United States and Israel with the reality of its realpolitik. Denying its intent when confronted with it initially, it now brazenly allows that the transference of the new technology is reality.

This is Russia, newly facing its economic disruption as a result of fallen oil prices, where it has newly imposed high tariffs against importation of foreign vehicles to extract from its people the necessity to buy home-produced vehicles. Vehicles that Russians recognize as inferior, more costly and mechanically dangerous - than the Asian products they prefer. Producing riots and violent government responses.

Russians now accuse their governing elite of squandering Russia's new wealth on their own personal aggrandizement, instead of investing it in public infrastructure and advanced technologies to benefit the country as a whole. The growing numbers of the unemployed and the steadily depreciating currency is fuelling true social discontent, long in coming.

Iran, that bastion of social development, has seen fit to close down the office of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre in Tehran, operated by the Nobel Peace laureate and women's rights activist Shirin Ebadi. Heaven knows, Iran is in dire need of courageous Iranians to dedicate themselves to easing the plight of Iranian women, and to defend the human rights of gays and Baha'i in the country.

Together, they represent a world-class duo of socially unsavoury and politically dangerous playmates.

Labels: Political Realities, Technology, Troublespots, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Monday, December 22, 2008