"Death to the Dictator!"
Iraq, now Shia-led, and professing warmer relations with Iran with which it shares a contiguous border suddenly, but unsurprisingly finds itself confronted with the reality of its emerging oil-wealth attracting the attention of a country whose economic straits compounded by its nuclear politics has brought a challenge to borders and ownership of natural resources. It would be amusing if it were not so potentially rife with danger of more violence in an already-violence plagued part of the world.A little game of hide-and-seek, possession-and-denial, where one will plant the outward manifestations of ownership inside the border of Iraq, and on departure, the other will extinguish signs of ownership by supplanting them with those of their own. Each in turn denying the existence of any scintilla of a disagreement between them. At least on the diplomatic front, government to government. That has changed.
In the trenches it was an altogether different story: "Iranian forces come to this well periodically and then at daybreak they withdraw", according to a senior Iraqi engineer. "They are provoking us ... I don't know why this is a big deal this time." The little cat-and-mouse game has turned serious with the issue of Iranian tanks crossing the border to claim ownership of a disputed oil well.
Disputed because Iran would dearly love to claim the well as its own, on the basis that borders were ill-defined at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Iraq's Deputy Interior Minister however, is unequivocal in his emphasis that the well is "300 metres inside Iraq". Not a very good prospect, that 300 metres, given the opportunity for the country to auction the field off to the highest international bidder.
Iran still denies any such incursion, defying the claim by an Iraqi border general that Iran "positioned tanks ... and dug trenches" around the Fauqa field's Well No.4, the latest of several such incursions. "Iraq will not give up its oil wealth" pledged the country's interior minister. And the country's national security council stated unequivocally that Iran had violated Iraq's "territorial integrity", demanding withdrawal.
An insouciant Iran has also announced that it has built more efficient centrifuge models to be placed at its uranium enrichment sites, to replace the earlier ones that have proven to be ineffective at producing the (weapons) grade of enrichment the country is aiming for. Again, in defiance of the IAEA, the United Nations and the Security Council all intent on having the country back down from its obvious direction toward nuclear armament.
This is a very busy country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, fending off diplomatic assaults on its own territorial integrity from the international community, disputing ownership of oil wells with its neighbour, proposing the elimination of another country in the geography, and posing as a direct political, military threat to the entire of the Middle East. For starters. All this while being faced with internal political unrest.
Where, in the wake of the death of the venerable Grand Ayatollah Hosein Ali Montazeri, the critical thorn in the side of the Supreme Council, the Supreme Leader and the illegal president, shock troops of the Republican Guard have been dispatched to Qom as well as Tehran to dispel the likelihood of further "Satan-inspired" riots by the proponents of reform.
Where reform-minded students are now chanting their rhetorical but subject-alternating invocations of "Death to the dictator!"
Labels: Middle East, Technology, Terrorism, Traditions
posted by Pieface @ Monday, December 21, 2009
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