generalspeaking

 Crisis Diplomacy

"Diplomacy is most needed in times of crisis.  Unless there's information I don't have access to that's truly dramatic, this is nonsensical.  It's highly unusual to take a step like this given Canada's very significant interests in the region and the role we might play in helping to resolve the crisis or at least prevent an escalation."  Michael Byers, Canada research chair in global politics and international law, University of British Columbia

That conclusion, academic as it may be, will most certainly give aid and comfort to Tehran.  A scornfully mocking article out of the Tehran Times today by Yuram Abdullah Weiler in response to Canada's shuttering of the Republic of Iran's Ottawa embassy taking inspiration from a Globe and Mail article on the subject included this:

Baird absurdly characterized Iran as the “most significant
threat to global peace and security in the world today.”
Countering this allegation, Globe and Mail columnist Doug
Saunders wrote, “U.S. intelligence agencies and Israel’s military
chief, Benny Gantz, have said recently they believe Iran is not
pursuing nuclear weapons. There’s no suggestion of any
Iranian military attack against any other country at the moment.
The Iranian menace is all politics and potential.”

That same article spoke pridefully of the fact that 120 countries representing the Non-Aligned Nations attended a summit in Tehran a week earlier to which UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the new Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi attended along with other world dignitaries, affirming, as the writer put it, Iran's proud legacy as a peaceful country wrongly accused of nuclear-weapons ambitions by the cunning and evil West.

Nowhere did the article make mention of Ki-moon's unequivocal berating of Tehran for defaming, slandering and threatening another state, for its intransigence with the IAEA and the United Nations and its defiance on behalf of Syria's murderous regime.  Nor did the article make the slightest allusion to President Morsi's affirming Egypt's position that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is slaughtering his people and must go.

According to Michael Byers' reasoning, diplomatic relations should have been maintained by the Allies with the Axis countries during World War II.  While Iran is not yet bombing those cities it threatens, it may come to that, but according to the theory that diplomacy is always better than fighting, the culture of seeing no evil and maintaining an embassy used for covert activities harmful to the well-being of Canada and its citizens would be akin to London hosting a German embassy while it was being bombed.

Canada has taken the principled, moral step in closing down its embassy in Tehran, withdrawing its personnel for their safety, and inviting Tehran to recall its personnel.  Tehran's assaults against decency, humanity and principles of justice and human rights are far too numerous to consider them an aberration in an otherwise-internationally law-abiding state.  Its own institutionalized support of terror groups, and of its own Revolutionary Guard Corps mounting terror attacks - or assisting its proxy Hezbollah to do so provides more than sufficient proof of institutionalized moral degradation.

The former Liberal-led governments of Canada have pursued in their own limited way, justice on behalf of Iranian-Canadians harassed, imprisoned, mutilated, raped, murdered in Iran.  It took the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to finally decide to play hardball with a rocket-wielding theocracy.  Before it mounts those nuclear-tipped bombs on its latest incarnation of long-distance ballistic missiles.

That's the message that needed to be delivered, unequivocally and firmly, that Canada will not be a party to tolerance of the intolerable in the name of international diplomacy.  What's fair for the goose is so for the gander; Iran blithely ignores international diplomacy when it sends out its murder squads and when it imposes on the international community at the UN general assembly to threaten a member state.

It was time and fairly done that the Government of Canada has officially designated the Islamic Republic along with Syria as state supporters of terrorism.  Their brand of terrorism.  As opposed to the brand that is well and thriving in the Middle East and which is opposed to the existence of other Middle East and Arab states that are not sufficiently Islamicized and do not practise rigid Sharia law.  The divide there is sectarian; take your pick - Sunni or Shia fanaticism.

Under the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act Iran and Syria have been listed as nations complicit in terrorism.  Lebanon is not yet listed although Hezbollah, a creature of Iran, is effectively in control of that sectarian-torn country.  Hamas rounds out the quartet rather nicely. 

Professor Houchang Hassan-Yari, a Middle East expert at Queen's University and the Royal Military College has stated his disbelief that Canadian diplomatic staff in Tehran might have been in any potential danger.  Yet the American Embassy was attacked in 1979, and diplomatic relations have never been restored.  And the British Embassy was attacked just recently.

"For me", Professor Hassan-Yari stated, "it would be extremely, extremely difficult to imagine such a thing."  Obviously, Professor Hassan-Yari's vision is slightly obscured by his lingering respect for his home country.  He must make a concerted effort in the name of reality, to imagine such a thing; it is not, after all, given ample evidence, that extremely, extremely difficult, at all.

Labels: Canada, Government of Canada, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Islamism, Political Realities, Syria, Terrorism, Traditions

posted by Pieface @ Monday, September 10, 2012