generalspeaking

The Man Who Would Be King

"Tikrit is a prime example of what we are worried about. Iran is taking over the country [Iraq]."
"We see Iran involved in Syria and Lebanon and Yemen and Iraq, and God knows where. This must stop if Iran is to be part of the resolution for the region and not part of the problem."
"The kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] stresses the need to provide the military means [through the U.S.-led coalition including Saudi Arabia] needed to face this challenge on the ground."
Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Foreign Minister

"We are witnessing the export of the Islamic revolution throughout the region. From Bahrain and Iraq to Syria, Yemen and North Africa."
Qassem Suleimani, head, Iranian Al-Quds force, Iranian Revolutionary Guard

"Even as we engage in these discussions with Iran around this program [nuclear negotiations], we will not take our eye off Iran's destabilizing actions in places like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen particularly."
John Kerry, American Secretary of State

Well, in actual fact, that is the problem, that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has quite deliberately taken its "eye" off Iran's destabilization plans for the region, in its hegemonic growth of the Islamic Revolution empowering the Shi'ite sect of Islam over the Sunni mainstream, at least in the Middle East to begin with. Tehran sees itself as having inherited the Islamist crown, instructing the greater Islamic world to adapt to its version and vision of Islam.

And no amount of violence, dire threats levelled against those the Ayatollahs consider the enemies of its totalitarian expansionism have been spared to inform the world at large of its plans. Confidence that the world is dealing with a reasonable administration that can be restrained by appealing to its intelligence and humanistic response, is offset by the very fact that this is an apocalyptic regime, anticipating an end-of-world event where pure Islam will prevail, informs otherwise.

To view the Shiite militias, the Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran's Lebanese proxies in Hezbollah as more humane and less of a threat to the world order than al-Qaeda-inspired-and-affilaited groups, and more particularly the Islamic State Caliphate is the kind of wishful thinking that deliberately obtuse and naive apologists for state terrorism indulge in. And the President of the United States and his executive minions are hugely indulgent to that mode of thought.


In Riyadh, where John Kerry flew after meeting with Iran's foreign minister to assure him that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's warning address to Congress was futile and could not conceivably upset their binary apple-cart of appeasement/conciliation the messages of assurance that Mr. Kerry was dispatched to provide to Saudi King Salman served little purpose but to prime another warning from yet another Middle East source concerned by Iran's plans for its own caliphate.

While the U.S. and its coalition allies attack the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham from the air, refusing to consider once again committing their militaries to ground battle, an unacknowledged partnership has taken place; the coalition attacking ISIS from the air, and Iran and its aligned Shi'ite militias have taken the initiative on the ground. Each ignoring the presence of the other, but both in effect coordinating a joint even if disjointed front against a powerful Sunni jihadist force.

For the Obama administration to wilfully insist that there is no connection and therefore no concern to be bothered about, relating to the negotiations surrounding the Islamic Republic of Iran's nuclear ambitions and its long-range aspirations to control the Middle East, bringing one country after another into its orbit, is to demonstrate the most exorbitant type of sanctimony imaginable.

President Obama is determined to live up to his Nobel Prize for Peace. Even by sacrificing an entire geographic region to his unwillingness to be regarded by history as yet another American president from whom events beyond his control led to eliciting a robust response meant to rescue the Middle East from itself and the world from the prospect of a lunatic theocracy from attaining nuclear warheads.

While Libya and Syria have fragmented into violently vicious civil wars enabling Islamist terrorists to claim greater portions of those dysfunctional areas while it becomes a tossup which among them is capable of the most gruesomely horrendous atrocities perpetrated one against the other, adjoining countries struggle to keep the Islamist jihadi hordes at bay.

And the single most powerful world intervenor that has traditionally maintained some element of order on the theatre of global affairs has surrendered its authority to the aspirational legacy of a man too timid to use that authority.

The vacuum that President Obama's lack of audacity and authority has left has demanded that alternates step in, for good or for ill, and none of the alternates that have since presented themselves: think Russia and think Iran -- have any desire to embrace good, since that simpering quality so lovingly embraced by the West is of little concern to them when balanced against their own singular and quite all-encompassing plans for their own futures.

Labels: Complicity, Conciliation, Defence, Iran, Islamism, Israel, Negotiations, Nuclear Technology, Saudi Arabia, Threats, United States

posted by Pieface @ Friday, March 06, 2015