Ever since it declared war upon the west in 1978, the Iranian regime has played the west for the suckers they are.
First, even though Iran repeatedly attacked it through terrorist atrocities against civilians or on the battlefield in Iraq, this supine western world turned the other cheek. Rather than respond appropriately to such acts, it pretended the ongoing Iranian war against the west, which was claiming the lives of US and British soldiers as well as hundreds of civilians, wasn’t happening at all.
Next, Iran was handed the supreme gift of President Obama who, by his vapid approach to a regime intent upon manufacturing a nuclear arsenal with which to achieve its murderous and genocidal ends, gave it the vital time it needed to spin its centrifuges as well as advance towards strategic domination of the Middle East.
Next, it finally got rid of its crude demagogue President Ahmadinejad, who had embarrassed the regime by revealing all too clearly its deep hatred towards the Jews and its psychopathic goal of wiping out Israel, and replaced him by the serpentine President Rohani, whose self-declared skill at playing the west for suckers was immediately demonstrated when western politicians purred with pleasure at his ‘moderation’.
This, of course, was the same ‘moderate’ Rohani who had helped Ayatollah Khomeini found the Iranian revolutionary terrorist regime in the first place; has expressed anti-Jewish views and lauded ‘the beautiful chant of “Death to America”’; defended Hezbollah as a ‘legitimate political group’ and called Israel a ‘terrorist nation’; and served as Chairman of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council from 1989 until 2005, during which time the Council is reported to have helped mastermind the 1994 bombing of the Jewish cultural centre in Buenos Aires and the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (although it is said Rohani was not personally involved in planning such attacks).
And then another great gift fell into the lap of the Iranian regime when President Obama, through his Syria debacle, effectively outsourced the role of policing the free world to its enemy – and Iran’s protector and arms supplier – President Putin, who instantly became the pivotal player in the Middle East.
Immediately after that, President Obama revealed that he had exchanged letters with President Rohani; his administration let it be known that Obama’s terrific success in achieving ‘peace in our time’ in Syria in getting its chemical weapons taken out of use would now enable him to achieve the same with Iran’s nuclear programme.
Since the most likely outcome of the Russia-US-Syria deal, however, is that Syria’s chemical weapons will remain very much in use while the west pretends that they have been neutralised, we can expect President Obama to achieve precisely the same thing with Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.
Sure enough, if this account in Spiegel is accurate, President Rohani is preparing to reel in the west on the end of his line in much the same way that he did when he was Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator between 2003 and 2005.
That was when Rohani duped the US into believing Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme, enabling it to resume as soon as the immediate diplomatic threat had passed. He has repeatedly boasted that his greatest achievement was advancing that nuclear programme while averting both force and sanctions. And when he was elected President, he declared that his aim was once again to protect the nuclear programme while gradually removing sanctions.
So now it’s groundhog day all over again. Spiegel reports from ‘intelligence sources’ that Rohani is planning to offer to decommission Iran’s Fordow enrichment plant and allow international inspectors to monitor the removal of the centrifuges, in return for lifting the ban on Iranian oil exports and allowing the country's central bank to do international business again.
But of course, just as in Syria, the likelihood that Fordow really would be decommissioned and dismantled is vanishingly small – not to mention the existence of Iran’s other nuclear plants at Natanz and Isfahan and who knows what other secret locations. And if sanctions are lifted, the pressure on Iran will ease – at the very moment when the pressure needs finally to be stepped up to an irresistible level if Iran is not to be allowed to destroy the security of the world for ever.
Are western politicians really mug enough to fall for this?
Merely to pose the question is to answer it. Alas.
