President Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from Iran’s “nuclear accord” earlier this month has left other key JCPOA partners in a conundrum and as they direly hope to salvage the treaty so as to sustain their own financial, political and credibility strategies vis a vis Iran. Meanwhile, Michael Pompeo the newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of State and the former CIA Director, has outlined a 12 [strategic] points of demands from Iran, that in his hawkish words, “unless expeditiously addressed, the U.S. would follow with “some of the harshest sanctions ever imposed by an administration against any other nation, and with presumptive preemptive unilateral military strikes to follow.”
The shear fact that the Islamic Regime in Iran (IRI) forty years in the making, has for quite some time, lost the confidence of the majority of its own constituencies, due to IRI’s ever intensifying and systematic failure to address the legitimate socio-political aspirations and economic concerns of the 85 million Iranians, is inextricably self-evident by populace dissent, strikes, demonstrations through media. By the same token, it is also the fact that, had the darkening cloud of Americans’ irrational concessions while imposing wars and sanctions NOT hovered over Iran for so long, that the IRI and other despotic outposts in the region would have been far less successful in repressing their own citizenries denying them with their yearnings to independently achieve modernization, secularization, reformation, democracy, accountability, justice and peace. Simply put, the same principled ideals to which we subscribe to and enjoy in the US, and while our government in theory asserts to export them to other nations such as Iran, has in effect been trampled over by our knee jerk short-sided rhetoric and opposite actions. Instead of critical political and economic engagement and dialogue, our government has. Instead, resorted to military and sanctions provocations, trumpeted by Mr. Trump and broadcasted by the powerful media tycoons and sensational fake news; consequently, such misguided policies have inflicted excruciating burden on the American populace with heavy tolls on the economy, global credibility and human and capital losses that are unprecedented in our and world history.
External interferences have and will in essence lengthen the IRI lifeline in that they exploit such massive human and financial tolls put on the back of people of Iran as a pretext to exonerate themselves from all miseries they inflict on Iran and pin it on the Americans.
As ironic as it may seem, it is naïve not to conclude that the fundamentalist conservatives in both the US and Iran wish for a combination of harsh sanctions and military strikes by US or its cronies Israel or Saudi Arabia just to name two, against Iran. Déjà vu all over again, one cannot help but to conjure up the painful memories of the Imposed Iraqi war on Iran in 1980, then supported by the US and its western and Arab allies in the region that led to half a trillion dollar economic loss and more than a million killed for Iran alone. In prospect, historians have concluded that had the Iraq war not been waged and dragged against Iran for eight years, that the likelihood of then the newly formed IRI lasting so long, would have been far less probable.
External interferences have and will in essence lengthen the IRI lifeline in that they exploit such massive human and financial tolls put on the back of people of Iran as a pretext to exonerate themselves from all miseries they inflict on Iran and pin it on the Americans. In their own twisted minds, “the fresh blood of martyrdom will irrigate the tree of revolution, in much the e same manner as their keeping the war furnace hot so they remain power.” Hence, as antagonistically divergent as the interests of the two nations of Iran and the US may have been portrayed, they do have far more common cultural, economic and strategic interests that those in power could ever dare admitting so to avoid losing their power grips. It is as if for both the IRI and the US regimes, destabilization, bloodshed, and destructions are far more lucrative for the their greedy corporate lackeys, linchpins and military industrial cronies than making the commitment to a long haul critical engagement which will inevitably lead to progressive transformations benefiting the silent super majority and tax paying bystanders on both countries.
Notwithstanding, Iran is an ancient nation with sporadic 100,000 human activities, 10,000 years of agricultural human settlements, and with 2,500 years of continuous government system. In fact, as its zenith, the Persian Achaemenes and the Sassanid Empires stretched across a vast tri-continental region, currently comprised of 45 countries, from which 45% (3.5 billion) of human gene pool was in part derived from. The Iranians’ yearning for a sovereign, secure, secular, democratic, modern, just and peaceful Iran-as enshrined in their rich literature of poetry, prose and ethos, unrivaled worldwide since antiquity- has only intensified. It is hence, conceivable that the Americans and their allies could still play a far more constructive and peaceful role toward such the organic fulfillment of such yearning before it is too little, too late. This latter ideal has for many decades remained the central longing of Iranians and will inevitably come to fruitions with or without adversarial culprits from within and from without the region.
