Wednesday 16 November 2011

ANACHRONISTIC US POLICY TOWARD IRAN

It appears that Iran is not cooperating with US demands to be further isolated and punished for pursuing a nuclear energy program, which has the potential of becoming a nuclear weapons program. Is Russia cooperating, and if not, why not? Is it not the case that without Russia, as US press reports indicate (assuming such reports are not plants by the US government), Iran could not possibly have made progress in the nuclear energy area? So why is the IAEA and US not going after Russia as the source of Iran's nuclear energy and/or weapons program?

If Iran is not cooperating, is it not the case that it knows both Russia and China are behind it, trying to protect their own broader geopolitical interests, especially after the US pulls out of Iraq and Afghanistan?  Iraq's Chief of Staff General Babaker Zebari favors cordial relations at many levels with Iran. Once the US pulls out of Afghanistan Iran will play a comparable role in that war-torn nation as well. So what has the US achieved, ask many who actually believe that the US went into the two Islamic nations in order to 'liberate' and 'democratize'? How does the US explain a decade of treasure and lives lost, all so that Iran can become more powerful?

The reality is that the US is dancing a delicate dance around Russia and China, and for more than a decade it has been unable to convince either of them on how to proceed so that their interests are not harmed. In this case, the Metternichian approach by the US has failed, no doubt to the surprise of Kissinger and others who think that such an approach works.

Two centuries after Austrian Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich tried to manage the European/Eurasian balance of power and sociopolitical order, is it not time to abandon that futile approach? Is it not time to re-examine the inane and dangerous policy of 'war on terrorism' that is at the source of all this? Is it not time to see how the world order and power structures have changed so greatly just in the last decade alone and to steer toward a course that reflects those changes, instead of living in the past?

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