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April 15th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
While the Iranians conceded talks on the nuclear issue, their only ally,
Syria, began observing a ceasefire, though the army shelled the city of Homs
again yesterday and one person was reported to have been killed. President
Bashar al-Assad seems to have at least diminished the bloodshed he has meted
out to his people.
Meanwhile, the most quixotic rogue state of them all, North Korea, has been
humiliated by the failure of its bid to put a satellite into space. The
rocket that was launched with such fanfare, only to fall apart in the
earth’s atmosphere, was – the US believes – a prototype ballistic missile
with the real purpose of firing nuclear warheads on to enemy capitals, not
delivering satellites into orbit.
So April seems to have been a bad month for the countries whom George W Bush
dubbed the “axis of evil”. Almost a decade ago, during his State of the
Union address in 2002, Mr Bush coined that phrase to describe Iraq, Iran and
North Korea.
He went on to topple the ruler of the first of that trio. The surviving
members of Mr Bush’s axis – if he was still in the White House, he would
doubtless include Syria in this club of infamy – still pose a critical
threat to the security of the West.
As such, their fortunes matter to all of us: even the straws in the wind are
worth watching. Of the three, Iran is by far the most important. If Tehran
were to build a nuclear arsenal, the consequence would almost certainly be a
new arms race in the Middle East, with a raft of countries scrambling to
acquire the ultimate weapon.
Last month, President Barack Obama predicted that if Iran went nuclear, “four
or five” other states in the region would follow suit, hugely multiplying
the risk of war. Instead of the two-cornered nuclear confrontation of the
Cold War, perhaps half-a-dozen or more countries would be glowering at one
another across the Middle East, each brandishing nuclear weapons, but
without the panoply of hotlines, diplomatic contacts and early-warning
systems that regulated the old super-power stand-off.
Add in the fact that this new nuclear crisis would take place in the world’s
most sensitive and troubled region and the home of most of its oil reserves
– meaning that the slightest tremor would have immediate consequences on the
oil price – and the prospect becomes more worrying still.
So any flicker of a change in Iran’s approach towards its nuclear programme
matters greatly. It might, just, mean that the world avoids this scenario in
the decades to come.
And there are faint signs that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of
Iran, could be weighing the consequences of his regime’s present course.
Sanctions on Iran have begun to bite more painfully than many thought: the
country’s all-important oil sector is falling prey to a European Union
embargo that tightens week by week and comes into full effect on July 1.
Last year, EU members bought almost 600,000 barrels of Iranian crude every
day, accounting for 24 per cent of the Islamic Republic’s oil exports. When
that disappears, Ayatollah Khamenei will lose billions of dollars of
revenues.
And he relies on the money earned by exporting black gold to cover more than
half of the national budget. If the Ayatollah does conclude that his nuclear
ambitions must yield to economic reality – particularly as Iran’s population
doubles every 25 years and more than two thirds of its 70 million people are
under the age of 30 – now might be a logical moment to make that decision.
The low politics of domestic survival could also point in that direction. Last
month, Iran held parliamentary elections that went exactly as Ayatollah
Khamenei would have wished: his allies triumphed; followers of President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did badly. The latter has become a thorn in the Supreme
Leader’s flesh, causing an intense power struggle between the two men.
But Mr Ahmadinejad is clearly coming off worse. He is a lame-duck leader,
compelled to step down when his second term ends in June 2013. The outcome
of the recent election has left him doubly weakened.
Meanwhile, the reformist challenge that emerged in spectacular fashion with
the mass street protests of 2009 has been successfully quashed.
If a leader has to feel strong at home in order to take a bold step abroad,
Ayatollah Khamenei might now be in that position. “All sorts of things could
go wrong, but the stars are in relatively favourable alignment,” said Peter
Jenkins, who negotiated with Iran as Britain’s Ambassador to the
International Atomic Energy Agency between 2001 and 2006.
The Ayatollah’s supreme responsibility is to guarantee the survival of the
Islamic Republic. If his public rhetoric is to be believed, he thinks the
biggest threat comes from the “forces of arrogance” – his term to describe
Iran’s foreign “enemies”, notably America, Britain and Israel.
But in his moments of realism, Ayatollah Khamenei might also consider that the
real danger to his regime comes from economic stagnation and the burgeoning
number of young, jobless Iranians. How long can an ossified, privileged,
ageing elite coexist with a young, growing and all too often unemployed
population?
“The Iranians are looking at the Arab Spring and asking, ‘What happens if
these sanctions bite and I have an Iranian Spring on my hands?’ ” said
Darren Ennis, a former strategic adviser to Baroness Ashton, the EU’s high
representative for foreign policy. “The Iranians have realised that
sanctions have caused more harm than they originally suggested.”
The logic is inescapable: preserving the regime means reviving the economy –
which means sanctions must go. But they will only be lifted if Iran
compromises over its nuclear ambitions. By this argument, it would be in
Ayatollah Khamenei’s own self-interest to reach a deal.
Yet logic is not the Ayatollah’s strong point. Aside from the Pope in the
Vatican, he is, after all, the world’s only religious leader of a theocratic
state. He may not be much interested in such trifles as his people’s
economic wellbeing in this world.
Preparing them for the next world is his real concern – and Allah favours the
austere, pious and dedicated. If sanctions are lifted and Iran builds
bridges with the rest of the world, Ayatollah Khamenei fears that Iranians
will offend the Almighty by becoming decadent and Westernised. And offending
Allah is the one thing that ayotallahs are paid to avoid.
On such dilemmas as this – divine will versus political survival – hangs the
future of global security. This is the supreme oddity of dealing with a
theocratic regime.
And that quirkiness shows through even in negotiations with the Iranians.
Whenever they want to privately confer, they have a tendency to declare that
prayer-time has arrived. They “play the whole religion card when they want
to duck out of the room,” said an official who observed previous talks.
In 2007, Iran’s then foreign minister attended the same Egyptian conference as
Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state at the time. Their hosts tried to
play the peacemaker by placing the two side-by-side at dinner. When Tehran’s
man spotted the ruse, he decided to skip the meal. What was his supposed
excuse? A female Ukrainian violinist – part of a string quartet to serenade
the diners – was wearing a sleeveless dress. Her bare arms were, apparently,
an affront to a modern Iranian diplomat.
Cultural barriers of this kind do not impede dealings with North Korea. These
run into the far more mundane problems of mendacity, duplicity and bad faith.
Last month, Mr Obama agreed to supply North Korea with US food aid in return
for a halt to Pyongyang’s nuclear programme, which has already delivered a
handful of weapons. America’s reward for this conciliatory gesture was this
week’s attempted rocket launch, which the US holds to be in violation of
United Nations resolutions banning North Korea from testing missiles.
If this was the first foray into foreign policy for Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s
youthful new leader, it was a disastrous start. With one decision, he
scuppered a deal with the US, missed out on food aid and made another round
of sanctions more likely.
And the upside? Well, the rocket fell to pieces, having cost a bankrupt regime
several hundred million dollars. This abject failure could not be covered up
because North Korea had invited a selection of international journalists to
witness what turned out to be its utter humiliation.
So the young Kim – dubbed the “glorious general” by his acolytes – has made
just about every mistake possible. The danger is that he will try to cover
his embarrassment by escalating tensions with his neighbours yet again. At
the top end of the scale, Kim might attack South Korea’s armed forces – or
even test another nuclear weapon.
Blessed with far more tactical finesse than his young counterpart in
Pyongyang, Mr Assad in Syria has shrewdly chosen to use a proposed ceasefire
for his own ends. Having hammered his opponents with a successful offensive
for the last two months, the military situation in Syria favours Mr Assad.
It makes complete sense for him to freeze the status quo with a ceasefire.
If the rebels try to challenge this, he will then be able to blame them for
any bloodshed.
So the pause in Syria’s ordeal amounts to nothing more than a cynical
calculation by Mr Assad. If Iran and North Korea have had a bad April, he is
probably stronger now than at any time since the year began. His acceptance
of a ceasefire amounts to a sign of strength, not weakness.
Mr Assad will also know that his fate is bound together with Iran’s. Thrust
together by their shared antipathy to the West and their devotion to Shi’ite
Islam, Iran and Syria have an iron-clad alliance. But they also eye one
another nervously: any sign of weakness in Damascus is bad news for Tehran,
and vice versa.
Mr Assad’s partial recovery in the last two months provides a rare crumb of
good news for Iran. In the end, the Islamic Republic’s leaders face the most
acute case of an agonising choice that confronts all rogue regimes. Does
burying the hatchet with the rest of the world strengthen or weaken their
grip on power? The safety of the world in the decades to come may depend on
the way that rogue regime answers that dilemma.
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