TFF Associates & Themes Blog

By Jan Oberg

Internal elite power games in Washington are now putting Middle Eastern and global stability and peace at stake.

Here is the latest attempt at killing a deal with Iran that, to the sensitive reader with a minimum of knowledge of foreign policy and of the Iranian civilization, is little but one long argument for warfare on Iran in nobody’s interest – certainly also not in the interest of the citizens of Israel. 

Is it just because it is summer time that intellectuals, media commentators and diplomats as well as friends and allies of the US conveniently keep generally silent at such irresponsible statements – and the many before it?

Don’t they understand that the nuclear issue as such – not proliferation but possession – is humanity’s most important and that Iran has been the object of revengeful harrassment since 1953 and punished for years for not having nuclear weapons?

Where do Western basically state-financed intellectuals – if they are that and not merely a priesthood of militarism and empire – stand when it comes to these authors’ threatening war on Iran? Do they recognize it is advocacy for violating international law?

Do they believe that any sovereign state would freely accept such a diktat, such an unfair deal as are outlined by the people signing this letter?

Do they believe that most of the world, e.g. the BRICS countries, share the same paranoid image of Iran as theirs?

Do they not see the character of the Theatre of The Absurd in this whole affair, the wrongheaded approach to the Iranian civilisation from Day One? Have they conveniently forgotten the lies on which the war on Iraq was based and the roughly one million Iraqis who died predominantly as a consequence of 13 years of the ‘soft’ mass killing instrument called sanctions?

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The world is not the backyard of the United States. But US political extremists and maximalists with what resembles a Herrenvolk’s mentality continue to treat Iran, the nuclear issue and the safety of the rest of the world with utter contempt. The concept of common good of the world seems unknown to them.

This much must be clear to anyone with an intellectual capacity reading this attempt at killing a deal with Iran – less than a week before it should be concluded. And the world should fully support President Obama’s and Secretary of State Kerry’s search for a peaceful solution in this matter. 

Without a deal with Iran – a negotiated deal where not only Iran but all parties give and take something – the risk becomes very high that yet another devastating war will break out.

A small group of extremist pro-Israeli Iran-haters in the United States have no right to expose the Middle East, Europe and the world to such a risk in the name of an outdated militarist national security thinking.

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Contrary to media perspectives, this is not a US-Iran issue, it is a world issue.

So it is time for the other negotiating 4 Permanent Members of the UN Security Council + Germany to speak up now.

If they can’t stop Washington’s most destructive impulses, they can at least support Iran, step-by-step ignore the sanctions and broaden their co-operation with Iran. 

The Iran nuclear issue can only be solved through mutual respect, dialogue and fairness and a principled policy that precludes the idea of “one set of rules for you and one for us”.

And of course it must be seen within the framework of a larger policy for the Middle East that, for the first time in more than a century, substitute divide-et-impera approaches, dirty weapon deals and geo-political double standards with principles of fairness, dialogue, reconciliation and systematic, intelligent conflict-resolution based on civil society needs and cultural sensitivuty as well as on Article One of the UN Charter – that peace shall be created by peaceful means.