National Post (National Edition)
A bloody mistake
IF THE IRAN PACT WAS SUCH A WIN FOR PEACE, WHY IS THE MIDEAST STILL IN CHAOS?
As President Donald Trump made good on his threat to pull the United States out of the 2013 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s nuclear weapons program on Tuesday, life in Iran trundled on in its usual, dreary way. The price of bread, eggs and meat did not stop rising. As the sun rose, you needed 60,000 rials to buy a single American dollar on the black market. At sunset, the price was the same.
In January, 2016, more than two years into the deal that former president Barack Obama had sought to enshrine as his enduring foreign policy legacy, $100 billion in Iranian assets were unfrozen in sanctions relief in return for the Khomeinist regime’s compliance with the terms of the deal. The Iranian people have seen none of the benefits. The Khomeinist regime has not shifted its boot from the necks of the Iranian people.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has engorged itself with infusions of cash and bolstered its arsenals with new acquisitions of deadly weaponry. The tyranny in Damascus is now a Khomeinist satrapy, underwritten by the Kremlin.
Already in control of most of the Iranian economy, the IRGC and related state entities persist in their plunder at home. A workers’ uprising that began in January continues to shudder and quake across the countryside. Wildcat strikes are a routine occurrence. The morality police are still pulling unveiled women off the streets of Tehran and shuttling them off to prison.
All the hot-take, clickbait eggheadery accompanying Trump’s speech in Washington on Tuesday followed exactly the course you’d expect. If you were wistful about the glamorous days of the Obama administration, Trump’s decision to pull out of the deal was an outrage against decency and the international order. It was a reckless, isolationist affront to the deal’s co-signers: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China. If you didn’t fancy Obama in the slightest, Trump’s move was a bold promise kept, a righteous display of American independence and will.
In the make-believe world occupied by the United Nations in its precincts in New York, UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres performed the precise rituals of concern that the UN Security Council expects of him on such occasions. Guterres lamented Washington’s abandonment of a “major achievement in nuclear non-proliferation and diplomacy,” claiming the accord has “contributed to regional and international peace and security.”
It has done no such thing. It may be true that the covenant has its merits in allowing UN inspectors to periodically assess whether the Khomeinist regime is in compliance with its commitment to forego the development of a nuclear-bomb capacity that the regime always denied it was pursuing in the first place, lying through its teeth all along.
But “regional and international peace and security” is an odd way to describe a half-million dead Syrians, six million Syrian refugees, a dangerously destabilized European Union, a bloody upheaval in Yemen, the corpse-strewn subversion of Iraq’s embryonic democracy and a Lebanon that is now only a hair’s breadth away from becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Hezbollah.
But this is the price Obama was willing to make innocent people pay for his vanity project. For the time being, it falls to the Europeans to keep it up and running. Unless and until the U.S treasury department’s reconstruction of its Iran sanctions forces European corporations to choose America or Iran — the process is expected to take between three and six months — the EU should be expected to carry on with what has been a delightfully profitable accommodation with the mullahs.
European trade with Iran soared from $9.2 billion in 2015 to $25 billion last year, and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani is giving the impression that he expects the lucrative collaborations to continue. “Our people should not be worried at all,” he said in a televised address following Trump’s announcement. In the parody shop of the Iranian parliament, some of the more enthusiastic legislators burned a paper American flag, chanting Marg Bar Amreeka — Death to America.
Boris Johnson, the United Kingdom’s colourfully oafish foreign affairs secretary, is putting on a brave face, too, and to his credit he can’t be accused of overselling the nuclear agreement’s virtues: “Of all the options we have for ensuring that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon, this pact offers the fewest disadvantages.” Fair enough. But then there was this: “Do not forget how this agreement has helped to avoid a possible catastrophe.”
Back in the real world, Obama’s arrangements invited, facilitated and advanced the greatest refugee catastrophe since the Second World War and the bloodiest upheavals in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Say what you like about the thuggish, know-nothing figure of Donald Trump and the uncharted darkness of the world he is dragging us all into. Obama made himself hostage to his own legacy ambitions, and twilight had already fallen over the American epoch long before Trump showed up.
Quite a few things did not change at all on Tuesday.
In the hours before Trump’s announcement, anticipating a revenge attack for its April 9 airstrike that targeted an Iranian Revolutionary Guards facility at a Syrian compound, Israeli defence officials ordered the opening of bomb shelters on the Golan Heights. There had been suspicious movement of Hezbollah units near the border. Shortly afterwards, Israeli missiles were reported heading east, in the skies above Syria’s Quneitra province. Moments later, an Iranian weapons depot southeast of Damascus was hit.
In the hours after Trump’s announcement, Germany’s Angela Merkel joined British Prime Minister Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron in releasing a statement pledging to carry on with the 2013 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Iran had complied with its terms. “The world is a safer place as a result.”
No, it isn’t. Not if you’re Israeli, Syrian, Lebanese or Iraqi. As for the rest of us, the world is a rudderless, directionless place as a result.