IRAN – FINAL COUNTDOWN

On 12^thMay, President Trump will decide whether or not to tear up the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He has described it as ‘insane’ and ‘the worst deal in history’. President Macron and Chancellor Merkel both flew to Washington last month to try to persuade the US president to stick to the deal. Theresa May and the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security – Federica Mogherini – have now added their voices to the strong chorus calling for Trump to keep the deal. 

Meanwhile Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a special televised news conference on Monday 30^thApril, revealed that Mossad agents had seized more than half a ton of files that proved Iran lied about developing a nuclear weapons programme. Netanyahu concluded that the whole nuclear deal, hailed by Obama as the highpoint of his presidency, was based on Iranian lies and deception. His revelations were immediately denounced by Iran as ‘childish propaganda’. But the White House stated that the Israelis had provided “new and compelling details” about Tehran’s efforts to develop “missile-deliverable nuclear weapons.”  

On a visit to Israel on Sunday 29th April, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US would cancel the nuclear deal unless steps are taken to fix it. No doubt he was referring to serious flaws in the deal such as the prohibition on international inspectors gaining access to military sites inside Iran. It is almost certain that all of the clandestine nuclear work being undertaken in Iran will be within such military sites, controlled by the blacklisted Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).  Calling the Iranian regime the world’s leading sponsor of terror, Pompeo said the US would stand with Israel against Iran’s dangerous escalation of threats and aggressive meddling in the region.

In a misguided effort to appease the theocratic fascist regime in Iran, the EU has long pursued a policy they refer to as ‘constructive dialogue’. This has included a reluctance to mention human rights to a regime that has now achieved the number one slot as the main proponent of the death penalty per capita in the world. Over 90% of all executions in the Middle East are carried out, often in public, inside Iran. The venally corrupt mullahs have also reduced women to the role of second-class citizens. Iranian women are regularly attacked on the streets by thugs from the state’s religious police for ‘mal-veiling.’ Torture, floggings, amputations, eye gouging and multiple hangings are the order of the day under the ayatollah’s medieval system of oppression. Despite this barbaric tyranny, Federica Mogherini has repeatedly visited Tehran, dutifully donning the veil and posing for selfies with Iranian politicians, handing a propaganda coup to the mullahs.

It is perhaps not surprising that millions of Iranians took to the streets in a mass uprising that spread to 142 cities earlier this year and continues to this day, despite a brutal crackdown by the mullahs, with many deaths and over 8,000 arrests. The impoverished citizens are fed up seeing their nation’s wealth squandered on foreign meddling in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, while they are left to starve at home. Obama’s flawed nuclear deal released over $150 billion in assets frozen by strict sanctions, which the mullahs have used to export terrorism and to bolster Bashar al-Assad’s murderous civil war and other vicious conflicts in the Middle East.

The theocratic regime has also used money released under the deal to redouble its secret development of atomic weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems. For a country whose main foreign policy objective is the destruction of Israel, it is hardly surprising that Netanyahu is urging Trump to tear up the agreement and hold Iran to account. Nor should it come as a surprise when the US does so. Churchill said: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” The West has cravenly fed the Iranian crocodile for far too long, standing aside as it devours its neighbours across the Middle East. The time has come to end appeasement and to treat Iran as the international pariah it has become. The countdown to 12^thMay has begun.