Smoke and Mirrors…
“Even if a preliminary agreement is reached, it will not alter Iran’s perception of America.” In just a few words, the Iranian news agency Tasnim – which reflects the positions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – indirectly pointed to the root cause of the existential crisis that has destabilized countries across the Levant and threatened several Gulf states for decades. The remark underscores a profound underlying problem: the divine ideological dimension that dictates the conduct of the mullahs’ regime, a dimension that some Western leaders consistently ignore – or at times fail to fully grasp.
In practical terms, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman highlighted one manifestation of that deeper issue earlier this week: a strategy built on stalling, evasiveness and buying time in order to allow the Islamic Republic to acquire the military, security, political, institutional, economic and financial tools needed to prepare for its confrontation with Western powers.
In recent weeks, more than one senior figure within Tehran’s ruling establishment has stressed that the regime has spent over 15 years preparing for such a war against the United States and Israel. Against that backdrop, the position voiced by the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman becomes easier to understand. Speaking bluntly on Monday, May 25, he declared: “We are negotiating to put an end to the war, and we are not currently discussing nuclear issues (...); Iran reserves the right to choose the timing of its response to ‘the enemy.’” Nothing could be clearer.
This particularly explicit clarification brings us back to what President Donald Trump had underlined just days earlier in stark terms: “For 47 years (since Khomeini’s seizure of power in 1979), the Iranian regime has been leading us on, making us wait, killing our men (...), and brutally repressing popular uprisings (...).” This is not, in any sense, an imputation of intent. The nuclear file and uranium enrichment have been raised by the international community – not only by the United States – since the early 2000s. On July 31, 2006, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1696, “demanding the immediate suspension of uranium enrichment,” with Russia and China allowing the measure to pass without resorting to a veto.
The Iranian authorities, however, did not comply with the UN demand. As a result, on December 23, 2006, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1737, imposing the first round of sanctions on the Islamic Republic. In vain… This was followed, again without vetoes from Russia or China, by three additional resolutions tightening the pressure: Resolution 1747 on March 24, 2007; Resolution 1803 on March 3, 2008; and Resolution 1929 on June 9, 2010. Nearly two decades later, the situation remains fundamentally unchanged. Today, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman argues that “talks” on the same nuclear issue – discussed since 2006 and even earlier – should now be postponed, with priority instead given to ending hostilities.
This strategy of evasion should come as no surprise, especially since it has consistently been accompanied, over the years, by a permanent belligerent posture toward several Arab and Western countries, particularly the United States, as illustrated by the many terrorist operations allegedly commissioned by this regime, starting with the seizure and occupation of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage crisis in 1979. A long series of hostile acts followed from the early 1980s: the truck bomb attack that destroyed the U.S. embassy building in Ain Mreissé in April 1983; the twin deadly bombings of October 1983 in Beirut against the headquarters of the U.S. Marines and the barracks of French paratroopers of the Multinational Force; the attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in July 1994; the establishment of subversive cells in Cyprus, Bulgaria, Germany, the United Kingdom, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Syria… These are only a few examples, to which must of course be added the assassination of Rafic Hariri, the political assassinations during the Cedar Revolution, the wars imposed on Lebanon, and, above all, the brutal repression of protest movements led by the Iranian people.
Such conduct, extending over time and indifferent to both space and chronology, follows a very specific logic: that of a divinely inspired ideology, a messianic mission which the Revolutionary Guards believe they embody.
It is this fundamentally irrational messianic dimension that is regrettably overlooked by some leaders, and which means that any attempt to resolve the current crisis through a purely Cartesian approach, a falsely “diplomatic” one, one that takes into account only short-term economic interests or narrow national reflexes, will merely postpone the problem and sow the seeds of a new war, a new existential crisis, even more serious than the previous ones.
Negotiating a “solution” with a faction whose “divine” ideological behavior is rooted in irrationality, whose ongoing actions are in no way constrained by moral, ethical or humanitarian considerations, amounts to a vast deception, a fundamentally misleading approach. In such a context, it becomes imperative to strike at the source of the evil, to tear out its deep roots. Any other outcome to the crisis would amount to nothing more than dangerous smoke and mirrors…