SHAFAQNA-
Islamic Students Associations in Britain held a discussion panel on the “Future of Iran’s Nuclear Deal” at Kanoon Towhid in London which is the centre of their London Branch. Mohammad Hossein Amirhosseini, the President of the Islamic Students Associations in Britain chaired the discussion, and introduced the Union of Islamic Students Associations in Europe as its hosts. The event was broadcast live to other branches in the UK and Europe with an audience of thousands. He outlined that “after years of complicated and overwhelming negotiations, finally, Iran and the 5 + 1 group, which is now “4 + 1″, reached a comprehensive international agreement, but after three years, with the withdrawal of the United States from this international agreement, a new phase has come into play.”
Some analysts believed that Iran would immediately withdraw from the deal, but it did not, and Iran decided to consider a short deadline for negotiating with Europe in order to examine the conditions for continued action if Iran’s interests were satisfied by the European side of the agreement, and to subsequently decide on whether to stay in the agreement or exit from it. It was in this regard that the discussion panel was set up – to analyse the future of the Iran’s nuclear deal.
The first speaker, Syed Mohsin Abbas, a journalist, broadcaster and Middle East Analyst, who appears on various international media channels, mentioned that “it is not simply a question of whether Iran should have the nuclear weapon or not – understanding the broader history and geopolitical context is vital on an issue as grave and complex as this.
In fact the Nuclear problem between the US and Iran is totally rooted in their history and in fact since the 20th century. It is particularly linked to US oil resource acquisition agendas, their military expansionism, the US blind support of Israeli geopolitical ambitions and also the genuine major ideological differences with Iran that existed ever since the time of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who the CIA toppled because he wanted to nationalize the hugely lucrative Iranian oil industry.The Americans of course replaced him with the Shah of Iran who then, as their puppet, dutifully complied with the policies of his US masters.
The deterioration of Irano-US relations was resumed during the Islamic revolution of 1978 and it has never really recovered after the US Embassy hostage crisis. It was killed by a sequence of deadly events – the ill fated US helicopter mission to.rescue its hostages from Tehran, the Iranian Passenger Airbus shot down by the US Navy, and most fatally finished off by the war imposed by the West’s Iraqi proxy, Saddam Hussain, resulting in over a million deaths.”
Syed Mohsin added that “more recently the various ongoing US and Western psyops efforts to sponsor the overthrow of the current political order, and their use of Wahhabist ideologies to fuel the rise of Takfirists such as ISIS in Syria and Iraq are yet more manifestations of the USA’s desperation to encircle and destroy Iran’s defiant government led by Grand Ayatollah Khamenei .
So the USA’s U-turn on the nuclear deal is hardly a surprise for Iran’s establishment.In light of all this history Iran can now hardly be blamed for its mistrust of a US establishment which has reneged on a binding international agreement, and that too, inspite of the advice of its own key European allies to honour it.” Iran has Mohsin said “complied with aĺl the JCPOA and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s stipulations; scaling down its operations hugely in the process, but the Zionist lobby cannot be satiated; it in fact wants the total capitulation of Iranian military capacity not just denuclearization. All this while they remain unquestioned by the US government about their reported four hundred nuclear warheads, all but uninspected by any International agency. They do not even subscribe to the Nuclear non proliferation treaty either, and have also tactically initiated several regional wars and continue to promote the Balkanization of the Middle East.
No such beligerent travesties of this magnitude have been commited by Iran, whose Supreme Leader has even stated his own principled Islamic jurisprudential position against the use of nuclear weapons, and yet the Nuclear investigation focus is still on Iran rather than Israel. A strange hypocricy indeed, particularly on the part of the US government.”
The real problem is that Iranian political ideology is challenging America’s hegemony in the Middle East and Welayat Faqih is its unique new system of moral politics. You cannot see anything approaching such an effective interpretation of Islamic governance in any other Muslim country, most of whom prefer dictatorships, monarchies or badly operated secular ‘copy paste’ versions of Western democracies. The danger for the Structural elite is, of course, that if Iran stands up on his own feet, it will show other oppressed countries that it is possible to successfully resist the US oppression and be an independent nation inspite of all the US economic sanctions, military intimidation.”
Mr Abbas argued that “the nuclear issue cannot be understood outside of the reality of global politics, nor the historical context of Western imperialist treachery and exploitation of the region. Iranian people understand this but some will argue “roti kapdah makan” (bread,clothes,shelter) are pressing realities too.” Mohsin said “Iran ignites the fears of the Corporate Structural elite with its Islamic independence. Their Western governmental levers of power fear that the Islamic world and the oppressed world might wake up to claim independence too ultimately developing their own Islamically inspired institutions and systems.
The second speaker, Dr. Majid Tafreshi,who is a historian, researcher writer and analyst on contemporary developments in Iran and the relationship between Iran and UK, said the nuclear power ambition started from Mohammad Reza Shah’s time. Documents show that there were always some people in Iran who remained interested in developing nuclear power and even nuclear weapons capability. He added that “after the Islamic Revolution, some people in Iran said we do not want nuclear activities but following the Iran /Iraq war, where chemical weapons supplied by the West were used against Iranian soldiers, they tried to restart the process of having nuclear power. Obviously there are still some people who think Iran needs to have a nuclear weapon or some certainly believe that Iran should have the technology to be able to make the bomb as a last ditch deterrent.”
He said that “in 2013, when Iran’s President Rouhani came to power, the United States announced that they would not allow Iran to have any sort of nuclear facility. The reality is that the US economic sanctions on Iran were not just started after the Islamic Revolution, but rather from the few days before the revolution when America noticed the last of the non revolutionary Prime ministers could not stop the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini. One of those pre Islamic Revolution sanctions was for example the cancellation of the contracts for supply of the Chieften tanks to Iran by the UK. Over a hundred billion dollars of Iranian funds were also frozen by the US around this period.”
According to Dr Majed “at the time of the recent Nuclear deal there were three basic idealogies about it; the first group believed that any deal with the West should be forbidden.The second group were pragmatists who believed it possible to make a deal as long as Iran’s needs were satisfied. The third group that was not happy with concluding a nuclear deal was allegedly those who were making money out of the sanctions.These three camps with their ideas were competing inside and outside of the country to influence or dictate Iran’s nuclear strategy.” They stilll may well be.
The panelists both agreed that the main external anger towards Iran’s nuclear programme comes from the Israelis, global Zionists and Saudi Arabia, who all feared that for the first time in the last two hundred years, Iran sat face to face in front of the world super powers at the top table negotiating in parity with them.The outcome of the deal was the secondary issue for them – Iran’s growing importance was their primary problem.
Dr Tafreshi said however that the first problem for Iran is still “that Iran remains relatively weak in lobbying effectively for its interests in the fields of foreign policy, commercial policy and public diplomacy policy inspite of the Russian and to a lesser extent Chinese support. The second problem is that Iran is weak in its media projection too and after 2009 when Press TV and AL-Alam lost their international credibility things have regressed further ” ensuring much of the world does not know Iranian hearts and mind.
So even though the Europeans and the US seem to be at loggerheads over the Iranian nuclear deal ultimately the transnational corporations will not take the risk of doing business with Iran given the inevitable negative impact of a US sanctions on their businesses elsewhere in the world. Syed Mohsin said ” It will take some very dextrous Iranian diplomacy to get things back on track as Iran demands credible guarantees from the Europeans to provide an economic firewall against US sanctions which would protect the Iranian Central Bank.
Iran will also dig its heels in on the non negotiable issues around its ballistic missile program, and its regional foreign policy especially in Syria where a very real threat of a direct confrontation with Israel has emerged. All this may ultimately mean Iran and the US have to sit together one on one to discuss how to avoid an escalation of a much greater war in a region already aflame.”
Economic expedience and moral principles are once again the choice facing Iran. The US of course has no such moral dillema – for Trumps’s administration economics overides morality everytime and the Israeli lobby on Capitol Hill will ensure Trump remains the Zionist entities sugar daddy.