This West is not enough for regime change in Tehran
To understand where the mullocracy is headed, let’s follow in the footsteps of Ali Bagheri, Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator in Vienna. While Western leaderships practice what they do best, talkative solidarity with those who risk their lives in the name of freedom, Ali Bagheri does things. Bagheri is a “hard liner”, as they say in jargon, he comes from the Iranian fundamentalist chain of the former president Ahmadinejad.
Related to the Supreme Guide of Islamic priests, Khamenei, Bagheri works expeditiously to give the regime a multipolar future. Where multipolarity is the definition preferred by rogue states to mock the West. Iran continues to do business by circumventing Western sanctions, threatens democracies with impunity, represses dissent at home by killing young girls and marching with its troops against the Kurds.
Kurdish was the young Mahsa Amini who died from the beatings taken having worn a man’s veil. Kurdish is Ghafouri, the ex of the national team arrested in front of his son. Because – unlike his teammates who sing the national anthem after the victory against Wales – he is one of the 14,000 arrested who do not give up.
Tehran looks to Russia and India
Again: the Security Council of Nations joins with a delay of two and a half months and authorizes the commission of inquiry into the violence in Iran. Bagheri announces a patriotic investigation into the fifty security agents who may die in the clashes since the revolt broke out.
Interviewed by the Indian channel Wion on the revolt and Tehran’s relations with the West, the diplomat adds that protests are “natural in democratic countries”, as natural as the 500 killed killed since September. Bagheri’s statements to Wion are not accidental. During his visit to New Delhi, the Iranian diplomat criticized the US for jeopardizing global energy security with the sanctions imposed on Iran, Russia and Venezuela.
Bagheri explained to his Indian counterpart what the advantages of import-export, energy in exchange for raw materials, between Tehran and Delhi will be. Bagheri refers to the development projects of Port of Chabaharliaison between Iran and India. The port is located in Sistan-Baluchistan with a Sunni majority, close to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the Revolutionary Guards fire on rioters who demonstrate by chanting slogans such as “Kurds and Baluchi are brothers”.
The encounter with the Indians takes place almost a year after Ali Bagheri’s trip to Moscow. Russia is the other beacon of democracy of the mullahs together with India and any other non-aligned power that can legitimize the anti-Semitism and Westernism of Iranian clerics. Thus the circle closes and we return to our latitudes, given that Iran is a threat that concerns Europe.
Tehran’s drones to Putin
The Iranian regime has admitted to supplying the Russians with kamikaze drones used to indiscriminately bomb Ukraine. Not that Iran’s supplies of kamikaze drones were new. Tehran had already given them to the Houthi ‘rebels’ in Yemen to attack Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates, targeting its opponents’ oil interests in the Gulf.
But it certainly makes a little impression to see them supplied, complete with on-site assistance offered by the Revolutionary Guards in Ukraine. A stone’s throw from our house. So much so that President Zelensky has made it clear that Iran’s involvement is prolonging Putin’s war. Zelensky also urged the self-styled international community to counter the Russo-Iranian alliance, to prevent further strain on Ukrainian air defense systems. But evidently the problem in Washington and Brussels is the missiles that have fallen ‘by mistake’ in Poland.
The Iranian regime regards NATO as a significant threat to its existence. During a phone call with Russian President Putin, Iranian President Raisi said that “the expansion of NATO towards the east creates tensions and is a serious threat to the stability and security of independent states in various areas”.
Well, all this diplomatic protagonism is legitimized by the fact that Biden’s America and Europe have been duped for almost ten years in the negotiations on the JCPOA, better known as the “Iran deal”. The nuclear framework agreement inaugurated at the time by President Obama in the illusion that rogue states such as Iran, Russia or North Korea could re-enter the international community through the back door of history.
The illusion of dialogue with Iran
While instead they were and remain what we know as the Axis of Evil. After the cowardly withdrawal from Afghanistan and the weapons given to Zelensky in order to make him fight by proxy in the Ukraine by blocking the so-called, the West lights the candles for Mahsa Amini. He fills bookshops with comics about Kurdish or Iranian persecution, but then he hangs out with Ali Bagheri, the JCPOA’s chief negotiator on Tehran’s behalf in Vienna.
The objective of the Western chancelleries continues to be to keep the Iranian regime quiet despite knowing that one kills women and children. Two, it develops its nuclear program to acquire atomic weapons and threaten Israel. Three, he sells kamikaze drones to Russians cornered by the valiant Ukrainian army. Exactly what can be defined as a cooperative attitude, in short.
Europeans welcome the release of Western women activists taken prisoner in Iran. But he should realize that the Russo-Iranian alliance, and the way people like Bagheri carry on the nuclear negotiations, are the result of a malapolitics that has lasted for years. Western softness is being exploited by the enemies of the West to stay in power and threaten the liberal international order.
Many Iranians, from the demonstrators in the streets of Tehran, to analysts of international affairs, to the Iranian diaspora, know what the complicities of the West with the regime are. Of course, the protesting Iranians have not yet openly asked the West to intervene directly to free them from religious oppression. But we all know that the West could do something better than lip service to the rebels for a democratic government.
The difficulty of the West
However, putting on a woolen T-shirt to support Zelensky in Europe is already a problem. Let alone venturing into wars of liberation in the Middle East. Who would explain it to the public blackmailed by the expensive bill? We need conscious elites to fight in the name of democracy. And in the West these leaders are now in short supply.
After all, it is not the first time that the leadership of our house has been indignant at the repression in Iran (1500 dead in 2019). To then continue to roll out red carpets in Vienna when hawks like Bagheri arrive. Iranians remember well that in 2019, while they were dying, Europe relaunched trade with Iran and the JCPOA talks, reducing the meaning of those protests.
The West, writes the National Interest, must remain aware of the enormous challenges posed by regimes such as the Iranian one to democracies. The mullahs are a security risk to NATO, the Middle East and their own people. Brussels, London, Washington, Ottawa should stop legitimizing the regime, as they have done for years with the war criminal Putin.
Give up the sham nuclear deals and support the revolution of the Iranian people. Iranians protesting in the streets and Ukrainians fighting on the front lines on the Eastern Front are defending Western freedom and democracy. One wonders if Western leaderships are still interested in promoting this democracy, or if it all boils down to a few posts on social media with Mahsa Amini’s photo attached.
Meanwhile Ali Bagheri delights on Twitter because Iran has scored. And the international community returns happy and satisfied to the sports bar.