Loading ...Responses: Allow Iran the nuclear bomb
Vladimir Lenin, for all his faults, had a rather good command of language indeed he coined the phrase “useful idiot” used to describe individuals or groups that naively considered themselves to be allies of the USSR but were in fact held with contempt by the Soviet rulers, and were being used by them. This sort of relationship occurs very frequently in politics especially when dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I am referring to the article written in Issue 3 of the London Student by Rikkie Bruzas entitled “Allow Iran the nuclear bomb” the basic premise being that Bruzas believes that if Iran is allowed the bomb we can then “bend the regime’s ear to our cause”. This betrays a deep misunderstanding of the nature of the Islamic Republic and is sadly not a new tactic. In 1986 two American government officials went to Iran with a Bible, and a chocolate cake, to attempt to persuade “moderates” within the Regime to release hostages. In 1997 the Western powers yet again grew hopeful of change and normalisation of relations as the “liberal reformist” Mohammad Khatami was elected in a shamelessly undemocratic election. Decades on, we can see that their hopes were not realised, and that all the Westerners who eagerly placed their supported in the “moderates” and “reformists” were simply taken for a ride by the Iranian regime and treated as “useful idiots”.
To quote Edmund Burke, “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”. The West’s fundamental error has always been to assume that the Islamic Republic can be tamed. They forget that the so-called “moderates” in 1985 are the same people that monopolised Iran’s industries through corruption and nepotism whilst a third of the population lived under the poverty line. They forget that the “reformist” Mohammad Khatami was Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance for a decade during which he prevented all “un-Islamic” forms of media or art being published.
So, sadly, Bruzas is “doomed to repeat history” too if his wish that Iran be given the nuclear bomb is granted. The fact is that those in charge of the Islamic Republic are unelected fascists and have no desire to acquiesce to the West’s wishes or “trust in liberal democracy” as the author of last week’s articles believes. The Mullahs that run Iran sit on a vast empire of oil and gas and control all major industry in Iran. Why would they choose to let go of this power when it has brought them untold fortune and wealth? On top of this they already fund terrorists like Hezbollah, Hamas, the insurgents in Yemen and the Taliban. Do we really want to add a nuclear bomb to their arsenal?
Furthermore the article advocates that we could try to bring “Ayatollah Khamenei and the Guardian Council on [our] side”; a truly appalling idea. Whilst tens of thousands of Iranians have been tortured, raped and killed simply for wanting liberty, the most basic of human rights, it is actually being suggested that we consort and associate with people that sanction rape and murder as state policy! The article sounds an awful lot like the Allied powers in the early 1930s that did nothing to stop the spread of the Third Reich by burying their heads in the sand and hoping that Hitler would stop fascism of his own accord.
The author goes onto mention that “nobody in the leadership of Iran is the malevolent despot that some of our media like to portray”. The facts are that four million people in Iran have an opium addiction problem, earthquakes regularly raze entire towns and villages due to lack of government building regulations, inflation was recently running at 29% and all the while the Iranian leadership chooses to spend billions of pounds on a nuclear weapon programme instead of trying to improve the nation’s infrastructure and the lot of the people. The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is unelected, violent, corrupt and does not care for Iran’s populace. If these things do not make the leaders of Iran “malevolent despots” I’m not sure what does.
So as we have seen the Iranian government is not going to change or “bend their ear to our cause”. They instigate fraud in elections to cling onto power and they do not set much store by international diplomacy and treaties either, instead using such occasions as an opportunity to deny the Holocaust. At the end of the day those that suffer most are Iran’s people. The ruling despots do not need further support for their misguided policy of spending Iran’s money on building a nuclear bomb, instead the world ought to be isolating the Islamic Republic’s leaders as it did to South Africa during the darkest days of Apartheid, whilst standing shoulder to shoulder with Iran’s people in their struggle for freedom.
