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Deja Moo
Location: Olympic Peninsula, WA
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Within the same link given above, is this article:
Quote:
Iran Thumbs Its Nose at the World
By Serge Truffaut
Le Devoir
Wednesday 11 January 2006
Iran has broken the seals at its nuclear research centers. The desired objective? To provoke, or rather, to force, the international community to live with the issue. The Teheran government having crossed the point of no return, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) should refer the case to the Security Council.
If the legal framework that covers nuclear matters is respected by the relevant authorities, they will have no choice but to submit the Iranian case to the Security Council to impose economic sanctions. But there, as the sum of divergent political interests far outstrips the related legal conclusions, it is rather unlikely that that will happen. Let's start from the beginning.
Among the five permanent members of the Security Council, three would normally be inclined to apply sanctions that, at first, would have a purely economic character. You will have guessed: they are France, Great Britain, and the United States. In the case of the first two, you will remember that along with Germany, they formed a troika charged the last two years with negotiating Iran's abandonment of its military nuclear ambitions in exchange for commercial opportunities and a certain support in international politics. Given the results, it's time for the players involved to agree that the work accomplished has proven to be a failure and to use the recourse available to them, i.e., the UN.
Within that institution, Great Britain, France, and the United States will face a significant obstacle: the vetoes that China and especially Russia will brandish, the first because Iran is gorging it with oil, the second because Iran is a very important commercial partner. Russia supplies it with nuclear assistance, to the point of building a power plant, and has, moreover, endowed Iran with long-range missiles. As recently as December, Moscow agreed to sell almost thirty of these, capable of covering a distance that worries Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. Moscow's leniency with regard to Teheran has one and only one explanation. For the masters of the Kremlin, Iran, as part of its sphere of influence, can be an ally in the geopolitical games that agitate the region.
In that regard, certain facts must be emphasized. On account of the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the American Army has based itself not only in those countries, but also in certain republics of central Asia once directed by Moscow. Since this American intrusion in a region long dominated by the Russians, the latter are more than a little irritated.
Hence, to return to the subject that occupies us today, the proposition President Putin formulated last year consisted of disconnecting the stages of nuclear production. More specifically, he proposed to help Iranian scientists with a certain number of functions in Iranian territory, while leaving responsibility to the Russians on Russian territory for more critical activities. Teheran said no to Putin, but left the door open to an eventual change of the "no" into a "yes, but."
If I have understood the meanders of Russo-Iranian relations correctly, this change took place in only the last few days. At the same moment the seals were being broken, a meeting between Russian and Iranian representatives was scheduled for next month. Now, we can contemplate the following: the members of the troika will find themselves back in the closet of fiascos, the United States will grumble, the Russians will rub their hands, and - above all - Iran will buy the so-precious time in which to pursue its ultimate objective: the bomb. The bomb in the hands of fascists and, moreover, of unstable fascists, at that ...
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