Iran is under the strenuous pressure from the West, especially the US. The US is turning the screw on Iran. So relentless is America that the fear of war seems more likely now that only sixteen months are left for George W Bush in office. The same kind of hype has been prepared as it was done in the days preceding the current war in Iraq. What at stake is not certainly uranium enrichment that Iran is legally entitled to under the non-proliferation treaty.
Iranian negotiator Ali Larijani has made it clear that Iran was readily complying with the inspection and surveillance of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the cameras are in place there. The chief of IAEA Mohammad ElBaradei has proved himself correct what he had said before the Iraq war that there was no weapon of mass destruction in Iraq. The chief inspector of arms Hans Brix too had similar opinion. Bush disregarded both. With hindsight ElBaradei now says ruefully: “I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700, 000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons”
Despite this foreboding the US is adamant on Iran. The stock reaction to President Mehmud Ahmedinejad’s visit to the Columbia University and the General Assembly indicates that war is a foregone conclusion. It is a matter of time. The president of the university took more time to ‘introduce’ his ‘guest’ speaker and gave him less time to reply. Bollinger Lee said of his ‘guest’ that the critical premise of freedom of speech is that “we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices”, it is not the speaker’s right to speak but the audience’s right to listen that is important. They listen that they have “the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament”.
In a real sense of the America absurd drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? of Edward Albee, the host begins humbling the ‘guest.’ “Let's, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.” Taking issue with the ‘guest’ over the denial of the holocaust the host goes a step further: “You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” There has been a move in the US to boycott Israeli college and university teachers because of the harsh, inhuman and intolerable treatment of the Palestinians. In order to build pressure on Iran and humble the ‘guest’ Bollinger turns this against Iran, which has no direct link with the issue. He concludes a la Samuel Huntington that he has “the weight of the modern civilized world” to ask him the questions. And thus the host excludes the ‘guest’ from the civilized world. What else is this if not continuing the clash of civilization between Islam and the West? Hence the war must continue.
In his reply to Bollinger, President Ahmedinejad took up the trenchant question of the holocaust and asked rhetorically, “Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?” In his riposte to the introduction of the President of Columbia University he remarked that the introduction was an “insult to the audience” and the university where “people are free to speak their mind.”
Most people believe that the US is not going to leave the Middle East because of its oil reserve. It is also using Israel to this end. The Israelis themselves may not like all that the Americans are doing but they too are hostage to the roguery of the States. Hence the Palestinian problem is kept boiling as well as the non-capture of Osama bin Laden hiding somewhere in the American protégé Pakistan. For the energy profligacy of the people of the United States the world is paying a heavy price.
The UN International Atomic Energy Agency is doing its work but America is peremptory in its insistence that Iran is not complying. Therefore the matter has become political rather than what it is, technical. Thus in the General Assembly Ahmedinejad remarked that Iran would from now on consider the nuclear issue not a “political” one for the Security Council, but a “technical” one to be decided by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Oil has corrupted the whole of the States in the same way as Mark Twain wrote of the man who corrupted the whole Hadleyberg. Bush family has had dealings with the Saudi magnate Osama bin Laden family in the matter of oil. Money has exchanged hands. It is no surprise that after 9/11 bin Laden family was allowed to leave the United States without even interrogating!
Who is who in this mad world? Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter described Bush as the greatest terrorist of the world. Even the US is not safe let alone the world because of him. Seven hundred housand innocent people have died in the Iraq war and two thousand US soldiers who were aggressors and hence not innocent. Will the world wait for seven hundred thousand citizens to die in the coming Iran war so that Bush will be declared good and Ahmedinejad evil?
Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua told the General Assembly that Washington’s actions against Iran were like those of “God telling people what is good and bad”. There might be a misuse of word here as last year the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had addressed the same after Bush, he had remarked that he knew that the devil was there; he could still smell the sulphur there.
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