This is a cross-post by Marc Goldberg
There have been many comparisons between the interim deal just signed between Iran and the West, designed to curb Iranian nuclear ambitions, and the Munich Agreementbetween Hitler, Chamberlain and the other regional powers of the time. In this scenario Obama plays the role of Chamberlain and Israel the role of the unfortunate Czechoslovaks who were sold down the river in a deal that utterly failed to maintain peace in Europe.
Let me cut to the chase, in NO WAY does Israel have anything in common with the weak and unempowered pre-World War II Czechoslovakia. The nuclear armed regional superpower is the country that everyone else in the region is watching and for good reason. Israel may not have the capacity to utterly destroy the Iranian nuclear program (using conventional weapons) but it is able to wreak the kind of damage on the country from which they could not recover quickly. Israel is the only country nearby that can.
The analogy does stand up for others however, especially for the Syrian people. It seems that participating in the murder of over 100,000 people has worked to Iran’s advantage. The plight of Syrians has barely been mentioned in all the fanfare surrounding this new age of diplomacy with Iran.
With their hand in the deteriorating conditions in Iraq as well as the civil war across another of their borders in Syria the Iranians have gotten the message loud and clear from Obama that violence does work. It is clear from United States Marine Corps intelligence files released by Wikileaks that Iran had a hand in the killing of US forces in Iraq from at least 2006, and suffered from that fact not at all. In fact the Americans neither publicised nor responded to the fact that the Iranians have been killing US soldiers at all.
This is the real threat posed by the Iranian regime. To ensure Iran doesn’t get nukes there are weapons inspectors and the word of the powers of the world but who stands ready to rollback the hegemony that Iran now exerts on the region?
Syria has been swept under the rug completely and Iraq hasn’t featured in the world news since US led forces abandoned the country to its fate. The Iranian takeover is out of the news and off the agendas of the world powers.
So while Iranian forces are murdering their way through the Middle East their new president is hailed as a miracle of diplomatic success in a period of optimistic re-engagement. This with a regime that doesn’t think twice before murdering its own citizens. Most notably during the 2009 Green Revolution but the regime is constantly executing Iranian citizens, according to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centrethe death count for 2013 alone is over 450.
Here in Israel our government has displayed concern time and again over the Iranian move to aquire nuclear weapons, less concern has been shown for the imposition of Iranian influence on the whole of the Middle East. Right now the Syrians and Iraqis are paying the price for this ‘influence’, tomorrow it will be someone else.
