The Real Story on
Iran, US, Russia and China
The real story is, and will continue to
be, how Iran, the key power in Southwest
Asia, is about to be positioned in the
nonstop complex ballet between the US,
Russia and China. That’s one of the key
vectors of the New Great Game in
Eurasia.
By Pepe Escobar
March 09, 2015 "ICH"
- "Spuitnik"
- The real story was never about how
warmonger Israeli Prime Minister Bibi
Netanyahu, a foreign leader, would
crudely use the House of Cards, sorry,
the US Capitol, as a lowly re-election
bully pulpit to mould the US presidency
and American foreign policy.
A graphic indication is
that while “Bomb Iran” Bibi was
distilling his 39-minute harangue
in Washington, US Secretary of State
John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister
Javad Zarif were engaged in their third
round of nuclear negotiations in Montreux.
The real story is also
only partially about this perennial soap
opera — the Iranian nuclear dossier. By
the end of this month there will be a
deadline to reach a framework agreement,
and by June – optimistically – a
comprehensive final settlement.
What’s at stake at the
highest level has been known to all
major players for ages. Tehran won’t
settle for anything less than a swift
end to the current nasty, illegal
package of sanctions. Yet Washington,
under the cloud of the self-described
"Don’t Do Stupid Stuff" Obama
administration, keeps changing the goal
posts as negotiations advance.
The latest is a demand
by Obama for a 10-year suspension
of Iranian nuclear activity. Zarif
called it "illogical" and
"excessive".
Well, as illogical as
the trademark paranoia exhibited
by the usual basket of US neo-cons and
extreme right-wingers. Compare it to how
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei
regards nuclear power – with all its
implications; this has also been
on the record for ages for anyone
to see.
China, Russia
and Plan B
Unlike the Cheney
regime, the Obama administration seems
to have reached a logical conclusion –
facilitated by extensive Pentagon
gaming; Washington can’t destroy Iran’s
nuclear program – unless it would use
nuclear weapons.
Along most of the
past decade, that was Plan A. Plan B is
the never-ending "negotiations", which
boils down to placing a series
of restrictions on Iran’s nuclear
program in exchange for a still very
dubious end of sanctions.
Yet the real objective
of the Masters of the Universe who
control the shadowplay in the
Washington/Wall Street axis is to manage
imperial decline. That implies,
in Southwest Asia, a renewed Divide and
Rule push, featuring Turkey, Iran, Saudi
Arabia and Israel.
Some key players
in Washington are getting increasingly
impatient with the House of Saud – what
with its low price oil strategy bombing
the US shale oil industry. Others worry
that Turkey – after a key Pipelineistan
deal, the Turk Stream – is moving away
to Russia. Thus the option to sort
of reintegrate Iran into a collaboration
with the West, if not close, at least
yielding profitable deals for Western
corporations.
Meanwhile, Russia and
China are not standing idly, as they are
an important part of the P5+1
negotiating team with Iran. Both BRICS
nations can – and do — use Iran
as leverage in how they negotiate
with the hegemon, always finding ways
to undermine the US "pivoting to Asia".
As soon as relations
with Iran are normalized, Tehran will be
admitted to the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO); currently it enjoys
observer status. Washington dreads the
move – as it will advance Iran’s
Eurasian integration, and solidify a
Moscow-Tehran-Beijing
political/commercial axis.
Russia already does
very good business with Iran –
from nuclear plants to weapons sales. No
US deal with Iran will come
through without a tacit Russian
acquiescence – and the Americans know
it. Beijing, for its part, tends
to cling to the status quo – as in not
desiring Tehran to get any closer to the
West because that would mean a freer
hegemon in its "pivoting to Asia" mode,
which China, correctly, identifies
as containment.
Further on down the
road, Tehran can use a rapprochement
with the West to increase its bargaining
power with Beijing. Assuming a deal is
reached this summer, Tehran will be
in an excellent position to extract
concessions – on the economy, security,
defense – from its Chinese partners. But
the name of the game remains Eurasian
integration.
The Caliphate,
"our" bastards
As for vociferous Bibi,
all he had left was to once again try
to sell Washington an Israeli war
of choice against a
demonized-to-oblivion Iran. It didn’t
fly – as much as those usual suspects,
the AIPAC lobby, bluntly ordered their
shock troops to tell the House of Cards,
sorry US Congress, that war is peace,
and any nuclear deal is a deal with the
devil. As argued by
Trita Parsi, the real "existential
threat" for Bibi is peace.
Once again, the real
story here is not a nuclear Iran; it’s
the possibility of a US-Iran détente
where Israel’s grip on US foreign policy
is not ironclad anymore.
Predictably, Bibi
lumped as evil forces lurking in his "neighborhoo"
everyone from Iran and "Lebanon" (he
meant Hezbollah) to Assad’s Syria and
Hamas. But not ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. So a
non-nuclear Iran is a worse threat
to civilization than the fake,
beheading-addicted Caliphate.
Espousing such a
worldview Bibi would not even qualify
as an extra on House of Cards – the one
on Netflix. Meanwhile, the real Israel
story – the illegal occupation/apartheid
imposed on Palestine – continues,
obscured by the usual gaggle
of somnambulists in the Bibi-raided
House of Cards, sorry, US Congress.
Pepe Escobar’s
latest
book is "Empire of Chaos". Follow
him on
Facebook.
© 2014 Sputnik