The Status It Craves

Just coincidentally. Just to be there. The HMCS Charlottetown left Halifax yesterday morning with 250 Canadian sailors on board. We are members of NATO, after all. Taking part in NATO's ten-year anti-terror program. Called Operation Active Endeavour. The HMCS Charlottetown is a well-armed frigate. Another such warship has been relieved of duty; the HMCS Vancouver is returning to Canada, mission completed.

It was involved in the NATO-led no-fly mission in Libya. Primarily involved in supporting an arms embargo that was imposed, while the popular uprising that ousted the Gadhafi regime from power was in progress. A job well done, that ship in the Royal Canadian Navy is returning to port in Canada. The HMCS Charlottetown, is taking its place in the Mediterranean. There is the possibility that it will be engaged in some regional crisis that may erupt.

These matters are not entirely predictable. There is the matter of the ongoing civil conflict in Syria. Which the Arab League is confident that they are capable of settling, eventually impressing upon President Bashar al-Assad that it does not reflect well on him and his Alawite regime to continue defeating the aspirational wishes of the country's majority Sunni population.

Although, of course, in Bahrain, the royal family of King Hamad al-Khalifa has managed to defuse a popular protest by his country's Shia majority, tired of being second-class citizens to the ruling Sunni minority. On that occasion, Saudi Arabia and Qatar sent in their troops to aid and assist the regime's brutal oppression of the pro-democracy revolt.

The thing of it is, NATO is not enamoured of the idea of becoming militarily involved in the Middle East. In the instance of Libya it was possible because the Arab League was fed up with Moammar Gadhafi in any event, and didn't quite mind the United Nations becoming involved as a result of the regime's massacre of its opponents, bringing NATO into the action with the assent of the Arab League.

Syria is different, we are informed. Turkey, which, as a member of NATO, balked at NATO involvement in Libya, is not indifferent to any prospect of NATO responding to the Syrian situation; it is hands off, even though it supports the popular revolt. And then there is Iran, the Islamic Republic of. Which enjoys tilting at windmills and lancing its adversaries in the eye.

Crowing that at their secret Qom mountain hideaway they are enriching uranium at a stupendous rate. Happily leaking the information that they will soon be enabled to test a modest, but still atomic bomb. If North Korea could do it, they can too. North Korea, after all, has gone out of its way to aid and assist Iran in that laudable venture.

So it isn't just that Iran presents the world with another dilemma in its nuclear aspirations. There's also the element of Iran facing a disastrous economic decline due to biting sanctions. One thing these tyrannical regimes have in common, be it Pakistan, North Korea or Iran; if funding is lacking for certain elemental things like food, enough can always be found to be diverted in support of nuclear weaponry.

And Iran is no exception. Except that it is furious with the world, just as its sister-tyrants happen to be; they aren't getting the respect that they feel they deserve. With power comes respect. And what is more powerful than the threat of nuclear obliteration? The Islamic Republic feels that if its economy must suffer under sanctions, then those who have inflicted those sanctions should suffer too.

Closing down the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipping would certainly cause great discomfiture globally. A shortage of oil, resulting in higher prices, placing a recovery-stumbling-block after a nasty recession would certainly speak of the efficacy of revenge. Should Iran manage to close the Strait as it certainly could again, it would bring down the wrath of combined conventional warfare from its opponents.

Which could, then, also lead to other nasty occurrences, like bunker-bombing the Fordow nuclear enrichment plant in central Iran, and the enrichment plant at Natanz. Things could get pretty chaotic. Giving Canada's Royal Navy, among other members of NATO, plenty of manoeuvres to consider in a combined effort to dissuade Iran against its plans of achieving the status it craves.