Cunning Orchestration

There are the instant enthusiasts, willing and eager to allow their minds and memories to completely blank out not-so-distant experience and realistic impressions in favour of wild applause that the leopard has suddenly taken on a new wardrobe. And then, there are those others, the skeptics of the world, the tedious, tiresome, nagging cynics who decry naivete and whisper "show me!".

Gee, gosh, charmingly inoffensive letters of greetings and wholesale pledges to friendship have gone out between Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the humble President of the United States of America. The Ayatollah has exchanged his usual sneering hiss at the overtures of Mr. Obama for sweet and simple does it.

The world is atremble with shivery anticipation at the formal unveiling of Iran's new president, Hasan Rowhani at the forthcoming General Assembly of the United Nations.

An address presaged by an interview that oozed fellowship and goodwill. Iran is tired, mighty tired of being an international outcast. Fed up with those nasty sanctions, to be sure. Well, not the administration particularly, though it is concerned that the trickle-down of the sanctions harming its economy has made its citizens grumble, not modestly but loud and getting louder. Risking another one of those irritation-inducing green protest movements.

So much has changed within Iran in so little time, it is quite simply amazing. Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is already engaged in a series of bilateral talks with his European counterparts. What has so motivated Iran's theocracy? The touch-and-go exhilaration of keen observation over the Syria conflict and the red line that got mushed into the sand of the Middle East?

If chemical weapons of mass destruction got a free pass plus bluster, why not nuclear weapons of mass destruction?

If sufficient care were to be delicately, exquisitely carefully taken to pledge, word of honour of a born martyr that not one atom would end up tipping a bomb; what then? Medical isotopes solely. And that is Ggod's own truth. Might it appear too awkwardly impolite to ask, why then the super-enriched uranium? Why the focus on missile systems development specific to the carriage of warheads?

Nuclear warheads, on speculation.

Who better to answer those questions than the moderate new president who was once his country's arbitrator/negotiator for the nuclear file with the IAEA? And he's an intimate member of the ruling administration, a pillar of long standing of Tehran's defence establishment. He served as secretary to the National Security Council, did he not? A fundamentalist then, a keen insider, a confidante of Ayatollah Khamenei.

But not to worry: a moderate. Such a nice man. Look at that smile!

Iranian President Hasan Rohani waves after being sworn in at parliament in Tehran, Iran, Aug. 4, 2013. Photo by AP

 

Suddenly neither he nor indeed Ayatollah Khamenei are hard-liners. They are moderates. Prepared to compromise. According to the Ayatollah who is the true strength behind the Islamist throne of the country whose words even the elite Republican Guard must obey even when he withdraws authority over the country's nuclear program from them to the auspices of the president. Can it seem credible that the nuclear program revolves around nuclear warheads when the Republican Guard continue to control it?

Precisely. The President of Iran is committed to the production of medical isotopes. Committed to the health of Iranians; certainly not to the sinister plot ascribed to the country of achieving nuclear weaponry the better to threaten Israel, the Arab Middle East, and why stop there? But we can relax and breathe a sigh of welcome relief for the Ayatollah has called for "heroic leniency", in embracing diplomacy over militarism.

The leniency already displayed with the freeing of a handful of political prisoners. Now there's progress for international consumption. And it's a figment of progress that the international community is literally lapping up like feral cats exposed to fresh cream.