Sweet Reason

"While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the [uranium conversion] facility in Isfahan ... In fact, by creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work in Isfahan".
Hassan Rowhani, President, Islamic Republic of Iran

Rohani (Photo by Reuters), and Obama (Photo by AFP).

But that, of course was then, when Mr. Rowhani was Iran's chief nuclear negotiator and that speech to the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council took place in 2004. Nine years ago, and not an awful lot has changed but the facade. That seems to be enough for a whole lot of people who subscribe to the process of believing whatever is told them as long as they want to believe it.

To the huge delight of the Iranian authorities it is true after all that the West is gullibly suggestive. If the West is so given to being persuaded, who are the Iranians, after all, to disappoint them? There is no shame, as far as they are concerned, in gulling and lulling. Particularly when it is engaged upon in the interests of the greater good.

That greater good, needless to say, is to advance the agenda of Iran's nuclear program. The First Lady of the United States shrank back from the possibility of shaking the hand, or horrors! air-kissing former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlosconi, for he is a notorious womanizer. Shaking the hand of Iran's new 'moderate president, however, is another thing altogether.

And he would have, graciously and happily, had Hassan Rowhani not reacted on the United Nations occasion just as Michelle Obama had when she met Berlosconi. A man whose loyal service to the Islamic Republic as a close aide to Ayatollahs Khomeni and Khamenei over the past 35 years is indisputable, and somewhat disgraceful.

But, he is not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with his crocodile smile and his declarations of the  true intentions of the Republic of Iran, whereas his successor's statements are merely prevaricatingly mendacious. Iran will never, ever, consider abandoning its program of nuclear production. Strictly, to be sure, for peaceful means; to generate energy, and produce medical isotopes.

The plentiful oil produced by Iran is, it would appear, useless as an energy-resource.

Iran does not refine its own oil, it exports its product for refinement elsewhere. It prefers to spend its capital on the hugely expensive task of building nuclear installations and uranium enrichment rather than building refinery plants. Peculiar beyond belief, unless one turns to the thought, unbelievable though it seems, from a country whose religion dedicates it to peace and humanity, that it means to produce nuclear weapons.

To, you know, kind of complement its research on ballistic rockets, attempting to improve, and succeeding admirably, in producing ever longer-range missiles which, equipped with nuclear warheads would prove devastatingly harmful to the continuation of that peace and the sweet human relations the Republic of Iran speaks so movingly of.

While Iran keeps the centrifuges spinning, it keeps telling the international community of its peaceful intentions. And that international community when it hears those words tripping off the lips of a 'moderate', beneficently-glowing face, leaps to believe what reality denies.

American President Barack Obama on the one hand, speaks of the deplorable activities of Iran in sponsoring terrorism, creating havoc in the world, instructing its non-state militia, Hezbollah to bomb and kill on its behalf. And on the other extends the other hand in friendship to a regime that has once, and now twice spurned that hand.

But, there it is, uranium enrichment for peaceful means is an inalienable right for the Islamic Republic of Iran whose near success in reaching its goal has its neighbours on tenterhooks of existential anxiety - all its neighbours save one.

And that one is headed by a murderous tyrant whose atrocities committed against his people Iran is pleased to support, as a peace-loving, human-rights-supporting regime.

Along with its very good friend, Russia. Which has prevailed so wonderfully in bringing America's previously adversarial position around to sweet reason.