Canada's Independence, Iran's Defiant Success

"We have made-in-Canada foreign policy. We think past actions best predict future actions. And Iran has defied the United Nations Security Council. It has defied the International Atomic Energy Agency. Simply put, Iran has not earned the right to have the benefit of the doubt."
"We're deeply skeptical of Iran and its ability to honour its obligations."
"A nuclear Iran is not just a threat to Canada, or its allies. It would also seriously damage the integrity of decades of work for nuclear non-proliferation. It would provoke other neighbouring states to develop their own nuclear deterrent."
"Effective sanctions have brought the regime to present a more moderate front and open the door to negotiations. The Iranian people deserve the freedom and prosperity that they have been denied for all too long by the regime's nuclear ambitions. Until then Canadian sanctions will remain t5ough and will remain in full force."
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, Ottawa

Principle, a valuable commodity, to be sure. Canada is a very small player on the world scene. And within Canada there are those other political groups who, were they in power, and not the current Conservative-led government, would be celebrating along with their peers elsewhere in Europe and North America. Canada's sanctions won't amount to much, to be sure, weighed with the total involved. But one stands on principle, or succumbs to hypocrisy. Canada did the former.

In this firm response to the much-ballyhooed-and-heralded signing of an initial agreement with Iran by the members of the permanent UN Security Council; China, Russia, United States, France, Britain, plus Germany, Canada stands outside the general consensus in the West. The EU had Catherine Ashton involved in the negotiations with Iran's Foreign Minister. But it was the United States that brokered behind-the-scenes invitations-to-talk beginning back in March to initiate proceedings.

This has been an Obama-administration play from start to finish. Bringing in the Security Council, the EU and Germany for an international signature to reach a final accord. All the countries now engaged in upholding United Nations-approved sanctions are in fact, eager to get back to business with Iran; as much as Iran has suffered from a lack of fluidity, those European and North America companies doing business with the country haven't much enjoyed enforcing the sanctions.

Those onerous sanctions that have so dreadfully harmed the Islamic Republic of Iran's ability to get on with its business as a normal country, exercising its normal prerogative of making choices for itself, so gracelessly and imperiously clawed by the international community, impoverishing the ordinary citizens of Iran, are to be gently lifted. Some $100-billion is said to be tied up, and now around $8-billion is to be released as an initial sign of trust in Iran's pledge of intent.

Those sanctions haven't managed to stop Ayatollah Khamenei from amassing an immense personal fortune in government-controlled properties and businesses, nor has it done much harm to the bottom line of the elite among the Republican Guard Corps. Financial constraints have not been reflected in Iran's funding of Hezbollah, and its military assistance to Syria's Bashar al-Assad. Nor have economic restraints resulted in curtailing in any part the building of new nuclear sites and the purchase of more technically advanced centrifuges, and the uranium to be madly spun to enrichment.

Nor does the ongoing and on-track alliance with North Korea in exchange of scientific-technical advances in nuclear warhead miniaturization, and more advanced longer-and-further-tracking ballistic missiles production appear to have been impaired. Like Saddam Hussein in Iraq suffering crippling sanctions, not all that crippling that he wasn't able to continue building luxe palaces while hospitals went without basic supplies and children died in their hundreds of thousands from deprivation, starvation and lack of medical attention.

FM: No Halt to Happen in Iran's N. Facilities

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif underlined that all Iran's nuclear sites will go on their normal activities.

 

So, the theocratic swaggering bully of the Middle East that sent hundreds of thousands of young Iranian boys dressed as martyrs into the bomb-littered fields of battle with Iraqi soldiers, wiping out a generation of their youth for the greater cause of Shia Islam domination -- the country whose delegation stood in the United Nations boasting of its intention to destroy a UN member-country -- and whose president spoke of the wonder he felt as a halo settled around his head, courtesy of the Hidden Imam whose reappearance would be hastened should an upheaval of huge, violent proportions take place to hasten his arrival, now will have that opportunity, thanks to the generosity of those countries who will not be in line for the first nuclear strike.