For The Greater Good

Obviously, the world is one extremely confused place. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a perfectly decent, well-governed society. That it celebrates capital punishment as a national past time, in numbers that astonish the civilized world, simply represents a reality that one country's traditions are another's abhorrent practices; not that one is right the other wrong, because morality cannot be seen in the lens of absolutes, for an all-powerful god would have it so. And no god is more powerful than that of the spirit that the Iranian Ayatollahs venerate.

Iran views the United States of America as "the Great Satan", and certainly there may be Americans who themselves view themselves as rather devilish. Although Iran has not (yet) expressed a public desire to destroy America, it has expressed on numerous occasions its determination to wipe the "Little Satan" whose name will not defile the lips of the Ayatollahs but which is known as the Zionist entity, from the map of the Middle East. To that end, as some incautious parliamentarians have concluded, nuclear bombs would be most efficient as a means to accomplish the task.

Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty Images

Nobel-prize-winning President Barack Obama appears convinced that with his charming personality and tenuous connection to Islam, it is entirely possible to disarm the Ayatollahs' distaste for the United States. To, in fact, harness the potential that lies within the Republic to establish good order and fine relations between it and the other countries within the Middle East; with an obvious exception, but that is of no moment at the present time, evidently. Iran has its well-honed hegemony in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon/Hezbollah.

President Obama appears to feel in his great, all-absorbing wisdom, that Iran's influence for the good can be extended for acceptance to other nations of the Middle East. Iran the power-broker is the vision that Iran has always cleaved to, considering that its rightful place in the order of things, of a magnitude that would satisfy its desire to be taken as the arbiter of all matters relating to the majesty of Islam in the Middle East.

Perhaps it is even possible that Mecca and Medina could be shifted toward Iran. Or Saudi Arabia be dissolved and Iran expanded.

In any event, the Obama administration appears to be growing increasingly comfortable with an alliance of great powers representing Russia, America, the European nations and Iran working in a tandem of aspiration to give a measure of much-needed stability to the Middle East. Mr. Obama's peripatetic envoy, Secretary of State John Kerry has expressed a need to invite Iran to Syrian peace talks in Geneva.

Inconveniently the Syrian Opposition will have none of it. When, confoundingly, given that Iran has thwarted the United Nations, the IAEA, the Security Council in its single-minded intention to acquire the wherewithal to produce nuclear warheads, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon invited Tehran to the Geneva conference, the Opposition withdraw its agreement to attend. Mr. Ban disinvited Iran.

Perhaps, despite all that has gone before, including Iran's representatives standing before the UN General Assembly and threatening destruction to another United Nation member-state, that the UN still saw its way clear to electing Iran president of its 2013 Conference on Disarmament handily illustrates the UN's utter dysfunction. Non-Proliferation Treaty disdained? All is forgiven.

Iran's abysmal human rights record is well enough known; its tradition of hounding members of Baha'i, political dissenters, homosexuals and others is well enough known; imprisonment, torture, death. Its funding of and incitement to terrorist acts by aligned militias a matter not of speculation but of proven existence. But all is forgiven. As for the President of the United States; his long-term wish is to withdraw from that cauldron of instability entirely, to leave it in the capable hands of Iran.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, Bahrain, and Egypt among others may harbour some trifling quibbles over this plan. Israel may shudder at the rather unwholesome prospect. But this is the way that great minds and powerful nations go about making decisions, after all. Iran's proxies are battling Sunni extremists allied with al-Qaeda and this is of primary interest to the United States; to keep a firewall of Shia extremists between it and al-Qaeda.

Specious thinking, it might seem, to anyone with a self-respecting Intelligence agency that could inform the great thinker that Iran has no problem working with al-Qaeda, has done and will continue to, if and when it suits its larger purposes. For the United States to imagine in its feverish daydreams that Iran would invest trust in it over agreements with other Islamist groups, is to be truly delusional.

The Middle East is imploding with hatred, sectarian divide, tribal and clan conflict, jihadist madness and destruction, bloodthirsty atrocities and insecurity abounds. And into this explosive mixture come Russia and the United States with their fear of al-Qaeda and determination to prevent it and its acolytes from treading on Russian or American soil, disrupting the calm and peace of their anti-terrorism self-defence plans.

And into this flammable concoction of hope and despair, dysfunction, religious fervour and nervous anticipation, comes Iran, humbly pleading for understanding that it has no sinister intentions in pursuing uranium enrichment to nuclear-weapons-grade capacity. Look, it is busy destroying its uranium stores, it means only to power up civil nuclear plants and its honesty and integrity must not be impugned by those whose suspicious minds see Armageddon everywhere.