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Pointless Vienna talks .. Will they be held forever?
Over the past decade, statements about the Iranian nuclear programme between US, Iranian and Israeli diplomats have not stopped especially after the announcement of the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant in September 2011.
The former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said once: "America is imposing sanctions - Europe is leading the negotiations and Iran is resisting."
Israel's statements are more strict than other countries' ones because Tel Aviv does not want a nuclear competitor in the region. The last of these statements was twelve days ago when Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said, "We will not allow Iran to become a nuclear threshold state, and if necessary, we will act on our own." It is a message to all parties involved in the negotiations with the Iranian delegation in Vienna.
This shows that the regime in Tehran is resisting time nothing else. There are many reports that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have made steps in manufacturing nuclear weapons, and in parallel, they are making ballistic missiles and they always avoid discussing them, thus, what is happening In Vienna is no more than a waste of time.
It is known that Iran is good at strategic patience especially it has been under Western sanctions for more than 40 years and this is all in public while in fact there are deals that are being signed under the table. Arabs in general and Iraqis in particular mentioned the so-called scandal Iran-Contra Affair between the Iranian regime and the USA and the Israeli delegate at the time was there, "Ari Ben-Menashe", to supply Tehran with missiles during the Iran-Iraq war during the era of the late Presidents Ronald Reagan, Saddam Hussein and the Iranian one Abolhassan Banisadr.
The most obvious thing about the P5+1 negotiations between the great powers and Iran is that Tehran hides its missile arsenal which it will use to terrorize its Arab neighbours before any other enemy and it always brags about its resistance against Israel and says that the way to Jerusalem is through Syria to justify its intervention to support the Syrian regime in killing its opponents.
From the Iranian point of view, returning to the nuclear agreement requires: Returning to the nuclear agreement, lifting sanctions and returning to UN Resolution 2231.
Starting from there, there is no need for new negotiations because there were already agreements signed in 2015. The United States is arming itself with pre-imposed sanctions on Tehran after the former damaged the Iranian economy to end its nuclear ambitions. Any declaration of a nuclear state in the Middle East would lead the region to a nuclear and ballistic arms race which Turkey and the Arab Gulf states would be engaged in.
The US role
Based on those facts, the USA wants Vienna talks to work step by step i.e. a gradual lifting of sanctions in exchange for stopping uranium enrichment.
It is clear that the Biden administration is trying to wait before taking any step lest it gives Tehran a gift which it may regret later especially since the US does not know the facts of events in Iran after Trump withdrew from the deal in May 2018.
The Europeans consider any return to the agreement as an opportunity to invest in a country with a population of nearly 100 million and whose economy suffers from the sanctions and the open conflicts in the region; the thing that suspended the French Airbus deal and the import of Iranian oil to Germany.
despite the ideological differences between Moscow, Beijing and Tehran, they have something in common, they all suffer from the US sanctions.
Accordingly, there is nothing that indicates that the West is against Iran having nuclear weapons but the question is whether Israel will be enough with just attacking the Iranian sites in Syria which has become common and neither of them bears any consequences at all levels. Most of the dead militia militants are shiitized Arabs who follow the fatwas of Iranian mullahs that encourage jihad with no basis or reference.
The most excited ones about the implementation of the nuclear agreement are those who are running behind the illusions of security and stability thinking that by doing so they would stop the Syrian massacre & the Iraqi factions, return Lebanon to its Arab brothers, and they preserve Yemen's geographical and national unity. However, the problem for the countries of the region is that signing the agreement will recover the Iranian economy after releasing the frozen funds and will be able to maintain its refusal to comply with international relations and protocols.
The second problem, if the agreement is reached, is lifting the 10-year sanctions imposed by Washington on ballistic missiles in January 2016 due to Iran's development of the "Qadr-H" and "Emad" missiles after signing the nuclear agreement with the Obama administration in 2015. The US claimed that these sanctions achieve security and stability in the largest security complex in the world i.e. the Middle East.
All this happened and we did not mention the contracts that Iran signed in Iraq with China, the US opponent, to extract oil and gas in the southeast of the country in the governorates of Basra and Maysan and the way Washington ignored the concerns of its strategic allies the GCC.
BY: Thaer Abdulaziz Alhajji
