I come at this from the standpoint of your averagely-informed listener, but I couldn’t help wondering about where diplomat Sir Richard Dalton, former Ambassador to Iran, was ‘coming from’ when he spoke this morning about the latest pronouncement from President Hassan Rouhani.
I've discovered that although his father was called John he’s not the chemist, physicist, and meteorologist after whom a central Manchester street is named.
Here’s the BBC’s explanation of the “Iran nuclear deal” etc:
“Iran has suspended commitments under the 2015 international nuclear deal, a year after it was abandoned by the US.
President Hassan Rouhani said he would keep enriched uranium stocks in the country rather than sell them abroad.
He also threatened to resume production of more-highly-enriched uranium in 60 days if other signatories did not act to protect Iran from US sanctions.
The 2015 accord was aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions in return for relief from sanctions.
But since the US left the deal it has imposed new sanctions, hitting Iran's economy and raising Iran-US tensions.”
It also includes Jonathan Marcus’s Analysis.
There’s more on EoZ from a US point of view (New York Times) and from VOA Forgive me for assuming that Sir Richard Dalton is one of the Foreign Office ‘Arabists’ who see everything through a pro-Islam prism, but what I heard seemed (to me) to be a remarkably defensive attitude towards the Mullahs, (whom I realise are not Arabs but Islamists) and a hostile one to the US.
Throughout this discussion I detected little or no mention of why Iran is so keen to develop its nuclear programme, nor of its sponsorship by proxy of terror groups or its genocidal intention to obliterate Israel as soon as it can.
I lie. There was such a mention, obliquely, (from Alistair Burt) but it’s pitched as a threat as to what might happen if we in the West don’t cooperate with the Iranians.
If there are any experts out there, please correct me if I’ve got it all wrong.
OT, but see what we’re up against? Alistair Burt reTweeted this tweet, and look at the torrent of ill-informed abuse that ensued.
Standard Issue Foreign Office!
ReplyDeleteCall me simple but I don't see why anyone would trust a regime that mandates a weekly chant of "Death to America, Death to Israel". That doesn't sound like a genuinely peace-loving or peace-seeking sort of thing to do. My working assumption would be that they would be using the deal to advance to nuclear weapons and also spread mayhem around the region.