On the Iranian regime international strategy

The first shy official meeting came to happen between Iranian regime’s representatives and American officials in the frame of International conference on Afghanistan in Hague.

Far from its so-called historical value, after some 30 years of interruption of official contacts, this meeting should be understood as a part of strategy that can be “new” for the new administration, but in its methods and nature of what the Iranian government is doing, is not really new, nor original.

For those who know the Iranian system of crisis management this is a fact that an old game is being played this time, with a barely new look. Some paradigm should be set up to understand this “made in Iran negotiation system“:

1)      A fundamental fact is following: as the Iranian regime lacks basically the legitimacy within society it cannot stay at power without a permanent crisis re-production. All the time an extraordinary issue should dominate the country to justify anti-popular policies and actions of the government regarding the Iranian people’s claims and rights. That’s why nobody, inside the heights of political structure, can imagine a non-crisis situation in the country without a strong raising of social and economic claims and requests of the Iranian people, which will put the political stability of the regime at stake.

2)      Iranian Regime welcomes all new crisis as long as it doesn’t put a direct and immediate treat to itself. That’s why the presence of the American in Iraq and Afghanistan was a historical chance for the Iranian State; that’s why not only they helped triggering these two wars but applied all their power to make these wars last and worst for the Americans.

3)      During the three recent decades the Iranian government had, several times, opportunities to start negotiations and solving the problems with the American. But they evaded from them with ability and brought them purposely to failure.

Based on this paradigm we can say that as the crisis is an integral part of the power in Iran, all the attempts to solve crisis and conflict is seen as a true crisis for the regime. For the Iranian Regime disaster starts where the crisis in which it is involved would be over.

The strategy of the Iranian regime to make the crisis last is simple: being involved in all the plans of a case: in hidden way, in official way, in direct way, in indirect way. They know that the more they are engaged, the more they will have means and levers to stop the process when it goes in the opposite direction of their will, slow it down when they need time to act later more effectively and to stop it when the process impose some unwilling issues to them.

In Afghanistan they have been involved as well in overthrowing the Taliban as in preventing the stabilization of a new pro-American political power in this country. They sent arms to rebels at the same time that they were giving money to reconstruction of the country and involving actively in the passage of the drugs from this country to the rest of the world.

In Iraq they were cooperative for putting Saddam’s regime down, and then they started to feed, finically and logistically, the most violent groups inside of the country to create a chaos and transformed it to the best shield facing the likely American pressure regarding the Iranian regime.

Now after three decades because of the new policy of Obama’s administration, the Iranian government is facing a classic case: the danger of resolving the crisis. This American effort is not really worrying the Mullahs since they master perfectly the game. The rules of this latter are extremely simple:

1) They will show a positive attitude to negotiation and solving all the disagreements,

2) They will effectively agree on a few insignificant and slight issues. Not immediately, they take a maximum of time possible to accomplish really a small step.

3) They will express the most confusing and ambivalent statements on the major issues, making them depend on the impossible requests, conditioning infinitely any agreement, changing negotiators, representatives and delegates, sending various and often contradictory messages through different power structures, authorities, personalities, producing the greatest bewilderment that no conventional political structure in the world is able to figure out and deal with.

In such a confusing environment their interlocutor will be completely lost, perplexed and mixed up.

The result: the Iran regime always wins, gains time, stops everyone at its borders, bar any intervention and does what it wants…

This method has been working for the last three decades, regarding American administration, divers European governments, Union European, International institutions, its neighbors and…

The substantial message of the Iranian government is not hard to elucidate: please, buy our oil, sell us what we need and let us do what we want inside of the country, in Middle-East and in other parts of the world. If our behavior bothers you, it is your problem, not ours, and if you think that we can make us change it, good luck.

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The Iranian strategy to screw up the Americans is to collaborate on the Afghanistan and Iraq’s cases, where the U.S is seriously in a bad situation, in order to show some cooperative sense, but they have a clear message to make understand behind this: we will help you to exit from these two mires in condition that you leave us do what we desire inside Iran, including developing our nuclear weapons and violating all the human and civil rights of the Iranian people.

And the other meaning of this strategy is clear too, if you bother us for our internal affaires we will create you a great number of troubles in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Middle-East, if it is not in other parts of the world through our network.

So, the hidden message of the Iranian regime through this so-called cooperation is very clear: You are our regional hostage and we can liberate you in exchange of our total freedom for what will assure our perpetuity: Nuclear weapons and unlimited internal repression.

The Obama administration can easily fall in this trap and play the game of the Iranian regime, a play that have only one winner: the Iranian government, but it has more than one loser: U.S.A but also all the world that will be facing an accomplished fact: Iranian nuclear bomb.

Cyrus Etemadi