The US attacks on Iran have backfired horribly – but a path to peace is still possible | Simon Tisdall
HAnging is the preferred method of execution in Iran, although the stoning and the crucifixion offer other options for a theocracy that has become. Death by suspension is not necessarily fast. Speaking and suffocation can take several minutes. The UN says that more than 600 people have been murdered judicially this year. Iran has more executions per capita than any country in the world. Since the American and Israeli attacks in June, the growing number of victims are political dissidents.
Fifty days, nothing positive at a distance has resulted from illegal bombing raids and missile strikes mounted by the American president, Donald Trump, and the head of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite their boastful of world success. Iran’s nuclear installations were not erased, as Trump said. Tehran has not abandoned the enrichment of uranium. The regime has not fallen, despite Netanyahu’s call to an uprising. If anything, the supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is more provocative. He has since launched a new repression against adversaries, hence the executions.
The abolition of the last weekend of political prisoners Behrouz Ehsani and Mehdi Hassani, Amnesty International, linked their fate to American-Israeli attacks. Arrested in 2022, the two men were accused of rebellion and “enmity against God”. They were tortured, forced to sign confessions and sentenced last year after a five -minute trial. The decision to execute them now “highlights the ruthless authorities of the death penalty as a tool of political repression in time of national crisis to crush dissent and spread fear,” said Amnesty.
Hundreds have been arrested since June in a regime campaign to unmask spies and collaborators, real or imagined. The flagrant intelligence failures which, for example, have enabled Israel to locate and bomb a meeting of the National Security Council, injuring the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, are not officially attributed to gross incompetence but supposed fifth columnists. The Iranian Parliament wishes to extend the use of capital punishment. Up to 60 political prisoners are faced with execution.
This generally severe reaction on the part of office carcals around Khamenei, and within the judicial and revolutionary guards, comes despite an increase in patriotic feeling after attacks, which would have killed at least 935 people, mainly civilians, and injured more than 5,000. By intensifying repression, the regime wasted a chance to exploit the anger of the public, especially against Great Britain and the European governments eyes.
American-Israeli actions have had other large-scale negative consequences. The attacks have violated the Charter of the United Nations and international law, as the Brics group of the countries of the “South World South” note. They led Tehran to suspend nuclear inspections of the UN. They exacerbated the American-Europe divisions. And, ironically, they increased the probability that Iran will build a bomb for self -defense.
Iran insists on the fact that he does not have and does not want nuclear weapons. For all the intelligence capacities of Israel, neither Netanyahu nor no one has certainly proven the opposite. The decision to attack was based on a supposition, motivated by fear and hatred. This caused serious physical damage, but has not changed mentality. Iran is categorical, it will continue to enrich uranium for civil purposes. The bombing was a bust. Trump’s angry threat to strike again is confirmation of failure.
What this act of reckless aggression did Do is encouraged rugs as Russia to believe that they can also attack other countries with impunity. It strengthens belief in Iranian leading circles, and not only among the rejecting factions, that the West cannot trust and a closer alliance with China is necessary. It strengthens the hand of the retraining, including the penchant for the regional proxy war and the secret operations recently documented against Great Britain, have rooted the status of pariah of Iran.
Historically speaking, Iran was and is an avoidable tragedy – one of the clean geostrategic objectives in the West. Impretless support for Shah helped stimulate the 1979 revolution. Subsequent ancestry, far from inevitable of conservative clerics and remains and irrational of irrational animosity, feeding on memories of the humiliating seat of the Tehran Embassy, made the Rift permanent. Europe has tried and has failed to draw an average path. In 2018, Trump denied the American nuclear agreement, no and EU with Tehran and reimposed the sanctions. The latter many errors in disastrous policy has led directly to the dead end of today. With wiser heads, it could have been very different.
All parties to this conflict should study the philosopher of French Enlightenment Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, an enemy with tyranny in all its forms. Writing in his Persian Letters of BestSeller of 1721 more than 300 years ago, he issued an impressive warning on what was then imaginary weapons of mass destruction. “You say that you are afraid of discovering a method of destruction that is believing that those used now,” wrote his Persian traveler Usbek to a friend. “If such a fateful invention became discovered, it would soon be prohibited by international law. By the unanimous consent of each country, the discovery would be buried. ”
In the sense that nuclear weapons are prohibited, Usbek’s optimistic prediction was correct. But not “each country” conforms. If the United States and Israel are sincere to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb, it should give an example and reduce, and finally eliminate their nuclear arsenals. They should stop threatening renewed attacks. And they should support talks on a regional nuclear pact, as proposed by former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
It is only then then, Tehran will come from the cold. It is only then then, his paranoid leaders will cease to suspend innocent people.
