Charles Elias Chartouni/The Iranian Equivocations and the Hackneyed Stratagems/شارل الياس شرتوني: المراوغات الإيرانية والحيل المبتذلة

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The Iranian Equivocations and the Hackneyed Stratagems
Charles Elias Chartouni/April 06/2021
شارل الياس شرتوني: المراوغات الإيرانية والحيل المبتذلة

The Iranian regime gambits are overused and yet sill in course, with no surprises or expectations of change: choreography, agendas, doublespeak and perverse effects. Observers wonder about the odds of a foretold story which never deviates from its original plot, while making too much ado about nothing.The bottom line is whether the Islamic regime in Teheran is willing to normalize its engagement, abide by the normative rules of the international community, and backtrack on its Counter-World order whims and losing wagers. The usual paraphernalia has proven of no use since the agreement of 2015 was flouted all along with the deliberate prevarications of the Iranian regime openly aired through its ideological discrepancies, double entendre, de facto sabotaging of its stipulations, instrumentalisation for political subversion throughout the Larger Middle East, and conventional arms race.

The segmented approach adopted in the initial draft of 2015 has played into the hands of the conservative aisle of the regime, which used it as a ploy to move onwards with its regional expansion policy, recover Iranian sequestered finances, set military outposts, solidify subversion networks under the leadership of the Lebanese Hezbollah, and double down on the destabilization strategy throughout the strategic continuums extending between Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese and Palestinian interfaces, Yemeni, Saudi and Arab Gulf configurations, and the international terrorist and criminal networks mapped on the very coordinates of mainly Lebanese Shiite migration in South America, Africa and minor diasporas. The main question which lies ahead the projected negotiations is whether these intentional and recurrent equivocations are likely to dispel, revise and usher an alternative course of normalization that will inevitably energize the vigorous civil society liberalizing trends. The Islamic regime is highly apprehensive of the Iranian civil society which has weaned itself from the delusions of the Islamic narrative, its multilayered panopticons, failed governance and pervasive corruption.

The looming negotiations are supposed to answer a series of questions regarding the nuclear technical issues: inspection of sites, uranium enrichment, the murky 2030 sunset stipulations, the ballistic missiles experimentations and arms race, the interlocking strategic matters in the Middle East, and the likelihood of a large concertation to address the contending dossiers and the gaping strategic voids (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestinian Territories, Yemen, Bahrain), and the issues of economic development and environmental policies. Far from being new, the planks of the impending negotiations are recurrent themes which bring forth the main interrogation, are they likely to herald a new era, or we are still dealing with an usher syndrome which preempts the chances of a working diplomacy. The ideological blinders of this Islamic dystopia, the vested interests of a corrupt and decaying nomenklatura, the brunt of massive repression and State terrorism should account for the stifled normalization and its correlate thwarted liberalization.

The problem is the future of the regime, its regional power politics, oligarchic foreclosures, inability to reform itself and engage an alternative course. In a similar vein, this accounts for the stymied Lebanese Politics preempted by Hezbollah from normalizing, and engaging a reform process direly mandated by the systemic floundering of a dysfunctional, let alone, dying Nation-State.