Plans To Remove Iran Sanctions Won’t Save The Lives Of The People – OpEd
The Iranian regime with its seven Presidents and two supreme leaders. has had many ups and downs over the past 41 years in regulating its relations with the United States. Throughout these years, Tehran by secretly negotiating, begging help from appeasers and exerting, pressure with its terrorist acts used all the tools at its disposal combined with lies and concealment to create opportunities for its influence in expanding the regime’s proxy forces in the region and enhancing the IRGC’s capacity for internal repression and export of terrorism. Of course, to a great extent was successful. Tehran has also tried to continue enriching uranium at every opportunity and violating its obligations in order to get closer to build a nuclear bomb. With creating a dozen fictitious crises IRGC tried to maintain its mercenary bases in Syria and Iraq.
The withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon after the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri gave Iran the opportunity to become the first actor in Lebanon’s political scene and eventually led to the creation of a Hezbollah terrorist group. In Yemen, in the vacuum of the Arab Spring, Mullah’s regime seized the opportunity to employ the Houthis to dominate the Yemeni capital and its military capability.
An ancient Iranian expression states that when the garden wall collapses, the fruit-pickers (opportunists) arrive. The fruit-pickers, in this case, were the western appeasers that underpinned such achievements for the mullahs.
Iran had an unprecedented opportunity under Barack Obama. It reached a “nuclear” deal with six countries and the US, after which Qassim Suleimani succeeded in expanding its broader regional offensive, and it later became clear that the implementation of the deal empowered Iran with financial resources for its regional offensives. Suleimani and IRGC’s offensives just before sanctions being imposed on them, in its peak, facilitated the annexation of four Arab capitals under Iranian control. The extent of this is obvious that an analyst of Iraq’s said: “No issue would be resolved until Qassim Suleimani came to Baghdad”. The most disastrous effect of IRGC+ financial resources was the killing of more than 100,000 and displacement of 6,000,000 Syrians.
Today, Tehran sees a good opportunity to use Coronavirus crises as a pretext to remove the deadly sanctions rope from its neck. Khamenei and Rouhani are now contemplating nothing but using the Coronavirus crises and pressure the international community and force governments to put pressure on the US to lift Iran’s sanctions. In line with this game plan, Zarif and Rouhani played innocent and wrote in a letter to the American people that “sanctions have reduced the ability of the Iranian people to fight the virus and even some of our compatriots have lost their lives because of these sanctions.” They have called on the American people to “loudly shout” at their government.
But Tehran does not say why Khamenei ordered the censorship of news of the Coronavirus outbreak in Qom for the sake of elections and did not quarantine Qom despite warnings from its Ministry of Health. Khamenei is portraying his regime as a victim of an American-engineered conspiracy, and on the one hand to send its Basij and Revolutionary Guards to the streets under the pretext of an anti-biological warfare maneuver to prevent insurgency and uprising against its rule. On the other hand, he could play the victim role and seize the opportunity to lift the sanctions. Therefore, we can not compare the regime’s reactions to Coronavirus crises with other countries and expect the same.
The Iranian people know very well in their contemporary history that Mirza Ali Asghar Khan Atabak, an opportunist when he saw Nasser al-Din Shah assassinated in Abdul Azim shrine, window dressed his corpse in the carriage and carried to the royal palace to show that the king was still alive. And now to those who want to lift sanctions on Iran, why do you want to show this dying regime alive?
We must ask them why Iran is not willing to accept Doctors without borders, international observers, journalists, missions and international aid to reach the needy people or Iran immediately! Why People’s Medical Facilities that belong to the People of Iran should show up in Lebanon and Iraq in the hand of the regime’s proxy forces! Why the Regime Doesn’t Release Political Prisoners?! Why Khamenei does not use the Imam’s executive headquarters $100 billion currency reserves for the Coronavirus expense?!
And why regime’s television, instead of pointing to the inefficiencies of the relevant organs, is constantly zooming in on people’s behavior, blaming the people in the city and condemning their behavior who don’t stay home while simultaneously weaving conspiracy theories internationally. Why the regime is planning military maneuvers and mobilization by IRGC? Can Coronavirus be restrained by military maneuvers?
Therefore, lifting the sanctions of the Iranian regime means giving the regime another chance to unleash its terrorist activities and further destabilize the region.
