SPEAKING
FREELY Canada's hostility to Iran is
overblown By Ardeshir Ommani
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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On Friday,
September 7, 2012, the Canadian government at the order
of Prime Minister Stephen Harper shut down
the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa declaring the Iranian
diplomats in Ottawa "persona non-grata" and
giving the staff there only five days to leave the
country, while at the same time pulling its
ambassador and embassy staff out of Tehran,
severing all diplomatic relations with the Islamic
Republic.
Then the Foreign Minister of
Canada John Baird at the Asia-Pacific Meeting in
Vladivostok made the announcement in a
name-calling tirade that
charged Iran with being a "state sponsor of
terrorism", being "the most significant threat to
global peace and security in the world today," and
mimicking Israeli myths about Iran's "racist
anti-Sematic rhetoric and incitement to genocide".
When two days later the American Iranian
Friendship Committee (AIFC) circulated a petition
on the Internet protesting the belligerent act of
the Canadian government's unilateral decision,
some respondents were dismayed by the flagrant act
of the Harper government against a nation that has
not attacked Canada, has not carried out any
hostile actions, and has not been any threat to
the international community in the last 200+
years.
Some people expressed surprise at
Canada's actions, thinking that Canada's national
health care and social welfare programs were
reflective of a more moderate, less imperialistic
country. What are the true causes of the Canadian
government's behavior? By glancing over the
history of the economic and political structures
of the West we see why Canada's actions have a
definite logic, and why Prime Minister Harper took
such a drastic measure. The following analysis
does not provide Canada with moral justification
for its words and actions but tends to prove the
polarization of the world into two hostile camps:
a small minority of the wealthiest nations pitted
against the great majority of the developing
countries.
Tehran's success at NAM
summit The Canadian government resorting to
severing diplomatic relations, a pathetic act, is
for several reasons:
Iran is becoming a regional power in the
Middle East - overshadowing Israel and Saudi
Arabia, two clients of the domineering powers in
that region. The shift in the balance of forces
has been felt by the West in central Asia, with
the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO) to include Iran in an observer
status since 2005. This has increased Iran's
cooperation with Russia, China, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and as a result of these developments
the NATO masters have been driven to extremes.
Iran's success in convening the 16th Summit of
the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran in the
last week of August was almost too much to bear
for Tel Aviv, and was one of the driving factors
in Canada's actions against Iran. The success of
NAM, with 120 countries in attendance, over 30
heads of state and 90 foreign ministers,
representing two-thirds of United Nations member
states was a brilliant proof and reflection that
Iran is a respectable member of the international
community and is NOT isolated as Washington, Tel
Aviv and Ottawa would like to claim.
According to Mazda Majidi, writing in
Liberation Newspaper of the Party for Socialism
and Liberation on September 7, 2012, "Hosting an
international summit of this magnitude has enabled
Iran to counter the claims of the United States,
its imperialist allies and Israel that Iran is
internationally isolated … the summit's final
communiqu้ included a unanimous adopted resolution
supporting Iran's right to a nuclear program."
Doubtlessly, the support of NAM members was a
strong rebuff to all those states who have tried
to deny Iran's right to uranium enrichment and
development of an independent economy and have
imposed sanctions on the country for more than
three decades. Such a defeat could not be
tolerated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
nor his neo-conservative ally Prime Minister
Stephen Harper.
Tehran has the chairmanship of NAM for the
next three years, and the members of NAM have
begun planning how to strengthen the role of NAM
in world affairs and begin to democratize the
United Nations.
Demise of a unipolar
world By all and every indications, short
of engaging in a full-scale continental and
nuclear arms war which may trigger the involvement
of Russia, China, India, Israel and Pakistan, a
handful of NATO top dogs - the US, Britain,
France, Germany, Canada, and their loud-mouth
puppet Israel - have been trying every conceivable
strategy, tactic, fantastic scenarios and
sophisticated tools of war propaganda to
intimidate or harm the countries and nations who
do not dance to the tune of a unipolar world.
A universe in which a small number of
highly industrialized countries of the West in the
grips of the neo-conservative and fundamentalist
Christian-Zionist ideologies headed by the US
would be in control of nuclear energy, weapons of
mass destruction, the choke points of the world's
waterways, and be in command of the most vital raw
materials and their related prices, particularly
the sources of energy, oil and gas, and the
materials needed for the production of advanced
technological instruments. The prerequisite of
this universe is that the US and its junior
partners are also in command of the world's arms
manufacturing-marketing and their means of
transportation in the world of finance capital,
for example, International Monetary Fund (IMF),
the World Bank, and the European Central Bank. The
aforementioned overwhelming domination in the
material world necessitates its corollary in the
world of politics, international relations, the
offices and structure of the United Nations, the
sphere of diplomatic and ambassadorial
interrelations.
In pursuit of preserving
the world monopoly control by a few over the
world's affairs and its resources, Canada as one
of the main beneficiaries of the unipolar world,
in severing its relationship with Iran, used its
diplomatic tool with the aim of isolating Iran and
tilting the world balance of forces back toward
the West, which for more than a decade has been
shifting in favor of China, Russia, Iran and the
Arab masses.
In the first decade of the
twenty-first century (the beginning of the post US
era), Russia which after its downfall in 1989 was
excluded by NATO from the economic and
geopolitical affairs of the Middle East and the
Arab world in general, now is benefiting from the
unsuccessful US-NATO interventionist voluntarism
in Iraq and Afghanistan that coincided with great
losses of life (fatalities of 4500 in Iraq, and
over 2000 in Afghanistan) and a great amount of
treasures, and once again it is finding a space on
the side of the peoples of Iran and Syria, having
prevented the West from duplicating their criminal
experience in Libya in the new theatre of war in
Syria.
The longevity of US wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq and the inability of NATO,
headed by the United States, to bring the people
of those countries to their knees - accepting the
supremacy of the United States and Israel - the
Arab nations realized the vulnerability of the US
and their own capabilities in challenging the
world's status quo. The attacks currently taking
place on US embassies and today's uprisings in
Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and ten other countries are
the result of the US NATO policies of total
domination.
The struggle of the Arab
masses could be heard in their slogans against US
imperialism and their attacks on the symbol of
hatred, ie, US embassies as military fortresses in
the midst of the Arab cities. In the process of
the Arab Awakening, the Arab masses have realized
that rulers such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Ali
Abdullah Saleh of Yemen were the puppets of
US-UK-France and their financial backers.
Syrian conflict For more than a
year and a half the US, France, Britain, Canada,
using the UN and the Security Council, have been
attacking the legitimacy of the Syrian government,
planning to use NATO and a "No Fly Zone" similar
to the intervention in Libya, but were blocked by
Russia and China's vetoes against any overt
military action. Fortunately, not being able to
use the UN Chapter VII to intervene, the West has
been funding and aiding foreign mercenaries,
operating as part of the opposition. The US has
made no secret that the Obama administration has
been providing communications technology, while
US, Britain, and the European big powers are
financing the arms and ammunition, and some
reports say that Britain and Turkey, along with
the Arab Sheikdoms allied with the US provide
direct training and military intelligence.
The United States and Canada have placed
unilateral sanctions on Syria and hoped to
intensify sanctions on a broader scale by using UN
resolutions. However, that path has been
consistently blocked by the Russian and Chinese,
who are advocating resolution to the Syrian
conflict through diplomacy and dialogue between
the Syrian government and the opposition. Canada
openly stated that the cutting of relations with
Iran was directly connected to Iran's support for
Syria, and their act no doubt was intended to use
the sanctions as another tool of war.
The
Syrian opposition is very much similar to the
opposition in Libya - both promoted, funded,
trained and backed-up by the financial and
military arsenals and treasury of the major
imperialist countries. This trend of financing
NATO and its wars of intervention has been
continuing while unemployment, poverty and
homelessness is on the rise in all the
industrialized countries. To divert the attention
of their own people from the causes of their
misery and the lowering of their standard of
living, the White House, State Department and
doubtlessly Tel Aviv and Ottawa are pointing their
fingers at Iran, Syria, Yemen, North Korea and
many other countries in a long list too many to
mention here.
Listen to the daily
propaganda of CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Fox News; you will
receive the pungent smell of their hatred toward
the people of those countries who resist foreign
domination, but every time there is a resistance
to the onslaught of the Western countries, by the
masses of people, the US State Department
automatically attributes that to the specter of
"al-Qaeda", who is no one else except the shadowy
forces armed and financed by the US and old
colonial powers.
It was a disappointment
to the US when they realized that a great majority
of the people of Syria saw into the plot of
Washington, London and Paris: the partition of
their country. The security and armed forces of
Syria, with all the casualties they've endured
still steadfastly resisted and are driving the
enemies of that country into the border and arms
of Turkey, which in collaboration with the
reactionary Arab regimes, was turning into a
springboard of NATO'S design.
Support by
the Islamic Republic of Iran for Syria was like a
dagger coming down on the Turkish-NATO spine.
Canada kept a low profile in the attacks against
Libya, but in the case of Syria, has openly
demonstrated its wrath by severing its diplomatic
relations with Iran. Canada severed relations with
Syria when it closed its embassy in Damascus last
March (2012). By doing that, Canada, which
provided the US with foot-soldiers in US wars in
Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq,
reveals its servile character.
Aside from
the full engagement of the Canadian military
forces in the first and second world wars, Canada
has been involved in practically every imperialist
war against every struggle for liberation. During
the US war on Korea, 1951-1953, Canadian military
forces were an integral part of the US invading
forces, suffering 1,558 casualties. During the US
war on Vietnam (Nov. 1, 1955 - May 15, 1975),
Canada provided the US with billions of dollars
worth of war materials and supplies, with the
result that 110 Canadians were killed in Vietnam.
As usual Canadian military forces aggressed
against the people of Yugoslavia and the partition
of that country.
Just as in all other
wars, Canadian military forces, along with the US,
British, French and New Zealand, (the coalition of
the willing), have had their share of killing the
people of Iraq and Afghanistan. As we examine
history, we see that Canadian governments over the
last 100 years have stood on the side of the
imperialist forces against the countries
struggling for liberation or simply wanting to
maintain their sovereignty. [1]
Ardeshir Ommani, president of
the American Iranian Friendship Committee (AIFC),
is a writer and political analyst with a
background in political economy. The American
Iranian Friendship Committee (AIFC)
www.iranaifc.com email is: aifc@optonline.net
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
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