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France Blocks U.S. Pivot To Persia
France has been and is a major nuclear proliferator in the Middle East. While it worked and works to enable some countries to build nuclear weapons it wants to deny any and all civil nuclear capabilities to others. The primary reasons are greed and a certain craving for its former grandeur which today is no longer supported by the necessary economic and military means.
FAS: Nuclear Weapons – Israel
On 3 October 1957, France and Israel signed a revised agreement calling for France to build a 24 MWt reactor (although the cooling systems and waste facilities were designed to handle three times that power) and, in protocols that were not committed to paper, a chemical reprocessing plant. This complex was constructed in secret, and outside the IAEA inspection regime, by French and Israeli technicians at Dimona, in the Negev desert under the leadership of Col. Manes Pratt of the IDF Ordinance Corps.
Saudi Gazette, Oct 3, 2013 France ready to be KSA’s strategic partner in nuke, renewable energy
Speaking to the Saudi Gazette, the French Ambassador to the Kingdom said “the aim of this meeting is very clear, France has been the first country to sign government to government agreement on nuclear and energy because we do think that taking it into account the huge program the Saudi government wants to implement in the nuclear field and France has a lot to bring in terms of the best nuclear technology in the world.”
France 24 Hollande backs Israel on Iran nuclear threat
A day after Benjamin Netanyahu urged France to take a tough stance on Iran, French President François Hollande spoke to the Israeli Prime Minister by phone and promised French support.
Guardian Geneva talks end without deal on Iran's nuclear programme
Three gruelling days of high-level and high-stakes diplomacy came to an end in Geneva with no agreement on Iran's nuclear programme, after France blocked a stopgap deal aimed at defusing tensions and buying more time for negotiations.
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[D]iplomats at the talks were furious with the role of the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, whom they accused of breaking ranks by revealing details of the negotiations as soon as he arrived in Geneva on Saturday morning, and then breaking protocol again by declaring the results to the press before Ashton and Zarif had arrived at the final press conference.
A temporary deal in Geneva would have been the first step for a larger nuclear deal which then could have brought Iran "in from the cold". This would have been the start of a "Pivot to Persia" after which the U.S. would have balanced its difficult relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia with friendly relations with Iran. Without such a realignment in the Middle East the U.S. will be militarily and financially incapable of executing its plans for a pivot to Asia.
France blew up the historic deal and, despite earlier signals from France, the other "western" countries involved were not prepared for this and their foreign ministers incapable of handling French intransigeance. This disunity within the P5+1 group negotiating with Iran will hamper all further negotiations. Who can Iran negotiate with if there is no united opposition?
The current break down gives the U.S. Congress and the Netanyahoo lackeys therein a chance to add further sanctions on Iran by attaching them to next weeks National Defense Authorization Act. But the P5+1 disunity is, at least in the short term, positive for Iran. No one can accuse it now of not being willing to negotiate and of not actively seeking a compromise. The sanctions Congress will enact are third party sanctions where it will "punish" other countries for dealing with Iran. As it is obviously not Iran that is holding up a deal those third party countries will be quite unwilling to follow such a U.S. Congress diktat. The sanction regime will thereby break down. Slowly first, but then with ever increasing speed.
It is dubious that France, Saudi Arabia and Israel will be capable of holding up an Iran deal for more than a year or so. There is a historic logic in a U.S. and general "western" pivot to Persia as such a pivot would allow to disentangle itself from the capricious "allies" it currently has in the Middle East. The hostile reaction of the U.S. public towards the attempt of waging an open war on Syria was a sign that historic changes in the current alliances are unavoidable.
On Fox news commentary (article on Iran nuclear deal) there are more than 6,000 comments dissing Obama and praising….the French! Sometimes in a somewhat bewildered fashion, concluding that if the French have more sense than Obama, that just goes to show how rotten Obama is, how low he has sunk!
Whatever France’s reasons are for aligning to the Saudi-Israeli axis, or rather the anti-Assad and anti-Iran axis, Hollande is perhaps the most foolish politician around today.
Not only is he completely bereft of any political skills, he literally imho has a few screws loose. He lacks, amongst other things, basic logical reasoning, ex:
1. Leonarda, a 15-year-old Kosovar girl, was arrested by strong armed police on a school bus. Her parents finally (after years of procedures and complications) were under an expulsion order which some prefect decided to enforce, and they were all shipped off to Kosovo.
Humanitarians, associations, schools, parents, children and high schoolers (big demos), several factions in the Socialist party, all of the Left (to the left of the Socialists), went batshit. A fierce and very ugly media storm ensued. Leonarda appeared all over the media (not ethical imho.) Now such expulsions are very common in F: about 36 000 last year. F, when parents are expelled, expels the children along with them, so as not to break up the family (Human rights texts and the like.)
So what does Hollande do? He makes a presidential speech on the tee-vee super solemn and all…and invites Leonarda back to France!
The mind staggers. Leonarda has guts though – again, all over the media – she told him to stuff it while managing very minimal politeness and told him she would NEVER leave her family. Not only was the logic missing, but Hollande managed to get insulted in public by a 15 year-old victim!
2. The vaunted 75% tax on revenues above one million Euros (which is actually rather mild in comparison with say Switz.) that Hollande promised and has made him the brunt of the right and the likes of the Economist. So some bill was finally gotten together. Right on. The Constitutional Council axed it immediately. On what grounds? Equality facing the tax. F taxes households, not individuals. One can’t tax an individual (unless he is defined as a one-person household.) Households – families – with one large revenue would be penalised as compared to say families with the same earnings coming from more than one income. Apparently Hollande didn’t know the rules (he has never been married) or couldn’t figure out the math?
Might it have been a sneaky move to state he tried but failed, boo-hoo?
No – this is so basic even your Joe-6 saw it (and the internautes were on the case) or understands it when laid out. So, now the new idea is that biz. or the employer would pay the tax! That might (?), in principle (?), be legislated, but it is extremely bizarre, and would throw many Corps.. biz, into a whole new world…where you pay tax not on your earnings / profits / holdings (whatever shape, like property) but your costs!
So, as this is the Sunday funny ;), it looks like Hollande has a bit of a problem figuring out schemas that include tags like ‘friend’, ‘enemy’, ‘friend of an enemy’, ‘friend of two enemies’, ‘friend of a friend’, with little arrows etc.
OK it is not funny …but throws a light on these Monarchic Republics, so called-democracies…and shows that when decline is steep wild greedy thoughts and mad alliances take hold. Note, as a last point, that Hollande apparently listens to no-one, there is nobody there who can advise him effectively. That is all without, of course, going into deeper geo-politics.
Hollande is going to Israel next week. (I read.)
Posted by: Noirette | Nov 10 2013 11:59 utc | 4
Lysander;
“I did not say the SL does not *want* a deal, only that he knows there wont be one.”
Ok, so if he “wants” a deal then that deal which he found acceptable was what was on the table being negotiated, and it was rejected by France, NOT by Iran. Then we are back at what LOYAL and I were arguing. If the deal was acceptable to the leader, shouldn’t it be acceptable to us without any further objection or even hint of criticism? After all we are in absolute submission to his custody, are we not? His word is the final word which should not be argued any further ((فصلالخطاب, is it not? Then why doubt at all that this deal or any other deal accepted by our negotiating team is bad? We should be in absolute obedience to our leader and never doubt his judgement.
“He is showing it to the world, and more importantly he is showing it to the Iranian public. They are suffering under sanctions and they need to know, including the greens, that it is not the fault of their government.”
Yes I agree with you on that he is doing everything to make this deal go through and it is the West which does not allow it to go through (which sort of makes my first point). So yes, no one can say it is Iran’s intransingence which stops a “deal”. I doubt that the greens will ever get the point though.
LOYAL;
“Iran was not humiliated during imposed War. Saddam in the end gave up everything including changing The 1975 Algiers Accord.”
Mr. Khomeini begs to differ, he considered Iran’s capitulation to Saddam as a “cup of poison that he [Mr. Khomeini] had to drink”. It was NOT Iran which forced Saddam to accept the Algiers Accord, it was US forces which made him. Had he not been stupid enough to attack Kuwait and bring himself into a confrontation with US, he would not have been forced to accept Algiers Accord.
At the end of war, when we accepted the cease-fire, Iraq was holding Iranian national territory, so we accepted a cease-fire as a nation whose territory was under occupation (similar to the situation between Syria and Israel today). So don’t try to present it in any other way, it was a very humiliating defeat. If in the end we got away without losing territory it was not due to our wisdom and strength, it was due to Saddam’s stupid attack on Kuwait and the strength of the US armed forces.
“No ,I don’t trust any political, religious leader but I trust SL much more than likes of reformers, liberals, anarchists.”
Well if you trust SL then you should not question his judgement, correct? He trusts our negotiating team led by our “moderate” Zarif. So don’t doubt the deal that Zarif and our negotiating team are trying to push through or any deal that they would accept. If the leader trusts them then that means that the deal is flawless. You should not complain.
Posted by: Pirouz_2 | Nov 11 2013 15:58 utc | 66
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