The Tehran Declaration: a historic opportunity for Turkey and Brazil

The 12 to 2+1 “victory” against Iran obtained through blackmail, pressure and threats by the United States in the United Nations Security Council makes it crystal clear to all, if anyone outside the usual gullible circles still believed otherwise, that the United States and the two former colonial powers with the longest rap-sheet of meddling in Middle East affairs, France and the United Kingdom, have chosen the path of confrontation with Iran. They are joined by Russia and China, each for its own motives and both hoping to manipulate this confrontation to obtain trade advantages in Iran and in the Middle East: Russia needs to keep its main potential competitor for the billionaire – and spendthrift – European energy market busy elsewhere than developing its energy sector, and China hopes  the Iranians, subject to all sorts of restrictions, will come to depend more and more on its only trade partner that has enough political, economical and military clout to give the sanctions the interpretation it wants and trade with them as it pleases. Neither of them, with significant Islamic populations in their own territories and vassal states, is interested in having a Muslim confessional state living in peace and thriving – and serving as a bad example for the others. And both nourish the illusion that, once it is set in motion,  they will be able to manipulate meddling trio’s propaganda and war machine to their own ends, and that they will stop it at will once it loses its usefulness for them.

The nuclear-fuel swap agreement  negotiated with Iran by Brazil and Turkey shows that the current Iranian leadership is willing to talk. The government led by Ahmadinejad, despite its firebrand and often cocky rhetoric, is the most well-disposed towards negotiations with the U.S. since the revolution that ended the Shah’s rule in 1979. However, in yet another demonstration that the meddling trio is not interested in finding a peaceful solution but in exacerbating conflict, they not only refuse to negotiate with Tehran but push their provocative stance to the point of promoting as leaders of an alleged “democratic movement” the butchers of Tehran, Mousavi and his puppet-master Rafsanjani, responsible for the deaths of more than 10,000 lay opponents of the religious rulers of Iran in 1988 and much more opposed to any talks with the so-called “Western” powers than Ahmadinejad or the current Majlis majority.

One can safely say that nothing said about Iran by the meddling trio and the accomodating international press is true. Which demonstrates, by exclusion, that the alleged secret Iranian military nuclear program is most likely another lie, nothing but an excuse, like the one used against Iraq in 2003, to set the stage for a military intervention.

Brazil and Turkey cannot yield to the temptation of presenting their rapprochement with the Iranians as a selfless initiative for “peace among peoples.” Both have very concrete interests in trying to prevent the escalation of an aggression against Iran, the Turks to assert their own leadership in the region and to avoid a military conflict that would interfere in their business and jeopardize their own hard-won domestic stability; and the Brazilians to defend their own right to a peaceful nuclear program free from the supervision and control of the nuclear powers, whose standards change according to convenience, as was clearly seen in the Iranian case – what is good against Iran today may be used against Brazil tomorrow.

The Tehran Declaration has served – and still serves – not only as a negotiation initiative against the project of launching a military intervention against Iran, but also as a rallying point for all non-nuclear countries against the guardianship and control of their technological development by the nuclear powers. It’s a common cause, now. Turkey and Brazil can no longer be content with defending the validity of their agreement with Iran, about which there is no doubt; they must instead take it to its logical consequences. They can’t stop midway, they can’t try to compromise and move on as if nothing had happened, as “moral champions” in a contest the prize of which is not a cup or a medal, but a massacre, a conflict with potentially devastating outcomes,  it’s the certainty of curtailment for the technological development of middle powers such as Brazil and Turkey and all the so-called “developing” world. Turkey and Brazil  must now take advantage of the ascendance and leadership they conquered with the Brazil-Iran-Turkey agreement and their “No” vote at the UN Security Council and make the best of their being non-permanente members of that body to denounce the imposition of sanctions against Iran as the path to war, not to a peaceful solution. They must expose the lies and the manipulations, of which they have the proof, used to force a “favorable” vote in the June 9 decision, they must accuse the USA-France-UK trio of trying to keep their crumbling control over the Middle East by maintaining a state of perpetual conflict that, since the arrival of the Royal Navy and the Napoleonic armies in the 18th century, have kept Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Jews and the rest of the world subject to their whims. Together with all nations aspiring to pursue their own development free from external meddling, they must make it absolutely clear that they will oppose military intervention against Iran by all means, and that an attack against Iran will be an attack against them. They must take this opportunity to force the reform of the anti-democratic structure of the United Nations Organisation and its subsidiary bodies, especially the Security Council, and make sure this kind of manipulation  never happens again.

Brazil and Turkey are facing a historic opportunity that requires courage and decision to be taken. Losing it will mean a defeat whose consequences will go far beyond the mere loss of political prestige, both domestically and internationally, and which will forever mark those responsible for it.