The tangled web of Iran appeasement

It’s no longer Russia v Ukraine and the west. It’s Russia and Iran v Ukraine and the west

By Melanie Phillips

One reason why the western public has been so indifferent to the threat posed by the Iranian regime is the widespread belief that only Israel is at serious risk.

This, of course, is not only pernicious but absurd. The Iranian Islamic revolutionary regime declared war against the west as soon as it came to power in 1979. It has pursued ever since a relentless war against western interests; its fingerprints have been all over every major global terrorist atrocity; it has killed American, British and other coalition forces in Iraq; it has a programme of building inter-continental ballistic missiles with a target range of Europe and America; it is a malign and anti-western presence from Afghanistan to Yemen.

No matter. In America, the Biden administration — like its parent Obama administration — appears fantastically to believe that empowering Iran will somehow draw its sting and produce greater stability in the region. This delusion is exceeded only by the related fiction parroted by the Bidenites that the nuclear deal will prevent Iran from getting the bomb — whereas in fact it would guarantee it, albeit with at best a short delay.

In Britain, the political establishment has told itself that renewing the nuclear deal with Iran would somehow empower its liberals who, the British claim, lurk within the regime. The idea that there’s an urgent need to empower instead the oppressed people of Iran, whose united strength could actually bring the regime down, inspires little other than a yawn.

The uprising against the regime that’s been taking place across Iran for some six weeks now, triggered by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini for the crime of wearing her hijab in a way not permitted by the notorious morality police, has been covered only fitfully in the British media — and has elicited a deafening silence from the west’s self-obsessed and posturing feminists.

So the fact that a nuclear deal would not only allow Iran to get nuclear weapons with at best a limited delay but would also funnel billions in sanctions relief into its coffers with which it could ramp up its infernal activities has left people cold.

Now, however, there’s a new reality: an “axis of evil” between Russia and Iran over Ukraine. …

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