Few days before a meeting we consider as the last-ditch one, Tehran announced it would trigger works for a second enrichment centre and then missile firing that would threaten Israel and the West’s Arab allies, those that provide it in oil.

On account of more serious issues, Tehran has been given a severe reprimand in the past. But this time, none of the great powers which met within the Six commented those firings except from France which ventured a release via the Quai d’Orsay. However in the meantime much media-staged Bernard Kouchner spoke to Europe 1 in order to express his optimism regarding the possible positive outcome of the 1st October’s meeting in Geneva. According to him, this will be the beginning of a long series of meetings to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis.

By firing missiles and making the appropriate speech, Teheran hoped for triggering anger but it received solely congratulations for its appeasement will. There’s here no sign of error of judgement from Americans or even from Kouchner. The Westerners’ true present stake is to attract mullahs to round-table discussions. However if this objective appears to be common, it is not for the same reasons. French are Iran’s economic partners and they suffer from American sanctions . They hope for the end of the crisis in order to resume their very profitable activities of oil purchasing at a price that is equivalent to a quarter of the market price.

American motivations are quite different : they don’t have any business relation with Iran but they wish to get to a strategic agreement with this regime in order to reach via Iran Central Asia’s gas wealth and also use the active and seducing Islamism of Hezbollah leaders to encourage some Islamic separatist unrest in China’s Western regions whose population is Muslim.

Those both competing powers, France and the United States, show the same interest in avoiding too heavy sanctions against this regime because it matches with their commercial objectives. Other members of the Six are in the same mood all the more that the regime is getting more and more fragile since Iranians’ upraising and it cannot cope with a very heavy sanction such as an embargo on gasoline. So they do anything to avoid coming to that.

Such necessity has two endemic inconvenient . The first inconvenient is that the kindness drip which is proper to the Six is not what Tehran needs. As we specified it in our latest analysis, Tehran wants on no account to dialogue peacefully with the Six such as it is mentioned by Kouchner but this dialogue implies de facto some appeasement with the United States which is par excellence Israel’s custodian. Such appeasement is impossible because Tehran pinned its power on a head-on opposition with Israel. It employs such opposition to press-gang the Arab street and then use it to destabilise the region and actually more the US Arab allies than Israel. If it would switch its slogans and its attitude, it would deprive itself from its sole efficient mean of pressure on the United States.

Consequently despite the risks that are implied by those sanctions, Tehran must go on. Then it wavers between tactical back-tracking such as the 1st October’s meeting and a whole catalogue of provocations so to make the meeting fall through, please the Arab street and why not make Europeans retreat thanks to the bluff of a possible war in the Persian Gulf. This is besides its sole option. That’s why the more the Six will make peaceful efforts the more Tehran will be in a state of unrest. When it will reach some threshold due to the exhaustion of its usual provocations, it will need to find other ones and then we can fear the worse.

The second inconvenient : we ignore which answer the West would give faced with this escalation it refuses ? Yesterday, in order to calm things down, the same article -with the same witness, Ray Takyeh, a regime’s lobbyist- was published in the Figaro and also in the New York Times. This article dealt with the absence of sanctions’ absolute efficiency ! If a consensus exists to preserve this useful regime, there’s none available so to ditch the same regime that despite its use remains much incompatible with the projects each one thinks up. The worse is not solely in Tehran.

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The french version of this article :
 Iran : On peut craindre le pire !
 (29 SEPTEMBRE 2009)