Did Syria deal defeat the US? UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (left) meets Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Illustrative. Photo Courtesy of UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe.
Well, Iran has learned one thing from Syria so far: The West is beatable. That was the rhetoric coming from Iran on Monday after the United States and Europe shifted from plans to strike Syria over its chemical weapons attack on its own people. Instead, the West and Russia have agreed to get Syria to give up their chemical weapons.
While that may sound like a small victory for the West, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) said it was actually another defeat. “The latest defeat and failure of the enemies and the arrogant powers against the resistance [Iran and its allies] took place in Syria, where their plot for military intervention failed and their top agenda fell flat similar to the other plots of theirs,” Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari was quoted by the Fars News Agency as saying.
This isn’t very good news for us, since one of the main concerns about the Syria situation is how rogue states such as Iran interpreted the situation there. The hope is that a tough response to Syria and the full removal of their chemical weapons would serve as an example for Iran to give up its nuclear weapons plans.
But instead, Iran sounds like they aren’t concerned by the West’s threats of force against Syria. Rather, they sound more like criminals who are getting away with murder.
In fact, according to Jafari, things are going well for Iran and its allies across the Middle East. “We are witnessing that the Islamic Revolution’s resistance front is moving on its path crushingly in the occupied Palestinian territories, Iraq and Lebanon,” Fars quoted Jafari as saying.
Iran is allied with Syria’s brutal regime and Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and supports Palestinian terrorists in an ongoing cold war with Israel and the West. The US has also long accused Iran of backing terrorists in Iraq as well.
In other words, the bad guys aren’t sounding very contrite right now, and that means they may be less likely to compromise in the wake of America’s backtracking in Syria. It may just be bluster, but if it’s really what they believe, that will increase the risk of real war and of terrorism against your country. In other words, so far so bad.
(By Joshua Spurlock, www.themideastupdate.com, September 16, 2013)