Surveying the anti-government protests in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, as well as the refusal of the Syrian revolutionaries to surrender, the Canadian journalist Terry Glavin writes:
There is a revolution going on. It has been underway in fits and starts for years. It unites Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, and Iraqis. Its object is the sundering of a bloody Khomeinist despotism that runs from the [Islamist dictatorship] in Tehran through the Assad regime in Damascus to Hizballah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and the Hashd al-Shaabi militias in Iraq, which have now insinuated themselves into every branch of the Iraqi state.
It’s all very well for Canada’s Justin Trudeau and the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson and Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron to want to force Tehran to get back in line with Barack Obama’s nuclear-rapprochement arrangement, which Donald Trump has renounced. But the genie will not be put back in the bottle so easily.
It was Obama’s nuclear deal that freed up [Iran’s] Quds Force to enforce its ghastly Khomeinist hegemony throughout the region in the first place, and now, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani is warning that European soldiers in the region, not just American soldiers, may soon find themselves on the Quds Force’s target list. Counseling a return to the Obama-era status quo is not a call to de-escalation. Don’t believe it.
It is profoundly ill-advised. It may suit the purposes of some Canadian and European firms that are scraping for a place for themselves in the Iranian economy, much of which is owned and controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But it would be a profound betrayal of the people of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, who have already known little but betrayal from six successive Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States, and from the “West” generally, Canada included.
Read more on National Post: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-glavin-theres-a-revolution-going-on-in-the-mideast-why-doesnt-the-west-see-that