Here we go again! Another entreaty by the IRI to the international community in order to save its own skin by setting forth its own version of a great bargain, when in reality it has nothing of great substance transact for the kind of value that it seeks in return. 

 Its arsenal of missiles if not raining hell on Ukraine have been batted out of the sky over Israel like one swats flies off the slices of watermelon in Ahvaz’s hot summer days! Its axis of resistance is broken, and the resistance itself like Mash-mamdali’s car is in the ditch. The only thing left of the bluster is some nuclear activity which can come to a screeching halt anytime Israel or the United States decide to take it out by force or bribe. Its oil can be cut off like before. All that IRI can do for now and in the near future is to spend its resources in pursuit of low-level violence through her remaining diminished proxies around the Middle East, hardly the kind of prowess that will command the attention or countenance of the West and IRI’s neighbors in the Persian Gulf to what it is proposing in the recent epistolary by Mohammad Javad Zarif titled “How Iran Sees the Path to Peace: The Islamic Republic Is Open to Negotiations –including With America,” published in Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/how-iran-sees-path-peace.

I am making the assumption that the piece in Foreign Affairs has the tacit, if not express, blessing of the Supreme Leader, without whose permission no one can have as much as a sip of water. Given the impending re-institution of the “maximum pressure” policy by the incoming Trump administration and its implications for regime change in Tehran makes this article’s timing more than just a proclamation on the part of the new Iranian presidential administration of Dr. Pezeshkian.

Let me start with the title itself, which reveals a mindset in Tehran that is devoid of any sense of reality. “Path to peace” for Iran and the region as a whole passes through Israel. Period. Full stop. Until the IRI recognizes the existence of the state of Israel there will be no such “peace.” Instead, Mr. Zarif proposes an unrealistic solution for a problem that he labels as the “underlying causes of regional unrest,” which he identifies as the “Israeli occupation.” He proposes that “the best way out of this century-long ordeal would be a referendum in which everyone living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – Muslims, Christians, and Jews – and Palestinians driven to diaspora in the twentieth century (along with their descendants) would be able to determine a viable future system of governance.” I am not sure how to take this prescription. Is he envisioning the disappearance of the state of Israel, or is he confident that an Israel will reemerge after all the votes are counted; if the former then how is that different from former Iranian president Mr. Ahmadinejad’s prediction about the erasure of Israel off the map?

It is this Israel-less vision that makes the veiled invitation to negotiations with the United States a non-sequitur. Imagining a Middle East without a state of Israel is just that, an imagining. As if to threaten the world if this vision is not realized, Mr. Zarif predicts that “the fighting and fury will continue until the occupation ends.” Perhaps fighting and fury will continue, but is the IRI willing to put its own survival on the line to side with the fighting and the fury in theaters increasingly out of his reach?

The IRI is under the delusion that it and the West  have shared challenges that if addressed could “even prompt Tehran and Washington to engage in conflict management rather than exponential escalation.” If the Biden administration was sheepish when it came to Iranian bluster and threats of escalation, the pro-Israel Trump administration will not be, especially now that the IRI’s capabilities have been shown to be lacking the vigor sufficient to back up the bravado. 

I am afraid this epistolary by Mr. Zarif is a hat-in-hand overture by the IRI offered in utter desperation, but with the typical Iranian misplaced bombast. I am reminded of a line from the Persian poet Naziri Neyshaburi (d. 1612/13) which goes something like this:

Dast-é tam’a cho pish-é kasān mikoni derāz/Pol basteh-y keh bogzari az āberu-yé khish.

As best as I can translate it: The hand thou stretcheth in cupidity be the bridge o’er which passeth thy dignity.