Tehran Institute For International Studies tiis
The unprovoked criminal aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran has further deepened the crisis in international relations already taken to unprecedented extremes by the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. Telesur has cited a report by the Harvard University Dataverse platform which puts the number of people missing in Gaza since October 7th 2023 at 377,000. Together with the 56,000 deaths formally registered by the Palestinian authorities, this implies that the Zionist genocide in Gaza has claimed the lives of more than 430,000 people, about half of them children.
This unimaginable human catastrophe had already demonstrated the complete collapse of the United Nations system to which Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega referred on June 23rd when he said that the UN is making a mockery of humanity and that it should disappear. In addition, as Comandante Daniel explained
“There are a number of organizations in the United Nations that serve only as instruments of Empire, to choke and strangle those Peoples who strive for Sovereignty, for Well-being, for Peace.”
After all, the UN system has its main headquarters in the principal US and European cities. For decades, its component agencies and organisms have been deliberately co-opted and corrupted by the ruling classes of the West in support of the various forms of their ruthless aggression against majority world countries resisting their domination. Thus, many international institutions reinforce the neocolonial advantage enjoyed by Western countries derived from centuries of conquest, genocide and slavery against the peoples of the majority world.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, commented a few days ago that
“The West exerts great influence over the secretariats of international organizations. In some cases, it is, in effect, as if they had been privatized… Western personnel in these bodies, from the UN onwards, often ignore the principles of neutrality and the prohibition of receiving instructions from any national government.”
In fact, Foreign Minister Lavrov’s comment acknowledges a reality that has been getting progressively worse since the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.
Since that fatal historic moment, the collaboration of multilateral organizations and the so-called non-governmental sector around the world has intensified, financed directly and indirectly by the Western ruling elites to serve the objectives of their governments’ foreign policy. In Nicaragua, with the suppression of the country’s illegal coup-promoting NGOs, the government has mostly eliminated the imperialist intervention machinery in the country. Subsequently, with its withdrawal from disingenuous multilateral organizations such as UNESCO, the FAO and the UNHCR, Nicaragua’s government took another essential step in defense of its national sovereignty.
The North American and European elites have always abused their control of multilateral organizations so as to devise pretexts for various forms of aggression, including terrorism, against countries that defend their sovereignty. For example, in 1998 and 1999 the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe allegedly served to monitor impartially the conflict in Kosovo. In fact, its members often acted in support of ethnic cleansing against the Serb population. Their reports also justified the NATO bombing of Serbia for several months in 1999, which killed thousands of Serbian civilians.
In Ukraine, following the coup in Kiev in 2014, members of the OSCE served as spies to facilitate the Ukrainian regime’s genocidal attacks against its Russian-speaking population during the conflict in Donbass. Another notorious example is the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons which was manipulated by NATO governments to falsely condemn the government of Syria for having used lethal chemicals against civilians. The OPCW’s false accusations served as an important pretext to justify both Western bombings and missile attacks against Syria and the financial and military support to the terrorist extremist forces which finally overthrew the Syrian government last year.
The International Atomic Energy Agency followed this pattern of bad faith as an accomplice to the criminal Israeli aggression of June 13th against Iran. The day before the attack, it issued a resolution dishonestly accusing Iran of failing to fulfill its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The subsequent attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities not only directly violated international law but also violated the IAEA’s own resolutions on protection of nuclear infrastructure. However, in a totally despicable and shameful way, the IAEA has not condemned the attacks.
Even worse than these serious failures, the Iranian FARS news agency has reported that the Iranian authorities accuse the IAEA of having passed confidential information to Israel. The quoted official commented,
“The IAEA has become an instrument that serves the goals of the Zionist regime.”
It is alleged that, with this confidential information, on June 13th, the Israeli authorities organized the terrorist assassination with guided rockets of several Iranian nuclear scientists along with members of their families and neighboring families. These latest killings of Iranian nuclear scientists were the most recent in a series of similar killings carried out since 2010 by Israel and the US using car bombs or snipers.
Now Iran’s parliament has passed a law suspending the country’s cooperation with the IAEA. Iran’s Foreign Minister explained that
“The Parliament of Iran has voted in favor of halting cooperation with the IAEA until the safety of our nuclear activities can be guaranteed… The IAEA and its director general are fully responsible for this sordid situation. Rafael Grossi’s insistence on visiting the bombed sites under the pretext of safeguards is meaningless and possibly even has malign intentions.”
In the end, the American and European elites and their vassal state Israel did not achieve any of the objectives of their aggression against Iran. They did not overthrow the government. They did not destroy the Iranian nuclear program. They did not destroy Iran’s ability to launch missiles. Nor they did destroy the essential role of Iran in supporting the Axis of Resistance against the illegal occupation of Palestine by the Zionist regime. Nor were they able to defend Israel from Iran’s just retribution. For the first time in its history, Israel and its occupying forces in Palestine suffered massive destruction of their economic and military infrastructure.
Iran has protected its nuclear program and will continue its legitimate development, only now without the interference of the Western powers through the unfair intervention of the IAEA. The Western powers do not know where Iran’s uranium will be located making them unable to attack the enrichment program again, which is a sovereign right of Iran for the civilian uses it contemplates. So, as a direct result of their unprovoked attacks, the collective West and Israel are at a greater disadvantage than they were before the war they unleashed against Iran, when they could impose their dictates through the IAEA.
The Western chorus to justify its criminal aggression against Iran has been “Israel has the right to defend itself” or “Iran cannot be allowed to enrich uranium”. However, the entire majority world can see that it was Israel and its US patrons that attacked Iran, not the other way around. Also, the entire majority world recognizes that Iran is fully entitled under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for civilian use. So the declarations of the US and European governments signify both their categorical rejection of international law and an admission of their guilt of the supreme international crime which is how the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal characterized the use of unprovoked military aggression.
To counter Western bad faith, for more than twenty years the majority world has been developing new international structures based on mutual benefit, equality and respect for the interests of all countries. The declarations of majority world organizations such as BRICS+ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization always insist on the primacy of international law. However, it has been constantly demonstrated during the last decades that the ruling elites of the collective West are certainly going to continue to act outside of all law, flouting their commitments as members of the United Nations.
The recent NATO summit in the Hague, the Netherlands, and the repeated statements of its Secretary General, Mark Rutte, have made it very clear that the collective West will continue its aggression against Russia, against Iran and is developing its policy of aggression against China. As Comrade Maria Zakharova of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation commented,
“The Summit in The Hague consolidated NATO’s return to its ‘roots’, to the original meaning of its existence. Again, just as during the Cold War, the motivation lies precisely in confronting our country.”
The NATO summit coincided with the SCO defense ministers’ summit in Qingdao, China, which included representatives from China, India, Iran, Pakistan and Russia.
While NATO countries promote conflict with Russia, Iran and China, the focus of the SCO defense summit was on how to make progress in ensuring peace and stability in the Eurasian region. Chinese spokesman Zhang Xiaogang affirmed the importance of “building a common house characterized by solidarity and mutual trust, peace and tranquility, prosperity and development, good neighborliness and friendship, and equity and justice, thus contributing to building a community with a shared future for humanity.” The contrast with the nihilistic militarism of NATO could not be stronger.
The attacks on Iran have highlighted the bad faith and maladroitness of the collective West. They made false offers of negotiations with Iran and took advantage of Iranian good faith to launch deadly terrorist actions inside Iran along with multiple missile bombardments launched from Israeli warplanes with logistical support from NATO countries. The criminal unprovoked aggression and vile deception practiced against Iran repeat the deception, aggression and terrorism practiced by the NATO countries against Russia since the end of the Cold War.
The result of all the bad faith and ineptitude of the collective West is that no one in the majority world respects its leaders or trusts their word. Everyone knows any agreement signed with their governments is worthless. As Che famously said
“You can’t trust imperialism even a little bit, like so… not at all!”
And as Comandante Daniel Ortega has also said
“Don’t drop your guard, as I was telling our Comrades, don’t let your guard down, I said, don’t be trusting, because the enemy is the same as the one Andrés Castro cast his stone against 167 years ago… He hasn’t changed!”
Note: Andres Castro is a Nicaragua national hero who in 1856, at the Battle of San Jacinto, having no more ammunition, struck down an attacking yankee soldier at close quarters with a stone.
By: Stephen Sefton
Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
