Why mediation with Iran is useless

No mediation between the United States and Iran is expected to avert war breaking out between the two sides. No mediator has the power to soften the positions of either party or convince them to wait for what future mediations could entail.

The war of words raging between the two is unreliable. It does not mean that war will happen tomorrow but tomorrow can bring unpleasant surprises for both sides.

The Iranians attempted to demonstrate what could happen to the region if the Americans were to strike at their country. Their pre-emptive acts were predictable. Four oil tankers were attacked near Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, as were oil pumping stations in Saudi Arabia and an improvised rocket landed in the vicinity of the US Embassy in Baghdad. All were linked by the US to Iran's Revolutionary Guard or Iraqi proxies.

Hezbollah is still to show the world how it would be participating in this war. The Lebanese are feeling they are inching closer to the edge of the precipice into which they would fall when war breaks out and Hezbollah drags Lebanon down with it.

All that has happened is a preparatory drill and many would be shocked if the preparations didn’t lead to something. All that Iran has been working on for the past three decades and the spending of billions of dollars belonging to the Iranian people must eventually bear fruit in the form of a front that will stand with it once the moment of its inevitable war with the world comes.

This war was ever present in the mind of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, on the day he linked the fate of the republic to the principle of exporting the revolution.

Iran is approaching its goal: a war that will engulf the region in flames if the world does not allow Iran to dominate the region and annex it according to the commandment of the imam, who will not rest easy in his grave if none of that happens.

For the United States, this amounts to the wishes of lawless brigands who do not recognise international law, state sovereignty, the world’s need for a region that acts as a global reservoir of energy or the people's right to choose a political system and lifestyle they deem appropriate.

Since Iran views the United States as a cowboy state, it is counting on a successful dialogue between cowboys and brigands. That is what enabled it to dominate Iraq. If it were not for the United States needing Iran to carry out the dirty ethnic cleansings that Iraq has witnessed, Iran would not be threatening today with Iraq likely to be one of its battlefields against the Americans.

Did the United States not give up Iraq to Iran under the leadership of former President Barack Obama?

What the Iranians should realise is that the United States’ policy has changed. Everything in the world has changed even. Donald Trump is not Obama. The United States is no longer the United States. The world is no longer the same. Why doesn’t Iran change then?

Mediation would be useless between a party that changes and another that believes that its guardianship over a vital part of that world is valid. What is the purpose of such mediation anyway?

That mediation pretends to prevent war but, in reality, the mediation aims to save the Iranian regime and protect and support its project of regional domination as well as its continuous efforts to spread strife and chaos in Arab societies.

That is what the Arab leaders whose countries and societies are targeted by the Iranian threat should be aware of. Iran is not the kind of neighbour that we need to find excuses for what it has done; it is an enemy that must be punished.

If Iran does not get its punishment through a war that would restore it to its natural size, the entire region will collapse. That is because Iran only plans to turn the region into camps for its militias that are preparing for Mahdi’s expected reappearance.

Farouk Yousef is an Iraqi writer. His article was translated and adapted from the Arabic. It was initially published by the London-based Al Arab newspaper.