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July
31, 2002 9:00 a.m.
Propping
Up the Terror Masters
Europe's
Solana on tour.
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on
Javier Solana, Europe's very own foreign minister, is on a foreign tour,
and he stopped off in Tehran to show the flag of continental appeasement.
The Europeans just don't see why they should cut themselves off from lucrative
oil contracts — even if they have to pay outrageous commissions to
the ruling ayatollahs and their bagmen — just because the regime
oppresses its subjects, trains, funds, and arms the world's most dangerous
terrorists, and hails the slaughter of Jews by suicide terrorists. In
the Brussels view of things, that's somebody else's problem, certainly
not theirs.
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The
Europeans have gladly discarded their feelings of responsibility for the
destruction of the European Jews, so they feel no moral obligation to
sacrifice their slightest chance for gain merely because it involves dealing
with monsters like Khamenei and Rafsanjani. Moreover, it gives them the
chance to tweak our nose, which Solana did at his press conference in
Iran, when he smugly observed that Europe and America had different approaches
to countries like the Islamic Republic. The Americans go for confrontation
while we prefer engagement and dialogue, he lectured.
At
the event, he got nothing. Even he was forced to point out to the Iranians
that it would be better if they were less aggressive in their support
for the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah, and if they eased up a bit on crushing
the Iranian people. The result was a torrent of insult from Khamenei's
newspaper, and French television declared the meeting a failure.
The
Europeans are in grave danger of being hoisted on their own selfish and
shortsighted petards in the Middle East; that is likely to follow our
defeat of the terror masters in Tehran, Baghdad, and Damascus. European
oil companies — most notably the British, French, and Italians —
have multibillion-dollar contracts that make Enron and WorldCom accounting
look like the model of transparency. Big commissions and kickbacks go
to the tyrants? European bank accounts, and the leaders of the newly freed
countries will assuredly not forget that British Petroleum, Elf, and Eni
are big backers of the evil regimes. If the Europeans were as clever as
they think they are, they would be taking out insurance today by giving
support to the opposition forces instead of sending their appeasers on
a hopeless mission to achieve some sort of détente.
This
is not idle speculation. Over the weekend I spent many hours on an Internet
telephone chat room, talking with Iranians all over the world, including
many inside the country. And one of their most frequent questions was
whether the United States would consider the current oil contracts to
be legitimate once the regime is overthrown. Their inclination is clearly
to declare them void.
Perhaps
this was in the back of Solana's mind when he insisted on meeting with
a "reformist" parliamentarian who faces trial and prison in
the near future. If so, it was a feeble gesture. At a minimum, he should
have called for the release of the scores of students, journalists, and
intellectuals who have recently been sent into the depths of the country's
prisons and torture chambers. Had he wanted to take a real stand for freedom,
he would have echoed President Bush's words: The regime is illegitimate
and the "reformers" are either frauds or impotent. The future
belongs to the Iranian people.
Such
a step would have been a real triumph of Realpolitik. It would have driven
home the pariah status of the mullahs, encouraged them to get out before
the situation becomes even more violent, and built up credit with the
successor governments.
But
the Europeans are not up to this kind of statecraft. They seemed doomed
to lose their standing with the peoples of the Middle East at the same
time they unnecessarily prolong those peoples' agony by reinorcing the
tyrants' illusion that they still have powerful friends in the civilized
world.
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