Taking Self-Delusion to the Next Level

The Iran nuclear deal has brought out the worst in much of the Western world, including greed, anti-Semitism, and the unsurpassed ability to rationalize just about anything.

Take, for instance, the ludicrous comment by British Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond that the current Iranian regime is displaying a “more nuanced” approach to Israel than its predecessors. The poor guy was looking for some way to justify being the first Western power to come running to Tehran to open an embassy (note that the British honor Iran’s choice of a capital city, but not Israel’s) after the signing of the nuke deal, despite Iran’s pledge to obtain the bomb and wipe Israel off the map.

He had to find some way to reconcile British civility with its embarrassing rush to establish ties with the most evil regime on earth, and so he discovered Iran’s “nuanced” approach. Insofar as Iran’s threat to stability in the region, to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and its sponsorship of terror groups Hamas and Hizbullah, his capacity for self-delusion set new records.

“What we’re looking for is behavior from Iran, not only towards Israel but towards other players in the region, that slowly rebuilds their sense that Iran is not a threat to them,” he suggested, as if he, or anyone else, understood a word of what he was saying.

Of course, Iran was having none of it. Hossein Sheikholeslam, adviser for international affairs to the Iranian Parliament’s speaker, made it crystal clear that “our positions against the usurper Zionist regime have not changed at all; Israel should be annihilated and this is our ultimate slogan.”

So much for nuance.

Switzerland likewise embarrassed itself last week when its ambassador to Iran, in an effort to play up to the Iranians and get a chunk of their business for the Swiss people, displayed a childish cartoon depicting two doves relieving themselves on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s head.

Ambassador Giulio Haas showed the image during a speech to hundreds of Swiss and Iranian businesspeople at a Zurich hotel.

The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) apologized for the “questionable cartoon,” which it tsk-tsked as “tasteless.” But it didn’t say a thing about his far more offensive, and dangerous, observation that Iran is the “pole of stability in a very, very unsafe region.”

What could possibly convince an ambassador from a country that is known for its cool logic and intelligence that Iran represents stability in the Middle East? Greed. He was urging Swiss businesses to move quickly to do business with Iran, a potentially lucrative market with a population of 80 million.

While it’s nice, but pointless, that the Swiss Foreign Ministry apologized for the offensive cartoon, it would have been more meaningful if it had disavowed the government from the ridiculous statement on Iran’s contribution to stability, and fired the person who made it. But that couldn’t happen because the ambassador was faithfully representing the delusional views of his government.

Germany isn’t in the same league as Britain and Switzerland when it comes to issuing logic-defying statements. Chancellor Angela Merkel supports the deal because she believes it will keep Iran from nuclear weapons. She also argues that if Tehran violates the terms of the agreement, sanctions can be restored.

The arguments are wrong because, among other problems, the nuclear agreement’s supervision mechanism allows Iran to determine when inspectors can enter suspect sites, and because once sanctions are gone, greed will make them impossible to restore. But this is not the same as describing Iran as nuanced in its approach to Israel or as a pole of stability in the Middle East.

(On the other hand, Merkel is guilty of gross insensitivity in trying to bring Israeli-Argentinian conductor Daniel Barenboim, who is to the extreme left on the political spectrum and virulently anti-Israel, to conduct the German Philharmonic during her upcoming visit to Tehran.)

In the United States there are those claiming that Iran won’t spend the expected $150 billion in post-sanctions revenue on advanced weapons that jeopardize Israel and the West, but on improving the welfare of its people. Considering that Iran has wasted no time in closing some very large military deals with Russia and that totalitarian regimes are remarkably unconcerned about the welfare of their people, the position is similarly an exercise in self-deception.

The bottom line is that no country in the world — not Switzerland, not Britain, not Germany, not the United States — would have accepted the deal had they been the designated target for Iran’s nukes. And none could have found such creative justifications for it, if not for the huge profits to be made.

As Emmanuel Nachshon, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, put it, “Greed begets attempts to grovel before the Iranian regime, with attendant loss of basic sense and self-respect.”

This article appeared in print in the September 2nd, 2015 edition of Hamodia.