Al Baradei at the receiving end

I feel sorry for the head of UN nuclear watchdog, Mohammad Al Baradei, for the rebuttal of his attempt to reason amid growing madness. Furious Paris and Washington reacted angrily to his remarks on Iran while delivering his report on its nuclear programme to the UN.

Al Baradei stressed on the significance of an agreement with Tehran to clear outstanding issues with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and tried to diffuse tension with Iran based on suspicion.

But the French and American attacks on Al Baradei came, as it seems, in response to his remarks in a CNN interview in which he criticised Israel and the US of failing to provide any evidence that Syria is developing a clandestine nuclear activity.

He described the Israeli raid on Syria as "taking the law in their hands", ie acting then looking for pretexts. Earlier, the IAEA head brought on himself the wrath of the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, when he warned the West of hyping the Iranian nuclear threat as Iran is years away from producing a bomb if it sought that.

Rice asked Al Baradei to leave politics and diplomacy to its professionals and stick to technical issues assigned to his agency.

Technical, diplomatic, or political - no illusions there that IAEA or the UN as a whole would be able to avert an attack on Iran, if US and its culprits decided. Exactly the same as an Israeli attack in Syria went fine by the so-called International Community.

Fabricated

Al Baradei wants to avoid being used, with his agency, in building a fabricated pretext to attack Iran. Sure he still remembers the build-up to the war to invade and occupy Iraq, when he and Hans Blix - Chief Weapons Inspector for the UN at the time - were shut up watching faked photos displayed by humiliated then US secretary of state Colin Powell.

Blix was bullied by the Americans to stop talking about the lack of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq, and as later said was literally blackmailed and threatened with tarnishing his reputation. Baradei, Nobel Peace Prize winner with IAEA in 2005, wouldn't fancy being in that position again.

If the French see that Iran, contrary to IAEA information, is so close to acquiring the bomb, they don't need evidence - former British prime minister Tony Blair told us before that Iraq can acquire it in 45 minutes and got away with it.

So, no worry about the evidence and information, as all can be made to suit the goals. When it comes to goals, I've never swallowed the widely perceived assumption that those who planned and executed the unlawful regime-change wars in Afghanistan and Iraq miscalculated the results and were surprised by the aftermath of their actions.

Whatever the reasons for such wars, nobody in Washington or London was expecting a better outcome.

Forget the rhetoric about combating terrorism and spreading democracy - it's a black joke with more totalitarianism and corruption.

Main allies

If we agree that the US is now the only superpower and leader of the world, with one of its main allies Great Britain where almost all major international strategies are brewed, we'd have to assume that what's going on in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Lebanon is related to what might be set for Iran and Syria.

About a quarter of a century ago, the Horn of Africa region was the focus of interest for the big powers, and since then it's living an internal conflict keeping it weak and fragmented - short of complete meltdown.

Such a state of affairs was called Protracted Low Intensity Conflict by the former national security adviser and known American strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Targeting Iran, whether by a direct strike or strangulating sanctions is another step in completing the belt of fire from Pakistan to Lebanon.

The two ends of the belt of fire are already mired in political instability and vulnerable to a large scale internal conflict with little outside induction. Syria is considered an easy job, either through regime change or Israeli military action.

The spark of controlled fire in that belt would be a hot buffer, on one side encapsulating the sources of oil in the Gulf - supposedly without igniting it - and on the other side keeping the strategic "soft belly" of Russia and China in check.

That might be a far-fetched analysis, possibly faced with the counter argument that it's a philosophical interpretation of stupid ventures and miscalculated policies. Yet, it's a valid projection if any logic is there behind what the US-led West is doing in this region.

Dr Ahmad Mustafa is a London-based Arab writer.