Addressing the United Nations on Wednesday, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran delivered a particularly absurd address that presented Iran as the solution to problems that Iran itself has created.
Rouhani claimed that what Iran really wants is to “strengthen consolidation among all the nations with common interests in the Persian Gulf and the Hormuz region.” Pointing out that freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf has recently been “seriously endangered” — whose fault is that? — Rouhani decided to “invite all the countries directly affected by the developments in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to the … ‘Hormuz Peace Endeavor,'” which he said is about fostering “peace, stability, progress and welfare.”
What a joke.
Iran is the nation responsible for endangering the freedom of navigation that it claims to want to fix. It is Iran that has launched multiple attacks on oil tankers in international waters, Iran that downed U.S. drones operating in international airspace, and Iran that fired missiles and drones into Saudi Arabia.
These actions were designed to extort the international community into yielding to Iran’s desire for U.S. sanctions relief. But at a most basic level, they are acts of aggression which undercut peace and security in the Persian Gulf. Rouhani knows this, of course, but his deception is part and parcel of Iran’s foreign policy. As long as Iran offers a thin pretense of deniability, it can consolidate its anti-American allies in the U.N.
Still, Rouhani’s theater wasn’t done there. He next asserted that Iran holds firm to the U.N.’s “two fundamental principles of non-aggression and non-interference in the domestic affairs of each other.”
This might be news to the peoples of Israel or Iraq or Yemen or Lebanon or the United States.
Rouhani had more to say. In a statement of extraordinary gall, even for an Iranian leader, Rouhani claimed that it was Iran, not America, that “managed to terminate the scourge of [the Islamic State] with the assistance of neighboring nations and governments.” In truth, Iran’s militias in Iraq regularly got their behinds kicked when they had to operate without U.S. air support. The big successes against ISIS were achieved by a mix of Iraqi security forces, Kurdish militias, and coalition air and special forces power.
Equally important, Iran’s sectarian influence over former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was a key cause of ISIS’ empowerment in the first place. To say that Iran defeated ISIS is a bit like saying that Adolf Hitler defeated Nazism. (He did come into contact with it, and it was defeated, therefore … )
Like the rest of Rouhani’s speech, it’s all quite mad.
