Mark Urban suggests it is hard to predict whether Israel will attack Iran. (Regime change doesn’t necessarily follow from an attack, and as Seals has pointed out it can lengthen the life of the regime). However, I think it is clear even among the experts that as a last resort an attack will come: it is only the timing we are arguing about and whether Israel will do it alone or not?
At the very least our Board owe us an explanation of why they think the MAK and Marwarid Mining Shareholders are more deserving of owning a bigger stake in Mehdiabad (at our expense) in these fast changing times in the Middle East that may throw up huge windfall gains for the new owners of Mehdiabad (e.g. a 30 fold gain if the Islamic Republic dictatorship collapses like communism), particularly when
1. Wonarah requires a two year wait and an input of $35m to bring it to the same stage as Medidabad. 2. Mr Jordinson has been guilty of purveying a terminological inexactitude to the background of smooth disarming synthesiser music denying any dilution (he said our positions would be maintained ) in a the recent Boardroom Radio video talk. 3. We don’t know anything about Mr Jordinson’s relationship with Dr. Al-Barwami and Marwarid Mining – has been invited to Muscat?
Mr Jordinon’s behaviour is perverse and it shows a lack of business acumen, even more so given the events going on in the Middle East (something he has no interest in from what can be gleaned from his reports on Iran – they say almost nothing).
And the justification for attacking Iran – well that is easy: the biggest problem with Iran is their leadership’s dogma and the lack of willingness to deconstruct it themselves (they don’t want to listen to Westerners doing it for them), and yet much of the view of the world they have is based on false or poor quality reasoning (and it is easy to do if you read history backwards for example – although in the case of Ahamedinjad’s holocaust denials there is perhaps no subtle error of method like that: he just refuses to take on board evidence that undermines his beliefs?). The leadership has even gone so far as to prevent its dogma being deconstructed by
1. encouraging (not necessarily intentionally) those who could deconstruct it to leave the country (the brain drain) 2. shutting down university courses that strive for excellence in anything to do with other cultures 3. appointing decision makers on the basis of loyalty to the dogma (four legs good, two legs bad sort of rubbish) (Something Dr Reid observed almost immediately he became MD – we’ve had no such observations from Mr Jordinson) 4. preventing the appointment of decsion makers on any other basis (fiddling elections)
None of the above are bad enough to warrant being attacked by us until they start to want to impose their dogma outside Iran, and acquiring nuclear know-how is an important tool in facilitating the latter in my view. Sure, the left wing peace campaigners will say Iran has never attacked anybody (in modern times?) and that we are doing it only for the oil (it is actually difficult to steal oil and we are not stealing oil in Iraq to my knowledge and it has certain disadvantages e.g. like making it harder to earn the respect of Iranians to sell them more goods). I will not be sorry if Netanyahu drops an atomic bomb on Fordow and blots out the Iranian telephone system and the country’s national power grid with less than a 1000 innocent lives lost (that is better than the casualty cost that has occurred in Syria) to put back the onus on them to have a better quality of decision making. High quality decsion making will earn the country the respect it lacks. Acquiring nuclear know-how is the wrong way to go about earning respect – and the leadership seems incapable of accepting this message. War with Iran is almost inevitable in my view. It is just a question of when it will happen. The Iranian leadership is incapable of building trust with the West. It will collapse if it does as ordinary Iranians will see the inferior quality of their leaders’ decision-making when compared with that of Western leaders. The current dogma does not allow for such a comparison (West evil, Iran good?). The truth of course is a lot more nuanced: both have a lot of good points.
If you are struggling to name good things about Iran, here are a few: It is the country that gave the world chess, it has some of the finest examples of Islamic architecture in the world, it is a country that is as mad about poetry as some other countries are about sport, it has exquisite cuisine, it has a history that predates many countries, it has a lower divorce rate (arranged marriages do seem to work for many – and they seem to like them).
There seem to be a lot question marks over the quality of Jordinson’s decision to dilute us out of Mehdiabad at this time. He doesn’t know his *rse from his elbow on Iran matters. He is acting outside his core competency.
UCL Price at posting:
13.5¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
