Is Fear Back?

Fear sells, and Wednesday was a good day to be in the business of peddling it.

The headlines were inauspicious. Perhaps most notably, Iran doubled its enrichment capacity of uranium to near weapons-grade using two centrifuge cascades, according to the IAEA.

“Iran had configured a new operational mode for the production of UF6 enriched up to 60% U-235,” Rafael Grossi, director of the UN watchdog, told AFP, which noted that “the move takes Iran closer to the 90% purity level needed for use in a nuclear weapon.” Tehran began enriching uranium to 60% in mid-April, but, as Bloomberg wrote, took the “added enrichment capacity off line… at the start of now-stalled negotiations to bring Washington back into the [nuclear] deal.”

Those negotiations are complicated by new President Ebrahim Raisi’s bid to replace Javad Zarif with Hossein Amirabdollahian, a hardliner with close ties to the IRGC and Hezbollah. Some experts say Amirabdollahian may actually be a better facilitator when it comes to rekindling an agreement with the US. The idea, generally speaking, is that even if he’s antagonistic, his close ties to the Guard reduce the scope for a misalignment between the message conveyed in Vienna and the thinking among the power structure in Tehran.

However, the same linked Bloomberg piece noted that Amirabdollahian is associated “with the interventionist approach to policy making that’s expanded Tehran’s influence in countries such as Syria and Iraq.”

That’s a polite way of putting it.

Amirabdollahian is a Quds acolyte, which means he held the late Qasem Soleimani up as something of a god. He’s hardly alone in that regard, but in a testament to his feelings for the general, Amirabdollahian once suggested that Soleimani had the power to deliver operational instructions to frontline fighters via dream sequences. “During certain operations in the region, some nights the general came to our dreams and showed us the roadmap,” Amirabdollahian said, during a television interview, apparently quoting soldiers in Syria.

In a separate interview posted to Khamenei’s official website, Amirabdollahian talked up his “face-to-face contact with Soleimani for nearly two decades.” Prior to embarking on key diplomatic missions, Amirabdollahian said he “received the latest advice from the general.”

He won’t be “receiving the latest advice” from Soleimani on any diplomatic missions for Raisi (Qasem being dead and such), but if Iran installs a top diplomat who believes it’s possible for Qasem to dole out posthumous advice via the dreams of the living, it’s not a stretch to suggest the path to a new nuclear deal could be more arduous than it was just a few months ago.

Meanwhile, the Taliban set up checkpoints around Hamid Karzai International Wednesday, raising concerns about freedom of movement for Afghans seeking to leave the country. Apparently, members of the international community haven’t had difficulties reaching the US-controlled airport, but citizens might.

The Taliban insisted anyone with valid travel documentation would have no trouble clearing the checkpoints, but the group also said it’s encouraging folks to stay. Hundreds of people have been evacuated over the past 24 hours.

In the UK, Boris Johnson flatly rejected calls for an investigation into the troop withdrawal from the country, telling Parliament “We must deal with the world as it is, accepting what we have achieved and what we have not achieved. Our immediate focus must be on those to whom we have direct obligations.”

Sometimes, I’m tempted to suggest that Boris hasn’t been a total failure as Prime Minister. Maybe some of my (admittedly sparse) British readership would disagree, but compared to the way things were looking early on in his tenure, Johnson seems to be doing ok, especially considering the rather exigent circumstances and the fact that he nearly died last year after a brief attempt to downplay COVID landed him on supplemental oxygen. The UK’s COVID experience was hardly ideal, but the vaccination campaign was a success. That doesn’t make up for lives lost, but comparisons between Boris and Trump (a mainstay of satirical social media during Trump’s final year in office) now seem pretty dubious.

Also Wednesday, the AP reported that the Taliban has begun the process of destroying monuments, although the first “casualty” was just a statue of Abdul Ali Mazari, a Shiite militia leader who championed the cause of the Hazara minority (victimized time and again, most recently in a horrific suicide bombing targeting school girls in May).

The AP noted that the statue “stood in the central Bamyan province, where the Taliban infamously blew up two massive 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha carved into a mountain in 2001.”

Blowing up Abdul Ali Mazari’s likeness seemed gratuitous. The Taliban killed him in 1995.