Conference at Paris School of Business

On Thursday, 10 December 2015, the Foundation for Middle East Studies held a conference at Paris School of Business entitled “Iran: War or Peace?”, held in the wake of the agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme and the intensifying Syrian conflict, which is poisoning the entire Middle East. Speakers included François Colcombet, President of FEMO; Bruno Tertrais, Senior Research Fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research; Frédéric Encel, lecturer at Sciences Po; and Afchine Alavi, member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the NCRI (Iranian opposition).

François Colcombet, President of FEMO, provided historical background on Iran and on the content of the Iranian regime’s Constitution, which calls for “the export of the Islamic revolution” and “the union of the Muslim world under the guardianship of the Supreme Leader” — an Iranian “caliphate” proclaimed well before that of ISIS. He recalled that this is not Paris’s first experience of religiously inspired terrorism: in the mid-1980s, what was then a new form of terrorism emerged. Paris was bloodied by a wave of attacks that investigators would later attribute to an Islamist network whose operatives were supplied by Lebanese Hezbollah and whose strings were pulled by Iran. Between December 1985 and September 1986, some 13 attacks struck Paris, each time leaving deaths and dozens wounded. The deadliest of these attacks was the one on Rue de Rennes, where a car bomb exploded near the Tati store, causing carnage previously unknown to Parisians.

Geopolitics and international relations specialist Bruno Tertrais focused his address on Iran’s nuclear programme and the unreality of an agreement that fails to meet the international community’s stated objective, namely guaranteeing non-proliferation. “Indeed, the agreement buys a little time in the face of a nuclear programme that has now been under way for 30 years. Let us remember what happened in 1994 with North Korea, when American negotiators were convinced the regime would have transformed by 2004.” “The Iranian crisis is far from resolved, and the agreement brings no positive effect to the Middle East — quite the opposite. Iran is already fighting the Islamic State group, because it is in its own interest to do so. At the same time, an improved financial and budgetary position, owing to the suspension of sanctions, will allow Tehran to maintain, or even increase, its military investment in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime and of the Iraqi Shia militias, whose conduct has done much to fuel the rise of the Islamic State group. And Saudi Arabia, believing its American protector has betrayed it, will continue to weigh the possibility of pursuing its own national nuclear option — the fire now raging across the Middle East is far from being contained, because Iran is an arsonist posing as a firefighter.”

Frédéric Encel, a doctor of geopolitics, set out the idea of a complex struggle in Syria. In his view, “the West should show zero tolerance for Iran’s harmful interference in Syria. Tehran should have no say over Syria’s political future. We must work with the Kurds and moderate forces in Syria to replace Assad and fight ISIS, and work with the Iranian resistance against Iranian extremism. We must work together with moderate allies to fight them. Only in this way will we be able to break this cycle of violence.”

Afchine Alavi, member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, for his part, challenged the overly simplistic image sometimes presented in the media of a powerful Iran capable of becoming an ally for the international community in the region. Drawing on figures and laying out the regime’s unforgiving track record, he described the Iranian regime’s economic dead end and, above all, its geopolitical failure in its bid to export revolution and extremism. He discussed the Iranian regime’s setbacks in Iraq, and above all its collapse in the Syrian quagmire.

The Foundation for Middle East Studies is pleased with how this conference unfolded, which proved highly instructive for the students of Paris School of Business (Paris 13th arrondissement); the exchanges following our speakers’ remarks were numerous, and our think tank remains particularly optimistic about a younger generation eager to understand and analyse the turmoil of the world.