Iran Sanctions on France24

Wow, I love France 24, the new news channel! It seems to break news before any of the other news wires do. Take this piece of news for example. It hasn't made it onto Reuters/BBC yet, but is already old news on France 24. Iran sanctioned by the UN security council.

I don't think that I'll comment much on the decision though, since it's Christmas and all. However, I do sometimes wonder how world politics is played. On one hand, the world community may require Iran to help out with the situation in Iraq, seeing that they're next door neighbours and all. But on the other hand, this community also throws sanctions like this on them.

Another thing that I find interesting is the timing of the decision. It's practically Christmas. I know that Iran doesn't celebrate Christmas, but most of the other nations on the security council do. This just means that nothing can be done about this decision until everyone comes back after new year. I wonder what Iran's response will be. They have previously threatened retaliation.

I wonder if they would be able to carry out their retaliations seeing that President Ahmadinejad seems to be losing political power back home. Many of his supporters have lost in the latest elections and the university students are beginning to get boisterous. Maybe that explains the timing. Maybe the main members of the security council felt that this is as good time as ever to impose sanctions. Get him while he is weakened.

On another note, our government has mentioned that Malaysia would need to pursue nuclear power as well, to fulfill our own energy needs. The country is currently sending more postgrad students to study related fields and trying to hire as many nuclear scientists/engineers as possible. I guess that our country will try to buy the technology from someone else later. It's the normal way we do technology transfers in Malaysia.

Well, I just hope that we do not get into any trouble with that later. Given that, quite similar to most muslim nations in the world, we do not recognise the existance of Israel, they may not like the idea of us having nuclear technology in our hands. But this is just plain conjecture.

I wonder what this means for our dear PM. If he had originally intended to ask Iran to help out with Iraq, as part of our duties as leader of the muslim world, he may have to modify his plans now. Well, nothing new there, as international politics is always fluid. It's quite interesting to watch from time to time.

Merry Christmas Tehran!