On Iranian New Year, Russia hints it May Swing Support to Tehran over Crimea Sanctions

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http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/iranian-support-sanctions.html

On Iranian New Year, Russia hints it May Swing Support to Tehran over Crimea Sanctions
By Juan Cole | Mar. 20, 2014

Iran may have gotten a New Year’s gift via the Crimea crisis, as Russia threatens to play the Iran card over proposed US sanctions. As I argued in the New York Times, Russia and Iran are being driven closer to one another as both are now under a US and Western European sanctions regime. Russia had earlier wanted to avoid unnecessarily angering Washington over Iran, but is signalling that it no longer cares what the US thinks on this issue.

The vernal equinox this year falls on March 20, and it is celebrated in Iran and some surrounding cultures as New Year (Now Ruz). Ancient Iranian legend says that New Year celebrations were switched from the fall to the first day of spring by the mythical king Jamshid, who also established the elements of a flourishing civilization in ancient Iran. (I retell this story in my sword and sorcery novel, “Fall of the New Year Throne”).

Among the rituals of the Persian New Year are house cleaning, buying a new suit of clothes, and making a household display of seven items that begin with the letter “s.”

Iran’s house cleaning this year is its negotiations with the five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5 + 1) over its nuclear enrichment program, in an effort to reassure the world that it is purely for civilian purposes and does not aim at producing a nuclear weapon.