There is more to Iran than meets the eye

The Arab League has withdrawn its observer mission from Syria because the violence in the country has not subsided. The West puts the blame squarely on the Bashar al-Assad government.

Syria has been in the headlines for some time now, the focus being on Bashar al-Assad after the fall of Muammar Gadhafi in Libya. It has shared the headlines, though, with the global financial crisis, which refuses to go away, and the eurozone and United States debt crises, which are an extension of the financial crisis.

Iran, in the meanwhile, has been in the news because of its nuclear program, which it claims is for peaceful civilian purposes and not for developing nuclear weapons, but the West will have none of it. To all intents and purposes, the Syrian crisis should be seen as a logical extension of the crisis created over Iran's nuclear program by the West, which makes the Western pressure on Syria a proxy war against Iran.