Tag: Hezbollah

Expired: The UN’s Resolution Prohibiting Exporting of Iranian Missiles and Drones

The Caspian Sea linking Iran and Russia may seem to be a quiet body of water, but the reality is that it has become Iran’s busy artery for exporting weaponry to Russia in violation of the United Nations Security Council’s 2015 prohibition on missile and uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAV) transfer, known as Resolution 2231.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence has indicated a recent uptick in Caspian shipping between Russia and Iran, some ships going dark. Additionally, CNN has tracking data, showing 85 Iranian cargo plane trips to Moscow airports between May 2022 and March 2023.

In any case, Iran has been violating the Resolution for several years, supplying drones to Houthi rebels in Yemen, who’ve employed them to attack Saudi Arabia and, this week, American naval vessels in the Persian Gulf.

Additionally, we know from intelligence sources that they’ve been supplying lethal drones to the Russians since the summer of 2022, who have been employing them on a near daily basis in Ukraine.

Both Iran and Russia vociferously deny violating Resolution 2231. They needn’t worry. It expired on October 18, 2023.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration has been amiss in soft-pedaling Iran’s intransigence in a concerted effort to renew the 2015 Nuclear Arms Limitations Treaty with Iran. Though the US has pledged to monitor the illegal weaponry trade, employing sanctions if needed, Biden approved the return of $6 bn of frozen Iranian funds from South Korean banks as part of a prisoner exchange deal in August.

Qatar will administer Iranian access, to be used only for humanitarian purposes. This will free, however, Iranian budget money elsewhere for terrorist groups such as Hezbollah.

Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli civilians was augmented by hundreds of Iranian supplied rocket salvos into the Israeli infrastructure, including Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, Hezbollah in Lebanon have been firing missiles into northern Israeli settlements and attacking American forces in Syria and Iraq.

Iran possesses a sophisticated arsenal of some 2000-3000 missiles that include short-and medium-range ballistic missiles, a long-range cruise missile, and long-range rockets. Its medium ballistic missiles could conceivably be armed with a nuclear payload, should Iran continue its advance to a nuclear bomb.

We know, too, that the Iranians have been working on a ballistic anti-ship missile to be potentially used against American aircraft carriers.

Will they ultimately effect a nuclear capacity to hit the US mainland as North Korea has done? Or before then, will Israel, under grave nuclear threat, launch a first strike of its own on Iran’s myriad underground bunkers, plunging the world into a nightmare scenario?

–rj

Chemical Attack in Syria: Obama Looks the Other Way

SyriaThe videos from Syria are horrific and unprecedented, with row upon row of corpses, many of them children, in what now seems to indicate some kind of chemical agent, perhaps nerve gas, judging by the symptoms, also captured on camera, of the last gasps and spasms of the dying.  Presumably the attack was launched under the auspices of the Assad regime, since it’s well known they possess a huge stockpile of chemical weapons.  It maintains, however, that rebels are simply staging a scenario for Western consumption to provoke intervention.

But this isn’t the way Britain and France see it, the latter calling for possible force if there is verification.  Even, and this is a shocker, Vladimir Putin has called on the Syrian government to allow UN inspectors, already in the country and just twenty minutes away, to visit the scene, though Russia assumes the whole thing is a rebel ruse.  I don’t think for a minute Assad will allow such a thing, though logic would seem to compel it, if what’s happened is simply a rebel scheme.

It’s conceivable Hezbollah or non-government loyalists could have launched an attack like this using make-shift rockets, which they’ve done before, employing tear gas or industrial toxins fired into a confined space.  Bad as the videos are, we don’t see defecation, vomiting and tremors that usually go along with chemical agents.

Because we can’t pin down, at least for now, what precisely happened, we need to refrain from a rush to judgment.  In America we’ve seen enough of war, of thousands of our children killed and maimed, our treasury depleted, and those we’ve fought to liberate us not liking us one bit more.  We got rid of Saddam, Iran’s nemesis, and stoked  its friendship with largely Shiite Iraq.

If this turns out to have been a genuine chemical attack, then such barbarism should meet with a strong response.  It doesn’t require boots on the ground.  No one wants that.  Nor does it mean a no fly zone.   Cruise missiles fired off shore can take out the missile depots.  Give the beleaguered rebels the weaponry they need so that the Assad regime pays a lingering price and this never occurs again.  Include anti-tank missiles as well.

The truth is that the Obama administration has dilly-dallied too long, allowing extremist forces to enter the fray, al Quaeda fighting with the rebels; Hezbollah, for Assad.  Now the war’s momentum, taking a very dangerous turn, increasingly resembles the imbroglio of Sunni vs Shiite, or what we see in Iraq, spinning out of control.

Like an ugly cancer, it threatens to metastasize, drawing in Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, where 42 died in a Tripoli bomb blast today.  Iran, meanwhile has been sending in fighters.

The toll on civilians is immense:  100,000 dead;  two million refugees, one million of them children divested of a future.

Meanwhile, our government is clearly confused, self-contradictory, and plainly ineffectual.

Obama told us a year ago, August 20, 2012, that chemical weapons would be a “red line” and “a game-changer.”  Shortly after, he concluded that they had been used and pledged arms.  No weapons have arrived.  Nothing changed.

If we discover that chemical weapons were indeed deployed on this occasion, and substantially, will it make any difference this time?  Don’t bet on it.  Politicians often say things they don’t really mean, and that’s why we’re wise not to believe them when they do.

Ironic for a nation that owes its own liberation from the intervention of the French two centuries ago.

–rj

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