The “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” deal consummated with Iran one year ago isn’t producing the consoling hope and change that President Obama claimed at the time would “make the world safer.” Nor is it likely that the “Nuclear Security Summit” he headed in Washington late last month promises a much brighter outcome.
Vladimir Putin, leader of the world’s No. 2 nuclear power, didn’t even find it sufficiently important to attend.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wasn’t impressed with the meeting’s relevance either. On March 30, just one day before the talks began, he warned, “Those who say the future is in negotiations, not in missiles, are either ignorant or traitors.”
Tehran used the special occasion during Vice President Joe Biden’s March Israel trip to demonstrate blatant contempt for those harboring any such wishful thinking. That message, written in Hebrew, was launched on the side of a long-range nuclear-capable missile proclaiming “Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth.”
If that threat wasn’t clear enough, an Iranian state television program recently presented a video showing an underground tunnel filled with missiles and launchers to be used when “enemies make a mistake.”
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Aerospace Division Commander Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh described the display as “a sample” of many such tunnels, over 500 yards deep, within mountains spread out all over the country. He pledged that Iran would begin deploying a new “advanced generation” of long-range missiles this year, warning that they will “erupt like a volcano from the depth of the earth.”
Although U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 of the Iran pact “called upon” Iran not to build or test nuclear-capable missiles for eight years, Russia, which has veto power, has taken the position that the violations really don’t count. As their ambassador Vitaly Churkin explained, “A call is different from a ban because you cannot violate a call.”
Perhaps Russia’s generous leniency on the matter becomes more understandable given that they have negotiated a separate deal of their own … a more than $8 billion Iranian purchase of Russian fighter jets, other aircraft and helicopters. With $150 billion of sanction money released by the U.N. agreement, Tehran can now well afford it.
Iran has also been providing financing for North Korea’s nuclear military program in return for missile technology over at least the past two decades. Kim Yong Nam, a high-level North Korean official, has met with top-echelon Iranian counterparts, and both governments have explicitly admitted working together against the U.S.
Senior Editor Bill Gertz reported in the Washington Free Beacon that the Kim Jong Un regime was even supplying missile components to Iran “during recent nuclear talks,” which violated U.N. sanctions on both countries. Although details of those shipments “were included in Obama’s daily intelligence briefings,” they were kept secret from the U.N.
Iran’s chummy access to North Korean nuclear warheads along with delivery systems cannot be casually dismissed. Last month North Korea released a photo of Kim Jong Un posing with what was claimed to be a mockup of a miniaturized nuclear warhead and boasting that they could wipe out Manhattan with a hydrogen bomb much larger than the one developed by Russia.
This, in turn, occurred only a month after the regime conducted its fourth nuclear test which they purported to be a hydrogen bomb … plus also launched a three-stage rocket into space … all in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
The White House has taken a position that such violations by rogue regimes will have no effect upon the Iran nuclear pact, essentially arguing that we should simply lower our expectations.
As Obama said last August, “We have no illusions about the Iranian government … Iran supports terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. It supports proxy groups that threaten our interests and the interests of allies, including proxy groups who killed our troops in Iraq. They try to destabilize our Gulf partners.”
Yes, and they are succeeding. This was humiliatingly evidenced by their capture of 10 American sailors in the Persian Gulf last January, just hours before the president delivered his final State of the Union address.
In February the Australian navy intercepted an Iranian ship off the coast of Oman carrying armaments which included rocket-propelled grenades intended to support the Houthis in their rebellion against the legitimate U.N.-backed Yemeni government. That interception was followed in March by a French navy seizure of another large cache of Iranian weapons Iran headed for the Houthis.
Meanwhile, after North Korea upstaged the most recent March Nuclear Security Summit by firing off still another long-range ballistic missile, President Obama expressed a need to “vigilantly enforce strong U.N. security measures.”
So I guess this means that they will have to meet again and pass another resolution.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom”(2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012). Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.