Iran
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United States
Opinion
IRGC
If it were not so serious, it would almost be funny. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has announced he has ordered his scientists to limit the range of his ballistic missiles to 2,000 kilometers. This, said a general in Tehran, was sufficient to target US forces should Washington attack. The unspoken part of this message was, of course, that Iranian missiles are already capable of reaching targets throughout the region. The threat could not be clearer.
In a desperate attempt to close the stable door that, in an act of the greatest foolhardiness, Barack Obama threw wide open with his 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, the US House of Representatives has voted a new round of sanctions on individuals and organizations involved in the Iranian missile program and other “destabilizing actions”. While this may inhibit some missile development and inconvenience the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in its financial shenanigans, in the greater scheme of things, these sanctions will prove useless. Only a restoration of the former economic lockdown is going to get Tehran’s attention. However, the return of such crippling sanctions would not only take time but is unlikely to be as effective as before. This is because the regime has long since moved its money as far away as possible from banks and other financial institutions that it would expect to comply with new US-led international sanctions. And Tehran has made a point of cutting deals that are large and lucrative for US and European companies who will protest loudly if these are jeopardized.
In terms of the technology for its nuclear program, there is probably not much more that Iran requires. It received help from Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan as well as from North Korea. The insanity of Pyongyang’s own nuclear weapons drive was never more clearly illustrated than in the recent tunnel collapse in the mountain beneath which it has conducted nuclear tests. Japanese sources say that some 200 people perished, 100 when the roof in one part of the tunnel caved in and the remainder in another collapse when they went to try and rescue the others. Chinese geologists are reporting that Mount Mantap is now unstable and likely to crumble on top of the test facility 2,200 meters beneath it.
The Iranian regime has also learned more than nuclear and missile secrets from North Korea. Pyongyang has demonstrated that the acquisition of nuclear weaponry provides a shield against interference from the international community. And even if sanctions were to be reimposed, the Iranian elite is not likely to be duly troubled since at the very least, unauthorized covert economic support would come from Russia just as China has thus far sustained North Korea.
There is also the reality that Pyongyang is further ahead in the provocation stakes - with the dictator Kim Jong-un now talking of exploding a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific. Tehran will be watching carefully to see how the world responds to any such outrage while it continues to beaver away at its own nuclear program.
Washington’s allies in the region are looking to President Donald Trump to confront Tehran and to do all within his power to undo Obama’s lunatic release of Iran from its international obligations and the catastrophic economic sanctions that had forced the regime to the negotiating table.
originally published on the saudigazette
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