Editorial: Obama's Iran Obsession Yields More Ill Fruit A preposterous situation.

Editorial: Obama's Iran Obsession Yields More Ill Fruit
A preposterous situation.
5:05 AM, FEB 28, 2018 | By THE EDITORS


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“Pyongyang is a crucial node in the international network of proliferation that already includes China and Russia as primary providers, Pakistan and North Korea as active disseminators, and Iran and perhaps Saudi Arabia among the final consumers. No less unsettling is the prospect that North Korea will sell nuclear weapons to international terrorist groups.”

These words, written by the international relations scholar Arthur Waldron in Commentary magazine, were published 14 years ago. The observation is still 100 percent true, as a U.N. report made clear earlier this month. That report described some of the means by which the regime manages to evade trade and finance sanctions and acquire weaponry and nuclear materials. Even more damning, the report detailed numerous shipments of banned weapons materials by North Korea to Syria. In short, North Korea is aiding Syria’s attempt to build a chemical weapons program.

Now we learn from a confidential U.N. report that Pyongyang has supplied Syria with 50 tons of material to build what is almost certainly a massive chemical weapons factory. In 2016 and 2017 the North Koreans evidently hired a Chinese company to make five shipments of chemical-weapons materials to Syria.

These reports are important but not entirely surprising. The relationship between Bashar al-Assad and North Korea goes back nearly two decades, when Pyongyang began sending trained personnel to assist Damascus in building a nuclear facility in eastern Syria. The nascent reactor was destroyed in an Israeli air strike in 2007. Now we discover that the diabolical alliance between North Korea and Syria has recently been rekindled: The U.N. report alleges that North Korean nuclear scientists and technicians visited Syrian in 2016 and 2017.

What allowed Syria to re-establish trade in banned materials with North Korea? Answer: Iran.

That’s Iran—the single greatest beneficiary of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Obama’s obsession with turning Iran into an ally continues to produce disastrous consequences. The use of chemical weapons was said by Obama to be a “red line,” but when Assad actually used them, he drew no meaningful response from the U.S. Why? Because Syria was backed financially and militarily by Iran and the U.S. administration felt it couldn’t alienate Iran since to do so would risk the nuclear deal on which the president had staked his entire foreign policy reputation. The cornerstone of that deal, of course, was to unfreeze more than $100 billion in Iranian assets—part of which no doubt found its way to Damascus, and then Pyongyang.

Thanks to the former president’s rose-tinted views of Iran, then, the U.S. now finds itself in the preposterous situation of having encouraged and enabled Tehran to pay for Damascus to reestablish relations with Pyongyang, all resulting in Assad rebuilding a chemical weapons program that either the U.S. or Israel will eventually have to destroy, possibly touching off a war in the Middle East.“As president,” Obama said in January of 2016, “I decided that a strong, confident America could advance our national security by engaging directly with the Iranian government. We’ve seen the results.”

We certainly have.




Article TagsBARACK OBAMA, EDITORIAL, FOREIGN POLICY, IRAN, IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL, NORTH KOREA, SYRIA, THE EDITORS, CONSERVATIVE NEWSSTAND, HOME PAGE, TODA