Iranian Mayhem About To Get Worse And Ultimately Will Harm Israel

Iranian Mayhem Is About to Get Worse

Eli Lake,Bloomberg

Back in 2015, desperate to reach a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program, U.S. negotiators made a fateful concession: The UN’s conventional-arms embargo on Iran, they agreed, would be lifted in five years.

The costs of that concession, one of the worst mistakes of those negotiations, are about to come due. The embargo is set to expire on Oct. 18, 2020 — and if it does, the situation in the Middle East is likely to get even worse.

The concession wasn’t to Iran so much as to China and Russia, two great-power rivals that participated in the nuclear negotiations. In the 1990s, China and Russia sold Iran a variety of weapons systems, which the Iranians then reverse-engineered. 

By this time next year, America’s two most potent geopolitical rivals will have a green light to sell advanced missiles to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

It would be bad enough if Iran kept those weapons for itself. But if past is prelude, there is a good chance Iran’s numerous proxies in the Middle East will benefit as well.

Last week, in little-noticed testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the U.S. special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, shared information from newly declassified U.S. intelligence assessments.

Since mid-2017, he said, Iran has “expanded its ballistic missile activities to partners across the region.” That includes Hezbollah, Palestinian terrorist groups and, as of mid-2018, Shia militias in Iraq. The new intelligence also finds that Iran has increased its support of Hezbollah by helping to expand the group’s ability to produce its own rockets and missiles. Finally, Hook said, the U.S. intelligence community now believes Iran is developing “missile systems and related technology solely for export to its regional proxies.”

Taken together, this information underscores not only the need to extend the United Nations arms embargo, but also the limits of the current U.S. strategy of “maximum pressure.” While crippling sanctions on Iran have made it much harder for groups such as Hezbollah and Shiite militias to pay salaries, they have not put a dent in Iran’s broader quest to arm those proxies with weapons capable of hitting U.S. allies. The world learned this firsthand in September, when an Iranian missile destroyed a crude oil processing facility deep inside Saudi Arabia.

The real danger, though, is that both China and Russia possess technology that will make Iran’s already formidable military production even better. Taleblu pointed to a Chinese and Russian cruise missile that can be disguised in a cargo ship’s container. If Iran can upgrade its arsenal, he said, it would be “the greatest missile power in the Middle East.”

Now it’s up to Hook and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to make the case to China and Russia to forgo weapons sales to Iran for the sake of broader Middle East stability. To say that’s a long shot would be an understatement.