Iran

Archive for Tag “Iran”

Iran to chair U.N. disarmament panel. Yes, really.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 by

200px-Emblem_of_the_United_Nations.svgOver at FoxNews.com, Anne Bayefsky captures the latest absurdity emanating from the United Nations:

In case you didn’t think the UN could get even more bizarre (and dangerous), try this one. Iran will soon become the President of the Conference on Disarmament. The Iranians rotate into the job for four weeks near the end of May. Their qualification for the position? Iran is the member state that comes next in the English alphabet after Indonesia.

Iran will have the task of managing the 2013 Conference agenda, which includes “the cessation of the nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament.” On the one hand, since the mullahs running the country are engaged in a mad race to acquire nuclear arms, chairing a meeting on disarmament may be a bit of a struggle. On the other hand, the Conference just talks, and talking for its own sake is an Iranian art form.

Bayefsky hits the nail on the head: “Now the proverbial foxes guard the chicken coop. It would be funny, except that the Iranian fox really intends to devour the chickens.” Read the whole thing.

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30 years ago: Beirut Embassy bombing

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 by

Beirutembassy

The roar sounded like thunder, but there were no storm clouds in the sky; it sounded like the dynamite used by fishermen working the waters off the nearby coast, but far louder and closer. When the explosive-laden truck rammed the building and blew up, the blast tore away much of the building’s facade. A fine dust of glass and debris clouded the air. Broken pipes spewed out jets of water. Employees inside the U.S. Embassy in Beirut felt the entire building sway; they were the lucky ones. The guards at the front entrance were obliterated by the force of the explosion. Sixty-three people died, seventeen of them Americans.

For the driver of the truck, a jihadist, this was a suicide mission. The attack had been orchestrated on the ground in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an Islamic totalitarian outfit that Iran had helped organize, train, direct, and finance. Hezbollah’s mandate was to establish an Iran-style regime in Lebanon. It was Tehran’s proxy force, part of the jihadist vanguard, working to expand the Islamic revolution.

Thirty years ago this month, so began the Iran-backed proxy war against America.

cc: wikicommons

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Iranian-linked plot in Toronto

Monday, April 22, 2013 by

[CNN reports that] Canadian authorities have arrested two men accused of planning to carry out an al Qaeda-supported attack against a passenger train traveling between Canada and the United States, a U.S. congressman told CNN on Monday.

“As I understand it, it was a train going from Canada to the U.S.,” Rep. Peter King, R-New York, chairman of the counterterrorism and intelligence subcommittee, said.

The news follows an announcement earlier in the day by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that they had arrested Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35.

The two men are charged with “receiving support from al Qaeda elements in Iran” to carry out an attack and conspiring to murder people on a VIA railway train in the greater Toronto area, Assistant Police Commissioner James Malizia said.

“When I speak about supported, I mean direction and guidance,” he said. [emphasis added]

Received wisdom after 9/11 was that Iran’s role in terrorism was confined to the Middle East. That was false then. It’s false now: Tehran has a well-established role as a global standard bearer and enabler for the jihadist cause, a point I argue in Winning the Unwinnable War. While the Iranian role in the alleged plot in Canada remains to be proven, on the face of it this fits with the regime’s modus operandi.

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An Iran do-over for Obama?

Monday, April 22, 2013 by

protesters in IranMichael Ledeen writes in the Wall Street Journal that with “an Iranian presidential election coming in June, President Obama may be presented with a second chance to get his policy right.”

In 2009, when massive protests followed Iran’s disputed presidential vote, Mr. Obama sat by as the insurrection was brutally put down by the Tehran regime. But the rage against the regime is still intense, and if similar protests explode in June, the White House should be prepared.

The president ought to know from the example of the Arab Spring that seemingly secure despots can be toppled by popular will. The coming elections offer a chance for America to demonstrate its belated support for the Iranian opposition, and Washington would do well to encourage the Iranian people to rise up in the coming months.

Ledeen points to evidence that some opponents of the Islamists’ regime are eager to rise up. Perhaps they are. Their bravery is laudable. And it would be wise for Washington to back them. But it beggars belief that now, four years later, the Obama administration would somehow adopt the correct policy toward protestors. What signs are there that the administration has learned from its failures in the last few years?

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Flotilla raid to blame?

Friday, April 12, 2013 by

President Obama’s March mission to coax an apology from Israel for the 2010 flotilla raid that left eight Turks dead has brought the decrepit state of Turkish-Israeli relations back into the spotlight.

According to the popular narrative, the Israeli decision to confront the boats with maritime commandos was not only unjustified and reprehensible, but also drove a wedge between the two states, ruining a once-cooperative relationship.

The truth, though, is that the relationship was crumbling long before 2010. And not on any fault of the Israelis.

Turkey expert Michael Rubin, of the American Enterprise Institute, argues that the secular, relatively-free Turkey that Israel had come to trust began to disappear as early as 2002, when the Islamist Justice and Development Party won Turkey’s general election. Over the next decade, he writes, Turkey underwent a methodical revolution that transformed it from a staunchly secular state, to an Islamic one:

Gone, and gone permanently, is secular Turkey, a unique Muslim country that straddled East and West and that even maintained a cooperative relationship with Israel. Today Turkey is an Islamic republic whose government saw fit to facilitate the May 31 flotilla raid on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey is now more aligned to Iran than to the democracies of Europe. Whereas Iran’s Islamic revolution shocked the world with its suddenness in 1979, Turkey’s Islamic revolution has been so slow and deliberate as to pass almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic of Turkey is a reality—and a danger.

Since the 2002 election of the Justice and Development Party, Turkey’s increasingly theocratic orientation has expressed itself in the form of antagonism against Israel. One way this has been manifest is in Turkey’s dealings with Israel’s enemies. In addition to aligning itself with Iran, Turkey has effectively endorsed Hamas by inviting its leader Khaled Meshaal to meetings in Ankara in 2006 and then, of course, sponsoring the blockade-challenging flotilla in 2010.

Taking account of these observations, the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations has to do with a more consequential factor, which predates the flotilla raid: Turkey’s embrace of a hostile ideology.

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What Iran may gain from North Korea’s nuclear test

Thursday, February 14, 2013 by

At Tablet Magazine, Lee Smith offers a provocative argument that if “North Korea has the bomb, then for all practical purposes Iran does, too.”

If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the history of extensive North Korean-Iranian cooperation on a host of military and defense issues, including ballistic missiles and nuclear development, that dates back to the 1980s. This cooperation includes North Korean sales of technology and arms, like the BM-25, a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching Western Europe; Iran’s Shahab 3 missile is based on North Korea’s Nodong-1 and is able to reach Israel. Iran has a contigent of Iranian weapons engineers and defense officials stationed in North Korea. Meantime, North Korean scientists visit Iran. And last fall, both countries signed a memorandum of understanding regarding scientific, academic, and technological issues.

Smith points to signs that North Korea and Iran have already formed a collaborative relationship, and singles out the incentives on both sides: Tehran wants nuclear technology, Pyongyang wants money. (North Korea is believed to have helped build a nuclear reactor for Syria, an Iranian ally.)

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Bulgaria blames Hezbollah. Will the EU ban it?

Monday, February 11, 2013 by

Defying pressure from France and Germany to back down, Bulgaria last week implicated Hezbollah in a lethal bus bombing last summer. (See my earlier post.) Ben Weinthal, writing at Foreign Policy, describes the almost continent-wide refusal to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group, a fact that I think makes Bulgaria’s decision all the more courageous:

There was ample reason to believe Sofia would punt. While the U.S., Canadian, and Israeli governments for months have been urging the EU to clamp down on Hezbollah’s activities—including raising funds, recruiting, and procuring dual-use technologies—within its 27-member union, the Europeans have consistently pushed back, and the issue has failed to gain traction.

Has the tide turned? Weinthal goes on to weigh the implications (and the odds) of a broader, perhaps EU-wide terror listing of Hezbollah:

A ban on Hezbollah could cripple it. Hezbollah‘s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged this reality several years ago, noting that an EU terror listing “would dry up the sources of finance, end moral, political and material support, stifle voices, whether they are the voices of the resistance or the voices which support the resistance, pressure states which protect the resistance in one way and another, and pressure the Lebanese state, Iran and Iraq, but especially the Lebanese state, in order to classify it as a state which supports terrorism.”

Read the whole thing.

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How European nations enable Hezbollah

Tuesday, February 5, 2013 by

Hizbollah_flagThe Wall Street Journal reports:

Bulgaria’s government is expected to release an investigative report this week blaming the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and its ally Iran for a terrorist bombing last summer that killed five Israeli tourists.

When you dig into the backstory, what’s curious is not that Hezbollah and Iran are implicated, but that there’s in effect a third party that deserves some blame: a pair of EU nations.

The U.S. and Israel rightly designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, but France and Germany do not. And they have pressured Bulgaria to avoid fingering Hezbollah for the attack last summer, because, well, that would be just so awkward. Why?

A sort of modus vivendi exists where Hezbollah keeps a low profile for its fund-raising and other activities and Europeans do not crack down. In Germany alone, some 950 people have been identified as being associated with the organization as of 2011. The group has always been treated as a benign force, even if assessments of the danger it presented varied greatly. [New York Times]

So for years now, Hezbollah has enjoyed unearned legitimacy and free rein to operate on European soil. That connivance typically relies on the claim that Hezbollah has a political wing and a distinct, separate military wing. In reality, the political side, which includes charities and medical care, is integral to the group’s ideological goal. The social services establish the group’s fidelity to Islamic morals (e.g., aiding the poor) and attract recruits for, and build loyalty to, the cause of jihad. Treating these two wings as separate is a rationalization, useful if your goal is to pass off a vicious organization as somehow non-vicious.

Even if the Hezbollah agents behind the Bulgaria attack had never set foot in France or Germany, for permitting the Islamist organization to raise funds and function within their territory, these governments should be branded as accessories to Hezbollah’s crimes.

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Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand and U.S. Foreign Policy (essay)

Friday, October 19, 2012 by

On the eve of the presidential debate on foreign policy, ARI’s Elan Journo has released a new essay, “Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand and U.S. Foreign Policy.”

Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has credited philosopher Ayn Rand with inspiring him to enter politics—and made her 1,000-plus-page magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, required reading for his staff. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said in 2005 at a gathering of Rand fans. “The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” It is a theme that pervades Rand’s corpus. While Ryan has distanced himself from Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, he continues to express admiration for Atlas Shrugged.

The addition of the Wisconsin congressman to the GOP ticket naturally unleashed a flash-mob of analysts parsing his speeches, articles, and signature proposals for evidence of her influence. On domestic policy, the impact of Rand’s ideas on Ryan’s outlook is marked, though uneven and sometimes overstated. Religion, in particular, has driven a wedge between Ryan, who would enact Catholic dogma into law , and Rand, an atheist, who championed the separation of church and state. But what has received far less attention is Ryan’s outlook on foreign policy—and whether it bears the mark of Rand’s thought. [...]

Read the entire essay [PDF].

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Yaron Brook and Elan Journo discuss the “Arab Spring”

Tuesday, April 24, 2012 by

Praying time at Al Tahrir squareYaron Brook and Elan Journo recently sat down with the Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, a publication of Seton Hall University, for an interview on how to evaluate the upheavals in the Middle East.

Dr. Brook and Mr. Journo discussed, among other things, why Iran is a significant enemy to America and how we should respond to its threat, whether, as some insist, Saudi Arabia is really America’s ally, and if our use of oil serves to enrich our enemies.

The full text of the interview is here (PDF).

At the launch event for this issue in March, Elan Journo took part in a panel discussion at Seton Hall University in which he discussed how the U.S. should respond to “Arab Spring.” Mr. Journo’s fellow panelists were Alon Ben-Meir of New York University and Paul Sullivan of Georgetown University. The event was moderated by David A. Andelman, who is the editor of World Policy Journal.

image: flickr/cc

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