De-Fanging The Islamic Republic of Iran

"Today, more than ever, there is fertile ground - with the grace of God - for the annihilation, the wiping out, and the collapse of the Zionist regime. In Lebanon alone, over 100,000 missiles are ready to be launched."

"If there is a will, if it serves [our] interests, and if the Zionist regime repeats its past mistakes due to its miscalculations, these missiles will pierce through space, and will strike at the heart of the Zionist regime."

"They will prepare the ground for its great collapse in the new era."

Hossein Salami, Commander-in-Chief, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Islamic Republic

Not a word of condemnation has been issued by either the UN or the EU on the Iranian regime's acceleration of its threatening ballistic missile program. Pictured: Iranian soldiers launch a Ghader missile on September 11, 2020, during a military exercise near the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran. (Photo by Iranian Army Office/AFP via Getty Images)

"The Iranian regime is in clear violation of the UN Security Council Resolution 2231. The resolution calls on the Islamic Republic of Iran "not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology."

"In addition, as Iran and the P4+1 (Germany, the UK, Russia, China and France) still contend that the nuclear deal [which Iran never signed] remains effective, Tehran is even violating the nuclear deal due to the fact that it indicates that Iran should not undertake any ballistic missile activity'"until the date eight years after the JCPOA Adoption Day [Oct. 18, 2015] or until the date on which the IAEA submits a report confirming the broader conclusion, whichever is earlier."

"The Iranian regime is also reportedly setting up weapons factories abroad and manufacturing advanced ballistic missiles and weapons in foreign nations, including Syria. Some of the arms that Tehran is producing there include precision-guided missiles, using advanced technology to strike specific targets. Iran's foreign-based weapons factories give it an advantageous military capability for waging wars or striking other nations through third countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Yemen or Iraq."

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, political scientist, board member, Harvard International Review, president of the International American Council on the Middle East

The IRGC has its own navy and air force, and oversees Iran's strategic weapons  Getty Images

 U.S.President Donald Trump has stated time and again his lack of confidence in the usefulness of the United Nations. He has taken the United States out of the UN Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, the UN cultural agency UNESCO, and a global accord meant to bring nations in line to tackle climate change. He has opposed a UN migration pact. His administration cut funding for the UN Population Fund, and the UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees [UNRWA]. On the other hand, the United States has always paid the lion's share of financial support of the United Nations, and its headquarters is based in New York.

That the United Nations is corrupt, that it is heavily infested with group influence brought to bear by human-rights abusing states, that its general membership has assented to one country and one country only being held in contempt as a perpetual scapegoat, is undeniable. The UN Human Rights Council is farcical, and the fact that UNESCO has denied Judaic heritage status of undeniably Judaic historical sites is yet another symptom of the body's bias against Israel and its lack of capacity to function as it should. The worst human-rights-abusing nations are continually being elected to head various 'rights' groups as yet another unabashed demonstration of contemptible corruption and cronyism.

But the United States still turned to engage the UN in a move to place further sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran in an effort to stop the Islamist theocracy from continuing on with its surreptitious program to attain nuclear weapons to complement the technologically advanced ballistic missile systems the country has devoted time, energy, research and production upon. An industry whose results have been shared with the Lebanon-based terrorist militia Hezbollah. Iranian rocketry has also been shared with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

As a destabilizing influence in the Middle East, Iran has no peer. It has laboriously built a Shiite-dominated alliance against the region's majority Sunni population, co-opting Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Qatar and Yemen in a deadly triangle of opposition and threat against Arab Sunni dominance. The ruling Ayatollahs' poisonous hostility against Israel and the United States; the West in general and democracy in particular, drives Iran's antipathy and aspiration to restore its historical position as the leading influence in the Middle East.

 

Iran is investing in the development of its nuclear technology, including at its power plant in the city of Arak.Photograph: Tina Manley/Alamy

Its deliberately transparent ambitions and its sinister threats alongside its covert weapons development pose an unambiguous threat to the majority Arab nations who have gradually moved to implicitly accept the presence of the State of Israel, viewing it as a bulwark of defence against the Islamic Republic. The agreement reached by the EU and Germany with UN approval to hold Iran to a mutually-agreed schedule of nuclear development for breathing space has been a dismal failure. Conditions that Iran agreed to, have never been met and nor has the Republic diminished its nuclear research activities, merely placed them deeper below ground to keep their presence hidden from prying Western intelligence.

In overtures to the United Nations to support additional snap-back sanctions on Iran as a penalty for its non-observance of conditions associated with the nuclear agreement, the Security Council chose to give its thumbs-down even while supporting sanctions collectively on North Korea. Handily overlooking that North Korea is a nuclear-weapons nation, and there is close collaboration between Iran and North Korea cooperating in the development of Iran's nuclear ambitions to obtain its own cache of miniaturized nuclear heads to complement its missiles.

 

Iran's missile capabilities are a key part of its military prowess. Iran has launched more than a dozen missiles at two bases in Iraq housing US forces  Getty Images

 

Although Europe, China and Russia deigned not to support further debilitating Iran sanctions the U.S. has made it clear that any of their corporations wanting to do business with Iran, offering it technical weaponry components aid will themselves be penalized for failing to return all UN sanctions on Iran. Failure to implement those measures to discourage Iran from further uranium enrichment has its clear consequences. Enforce UN sanctions or pay the penalties of the Iranian threat to the Middle East and the larger world order. 

Crippling sanctions once again imposed to persuade Iran to negotiate a new, more heavily binding and inclusive agreement on nuclear arms and other weapons development, along with Iran's interference in the affairs of other Middle East states, its support for Islamofascist terrorism and alliances with like-minded regimes will deliver an indelible message, that Iran's current trajectory will not be permitted by a world order alarmed at the extent of its sinister and destructive ambitions.

A senior Security Council diplomat has stated that "Iran is closer to the bomb right now than it was two years ago", (ostensibly as lash-back to the U.S. pull-out on the nuclear agreement), that the threat posed by North Korea "now is bigger than three years ago", speaking anonymously. Some level of credit must go to Donald Trump, as flawed a human being as he is, for making the effort to set aside earlier failed efforts and committing to a personal appeal, face-to-face with North Korea's Kim to relinquish its own nuclear ambitions, only to fail in the end. 

So little having been accomplished at great effort and hopes for a resolution of the impasse, the US. has proceeded with sanctioning over two dozen people and entities linked to Iran's nuclear, missile and conventional arms programs. Another anonymous official speaking on the situation stated that Iran could have sufficient fissile material to produce a nuclear weapon by year's end, along with the resumption of long-range missile co-operation with nuclear-armed North Korea.