On top, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on January 23, 2016. On bottom, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 13, 2013. Iran, China, and Russia are all strategic allies.
Photo Credits: Top: Wikimedia Commons/Khamenei.ir , Bottom: Wikimedia Commons/Kremlin.ru

Despite President Barack Obama’s fondest hopes, after Iran secured its nuclear agreement with the West, it began to show itself as a particularly virulent enemy of the West. As noted in the illustrations above, Iran is an informal strategic ally of two other militarily powerful states generally hostile to U.S. and Western interests: Russia and China. 

Recent Iranian Hostile Behavior

President Obama apparently hoped for a chance to engage Iran in friendly negotiations to convert them from a foe into a friend. Unfortunately, Iranian behavior over the past year since the adoption of the nuclear agreement has been anything but engaging in a friendly sense. More typical of their behavior is their threatening actions against the U.S. Navy fleet guarding the Straits of Hormuz, the very narrow passage way between the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf. Below is a video of fast Iranian missile boats harassing the U.S. Navy destroyer Nitze with threatening maneuvers.

How dangerous can these small boats be against U.S. ships? You be the judge of their fire power from the still photo below of this type of boat firing missiles. Judging from the relative size of these missiles to the boats, their warheads are probably equivalent to that of a 5-inch naval gun, or of an army 105 mm howitzer. A five-inch projectile typically weighs about 70 pounds of explosive and steel; an Army 105 mm howitzer shoots a projectile of typically 13.0 to 15.5 kg ( 29 to 34 lb).

Now those projectile weights might seem small compared to the size of a modern destroyer, but the high explosive filler of the projectile can be extremely destructive, especially if it penetrates the metal of the superstructure or hull to explode in the interior. Judging again from the photograph above, it would appear the fire power of three or four such boats would equal that of a 105 mm howitzer battery. If an entire battery scored hits on a destroyer, the destroyer would be in very grave danger indeed.

Naval harassments of this nature are growing more common. The U.S. Naval Institute reported that “Seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) fast in-shore attack craft (FIAC) approached USS Firebolt (PC-10) while it was operating in international waters in the central Persian Gulf on Sept. 4.” The USS Firebolt, shown below, is a coastal patrol ship very similar to a Coast Guard cutter, and is considerably smaller than a destroyer. It would be in much graver danger in a missile attack, as shown above.

In October and November of 2015, the Iranians sent us additional messages of their disregard for any agreement on ceasing to develop nuclear weapons. What they did was to conduct tests of a number of ballistic missiles. Some of these missiles were of relatively short range, but were launched close to the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman, shown below, the destroyer USS Buckley, and the French Frigate FS Provence in the Strait of Hormuz in a “highly provocative” test. The missiles were launched from Iranian missile boats about 1500 yards from the warships.

Shown below is a declassified U.S. Navy video of the incident, taken apparently from a U.S. Navy aircraft using thermal imagery, that was uploaded to Youtube by the Russian government news outlet RT. (Now why would Russia do that?)

However, more disturbing were tests of the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) Emad, internally developed and produced by Iran. IRBMs make sense only with nuclear warheads. They are entirely too expensive to be used otherwise.

These missiles reportedly have a range of 2000 km (1243 miles) to accurately hit targets , and their development violates a United Nations Security Council resolution that prohibits Iranian ballistic missile development. The Obama administration has known about these missiles for a long time, as demonstrated by an unclassified Defense Department report to Congress, Fiscal Year 2014 Annual Report on Military Power of Iran, January 2015. In that report we find the following point.

(U) Although Iran has paused progress in some areas of its nuclear program and fulfilled its obligations under the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), it continues to develop technological capabilities that also could be applicable to nuclear weapons, including ballistic missile development.

Such ballistic missile development would make sense only if Iran possessed nuclear warheads to put on the missiles. All of these Iranian activities should give any American a deep foreboding about Obama’s nuclear agreement with the Iranians, especially given Iran’s long history of duplicity with the West.

Iran’s Allies and Affiliates

As a Shiite Muslim state, Iran has close and friendly relations with the Baghdad government in Iraq, the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and with Hezbollah in Lebanon. As you can see in the map below, Iran shares borders with many of headline country names in the war against terrorism. Names like Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It also faces important Sunni foes across the narrow Persian Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. While one of the Gulf states, Bahrain, is majority Shia, it is ruled by a Sunni king, and hosts the home port of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet. If Iran should gain regional suzerainty, the current Bahraini regime (along with all the other Gulf states) would be in deep trouble.

Iraq is also a majority Shiite country, and when the U.S. substantially abandoned Iraq when it withdrew at the end of 2011, Iraq began to slip slowly into an Iranian orbit as Iran filled the power vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal. However, by its heavy handed behavior with Iraqi government officials and other Iraqi groups, such as Moqtada al Sadr and his Shiite Mahdi Army, Iran alienated many of the political powers in Iraq starting in 2013. Nevertheless, it is possible the Iranians may have partially rectified their mistake and again started to acquire Iraq as a satellite, or the Iraqis have simply become more desperate with the growing threat of ISIS and their own political dysfunction. At the beginning of last May, al-Sadr travelled to Iran, possibly to gain Iran’s support in uniting the feuding Iraqi politicians. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time,

Mr. Sadr’s departure came as a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Hossein Jaberi Ansari, “expressed Iran’s readiness to use all its links in line with paving the way for Iraqi talks,” according to an official statement carried by Iran’s state-controlled news agency. … Given the sway the Islamic Republic has in Iraq, Mr. Sadr may hope to take the Iranians up on their offer to mediate among senior Shiite Iraqi politicians.

Nevertheless, in a sign that relations between the Iraqis and Iranians had not yet been totally reconciled, the WSJ also reported:

Many of Mr. Sadr’s supporters could be heard chanting anti-Iranian slogans during the weekend protests—chants that are likely to offend mainstream Iraqi Shiites who consider Iran critical to the fight against Islamic State.

Whether Iran can continue to cement Iraq into a subservient position is a question vital to the Middle East’s future outlook.

Iran’s two major allies, China and Russia, especially Russia, are also vital to the Middle East’s destiny.  As I noted in the posts Russia Inside Syria, Russian Military Operations in Syria, and What is Russia’s Game in Syria, Iran has persuaded Russia to come to the military aid of Iran’s client Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria. While the Russian’s have stabilized Assad’s position, mostly by killing the Syrian domestic rebels with air power, with only a minor amount of air strikes against ISIS, they have also served themselves in the process. After withdrawing some of their forces from Syria last March, they still possessed a newly secured naval base on the Mediterranean at Tartus, and a brand new military airbase at Latakia. Those are both possible military and naval threats to NATO on its south eastern flank.

In addition, with fierce air strikes against Syria’s domestic rebels, Russia was able to generate a vast flood of Syrian refugees into Europe. A friend of mine, whose knowledge and judgment I trust, wrote to me that “it is my belief that the Russian objective in Syria was precisely to create the flow of refugees into Europe in order to destabilize NATO.” That would seem to be a relatively easy way to weaken NATO – not only by creating a huge economic burden on Europe to support the refugees, but by creating an obscuring flow of people in which ISIS agents could hide to infiltrate Europe. The infiltration by ISIS may or may not have been intended by Russia, but it is certainly advantageous to them.

Effects of the Iranian Nuclear Deal

When you consider all these developments, you have to wonder how Obama could possibly have believed he could trust Iran to keep its side of the bargain in the nuclear deal, or how he could have thought he could entice Iran into friendly negotiations that would transform them from foe to friend. Recently, Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and Senior Vice President for Policy and Programs with the Center for Security Policy, discussed Iran’s behavior since the international adoption of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) providing the framework for the final nuclear deal. Has Iran honored the agreement? Fleitz’s talk before the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) is shown in the video below.

The agreement described is so convoluted, so riddled with secret side agreements, so extensively engineered to allow Iran to cheat, one almost has to believe the Obama administration actively wants Iran to get the bomb! I am sure this can not be, but that is a suspicion that inevitably arises. Just consider one aspect that has been extensively publicized. The organization that has been tasked with inspecting Iran’s compliance is the International Atomic Energy Agency. However, Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has flat-out decreed that  Iran’s military sites were strictly off-limits for any verifying inspections. (There is in fact only one that we know of, the one at Parchin.) The deal does require inspection of suspect facilities with 24 days notice (more like three months when all prescribed procedures are followed according to the Wall Street Journal). This gives Iran plenty of time to disguise or dismantle any evidence. There is also some confusion about whether or not the agreement allows Iran to inspect itself at the military sites! See here and here and here and here. Because of its complexity and the secretive nature in which it was negotiated, I will reserve further analysis to future posts.

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