The Iranian regime has been busy lately playing at war games with the gusto of a 10-year-old boy with his new toys. After going on a multi-billion dollar shopping spree using cash provided courtesy of the U.S. for the release of American hostages and as a result of lifting economic sanctions with the nuclear agreement, the mullahs in Tehran have been busy showing off their new toys.
This has included test firing new ballistic missiles, launching new Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles, flying new aerial drones and sailing new ships designed to launch small ship raids against larger warships such as the U.S. Navy.
The Iranian regime has also been busy resupplying Houthi rebels in Yemen with smuggled shipments of rockets, mortar rounds, ammunition and guns. It has also been sending a steady stream of fighters culled from Afghan mercenaries, Shiite militias in Iraq and its own Quds Forces and Revolutionary Guard Corps to fight in Syria.
Meanwhile its navy has been busy flitting about the Persian Gulf and Red Sea to run aggressively at U.S. Navy warships in an attempt to intimidate and possibly cause an incident on the high seas.
This sort of action continued with the launch of a series of war games both on the ground and at sea. The regime just completed three days of war games and launched another series of war games; these to be conducted in a massive area stretching 772,000 square miles from the Strait of Hormuz, the Sea of Oman, through the Indian Ocean and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.
Announcing the exercise on Sunday, regime Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said: “The aim of the Velayat 95 drill is to upgrade the country’s defensive capabilities and send Iran’s message of peace and friendship to the regional countries.”
Millions of barrels of oil are transported daily to Europe, the US and Asia through the Bab el-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz, waterways that run along the coasts of Yemen and Iran and has often been used by the Iranian regime as a threat to global trade.
The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based in the region and protects shipping lanes in the Gulf and nearby waters.
On top of the regime banging the war drum loudly, it announced its intentions to buy 950 tons of uranium ore from Kazakhstan over the next three years and is relying on Russia to help refining the uranium into nuclear fuel.
The deal would not technically violate the horrifically bad nuclear agreement between Iran and the U.S. and other nations because the deal did not set limits on the Iranian regime’s ability to produce supplies of uranium ore, which gives you an idea of how idiotic the deal was to begin with.
Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, told the ISNA news agency that the purchase was supposed to happen “within three years.”
“650 tons will enter the country in two consignments and 300 tons will enter Iran in the third year,” he said.
Salehi said the final shipment of concentrate, known as yellow cake, would be turned into uranium hexafluoride gas and sold back to Kazakhstan — its first international sale of the compound which is used in the uranium enrichment process, according to Breitbart News.
Salehi said Iran has already received around 382 tons of yellow cake, primarily from Russia, since the nuclear deal came into force in January last year.
Under the deal, Iran is allowed to run around 5,000 “IR-1” centrifuges and has been testing more advanced models that can produce greater quantities of enriched uranium.
Taken together, the order to buy tons of uranium along with an almost constant string of military actions set an unsettling stage for the world in 2017. Couple these developments with the upcoming Iranian presidential elections in which it is assured that no dissident candidate will be allowed on the ballot by the regime’s ultraconservative Guardian Council, Iran will remain firmly in the control of mullah Ali Khamenei.
Amidst all of these provocative moves, the Iran lobby has been completely silent, never raising any objections to the escalation in Iran’s military activities, nor its desire to ramp up a civilian nuclear program that could be easily converted to military purposes.
For example, the Ploughshares Fund, which partly funds the National Iranian American Council, has been aggressive in making the claims that it works to stop nuclear proliferation, but in the case of the Iranian regime expanding its nuclear capacity, it is as deaf and dumb as a door post.
The lack of objections from the Iran lobby demonstrates its complicity in supporting these aggressive acts by the mullahs.
Michael Tomlinson