Ali Khamenei (Iran) - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

China’s Next Military Move: A Base in the Persian Gulf?

Michael Rubin — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 11:50:22 +0000

For the past half-century, the United States has essentially dominated international waters in the Persian Gulf uncontested by any Great Power. As in the South China Sea and in the Bab el-Mandeb, however, Xi may have ambitions to challenge the United States and assert its military influence over yet another strategic chokepoint.

For a generation, China has expanded its economic outreach to the Middle East but has largely remained diplomatically neutral and militarily absent. Beijing, for example, maintains cordial diplomatic relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. It often abstained on contentious UN Security Council resolution. And while Chinese Navy ships do make occasional port calls in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, but China’s non-combatant evacuation operation from Libya at the beginning of that country’s civil war was far less coordinated and effective than Chinese authorities claimed.

President Xi Jingping’s assertiveness may not be limited to China’ periphery, in Hong Kong, the South China Sea, and Ladakh. China, for example, not only established a military base in Djibouti within miles of the U.S. presence but also has begun to interfere with U.S. pilots in the region.

Now, according to the Iranian press, it appears that China may be seeking a more permanent base in the Persian Gulf. Majid Reza Hariri, speaker of Iran-China Joint Chamber of Commerce, traced increased Chinese involvement both to Ahmadinejad-era agreements and to Xi’s 2015 visit to Iran, in which the Chinese president both met with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani and signed agreements involving both the security and military sectors.

Within the Iranian parliament, rumors now abound that one of these agreements include the lease of facilities on Kish island (Kish is where Bob Levinson disappeared, before being held by Iran until his death years later and where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps onloaded 50 tons of weaponry onto the Karine-A before attempting to smuggle it to the Palestine Liberation Organization). The rumors about the alleged lease started airing in the conservative Iranian news agency Tasnim in February 2020. Alef.ir, a news site affiliated with conservative parliamentarian Ahmad Tavakoli, quoted Hassan Norouzi, a parliamentary hardliner, announcing that he had written to Rouhani to explain why “Negotiations [have been] underway by the government to hand over Kish Island to the Chinese for 25 years.” After complaining about government secrecy in its past dealing with Beijing, Norouzi announced, “If there is any discussion about this, we will definitely stop it, and the Chinese officials should also know that such transfers will not take place.”

While Norouzi’s populist rhetoric may resonate with his working-class constituents in Robat Karim, an impoverished district near Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, parliamentary outrage is a non-factor in Iranian security and defense calculations. In practice, Iran’s elected parliament has no power to counter the military, defense ministry, or supreme leader. That he would air such threats publicly, however, likely suggests that there is some truth behind the rumors and that Chinese work is either progressing or becoming more visible.

China’s growing military assertiveness has various ramifications. Too often, the State Department has assumed that where it leads, Gulf Cooperation Council members would follow. Arab Gulf states might be frustrated with Washington, but they understood the threat from Tehran meant they had little choice but to grin and bear American arrogance. Congressional and partisan hostility toward Saudi Arabia, however, increasingly causes its leaders to look for balance farther afield. While the United States is adept at deploying its forces, it has less accustomed to having to compete. It is becoming increasingly urgent, however, that it does so; Washington can no longer take the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, let alone Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman, for granted.

Likewise, China’s growing military ambitions in the region make it more crucial that Israel stops its flirtation with Beijing. A generation of Israeli leaders has tried to have it both ways: a partnership with the United States while seeking to sell sensitive military technologies to China. Many Israeli officials rationalize that by cultivating China, they can keep it from fully casting its lot with reactionary regional regimes. That was always naïve, but should China be building a base in the Persian Gulf, it should end that illusion once and for all. If Israelis do not conclude similarly, then it is time for both Republicans and Democrats to consider continued guarantees to maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge. After all, U.S. investment in Israel’s security was always part of a broader U.S. strategic calculation. If Israel becomes a strategic liability in a new Cold War, it behooves the United States to mitigate the threat Israeli technology leakage could have on U.S. forces regionally.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). You can follow him on Twitter: @mrubin1971.

Source: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/chinas-next-military-move-base-persian-gulf-164184

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Esper: Iran will face ‘severe response’ if U.S. is challenged

Fox News — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 22:54:16 +0000

The post Esper: Iran will face ‘severe response’ if U.S. is challenged first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Israel’s strikes in Syria hurt Iran

Hillel Frisch — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 10:46:34 +0000

IAF attacks are forcing Iran in Syria and its proxies in Iraq to go underground.

IAF attacks Syrian and Iranian targets in Syria, November 20, 2019 –(photo credit: YEDIOT M’HASHETACH (TELEGRAM))

The Israel Air Force has been unrelenting toward the Iranian build-up in Syria despite the dangers these attacks pose, most of all, the fear of incidents of clashes between the IAF and Russian Air Force planes.

No doubt the major reason for Israel’s offensive posture toward the Iranian build-up in contrast to the containment policy directed both toward Gaza in the South and Hezbollah in the North, stems from the desire to prevent the introduction on a mass scale of precision-guided missiles against Israel and the establishment of a local Iranian-run weapons industry in Syria. Israeli leaders and just recently the IDF’s chief of staff have spelled this out clearly on numerous occasions.

But there is clearly another reason behind Israel’s resolve in striking the Iranians in Syria that dovetails with the American strategy toward Iran: increasing the costs of Iran’s imperialism.

United States-led sanctions against Iran have struck hard. The BBC in six charts tells a woeful tale equivalent to thousands of words of recent Iranian economic decline. The Iranian economy boomed with the announcement of the nuclear deal struck between Iran and the world’s major powers to record a 12% growth rate in 2016. With Trump’s inauguration that growth rate decreased to 3% the following year. By the end of 2018, during which the sanctions against Iran were renewed, the Iranian economy had contracted by more than 3% and by a further 9% in 2019.

Most of that decline can be attributed to the effects of sanctions on Iran’s oil production and even more critically, the decline of oil exports. Iran’s oil production has declined by nearly 40%, from 3.8 to 2.4 million barrels a day, with an even steeper decline for exports, from nearly 2.5 million barrels daily to less than half a million.

The black market rate for the Iranian rial meanwhile has slid from 40,000 to the dollar to stabilize at 120,000. Little wonder then that car sales in Iran declined from a high of 1.5 million in 2017 to just less than one million a year later.

Worse still, China, one of the few friends the Islamic Republic has, and certainly the strongest and least threatening, which was heavily invested in Iranian energy production, has recently diversified its oil imports away from Iran in the fear of disruptions of oil supply due to tensions with the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, especially after its attack on Abkaik, Saudi Arabia’s largest oil field, and nearby oil processing center. It is choosing instead to increasingly rely on Russian energy sources.

NOW IT is the turn of Israel’s destructive sorties against Iran’s military and economic infrastructure in Syria to increase the costs of a regime just at the time it faces decreasing revenues and a disgruntled and protesting public.

IAF attacks are forcing Iran in Syria and its proxies in Iraq to go underground. Jonathan Spyer reports that the Iranians in the Imam Ali Base in Abu Kamal along the Syria-Iraq border have already created a tunnel system for the storage of missiles and heavy weaponry, which presumably Israel attacked on December 25. The area forms a land bridge between Iran, its Syrian ally Hezbollah, and its Iraqi militia proxies.

The recent devastating US Air Force attack on the military base of the Iraqi Shi’ite Hezbollah Brigades in retaliation for its attack on US personnel in Iraq, which killed at least 25 of their fighters and injured at least double that number, has had much the same effect as Israeli attacks in Syria and Iraq, forcing Iran to expend considerable costs to enable its Syrian and Iraqi proxies to go underground in an attempt to reduce vulnerability.

Building the infrastructure below ground is an expensive proposition, so expensive that even the existing US military bases in the Gulf risk the dangers of operating above ground rather than incurring the costs of building a safer underground infrastructure.

Will such increasing costs prove to be the hair that broke the camel’s back?

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and the conservative clerics who back him are probably willing to pay a high price to continue the build-up project in Syria. Creating a missile siege around Israel based on precision-guided missiles in their strategic thinking is on par in importance with achieving nuclear-strike capabilities.

The regime is also banking on the 2020 presidential elections in the US to bring about the removal of sanctions that will enable it to bring both projects to fruition. As for the European states, three of the most important among them, Germany, France, and Great Britain, have been seeking ways to undermine the sanctions in the desire both to develop Iran as a market for their goods and a source of diversifying away from energy dependence on Russia.

So the Iranian leadership is most likely to buy time by depleting its monetary surplus, the CIA estimated to be 80 billion in 2014, and the monies Iran received as part of the thawing of monetary assets deposited in the United States during the reign of the shah as a result of the nuclear deal.

Fortunately for Israel, even if the probability that increasing costs will not fundamentally change Iranian resolve in pursuing both projects, forcing the Iranian underground in Syria is a benefit incurred at no extra cost to the major aim of denying the buildup in the first place.

The writer is a professor in the Political Studies and Middle Eastern Studies departments at Bar-Ilan University.

Source: https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Israels-strikes-in-Syria-hurt-Iran-612812

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Crown Prince bin Salman Compares Ali Khamenei to Adolf Hitler

Victor Hazan — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 12:16:44 +0000

Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (L) was compared to Hitler by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman

Saudi Arabia’s powerful Crown Prince has compared the Supreme leader of Iran to Adolf Hitler, during a recorded interview for 60 Minutes.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also said his country would acquire a nuclear weapon “as soon as possible” if Iran built one, Irish Times reported.

“He wants to create his own project in the Middle East very much like Hitler, who wanted to expand at the time. Many countries around the world and in Europe did not realize how dangerous Hitler was until what happened, happened. I don’t want to see the same events happening in the Middle East” bin Salman said during the interview referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Saudi officials, comparably to President Trump, Israeli officials, and many GOP leaders, agree that the Obama deal with Iran does not limit Iran’s nuclear capacity but merely delays Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, while ignoring Iran’s other activities, such as supporting Shia militias.

Bin Salman is scheduled to meet with President Trump soon and during his trip to the White House, he plans to persuade Americans to invest in his reform plans, which aim to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil, increase the kingdom’s military self-sufficiency and raise its citizens’ quality of life, Times of Israel reported.

He also plans on meeting with business, entertainment and technology leaders in a number of US cities.

Bin Salman who has forged a close friendship with President Donald Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is on the same page with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when it comes to the topic of Iranian expansionist policies.

“Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible,” Mohammed bin Salman said in an interview with the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” which recently aired.

The Crown Prince also played down Iran’s power, saying its army was not well ranked in the Muslim world and that Saudi Arabia had a larger economy. “Iran is far from being equal to Saudi Arabia”, he said during the interview.

Saudi Arabia, a Sunni monarchy and has been at odds with Iran and has accused them of funding militias to undermine Arab states, while Shia Iran accuses Saudi Arabia of backing Sunni extremist groups. This conflict puts them at opposite sides across the world in various conflicts, including the ones in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, as The Irish Times explained.

The Saudi-based Muslim World League, a body once notable for its anti-Israel hostility, in January condemned Holocaust denial, Times Of Israel noted.

The powerful Crown Prince has been a positive force for change in Saudi Arabia and for the strengthening of the nation’s allegiance with the US and Israel.

Source: http://thejewishvoice.com/2018/03/19/crown-prince-bin-salman-compares-ali-khamenei-adolf-hitler/

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