Whether or not Iran did test a powerful new missile last week is less relevant than the fact that it said it did. US intelligence asserts with some confidence that there was no such launch of a Khorramshahr ballistic missile with its supposed range of 2,000 kilometers.
Officials in Washington insist that TV footage Tehran put out was seven months old and dates from a failed launch. The suggestion seems to be that if the Iranians tried again last week, that launch also failed.
What this latest piece of apparent hokum demonstrates yet again is the sheer duplicity of the regime of the ayatollahs. They hoodwinked Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry into backing the 2013 Geneva nuclear deal, which dictated that Iranian nuclear development would be suspended merely for 15 years. But it quickly became clear that this restriction was not onerous since Tehran soon began to dishonor it. Moreover, the continued missile development program, despite international protests has gone hand in glove with the covert resumption of work on nuclear weapons. It is abundantly clear that the day that Iran unveils its first atomic warhead, it also wishes to show off the rocketry with which to deliver it.
This was one of the anomalies of the North Korean nuclear program, from which the Iranians have derived much secret benefit. Pyongyang had been conducting underground nuclear tests that proved to the outside world that it had acquired this terrible atomic weapon. But it has only recently begun to demonstrate in earnest that its ballistic missile technology has caught up with its destructive nuclear ability.
During the eight years that the Iranians strung out the negotiations that ended in the Geneva deal, their scientists continued to work feverishly on the regime’s weapons of mass destruction. The incremental program of US-led economic sanctions brought the economy close to collapse. Obama chose to believe that it was this domestic crisis that forced the Iranians to finally ink a real deal. All the advice he received from his own intelligence agencies as well as America’s friends and allies, including here in the Kingdom, was that from start to finish, the ayatollahs had been negotiating in bad faith. What Obama wanted to be his one solid foreign policy achievement has actually turned out to be his most abject overseas failure. He bought the snake oil in huge quantities from a regime whose dishonesty, bad faith and sheer slipperiness was there for all the world to see.
Thus it is actually because Tehran has lied about its latest medium-range rocket test that the international community should be put on even higher alert. The ayatollahs are prepared to stop at nothing in their drive for a full nuclear capability and making false claims about a successful launch demonstrates just how determined they are to achieve it.
Unfortunately, President Donald Trump was this week himself guilty of a botched launch. Very soon after Iran claimed the missile had been fired, Trump tweeted his condemnation. He should have done a little checking before his finger hit the send button. Trump’s instincts that the Geneva deal is a very bad deal are completely right. But he needs to get off his smartphone and actually do something about it, such as quickly reintroducing economic sanctions.
