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What the Iranian Arms Shipment Means

(Washington Post) Jennifer Rubin - In the wake of the seizure of advanced Iranian-supplied rockets by the Israeli Navy in the Red Sea, a former U.S. official observed that "the so-called [Iranian] moderates are presiding over an aggressive foreign policy designed to create instability throughout the region. If Rouhani is in favor of all this, he is no moderate; if he is opposed to it but cannot stop it, he has no influence....His only function is to mislead the United States into thinking he is a moderate, so that we change our policy toward Iran and weaken the sanctions." As Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) pointed out, the Iranians are not only using the talks and sanctions relief for cover to continue their advanced research and missile program, but also they are inhibiting the U.S. from responding to Iranian behavior outside the talks. Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a key architect of sanctions, warns, "The nuclear talks with Tehran already have constrained the Obama administration's willingness to respond to a range of Iranian provocations including the arming of anti-American terrorists like Hamas, Hizbullah, Iraqi Shiite militias and the Taliban, extremist groups in Yemen and Bahrain, and rogue regimes like Assad's." "Iran's threat network will be supercharged when the Islamic Republic becomes a threshold nuclear state and American willingness to push back forcefully will be even more severely constrained....That freedom for terror, after all, is a major reason why Tehran has pursued nuclear weapons capability in the first place." Iran is a fundamentalist Islamic state that employs terror and murderous allies (e.g., Syria) to accomplish its aims, including the destruction of the State of Israel. In putting a friendlier face on its interlocutors with the West, the regime hopes to lift sanctions while keeping its sponsorship of terror going full tilt and its nuclear weapons program intact. So far, it's working like a charm.
2014-03-06 00:00:00
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