If so, we better have a Plan B if Moscow’s recent past is prologue. A little over a year ago, the European Union slapped an arms embargo on the authoritarian regime in Uzbekistan for its refusal to allow a legitimate investigation into the shooting of hundreds of protestors there last May. But Moscow said it wouldn’t honor it. The Kremlin has also been practicing so-called “pipeline politics” to put the screws on Kiev and other governments in the Caucuses. But Moscow’s dealings with Iran are the most alarming. They have helped Tehran build better missiles and, as Mort Zuckerman explains in US News, have been critical in building Iran’s nuclear capacity.
Through its 900-mile border with Iraq, Iran is flooding its neighbor with money and fighters. It is infiltrating troublemakers into Afghanistan, supporting terrorism against Turkey, sustaining Syria, and had a hand in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. Iran today is in the grip of yet a new wave of extremists. Its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a revolutionary firebrand who has directly threatened the West. In his own words, “We are in the process of an historical war between the World of Arrogance [i.e., the West] and the Islamic world.” His foreign policy ambition is an Islamic government for the whole world, under the leadership of the Mahdi, the absent imam of the Shiites–code language for the export of radical Islam. And he casts himself as Hitler reincarnated, calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Who can think that Iran poses no threat to world peace? History tells us that when madmen call for genocide, they usually mean it. And Russia has made the threat more real. It sold the nuclear power plant at Bushehr to Iran and contracted to sell even more to bring cash into its nuclear industry. As one American diplomat put it, this business is a “giant hook in Russia’s jaw.” Russia provided critical assistance in the development of Iran’s Shihab missile, which has an ever expanding delivery range and can carry a warhead designed for a nuclear charge. “No return.” Everyone knows that the Bushehr “energy” plant is essentially a cover for Iran to have a nuclear infrastructure with a community of physicists, technicians, chemists, scientists, and engineers who can create a military capability. This became clear when Iran was found to be secretly building a facility at Natanz, involving centrifuges that could bring about nuclear enrichment to produce weapons-grade material. The work was suspended for a period of time, but Iran has now removed the United Nations seals, and its nuclear team is once again hard at work. Within a very few years, in all likelihood, Iran will be able to launch nuclear missiles. The Russians had to know that the work at Bushehr was not for peaceful purposes, as the Iranians claimed, yet it has gone on assisting Iran in its grotesque deceptions and patently false protestations…. Equally revealing–and deeply disturbing–is the fact that Russia, under Putin, has encouraged Iran to tough it out with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The agency has only persuasive power, but Russia has refused to condemn Iran’s nuclear work and resists American and European efforts to force the issue at the U.N. Security Council, which could impose economic sanctions. Russia has even bolstered Iran’s ability to resist military intervention by confirming a deal to sell TOR-M1 surface-to-air missiles, the most advanced system available, which uses launchers to shoot down multiple targets like missiles and planes.
