Iranian Gas and Missile Games
It wasn’t a particularly good week for Iran.
French oil giant Total is pulling out of a planned investment in a huge gas project in Iran’s South Pars gas field. Total, one of the few companies in the world thought to have the technology to exploit Iran’s gas reserves, is the last of the major Western players to quit; Royal Dutch Shell and Repsol of Spain withdrew last year. The Financial Times says it is now unlikely that Iran will be able to significantly boost its gas exports before sometime late in the next decade.
It wasn’t a particularly good week for Iran.
French oil giant Total is pulling out of a planned investment in a huge gas project in Iran’s South Pars gas field. Total, one of the few companies in the world thought to have the technology to exploit Iran’s gas reserves, is the last of the major Western players to quit; Royal Dutch Shell and Repsol of Spain withdrew last year. The Financial Times says it is now unlikely that Iran will be able to significantly boost its gas exports before sometime late in the next decade.
Then, there was a lot of giggling on blogs [“Iranians S**K at Photoshop”] about Iran’s faked picture of its missile launch; they stuck an extra missile in the photo distributed through their news agency. Agence France Presse, The Guardian and The New York Times ran with it before the duplicity was discovered. Mark Fitzpatrick of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, was cited in Middle East News Line saying Teheran also doctored a photo of a Shihab-3 launch on the website of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
On top of which, Israeli analysts said the Shihab-3 they saw on television was an old model and that Iran has failed to flight-test any missile with a 2,000 km range. Uzi Rubin, a leading Israeli defense analyst and former missile defense chief, said, “The Iranians have a tendency to exaggerate to a certain extent the capabilities of their missiles. From what I saw, this is an old version of the Shihab-3, and contrary to their claims, it is not capable of reaching 2,000 kilometers, rather 1,300 kilometers.” The Christian Science Monitor reported that Americans and Europeans agree that sanctions have had some effect on Iran’s capabilities.
But don’t laugh too soon. Iran’s acquisition of nuclear capability would be the biggest problem it presents, but not the only one. The United States and Israel currently face deadly threats from Iran in Iraq and through Iran from Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Iran has upgraded the rockets they are supplying to Iraqi Shiite militias – particularly the Mahdi Army, against which Iraqi and American forces have been having great success. Militia members are taught to assemble Improvised Rocket Assisted Munitions (IRAMs), a 107 mm rocket packed with hundreds of pounds of explosives (there are reports that Hezbollah is doing the training). “It’s incredibly deadly and so cheap to make,” an official said. The U.S. military acknowledged that IRAMs have killed three American soldiers this year. In June, five IRAMs being driven toward an American base for launching fired prematurely (what the Israelis ironically call a “work accident”), killing at least 18 Iraqis, injuring 29 and damaging 15 buildings – an indication of enormous lethality.
In Israel, public radio cited intelligence officials as telling the Israeli government that Hezbollah now has an arsenal of 40,000 rockets ready to be fired at Israel, three times more than it had when Israel went to war in Lebanon two years ago. The rockets and the training for use come from Iran through Syria.