Iran deal ‘spells chaos for Middle East’
Tehran will use funds from nuclear agreement to arm its proxies in Lebanon and Syria, Israeli envoy warns
BILLIONS of pounds due to be unlocked by the proposed nuclear deal with Iran will be channelled to militias wreaking havoc across the Middle East, Israel has warned.
As diplomats said an agreement may be reached by today, Joshua Zarka, deputy director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry, said the country was “extremely troubled” by what it saw as the likely prospect of Tehran spending the previously frozen funds “on arming its proxies and financing its proxies”.
Mr Zarka warned that tensions between the two countries would “grow significantly” in the event of sanctions against Iran being lifted.
Benny Gantz, Israel’s defence minister, has signalled that the country is prepared to attack Iran if it is left with “no choice but to act”.
Mr Zarka’s intervention, in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, comes after Simon Coveney, the Irish foreign minister and UN Security Council facilitator at the nuclear talks in Vienna, said the “signals are good” for a deal.
The agreement would mean US sanctions being lifted in return for Iran agreeing to salvage the 2015 deal that imposed strict limits on its nuclear ambitions. As well as releasing billions of pounds, the deal will pave the way for Iran to step up oil exports to western countries that want to reduce their reliance on Russian energy supplies after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Liam Fox, the former defence secretary, stated that the deal would simply “delay” Iran’s efforts to develop a nuclear bomb, rather than preventing it from acquiring such a weapon.
Dr Fox says: “It would be complete folly if, in trying to escape from our dependency on Putin’s oil and gas, we were to end up funding the development of another nuclear state whose political stability, human rights record and disregard for international law is at least as bad as Russia’s.” Mr Zarka, a former senior diplomat at Israel’s embassy in the US, said: “Our assessment is that a large part of the money that the Iranians will receive as a result of the agreement is going to be spent on its proxies.
“On arming its proxies and financing its proxies. Lebanon is in a significant crisis. The money could basically be used to allow Hezbollah to have the run of Lebanon, which is extremely troubling. Then we have Syria. Iran is going to double its efforts to entrench itself in Syria militarily. Iranian militias will be encouraged because of the agreement and Iran will have more money. Clearly the tensions between us and Iran in that region are going to grow significantly.”
In Iraq, Mr Zarka said: “There is going to be significant growth in Iranian involvement, which will result in increasing violence.”
He added: “And of course there’s the Houthis. They have targeted Saudi, UAE and others and will have the backing of a country that is more stable, has more money and that is going to try to continue destabilising the region.
“In 2023 a sunset clause is going to be hit, therefore it’s going to be legitimate for Iran to import and export missiles and missile technology. So clearly we are very much worried about that.”
Senior figures in the UK and US fear that the agreement will be weaker than its predecessor, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, from which Donald Trump withdrew.
Ididn’t support the JCPOA (known as the Iran nuclear deal) in 2015, as I believed it was a fundamentally flawed agreement. Not only did it abandon the original aim of preventing Iran from ever becoming a nuclear weapon state, but it failed to tackle Iran’s ballistic missile programme, its systematic destabilisation of its regional neighbours or its championing of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.
In 2018, President Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement, blaming Iran’s hostage taking, its continued missile development and its active support for groups such as the Houthis, who precipitated and exacerbated the bloody conflict in Yemen. When Iran refused to sign an agreement covering these issues, tighter US sanctions saw the Iranian currency go into free fall, a massive flight of capital from the country, and a deep recession follow.
Now, negotiations are being resurrected under the Biden administration. But has anything fundamentally changed? Iran has continued its nuclear programme at pace and its stockpile of enriched uranium is now massively greater than permitted, with some of it just below the level of purity needed for a nuclear bomb. In defiance of the United Nations, it has also continued with its ballistic missile programme. In 2018, both the UK and France accused Iran of breaching its obligations by testing medium-range ballistic missiles, which were capable of carrying multiple warheads.
Both before and after the collapse of the JCPOA, Iran has continued its malign activities in its own country and beyond. Two Iranian diplomats were expelled from the Netherlands in June 2018 for plotting political assassinations in the country. A bomb plot to target a rally of opposition groups in Paris was foiled by French intelligence. In the UK, a terrorist cell with links to Iran was caught stockpiling tonnes of ammonium nitrate explosives at a secret bomb factory on the outskirts of London.
Iran has been an active and consistent supporter of Palestinian terrorist organisations, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas. Lebanese Hezbollah remains Iran’s primary terrorist proxy with the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, proudly boasting that “Hezbollah gets its money and arms from Iran, and as long as Iran has money, so does Hezbollah.”
The implications of lifting sanctions on Iran are crystal-clear. It is through such proxies that Iran targets Israel and Israeli interests and gives effect to the long-standing hatred of Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, for the very existence of the Israeli state.
To remove sanctions on Iranian oil without guarantees of stopping such activities would risk money being poured into regional destabilisation and the funding of groups who are fundamentally anti-West and anti the allies of the West. How, in any rational world, could that be regarded as progress, especially when Putin’s Russia has shown the dangers of pouring oil revenues into a hostile state where they can be used to finance a war machine?
Any new agreement with Iran must answer three questions. Does it stop Iran from becoming a nuclear weapon state? Does it deal with Iran’s illegal ballistic missile programme with its ability to strike evermore distant targets? And does it restrict or rein back Iran’s malign influence in its own region and beyond?
When the original agreement was being drawn up, negotiators concluded that in order to make progress, they would have to isolate the nuclear deal from the other areas of concern. Abandoning the original aim of preventing Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, they eventually watered-down their ambitions and agreed to simply delay it.
Constraints on enrichment capabilities were designed to lengthen the time it would take Iran to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a single bomb to at least one year for the first 10 years of the agreement. The effect was simply to hand the crisis to succeeding governments further down the line.
Today, Iran has the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, with most coming from foreign sources, especially North Korea. It is the only country to have developed a 1,200-mile missile without first having a nuclear weapons capability. The implication is blindingly obvious. Iran has unveiled 10 new ballistic missiles and three new satellite launch vehicles (SLVs) since 2015, while in his first budget, the new President, Ebrahim Raisi, earmarked almost £200 million for ballistic missile projects.
All of this comes at a time when Western governments are desperate to find a replacement source for Russian fossil fuels. It would be complete folly if, in trying to escape from our dependency on Putin’s oil and gas, we were to end up funding the development of another nuclear state whose political stability, human-rights record and disregard for international law is at least as bad as Russia.
We have seen in the horrors enforced on Ukraine by Putin’s Kremlin why wishful thinking is a poor basis for foreign and security policy. How irresponsible and foolish we would be to repeat the mistakes with Iran.
Iran is the only country to have developed a 1,200-mile ballistic missile. The implication is obvious