Last Friday I wrote about the USS John S. McCain shadowing the North Korean-flagged ship, the Kang Nam. Today more details about the operations are coming out. Associated Press reports the ship is carrying missiles to Myanmar;
The South Korean news network YTN, citing an unidentified intelligence source in the South, said on Sunday that the U.S. suspects the cargo ship Kang Nam is carrying missiles and related parts. Myanmar’s military government, which faces an arms embargo from the United States and the European Union, has reportedly bought weapons from North Korea.
US News and World Reports writes that the North Korean government is issuing some of their usual rhetoric;
“As long as our country has become a proud nuclear power, the U.S. should take a correct look at whom it is dealing with,” said a commentary in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, which is regarded as a source of official viewpoints.
“It would be a grave mistake for the U.S. to think it can remain unhurt if it ignites the fuse of war on the Korean peninsula.”
The newspaper also blasted President Obama’s recent pledge to protect South Korea, saying it was an attempt to attack the North with atomic bombs.
SInce the US and the UN both decided to make public that they won’t authorize the use of force against North Korean shipping, is it really surprising that the Norks would engage in illegal arms sales? The crew of the McCain is probably on the decks practicing their fist shaking as I write this.
We really can’t expect the President to worry about weapons proliferation while he’s busy handing over tobacco regulation to the FDA, can we?
It’s kind of hard to blog these days without a post about Iran. So here’s my first for the day. Start with the hour-old AP update for those who tried to ignore Iran this weekend;
Drew M at Ace of Spades writes that the Islamic Republic’s regime overestimated the number of phony ballots by only a couple of million.
But they aren’t sure if the 3 million extra votes really matter given how much of a landslide Ahmadinejad won by.
Iran’s Guardian Council has suggested that the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of people eligible to cast ballot in those areas.
His camp, meanwhile, denied reports that he had proclaimed himself ready for martyrdom on Saturday.
“Mousavi has never said this,” his close ally, Qorban Behzadiannejad, told the AP. Mousavi’s Web site also said statements that Mousavi was preparing for death were inaccurate.
But the Washington Post reports that Ahmadinejad is willing to help Mousavi achieve martyrdom;
The semiofficial Fars News Agency, which has strong ties to the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, quoted a law professor at Tehran University as saying that Mousavi’s actions were criminal.
“Through uncivil and illegal means, he created an environment for unrest and hooliganism,” Firouz Aslani told Fars News. “Contrary to his claims of lawfulness, he acted against the security of the nation and the interests of the system.”
Five members of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani family were arrested and released yesterday, ostensibly to send a message to the popular ex-president who reportedly supports Mousavi’s call for a revote.
Many are upset at our own President for taking his kids for ice cream during this critical moment in time on Saturday – but not me. I’m afraid if we criticize every single thing he does, we risk sounding like the crackpots on the Left did for eight solid years. Sean M makes the same point, sort of, at doubleplusundead. But I will make this point about our President – if he doesn’t start using this unrest in Iran to our advantage (vis-a-vis nuclear proliferation and Iran’s support of the Taliban) he’s going to miss his opportunity and he’ll be blamed for a nuclear Iran and every death of US troops in Afghanistan. It’s Back Obama’s problem now and he can’t blame it on George Bush from this moment forward.
In an interview on CBS’ Early Show, Obama said;
President Obama says he does not want to become a scapegoat for Iran’s leadership as postelection upheaval continues, but Republicans are still saying the new president is being too cautious.
“The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States,” Obama said in an interview broadcast Monday on CBS’ “The Early Show.” (Fox News link)
“We shouldn’t be playing into that,” he said in the interview, which was recorded Friday.
In other words, he’s declared the popular movement dead on arrival. If he had confidence in the uprising, Obama would praise them without caring what the mullahs thought – like Jimmy Carter when he bet on the wrong horse in 1979. Ronald Reagan bet on democracy in Nicaragua and Central America and was vindicated. Obama would rather deal with the status quo at the cost of democracy and lives of brown people.
A few hours ago, I mentioned the Code Pink statement made on Friday that Obama was doing the right thing by staying out of the Iranian protests. Of course, the following day Obama reversed course and issued his toughest statement on the situation to date.
That’s the way I’d do it – if Code Pink thought I was right about something, I’d change course, too. But I set out to look at what the far Left is saying about the protests and they all seem to think that President Bush is still pulling the strings.
I also mentioned Paul Craig Roberts’ piece seething with Bush Derangement Syndrome. As evidence that the Iranian protests are a CIA plot, Roberts cites Kenneth Timmerman of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran; (more…)
Finally, President Obama, after a week of trying to remain neutral in the conflict in Iran, summoned some testicular fortitude and stood up for freedom yesterday. The Washington Post called it a “cautious response”;
[T]he president called on the Iranian government “to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.”
U.S. officials say Obama is intent on calibrating his comments to the mood of the hour. They say he is seeking to avoid having the demonstrators accused of being American stooges and is trying to preserve the possibility of negotiating directly with the Iranian government over its nuclear program, links to terrorism, Afghanistan and other issues.
I’d agree, if Obama made that statement after the first death in Tehran, but amid unsubstantiated reports of hundreds of casualties, the wording sounds weak. From the Washington Times;
An Iranian who asked to be identified only by his first name, Ali, told The Washington Times that he saw security forces near Azadi (Freedom) Square dropping tear-gas canisters into buildings sheltering demonstrators, driving motorcycles into crowds of people and firing tear gas into demonstrators’ eyes. As he spoke, continuous shooting could be heard in the background, along with cries and shouts.
A graphic video posted on Facebook by Goli Fassihian, a spokeswoman for the National Iranian American Council, showed the body of a young woman whose face was covered in blood. Another video showed a young man with blood on his chest lying on the street, with gunshots ringing out around him.
Here’s some video from yesterday. Sporadic gunfire breaks out at about 3:00 into the video;
And another;
Actually, if Obama’s intent is to avoid being blamed for the riots, that ship has sailed. Last week, the mullahs had already blamed the US, the UK and the west in general for the protests. This morning, the Malaysian Insider published Ahmadinejad’s warning to the west;
Iranian authorities today blamed “terrorists” for clashes in which at least 10 people were killed and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the United States and Britain to stay out of unrest sparked by his disputed re-election.
Iran state television said 10 people were killed and more than 100 others injured in protests held in Tehran yesterday in defiance of a stern warning by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A separate report put the number of deaths at 13.
State television said the violence included the torching of a mosque, which it blamed on “rioters”.
“In the unrest leading to clashes 10 people were killed and more than 100 wounded,” it said. “The presence of terrorists … in yesterday’s event in Enghelab and Azadi avenues was tangible.”
The harshness of the language suggested the authorities could be preparing for a crackdown to end more than a week of protests.
Obama’s reliance on words to resolve the problem is fairly naive (Fox News link);
And Obama cited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s, famous quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“I believe that,” Obama said. “The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.”
In other words, if we just wait long enough, everything will shake out in the end. Unfortunately, Martin Luther King was talking about rational governments and rational societies. A rational government in Iran wouldn’t have let the current conditions there get this far. The mullahs would have suggested a power-sharing agreement with the opposition by now, if they were indeed committed to peace in the streets instead of the line about an 11 million-vote gap in the elections.
The Iranian government knows, after years of dealing with the pussy-footing West over their nuclear ambitions, their is little chance of a Gordon Brown/Barrack Obama insurgency into Iran. The mullahs can get away with anything, so the Iranian people are pretty much on their. Bullets against voices.
The blame for that can rest on the forlorn wailing of the anti-war crowd who have been protesting direct action against Iran for at least three years that I know of. As recently as this Spring, Code Pink has been praising the Ahmadinejad government and advocating for further suppression of women and minorities in Iran.
The American Left consistently comes down on the wrong side of history. Proof? How about the Code Pink press release from Friday;
CODEPINK calls on the Obama Administration to fulfill its commitment to pursue diplomacy with Iran through face-to-face talks without preconditions; as Obama promised during his campaign, “We should not just talk to our friends, we should be willing to engage our enemies as well. That is what diplomacy is all about.” CODEPINK also affirms the Obama administration’s decision to withhold comment on the Iranian election and its government’s decisions around conducting a recount or reelection.
Furthermore, CODEPINK calls on the United States to cease threats of new economic sanctions, remove existing sanctions, and end threats of war.
These affirmations will lend much needed credibility and legitimacy to Obama’s commitment to improve relations with Iran and the Arab-Muslim world, and uphold his campaign promise to meet with Iranian officials without preconditions.
Emphasis is mine. In other words, Code Pink supports the mullahs on their continued murder of gays and stoning of women as well as the current atrocities on the streets of Iranian cities. Peace at any cost.
In truth, it’s a repeat of the 1979 revolution – Jimmy Carter supported the Shah’s government and we became The Great Satan for three decades. Obama is tacitly supporting the Mullahs, so we’ll get another few decades of being The Great Satan to the rest of Iran.
The U.S. Navy is monitoring a vessel called Kang Nam at sea under new U.N. sanctions that bar North Korea from exporting weapons, including missile parts and nuclear materials, they said.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the ship based in North Korea became “a subject of interest” after leaving a North Korean port on Wednesday.
They declined to say what the ship, now in international waters, might be carrying.
Today these stories intersect with a report from Fox News Jennifer Griffin that the McCain is maneuvering to interdict that North Korean ship suspected of carrying embargoed cargo. No links yets – just picked it up on the tube.
In a surprising announcement today, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared there was a “definitive victory” for Ahmadinejad in the iranian election last weekend. Well maybe it wasn’t surprising – maybe it’s what we expected him to say. What’s surprising is that he was able to count so many votes so quickly all by himself to arrive at that conclusion. From the Wall Street Journal;
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a rare speech at Friday prayers at Tehran University, said protests should cease and the opposition must pursue its complaints within the confines of the cleric-led ruling system.
He said protesters would be “held responsible for chaos if they didn’t end” days of massive demonstrations, and that official results showing a landslide for hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were beyond question. “There is 11 million votes difference,” Mr. Khamenei said. “How one can rig 11 million votes?”
Mr. Khamenei blamed the U.K. and Iran’s enemies for the unrest, vigorously defending the ruling system….
Apparently, Khamenei didn’t catch the latest from Charles Krauthammer in today’s Washington Post;
[P]eople aren’t dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.
This started out about election fraud. But like all revolutions, it has far outgrown its origins. What’s at stake now is the very legitimacy of this regime
I’m pretty sure the reformists aren’t going to accept a decision from the “Supreme Leader”. Especially since there are stories like these that the Wall Street Journal has assembled from inside Iran;
They beat students more when they saw posters of Mousavi in their rooms. And they carried big knives and guns.
They also attacked the women’s dormitory next door. The Supreme Leader calls us rioters, but I want to ask him: How can sleeping women in their beds be rioters? Is this the Islamic justice he believes in?
President Obama’s speech was good; he says that he will support us. He also said that nations must decide the fate of their countries by themselves. I agree with him, but now we don’t have any power to change the situation, so we need help and attention.
My hand was hanging out of the taxi window with a little green ribbon — the color of the reformists — tied around my finger. One of the militiamen told me to “throw that ribbon away!” When I refused, 15 people attacked me inside the car. They beat me with their batons and tried to pull me out.
My wife and my daughter who were sitting in the back seat cried and held me tight. I also held myself tight to the chair.
It’s not about an election now – it’s about a bunch of people who are tired of being oppressed. I keep hearing from the Democrats that Americans voted for domestic change in 2008. I read in the comments sections of the Washington Post questions like “why should we care” about Iran? Is that the kind of nation we’ve become in the last few months? From a “shining city on the hill” to a short-sighted, selfish walled in city that can’t see beyond it’s own self-serving, petty wants?
And, oh, since the current regime in Iran happens to be supporting our enemies in the war against terror, the fall of that regime would go a long way towards ending that war. Not to mention ending support to Hezbollah and Hamas in Syria and Gaza.
Stunning, stunning news from the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei yesterday;
Iran wants the ability to build nuclear weapons to gain the reputation of a major power in the Middle East, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said in a BBC interview broadcast Wednesday.
I’m shocked, aren’t you? This is the first I’d heard of this. But, ElBaradei may have made this announcement without examining all of the facts;
Tehran denied the assertion.
Oh, well, I feel better. Go back to sleep ElBaradei.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Evan Perez reports this morning that the Government Accountability Office announced that “most” of the guns used by criminals in Mexico come from the United States;
Drug-related murders have more than doubled in number to 6,200 last year from 2,700 in 2007, according to the GAO study, a draft of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The study is set to be released Thursday.
Mexican officials have pushed for the U.S. to enact tougher gun laws and to help restrict arms smuggling as Mexico attempts to battle drug cartels on its territory.
“The availability of firearms illegally flowing from the United States into Mexico has armed and emboldened a dangerous criminal element in Mexico, and it has made the job of drug cartels easier,” said Rep. Eliot L. Engel, (D., N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere….
Ya know what’s funny (not funny, ha-ha) – we’ve been asking Mexico to tighten up their side of the border and help stem the flow of people and drugs for decades. Now that the Mexicans are reaping what they’ve sown along the border, they expect us to change our Constitution to help them. And of course, the Democrats are willing to bow and scrape to them.
I own several weapons that Democrats would classify as “assault weapons”. Some I’ve owned for decades. I’ve never committed a crime with them, and the rifles were never even pointed at another human. I suspect most gun owners can claim the same responsible ownership.
So why are we the ones who have to relinquish our rights? Just like those of us who’ve always provided health care for our families are now being told to pay for the irresponsible. Funny how law abiding people are always the ones who have to abide by more and more laws.
