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April 29, 2015

On Iran & N Korea: A good deal can’t overcome bad judgment

As the Obama Administration works toward an agreed framework with Iran, a curious division is emerging among its defenders. On one hand, the administration and its supporters are understandably rejecting comparisons to the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea. The State Department insists that “[t]he comprehensive deal we are seeking to negotiate with Iran is fundamentally different than what we did in terms of our approach to North Korea,” and will require more intrusive inspections “because of the lessons we learned from the North...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Iran/Six-Party Talks
March 25, 2015

Must read: Iranian bank handled arms transactions for Tehran, Pyongyang through Seoul branch

Investigative journalist Claudia Rosett, who covered the Tienanmen Massacre and exposed the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, has written an extensive report about the operations of Iran’s Bank Mellat in Seoul during the administrations of Roh Moo-Hyun and Lee Myung-Bak: In a cable dated March 20, State asked its embassy in Seoul to tell the South Korean government that “Bank Mellat has facilitated the movement of millions of dollars for Iran’s nuclear program since at least 2003.” Four days later, State followed...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD
March 16, 2015

Three Pinocchios for Glenn Kessler’s “fact-check” on North Korea

If only for prudential reasons, 47 Republican Senators should not have written to Iran’s Supreme Leader. We only have one President at a time, and only the President should negotiate with foreign leaders. Parallel, shadow-government negotiations with foreign adversaries are wrong when Republican Senators do it; they were just as wrong when Jim Wright met with Daniel Ortega, when Nancy Pelosi met with with Bashar Assad over a Republican President’s objections, and when a young John Kerry met with Madam...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Iran/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/WMD
November 25, 2013

How the Iran deal affects North Korea policy

You would think that the world’s biggest government would be capable of handling more than one global proliferation crisis at a time. Unfortunately, Washington isn’t wired for that kind of bandwidth. Major policy initiatives require political capital, and it will take all of this administration’s dwindling reserves to fend off a new round of Iran sanctions in Congress.* The administration couldn’t defend a deal with North Korea now if it had one, and that goes double for the sort of...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Sanctions
October 3, 2013

Sanctions are working in Iran. They’ll work better against North Korea, and here’s why.

Drag a modest grant check through DuPont Circle and you’ll accumulate at least ten pundits, several dozen grad students, and a multitude of assorted kooks who would willingly write you an academic paper entitled, “Why Sanctions Never Worked.” And that’s true, except for South Africa, Yugoslavia, Burma, Nauru, Al Qaeda, Iran, and North Korea, and only if you limit the argument to trade sanctions and exclude other tools of economic pressure, like coordinated divestment, third-party financial sanctions like those in Section...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Money Laundering/Sanctions
August 22, 2013

Is North Korea importing oil from Iran?

Remember when Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard wrote that North Korea, notwithstanding the deepening misery of most of its people, had begun to show a current account surplus in recent years? Their conclusion was based largely on trade data showing that North Korea was importing more foreign goods, mostly through China.  If you believe these official Chinese government statistics for the last six months, however, Pyongyang’s imports from China fell sharply … for the first time in four years. Is this welcome evidence that sanctions...

Categories Anju Links/Axis of Evil/Iran/Sanctions
March 9, 2012

Did Iran test a nuke in North Korea?

It would be a very serious matter if Iran had tested a nuclear weapon in North Korea in 2010, as this German language report in Die Welt claims. The claim has received much less attention in the U.S. press than it would seem to merit, and most bloggers who have picked up the story have merely wondered aloud whether it could be true (the notable exception being Stephan Haggard). I’ll add my summation of the evidence to Stephan’s, but I’ll...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Proliferation
July 1, 2010

What Sanctions Can, and Can’t Do

While President Obama expresses frustration at China’s refusal to support sanctions against North Korea for sinking the ROKS Cheonan, U.S. officials are also expressing their concerns that China will also undermine sanctions against Iran. For what it’s worth, I’m much less bullish about Iran sanctions than I am about sanctions against North Korea. The potential effect of sanctions is inversely proportional to a regime’s connections to the outside world and its possession of goods that have an export market. As...

Categories Iran/NK Economics/Sanctions
January 8, 2010

The Indictments Are Coming! The Indictments Are Coming!

Why do I blog? Because of stories like this: U.S. authorities plan to indict a New Zealand company allegedly involved in selling North Korean arms to Iran, sources linked to the investigation say. They are trying to track down shadowy figures using a labyrinth of thousands of Auckland companies registered to an office on Queen Street, Auckland’s main street. [Sydney Morning Herald] The significance of indicting the company is that the feds will probably tack on some criminal forfeiture counts,...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Missiles/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions/U.S. Law
December 30, 2009

Iran’s History May Be Decided This Friday

I continue to be astonished by the numbers, persistence, and courage of the Iranian people in coming out into the streets to protest the corrupt theocracy, even as that theocracy lowers itself to new depths of brutality to suppress their hopes. The other day, I framed the question that is key to Iran’s fate this way: “I wonder if the security forces can maintain their cohesion as long as the protesters can maintain their courage.” The stakes are rising. There...

Categories Iran
December 28, 2009

Iran Rises Again

I confess that I’d written off the Iranian protest movement for this year, but I was wrong: the movement actually appears to be spreading to new places and attracting support beyond its traditional base among the students. Large-scale protests spread in central Iranian cities Wednesday, offering the starkest evidence yet that the opposition movement that emerged from the disputed June presidential election has expanded beyond its base of mostly young, educated Tehran residents to at least some segments of the...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Proliferation
December 17, 2009

North Korean Arms Shipment Linked to Iran and China

Did I call it or what? Weapons seized in Thailand from an impounded plane traveling from North Korea were likely destined for Iran, a high-ranking Thai government security official was quoted by Reuters as saying regarding the findings of a team investigating the arms. “Some experts believe the weapons may be going to Iran, which has bought arms from North Korea in the past,” said the official. The official was quoted as saying the Thai investigating team considered Iran the...

Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/China & Korea/Iran/Missiles/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD
December 4, 2009

Axis, Schmaxis, Part 11: Iran Equipping Terrorists With North Korean Weapons

This Washington Post article, in addition to being an interesting and entertaining read, confirms my immediate suspicions about that shipment of North Korean arms recently interdicted in the Persian Gulf: Inspectors from the United Arab Emirates quickly swarmed the ship and uncovered a truck-size container packed with small arms made in North Korea. Concealed deeper in the ship was the real find: hundreds of crates containing military hardware and a grayish, foul-smelling powder, explosive components for thousands of short-range rockets....

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Proliferation/Terrorism (NK)/Terrorism/Iraq/Uncategorized
September 1, 2009

Commentary on the UAE Weapons Seizure

The shipment of RPG’s and detonators to Iran being akin to shipping snow to South Dakota in February, I continue to be curious about the ultimate destination for those weapons. Like GI Korea, I think it makes sense that Iran might have been using North Korea as a plausibly deniable source for weapons it planned to give to Shiite militias in Iraq, or to al Qaeda. Iran, after all, is a major manufacturer of antitank missiles, including RPG’s, in its...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Terrorism (NK)/Terrorism/Iraq
August 28, 2009

UAE Intercepts N. Korean Arms Ship

[The ANL Australia, photo from here] The ship was on its way to Iran, carrying weapons whose trade is embargoed by UNSCR 1874: Diplomats at the UN identified the vessel as the Bahamian-flagged ANL-Australia. The vessel was seized some weeks ago. The UN sanctions committee has written to the Iranian and North Korean governments pointing out that the shipment puts them in violation of UN resolution 1974. [Financial Times, Simeon Kerr and Harvey Morris] Because they probably had no idea....

Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/Iran/Proliferation/Sanctions
July 18, 2009

The Iranian Revolution: On Again

Two weeks ago, I had resigned myself to the view that it was all over except for the show trials. But the discontent just won’t go away. After the sermon, downtown Tehran erupted in violence. Security forces attacked demonstrators, older and grayer than recent gatherings, who were chanting “Death to the dictator!” and “God is great.” Tear gas filled streets as protesters sought to enter the gates of the university, which riot police had locked. The crowds swarmed through downtown,...

Categories Iran
June 20, 2009

Iran on the Brink

It has started: Witnesses said police fired tear gas and water cannons at thousands of protesters who rallied in Tehran Saturday in open defiance of Iran‘s clerical government, sharply escalating the most serious internal conflict since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Eyewitnesses described fierce clashes near Revolution Square in central Tehran after some 3,000 protesters chanted “Death to the dictator!” and “Death to dictatorship!” Police responded with tear gas and water cannons, the witnesses said. English-language state TV said a blast...

Categories Iran