Biden Defends His Record On Iran And The Middle East
Iran has been diplomatically isolated during his 18 months in office, President Joe Biden argued in an opinion piece published Saturday by The Washington Post.
Iran has been diplomatically isolated during his 18 months in office, President Joe Biden argued in an opinion piece published Saturday by The Washington Post.
Prior to his trip to the region Biden tried to defend his diplomatic record and efforts of military deterrence, arguing that attacks against US targets have decreased and a ceasefire has been declared in Yemen.
The President said that when he took office the United States was isolated on the issue of Iran, as his predecessor had withdrawn from the 2015 nuclear agreement known as the JCPOA, which “was working” and found itself “isolated and alone” at the United Nations Security Council.
“With respect to Iran, we reunited with allies and partners in Europe and around the world to reverse our isolation; now it is Iran that is isolated until it returns to the nuclear deal my predecessor abandoned with no plan for what might replace it,” he said.
Biden also took credit for a vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors on June 8, when “30 countries joined us to condemn Iran’s lack of cooperation,” he said and added, “My administration will continue to increase diplomatic and economic pressure until Iran is ready to return to compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, as I remain prepared to do so.”
But the president also made a series of claims not exactly reflecting reality.
While there is more Western diplomatic coordination in dealings with Iran, but that country has almost reached a nuclear threshold stage during Biden’s presidency and is violating more US oil export sanctions. Iran has now sufficient enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb.
Biden said that after Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA, “Iran had passed a law mandating the rapid acceleration of its nuclear program.”
He was referring to a law tabled in the Iranian parliament on November 4, 2020, to elevate uranium enrichment to 20 percent, the day after the US election, and 17 months after Trump abandoned the deal.
The Iranian escalation came after candidate Biden published an opinion piece on CNN in September 2020 saying Trump’s decision was a big mistake and he would retore the JCPOA. It seemed that Iranians seeing Biden willing to negotiate escalated their nuclear program.
The escalation continued in early 2021 with uranium enrichment reaching 60-percent purity, as the Biden Administration began negotiations with Tehran.
Before Biden’s election, Tehran had retaliated against Trump by a small increase in the level of enrichment, but nowhere close to accumulating highly enriched fissile material for a bomb, as is the case now.
The President also made claims about more stability in the Middle East which leave room for questions.
He said that attacks against US targets substantially decreased after he ordered retaliation for Iran-backed rocket strikes. But US troops have been targeted at least 29 times since October 2021 without any military response, a critic said.
He also did not mention dozens of Iran-backed Houthi missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia in 2021 and 2022, with the aggression expanding to the United Arab Emirates earlier this year.
Iran also continues its terror activities in the region, as recent events in Turkey showed and pro-Iran groups such as the Hezbollah and Hamas maintain a highly aggressive posture toward Israel.
Thursday’s statement from the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence justified the Royal Navy impounding surface-to-air missiles and other hardware under United Nations Security Council resolution 2140, passed in 2014. This imposed an arms embargo on named leaders of Ansar Allah, or the Houthis, and was in February extended to the Houthis as a whole.
The anti-ISIS coalition, Inherent Resolve, tweeted that the “successful seizure of smuggled Iranian missiles is another example of Iran violating int'l law, supporting terrorism & threatening Int’l peace & security. Together with our allies & partners, we remain committed to deterring their destabilizing activities.”
The British announcement came with Yemen in the fifth month of a fragile ceasefire between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, just ahead of United States President Joe Biden’s 13-16 July Middle East visit, and with US-Iran nuclear talks paused.
US Republican Senator Jim Risch, ranking member of the Foreign Relation Committee tweeted, “As the Biden Admin tries to rush back into the JCPOA, Iran continues to destabilize the Middle East and flood the region with illicit weapons. US sanctions relief will only serve to increase Iranian terrorism.”
London’s statement on the arms seizures said marines, deployed in inflatable boats from the Royal Navy ship HMS Montrose, had found the weapons in “speedboats being operated by smugglers in international waters south of Iran” on January 28 and February 25, following the scanning of vessels by helicopters.
The weapons were returned to the UK for technical analysis that “revealed that the shipment contained multiple rocket engines for the Iranian produced 351 land attack cruise missile and a batch of 358 surface-to-air missiles.”
The cache was also inspected on June 24, said the British statement, by experts appointed by the UNSC – which might account for the timing of Thursday’s announcement some months after the interception.
‘Loitering’ missiles
This is believed to be the first British interception of relatively sophisticated weapons supplied to the Houthis by Iran. The 358 is a ‘loitering’ missile designed to stay aloft and target airplanes, while the 1000-km-range 351 cruise missile has been fired by the Houthis at targets in Saudi Arabia and was possibly used to attack Abu Dhabi on January 17, killing three civilians. Similar missiles were impounded by the USS Normandy in the Arabian Sea in 2019.
The Iranian foreign ministry in a tweet Thursday disputed the “moral authority” of the British to “make a claim” against Iran, arguing that the UK was “continuously selling advanced weapons to the self-proclaimed military coalition against the defenseless people of Yemen,” making the UK “a partner in the war and aggression against Yemen…and…not in a position to make such baseless accusations...”
The UK has faced criticism over arms sales including strike aircraft to Saudi Arabia, which began its armed intervention in 2015 in support of ousted president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi against Houthi rebels.
Yemen ceasefire
The current four-month ceasefire in Yemen is expected to be high on Biden’s agenda in his looming visit to Saudi Arabia, part of the US president’s Middle East tour July 13-16. There have been reports that the Yemen ceasefire was negotiated by the Saudis in Beirut with Hezbollah, the Lebanese party allied to Iran, acting on behalf of the Houthis.
Sea lanes around Yemen are increasingly contentious. Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz claimed Tuesday that Iran was expanding its naval presence in the Red Sea.
The HMS Montrose, a type 23 frigate, operates as part of the 38-nation Combined Maritime Forces (CMF), which counters illicit non-state operations including drug seizure. In January HMS Montrose seized one shipment of 663kg of heroin, 291kg of hashish and 87kg of methamphetamine in the Gulf of Oman.
The whole scheme of producing domestic vaccines now seems little more than wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and precious time in preventing tens of thousands of deaths in 2021.
According to the latest official figures, nearly 65 million Iranians have had one dose, 58 million two doses but only 27 million have had a third shot of the vaccine. Of the total of 150 million doses administered so far, the Chinese Cinopharm accounts for over 80 percent and AstraZeneca for around 10 percent. Vaccine imports stopped a few months ago and the only vaccines available for a booster now are homegrown variants.
Only a total of 20 million (13%) used in the vaccination program so far were produced by the seven Iranian developers that received support and funding from the government. None of Iran’s seven homegrown vaccines has received the approval of the World Health Organization.
Some Iranian physicians believe many Iranians are refusing to get a third shot because they were inoculated with foreign-made vaccines before but will now have to get homegrown ones with doubtful efficacy against new Covid variants.
Lack of demand has led to homegrown Covid vaccine production lines shutting down one after the other and millions of doses are near expiration in storage.
All domestic developers, including the Barekat Foundation and Razi Institute, for instance, hav millions of doses of unsold vaccines which will soon expire. Developers will go bankrupt, they say, if the government does not purchase their products but the government already has 50 million doses in storage and no cash to even pay the rest of its debts, around $250 million, for the 50 million doses of homegrown vaccines it purchased before.
Some of the vaccine producers, including the state-owned Barekat Foundation, received hundreds of millions of dollars to start their vaccine development program from scratch despite having had no experience in the field.
Mohammad Mokhber, the head of the Barekat Foundation who is now vice president in President Ebrahim Raisi’s administration, repeatedly promised that the foundation would be delivering fifty million doses of its product, CoVIran-Barekat, before August 2021 to be used in the vaccination program. These promises never materialized.
Iran's national vaccination plan did not make any significant progress before presidency was handed over to Raisi in August last year. Raisi has repeatedly boasted about the success of his government in mass vaccination and Covid management.
But critics say centers of power controlled by hardliners impeded fromer President Hassan Rouhani’s vaccine purchases and once he was gone, allowed vaccines already ordered to flow into carry out the vaccination plans and take credit for it.
This resulted in a new wave of infection in the summer of 2021 to kill around 40,000 unvaccinated citizens.
The Rouhani government had ordered 16.5 million doses of these vaccines, the only ones approved by World Health Organization (WHO) at the time, through WHO’s Covax program, but Khamenei banned the purchase of American and British Covid vaccines in early January 2021 putting forth a conspiracy theory that the two counties could not be trusted.
Some hardliners including a top IRGC official even claimed that there was evidence that foreign companies producing Covid-19 vaccines wanted to reduce the world population by 20 percent or that their vaccines were meant to use as biological weapons against Iranians.