Here’s a chart that Iran’s oh-so border-conscious Revolutionary Guards & Affiliates won’t show you. No, that red dotted line along the Iranian coast is NOT the route of British Royal Navy ships violating Iran’s territorial waters. It is the route taken by oil smugglers doing illicit, lucrative, sanctions-busting business with Saddam Hussein during the era of UN sanctions on Iraq.
The chart comes from the 2004 Duelfer report on Iraq, and the accompanying text explains that one of the routes used by Saddam’s UN-sanctioned regime to smuggle out oil was along the Iranian coast. And who was enabling this smuggling? Why, “the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy,” of course! –which “facilitated this illicit trade in return for a fee.”
Charles Duelfer’s Iraq Survey Group calculated that Iran got a 25% cut of the profits from all Iraqi oil smuggled along this route. Duelfer noted that Iran and the UAE were the most frequent destinations for this smuggled Iraqi oil, and “the majority of the smuggling vessels were owned by entities from these countries.” In other words, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards turned a neat profit by offering Iran’s territorial waters as a corridor for the sanctions-busting traffic of Iranian and UAE smugglers allegedly doing dirty business with Saddam.
The 15 British hostages now held by Iran were patrolling near Iranian waters in an attempt to stop the current smuggling of Iraqi oil. And although the evidence shows that British patrols have NOT been violating Iran’s territorial waters, the chart above is enough to suggest that in a saner world, they really should — with the full help and blessing of the international community.
Right on! If only the “international community” was willing to see the truth of this situation!!
Quite honestly, the present stand-off illustrates the absolute impotence of multilateral institutions as they presently exist – even more so than Saddam’s flaunting of the UN and of UNSC resolutions and sanctions; more so than Iran’s decades-long deceptions about its nuclear program; and almost as much as the complete absence of real, effective action to halt the truly horrific actions of Sudan’s Islamist government.
Leaves me wondering what the utility of such institutions is, and why the American public should continue to finance such useless venues for the world’s worst to call us evil.
Of course, the Duelfur map must be wrong.
Everyone knows that the peace-loving, (international) law-abiding Iranian Shiite theocracy, having fought a vicious, lengthy and costly war after being attacked by Iraq, wouldn’t cooperate with (Sunni) Saddam Hussein’s secular government any more than they (the Iranians) would supply and train Sunni insurgents in Iraq, subvert UN mandates or challenge UN authority.
Oh wait!
So Iran is a pirate state. We’ve had a terrorist state (Palestine), a basket-case state (Somalia, to name but one), and now a pirate state. Give Ahmadinejad an eye patch, and he’s a dead ringer for Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. Just not dead enough for my tastes.
Bloodthirsty Liberal
http://bloodthirstyliberal.com