North Korea and Iran

I love Christiana Amanpour because she has such good sources in the Middle East.  She was on CNN today talking about the test of a bomb by North Korea which claims it was a hydrogen device.  Just about everyone knew that, but the rest of that discussion was a little different.  She mentioned the connections between Iran and North Korea.  Part of that discussion was that Iran and North Korea might have cooperated in the development.  I can find nothing about that anywhere in public sources.  That is an interesting enough topic to delve into, though reporters should be on it soon enough just because it was mentioned.    

We might be surprised at the amount of cooperation the two have already had, especially in the arms business, where Donald Kirk [Forbes, Missiles Despite Iran Nuclear Deal 13 November 2016 http://www.forbes.com/sites/donaldkirk/2015/11/13/forget-about-china-n-korea-markets-missiles-as-iran-nuclear-deal-approaches/]  points out that the North Korean arms find their way from Iran into Syria and Yemen:

“Most of North Korea’s missiles for years have been going to buyers in the middle east, notably Iran and Syria but also Egypt, Yemen, Libya and other markets.  Although slowed down by sanctions, sales of short-range Scuds and mid-range Rodongs have been an important source of foreign exchange for the financially strapped regime.

North Korean missiles, moreover, remain a constant threat as seen when Scuds fired into Saudi Arabia by rebels in Yemen were discovered to have been manufactured in the North. South Korean intelligence sources estimated that Saudi forces had shot down about eight of 20 Scuds fired by rebels into Saudi Arabia.”  

Rand Paul said this morning that the same negotiators that did the agreement with North Korea to limit their capacity to get a bomb, also did the one with Iran.  What an irony that would be, if true.  North Korea is proving that trying to do something about nuclear programs is more difficult than promising to “snap back” sanctions.  It doesn’t work without a wide ranging agreement among countries with interests in seeing that North Korea or Iran does not have a bomb.  Apparently, some would like for that to happen.  

I said in my first book that China used North Korea to test its various approaches to manipulating the rest of the world and to see what the reactions would be to certain types of actions.  I still think that is true.  But, we might want to ask China if this test was something they knew was coming.  In April, they warned the whole world that North Korea was ramping up their missile testing.  Did they know that North Korea was about to test a bomb?  Did they know Iran was involved with North Korea on the development of that bomb? How could the Chinese sit in those nuclear discussions with Iran knowing they were involved with North Korea?  They can’t be that desperate for Iranian oil.  

China wants to see our reaction to a buildup of weapons delivery systems, but hardly something like a test of a big bomb that rattled some of China’s own cities, like this one did.  If the Chinese fail to punish North Korea for this test, we will have a pretty good idea that they knew and approved of this test.  All the while, they participated in negotiations with Iran.  We have to wonder what their motivation for condoning this kind of action would be.    

In the meantime, the U.S. has decided to wait to respond until it is confirmed that a nuclear test was actually performed.  They have to be kidding about that one.  Unless our intelligecne services have all gone asleep in the past couple of weeks, they must have known it was coming.  They must have known what that flash was.  As David Sanger pointed out today, 3 of the 4 tests of weapons were on Obama’s watch.  It wouldn’t be a big surprise to the next President that this one could not prevent North Korea from having or exploding a nuclear weapon.  We have to wonder if their intent is to give one to Iran.