Iran test fires ballistic missile, violating UN resolutions - Rick Moran

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by Rick Moran

The test missile was capable of carrying several warheads, says Secretary of State Pompeo.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that Iran had test fired a medium range ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple warheads. The launch specifically violates a UN Security Council resolution that calls on Tehran not to test ballistic missile technology.

NBCNews:

The ballistic missile Iran tested has the ability to hit parts of Europe and any location in the Middle East, the secretary said, which he claimed would violate a U.N. Security Council resolution that called Iran to not pursue "any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology."
"We condemn these activities," Pompeo said, "and call upon Iran to cease immediately all activities relating to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons."
On Sunday, a senior Iranian official said the country's missile program was not in breach of U.N. resolutions.
"Iran's missile program is defensive in nature... There is no Security Council resolution prohibiting the missile program and missile tests by Iran," state news agency IRNA quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi as saying.
Qasemi did not confirm or deny that Iran had carried out a new missile test.
Iran has repeatedly said its missile program is purely defensive and denied its missiles are capable of being tipped with nuclear warheads.

An American lobbying group loyal to the regime in Iran, says Pompeo is wrong.

The language of the U.N. Security Council Resolution "calls on" rather than "forbids" Iran from testing its missiles, according to Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council. The very U.N. resolution that Pompeo cited is also the very nuclear deal the Trump administration withdrew from earlier this year, Parsi added.
"We had a functioning deal and you may not have agreed with all the contents of it but it actually contained this conflict," he said. "Trump came in, ripped it up and now we are seeing more missile tests, we’re seeing escalation and we are seeing a drift towards war."

That's an idiotic statement. Iran conducted missile tests during the Obama administration, who called them out for it - to little effect. To use Trump's scotching the nuclear deal as an excuse is ludicrous. Besides, one of the glaring deficincies of the nuclear deal was that it never covered Iran's missile tests, as Tehran gleefully pointed out several times during the Obama presidency.

Iranian missle technology may be outdated, but they can pretty much hit what they aim at. Of course, if you're using a nuclear warhead on one of those missiles, you don't have to get very close to the target. Iran is clearly building for a day when they can arm their missiles with nukes. That spells big trouble for Israel and US friends in the region.


Rick Moran

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/iran_test_fires_ballistic_missile_violating_un_resolutions.html

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