Nikki Haley: The U.N.’s Uncomfortable Truths
About Iran
By NIKKI
HALEY FEB. 17, 2018
The remains of what the United States said was an
Iranian rocket’s Qiam guidance component on display in Washington in
December. CreditCliff Owen/Associated Press
Last week, the United Nations published a
report with news a lot of people don’t want to hear. A panel of experts
found that Iran is violating a United Nations weapons embargo — specifically,
that missiles fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebels into Saudi Arabia last year were made
in Iran.
The mullahs in Iran don’t want to hear this news,
because it proves Iran is violating its international agreement. Die-hard
defenders of the Iran nuclear deal don’t want to hear it because it proves,
once again, that the Iranian regime can’t be trusted. And some members of the
United Nations don’t want to hear it because it is further proof that Iran is
defying Security Council resolutions, and the pressure will be on the U.N. to
do something about it.
Yemen is the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian
crisis today. After three years of brutal civil war, 75 percent of the
population is in need of humanitarian assistance. The government has virtually
ceased to exist. Terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula are exploiting that lawlessness to pursue their barbaric
agendas.
The U.N. report reveals much more than just the
Iranian sanctions violation. It charges the anti-government Houthi rebels with
not only launching ballistic missiles into Saudi Arabia but also using the
people of Yemen as human shields and kidnapping Yemeni children to fight in the
war.
At the same time, the report notes that Saudi
restrictions on imports of civilian goods into Yemen worsened the suffering
there. Saudi Arabia is now working to address this through a new Yemen
humanitarian aid plan. We welcome its engagement with the United Nations to try
to address the humanitarian crisis, and urge it to do more.
But the report, for all its bad news, should be
welcomed by those who wish to prevent the conflict in Yemen from becoming a
direct, major confrontation in the Middle East. By confirming that Iran is the
source of the missiles and other weaponry fired into Saudi Arabia, the U.N.
panel has given the world a chance to act before a missile hits a school or a
hospital and leads to a dangerous military escalation that provokes a Saudi
military response.
It is imperative that we seize this opportunity.
Iranian missiles have already come close to hitting civilian targets in Saudi
Arabia. Last November, Houthi militants fired a missile at a major civilian
airport outside Riyadh. Fortunately, the missile fell short of its target. But,
as this newspaper reported, it detonated so close to the terminal that it
caused people inside to jump out of their seats. And the debris it left
scattered around the airport had Iranian fingerprints all over it.
In December, the United States and our partners
took the extraordinary step of declassifying evidence from this missile attack,
as well as from other attacks by missiles, conventional arms and explosive
boats of Iranian origin — all used by the rebels in Yemen and all violations of
U.N. resolutions.
In a warehouse in Washington, we put on display
recovered pieces of the missile fired at the Riyadh airport, with its telltale
nine valves running the length of it and lack of large stabilizing fins, proof
of its Iranian manufacture. Some of the missile remnants on display were
stamped with the logo of ShahidBagheri Industries, an Iranian manufacturer.
Based on the strength of this and other evidence, our intelligence community
concluded unequivocally that the weapons had been supplied by the Tehran
regime. As I said at the time, they might as well have had “Made in Iran” all
over them.
The U.N. report agrees with our intelligence, and
it makes an additional, critical finding. When we first unveiled our evidence
last year, some skeptical observers questioned whether the Iranian weapons had
been transferred to Yemen before the imposition of the U.N. arms embargo in
April 2015. The new U.N. report makes it clear that the weapons were introduced
into Yemen after the arms embargo was imposed, putting Iran in undisputed
violation of the United Nations resolution.
No one, in truth, should be surprised by these
findings. Since the signing of the nuclear agreement, the Iranian regime’s
support of dangerous militias and terror groups has markedly increased. Its
missiles and advanced weapons are turning up in war zones all across the Middle
East. And Houthi militants continue to fire them into Saudi Arabia, including
in December, January and this month.
The world can no longer claim ignorance or
skepticism of Iran’s role in fomenting instability in the Middle East. To
acknowledge the Iranian origin of missiles falling on Saudi Arabia is not, as
some charge, to lay the groundwork for war. Far from it. It is a necessary
prerequisite for preventing war.
Today, armed with this evidence, we have the
chance to rein in Iran’s behavior and demand that it live up to its
international agreements that discourage conflict. But if action is not taken,
then someday soon, when innocent Saudi civilians are killed by Iranian weapons,
the chance for peace will be lost.
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