Skip to main content

Arms And The Man

According to a report in the Washington Times, The Bush administration has imposed economic sanctions against Russia, China and North Korea for supplying missiles and weapons to Iran and Syria. Senator and soon to be President Chris Dodd visited Syria recently where -- we hope -- he castigated Bashir Assad about supplying munitions that are killing American troops and innocent civilians in Iraq.

The Bush administration is imposing economic sanctions on Chinese, Russian and North Korean companies for selling missiles and weapons goods to Iran and Syria, administration officials said.

The sanctions were imposed earlier this week on three Chinese state-run companies, three Russian firms and a North Korean mining company under a 2000 arms proliferation law that was renamed Iran and Syria Nonproliferation Act in 2005.

The sanctions ban U.S. government business and support to the companies for two years and block U.S. firms from selling them items that require export licenses.

They are largely symbolic, but U.S. officials have been effective in publicly singling out companies that are engaged in selling arms to rogue states.

The Bush administration has imposed sanctions more than 40 times since 2001 as part of a more aggressive push to stop arms transfers to rogue states or unstable regions of the world.

The law requires the imposition of sanctions on companies, governments and people caught transferring missiles, weapons of mass destruction materials or advanced conventional arms to Iran or Syria.

The officials said the sanctions were imposed after an interagency review of intelligence on transfers that happened within the past two years.

Specific details of the transfers were not released, but officials said they included missile sales to Syria and arms sales and transfers of weapons-related goods to both Iran and Syria.

The sanctions ban the companies from conducting business with U.S. companies for two years and are likely to affect the Russians more than the Chinese and North Korean companies because of the potential to block sales of aircraft-related materials to U.S. manufacturers.

The Chinese companies are the Zibo Chemical Equipment Plant, which has been linked to chemical-weapons sales, the China National Aerotechnology Import Export Corp. and the China National Electrical Import and Export Co.

The Korean Mining and Industrial Development Corp. also was sanctioned for its role in the transfers. An official said the North Korean company, which was linked in the past to air shipments of missiles from North Korea to Iran, is a "serial proliferator."

The new sanctions could affect the six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear program. Until last month, North Korea rejected further talks with five other nations because of what Pyongyang called economic sanctions against a Macao bank that U.S. officials said North Korea was using for money laundering and counterfeiting.

The sanctions also will penalize Russian state-run arms exporter Rosoboroneksport, the officials said. Two other Russian firms, Kolomna Design Bureau and the Tula Design Bureau of Instructment Building, also were sanctioned. A Russian national identified as Alexi Safonov will be sanctioned, too.

Rosoboroneksport signed deals with Syria worth $9.7 billion in May 2005 that U.S. officials said included high-technology arms such as advanced anti-tanks missiles, some of which were used during the fighting last summer between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.

Israeli forces found Russian-made Kornet and Metis anti-tank missiles in Lebanon, and U.S. officials said the missiles may have been sold to Syria in 2002.

The Russian government exporter also signed a contract last year to sell $3 billion worth of arms to Venezuela, whose regime has emerged as key regional U.S. enemy.

Rosoboroneksport is run by Sergei Chemzov, a former KGB colleague of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Obamagod!

My guess is that Barack Obama is a bit too modest to consider himself a Christ figure , but artist will be artists. And over at “ To Wit ,” a blog run by professional blogger, journalist, radio commentator and ex-Hartford Courant religious writer Colin McEnroe, chocolateers will be chocolateers. Nice to have all this attention paid to Christ so near to Easter.

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Did Chris Murphy Engage in Private Diplomacy?

Murphy after Zarif blowup -- Getty Images Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, up for reelection this year, had “a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the Munich Security Conference” in February 2020, according to a posting written by Mollie Hemingway , the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. Was Murphy commissioned by proper authorities to participate in the meeting, or was he freelancing? If the former, there is no problem. If the latter, Murphy was courting political disaster. “Such a meeting,” Hemingway wrote at the time, “would mean Murphy had done the type of secret coordination with foreign leaders to potentially undermine the U.S. government that he accused Trump officials of doing as they prepared for Trump’s administration. In February 2017, Murphy demanded investigations of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn because he had a phone call with his counterpart-to-be in Russia. “’Any effort to undermine our nation’s foreign policy – e