Sunday, April 25, 2010

Iran Trades Oil for Enriched Uranium from Zimbabwe


Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News

Iran last month sealed a secret deal to trade oil for enriched uranium from Zimbabwe, which hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week, according to the London Telegraph. The deal was signed last month “away from the media glare” when an Iranian minister visited Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, a source from the African country told the newspaper. The oil-for uranium agreement gives Zimbabwe badly needed oil and allows Iran free and unsupervised access to material that can be used to produce a nuclear weapon. Israel, the United States and several Western countries have assumed that Iran is lying in claiming it has no intentions of building a nuclear weapon, which it presumably would try to use to carry out its repeated threat to “wipe Israel off the map.”

The reported deal with Zimbabwe would violate United Nations sanctions on Iran, which suddenly stated last week that it is willing to let U.N. nuclear watchdogs inspect its nuclear facilities.

Ahmadinejad last week visited Zimbabwe, whose Muslim population accounts for only one percent of its citizens. He showed support for Mugabe against “expansionist countries’ satanic pressures on the people of Zimbabwe” by allegedly trying to manage the country’s natural resources.

Mugabe responded, "We remain resolute in defending Zimbabwe's right to exercise its sovereignty over its natural resources. We have equally supported Iran's right to peaceful use of nuclear energy as enshrined in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.”

Zimbabwe is estimated to have nearly half a million tons of uranium, five percent of which can be extracted.

Ahmadinejad was the first leader outside of Africa to open the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair, where Iran was the biggest foreign exhibitor.

Comment: Tough sanctions? Sanctions at all? The truth is Obama has spent any leverage with the international community he had some 14 months ago. The mark of a true leader is to use pressure, leverage and old fashioned diplomacy to secure a large coalition of countries who will resist any business with Iran-from banks to oil to gasoline to weapons parts and munition. He has failed and failed miserably. He alone is responsible for Iran's march toward the bomb. Remember, he told us, he insisted that he and he alone could change the culture of anti-USA mood and behavior across all of the planet. He cannot even get his Western partners to refrain from doing business with Iran; he cannot get them to stand down. He has brought CHANGE to the world-a weakened USA posture across the globe that has endangered all of us!

No comments:

Post a Comment