A new report reveals that the Trump administration is ready to declare Iran is breaching the Chemical Weapons Conventions, as they are supplying Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who has deployed chemical weapons. The Obama administration refused to make such a declaration, weakly stating it could not verify whether Iran was obeying the conventions.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Multiple sources with knowledge of the matter confirmed that next week the Trump administration will transmit a formal finding to Congress regarding Iran’s non-compliance with the conventions, which ban stockpiling and use of these lethal weapons.
One senior congressional official told the Beacon, “No one who’s actually an adult is surprised by this news. The Iranians have never met an arms control agreement they didn’t violate. That’s why the nuclear deal was such a transparent joke. The IAEA verifies what it’s allowed to verify and on everything else the Iranians cheat. The Trump administration should draw the logical conclusion and force the Europeans out of the deal, which so far they’ve refused to do.”
Obama was so fearful of jeopardizing his cherished nuclear deal with Iran that he refused to condemn Assad for the chemical weapons attacks. As Foreign Policy wrote, Obama was more interested in appeasing Russia:
The State Department’s top brass balked when staff at the U.S. mission to the United Nations drafted a plan in the fall of 2014 to point the finger at the regime for a series of chlorine attacks in Syria, fearing it might upend efforts to secure Russia’s support for peace in Syria and jeopardize an Iran nuclear pact, according to former State Department officials.
The Jerusalem Post reported in 2017 of the Iran-Syria chemical weapons connection:
The 59 Tomahawk missiles the U.S. fired at the Shayrat Air Base served to punish dictator Bashar Assad for his use of chemical weapons against civilians. The strikes on April 6 also helped shine a spotlight on Iran’s role in Assad’s repeated use of nerve agents, because the mullahs’ Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were at Shayrat.
What the rapid-fire news cycle didn’t say early this month was that Tehran and Damascus jump-started a program to develop a sophisticated Syrian chemicals arsenal as early as 2004. The British publication Jane’s Defense Weekly reported in 2005 that the Islamic Republic would work with Syria to build an “innovative chemical warfare program.”
Iran ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997.
NTI reported what Iran had in stock:
Iran has imported chemicals such as thiodiglycol and thionyl chloride that can be applied towards legitimate purposes such as dyes, textiles, and pesticides or could be diverted towards an illicit CW program. In the mid-1990s, Iran also imported several tons of phosphorus pentasulfide, which is on the Australia Groups watch list for controlled chemical precursors, but not on the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) Schedule lists. Although this compound has several legitimate uses—including pesticide production (most notably malathion) and as an additive for lubricant oil—it is also a starting point for the production of V-group nerve agents.