A Chinese link to Middle East conflict ?
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A Chinese link to Middle East conflict</font size></center>
Gulf News.com
By Abdullah Al Madani, Special to Gulf News
Published: 08/20/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)
There is no doubt that Iran is the source of Hezbollah's arsenal of missiles, which have recently been used against Israel. But the controversial issue is whether these missiles are genuine Iranian products. Military and intelligence reports have long confirmed that they are one of the fruits of the strategic alliance between Tehran and Beijing.
Sino-Iranian ties, initiated in 1971 during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, have strengthened after Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979. In recent years, however, cooperation between the two countries has grown exponentially, primarily because of China's insatiable energy needs and Iran's hunger for technology and consumer goods, as the economies of both states continue to expand.
One of the aspects of the relationship is cooperation in the energy and construction sectors. China is now Iran's third-largest export market for crude oil. Its state-owned oil company Sinopec has a 50 per cent stake in the development of Yadavaran, Iran's largest undeveloped oil field. In April 2005, the two countries decided to set up a joint-venture to build huge tankers capable of ensuring deliveries of Iran's liquefied gas to China. And one month later, China agreed to buy some 110 million metric tons of Iranian gas over 25 years in a contract which may be worth $20 billion.
China is also involved in the construction of Iranian dams, airports, steel mills, and roads, including Tehran's metro and a new highway linking Tehran with the Caspian Sea coast.
Bilateral trade, on the other hand, hit a new record of $9.5 billion last year, compared with $7.5 billion in 2004.
The most important aspect of the alliance, however, is Tehran's access to the technology being developed by the Chinese People's Army, particularly in the area of cruise and ballistic missiles. This has long been an issue of great concern for the Americans. Washington has repeatedly expressed its dissatisfaction on the grounds that promoting the military capability of Iran's Islamic regime could raise tensions in the Gulf and threaten US interests in the region and the safe passage of oil tankers.
Commercial considerations
Beijing first began exporting Chinese-made missiles to Tehran in 1985, during the Iran-Iraq war, when it supplied weapons to both sides. At the time, Chinese missile exports were purely driven by commercial considerations. The decline in the domestic military orders in the 1980s, owing to declining defence budgets had forced defence industrial sectors to make up the shortfalls by trying to market military products abroad, particularly in the Third World. But commercial considerations have soon changed to strategic ones under the pressure of a number of developments.
Beijing has realised since the 1990s that it could use the export of missiles and related technology to Iran as a bargaining card with the west regarding issues concerning its own security, such as Taiwan, US military sales to the Taipei regime, US military presence in the neighbouring central Asian republics, and the west's repeated criticism of human rights violation in China. Tehran realised too that Beijing's hunger for energy represented a golden opportunity to connect its oil supplies and concessions to China with the latter's military exports to Iran.
As a result, China continued throughout the 1990s to provide Iran not only with missiles but also with production technology, equipment, training and testing facilities for the indigenous Iranian manufacture of Chinese and North Korean designed missiles. Following US-China summits in 1997 and 1998, however, Beijing decided, under US pressure, to halt its sales of missiles to Iran and pledged not to provide Tehran with missile production technology. This was a significant development as Chinese officials had never before admitted their country's involvement in promoting Iran's missile programme. They had always denied reports on the issue, accusing the west of spreading rumours about China.
But this did not last long. New tensions in US-China relations in 2000 and 2001 in the backdrop of events such as the Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the growing tension in the Taiwan Strait and the EP-3 spy plane incident led Beijing to resume its missile cooperation with Tehran.
Despite the improvement in US-China relations in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in Washington and New York and the release by Beijing in 2002 of a set of measures aimed at controlling exports of missile related technology and assistance, Sino-Iranian missile cooperation has continued according to many reliable reports.
Based on these reports and other intelligence information, Washington imposed sanctions on three different occasions between 2002 and 2005 on tens of Chinese state-owned firms for the transfer to Iran of dual-use missile-related items.
The Iranians have always asserted that their missiles are indigenous and fully designed and manufactured at missile facilities near Tehran and Esfahan by local scientists and experts.
But the aforementioned evidence and many other indicate otherwise. Iranian missiles such as Zilzal, Raad, Oghab, Nour and Mushak are said to be copies of Chinese missiles, particularly the Silkworm, with the fuselage being lengthened and the engine's place being changed.
China, therefore, is indirectly responsible for encouraging Hezbollah to act as a state within the state and drag Lebanon into war.
Dr Abdullah Al Madani is an academic researcher and lecturer on Asian affairs.
http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/region/10061326.html
They get their rockets from China...now what? Israeli cowards that attack women and children are not going to get into a REAL fight...not after being DEFEATED by Hezbollah. Yes defeated. When you have a superior army like the Israelies claim and you cannot take down a "terrorist" group with all of the civilian destruction they caused "YOU ARE USELESS" especially as allies.
