Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Claire Berlinski, Ed. ·
Oct 7, 2010 at 6:39am
Just when I'm on the verge of despair, a little item like this comes along. Russia took $800 million from Iran to supply it with S-300PMU-1 missiles. They're now refusing to deliver the goods. They won't refund the money, either. They're pretty much saying, "What are you going to do, bomb us? With what missiles?" The Iranians, note Pravda derisively, are "in convulsions." They're threatening to sue. Sue where? In Russian courts, of course. Good luck with that, Tehran.
It's all so delicious I can barely stand it.
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Comments :
Jul '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
I'll bet the White House will still follow through with our sale of F-22's to Turkey.
Aug '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Sure sounds like the Russians have Turkish counsel.
Aug '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Maybe the Russians got wind of the Iranian training of the Chechens, or the Uighurs, or any of the groups that the RG is so involved with.
Gosh, maybe there are lessons here for our Admin. ! Ya think ?
Jul '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Shame they can't both lose.
May '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Good stuff Claire, but where does Pravda rank on your daily reading list? And how often do you see stories there that do not appear in the Western press?
Aug '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Skimming the site, they certainly have better headlines than anything I see in Western media.
"United States gradually disappear from world map"
"China to conquer world arms market with poor quality rip-offs"
"USA is about to win the fight for Merchant of Death"
"AKA Obama fans: All together now – say OMG!!"
(linked two just to show the massive difference between headline and article content)
I don't know how the Russians ended up with all the awesome headline writers, while the NYT leads with snoozers like "Vargas Llosa Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature". Mr. President, we must not allow a headline gap to develop!
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Curious, I went to Pravda On-Line and it will now be my first stop for news. Its headlines read like The Onion: "China to conquer arms market with poorly made rip-offs." "United States gradually disappears from World Map." And that's their news headlines. The features included "Cannibal eats grandmother while alive." And in coverage of Amadinejad's UN speech concerning many untruths, including the burning of the Koran in the United States, they failed to mention that it never actually happened. This is a scary insight into what a great swath of the world is reading. Yikes.
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
OMG Blueant...we were having a simultaneous bloggasm!
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
I think we can safely take that article as a message from Russia to Iran, with love.
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Wait, I thought the Russians were our implacable expansionist foes, bent on thwarting our aims around the globe? Make no mistake, as Our President would say: the Russians are hardly our allies. But this S-300 business is a big, necessary win for us. Policymakers who view Russia as our enemy are likely to see their dreams -- and our nightmares -- come true. The situation is far more complicated.
Sep '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Trust, but Terrify.
Sep '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Cannibal eats grandmother while alive
That's a typo: it should be Carnivore.
May '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Beautiful.
I'd bet Pseudodionysius' whiskers that Obama will condemn Russia for the deceit.
Sep '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Aaron Miller: Beautiful.
I'd bet Pseudodionysius' whiskers that Obama will condemn Russia for the deceit. · Oct 7 at 11:42am
I can see Russia with my mouse.
May '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Not really expansionist. Just slimy gangsters; Authoritarians without the prophylactic image of Leninist ideology.
Sep '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Just slimy gangsters
Gangsters with no pasta, but lotsa vodka.
Jul '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
I find the title to this post simply brilliant.
Oct '10
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Ms. Berlinski: I'm glad the Iranians don't get the S-300PMU-1's too.
Yet.
My concern, though, is that this might just be a bargaining move. That, say, Gazprom might like to run a pipeline through Iran, or might even like to buy from Iran, and that Russia might be willing to cut a deal with Tehran for the rockets in order to make that happen. Russia gets both the hard currency and recurring revenues they desperately need; Iran gets a bunch of good rockets to put that peaceful fissile material they've been enriching in an increasingly-open way in.
I hope I'm wrong. But I'm probably not.
Re: Tehran Caught in Moscow's Nyet
Oh, is it ever awesome to see the Russians putting the screws to someone else for once.
Turkey's a partner-customer (for now) in the F-35 program. We likely will never sell an F-22 to anyone, since we cut production at 187 (incredibly rashly, in my opinion) and refused to sell them to much closer allies like Australia and Japan.
Still, the F-35 is the program on which the Administration has staked the future of the USAF and all the services' air umbrella, and Turkey will have access to (a slightly less sophisticated version of) the plane. Given their current foreign policy, which is operatively anti-American in many respects, it's a real worry whether they could be trusted not to give, say, the Iranians a peek at the manual, which of course, the Iranians could then swap to Moscow for, say, an S-300 system…