Below from my column in today's New York Sun:
detail of the Iran observers was confirmed in public (open source)
yesterday in Congress testimony. Additional note: the Iranians are
now ready for the US air strikes. The North Korea test (and there
may be a second test) was a full scale exercise in wartime
conditions. North Korea trained Iran's rocket brigades. The Iran
warhead is North Korean design.
First, on Tuesday, July 4, North Korea stunned its East Asian
neighbors and rocked the U.N. Security Council by firing not only
the Taepodong-2 missile that had been displayed on its launch pad
for two weeks but also by launching up to nine more smaller
missiles from its rocket brigades' arsenals. Japan was the angriest
of the six-party talking states and demanded sanctions from the
United Nations. China expressed its frustration as well as
restating its fear that any confrontation would trigger a flood of
desperate North Korean refugees into Manchuria. Even Russia was
unusually alarmed. The salve to the crisis was that the Taepodong
missile had failed within a minute of its launch and fell
haphazardly into the Sea of Japan along with the smaller missiles.
The press smirked that Kim Jong Il needed more smarts before he was
ready to be the big bad wolf of Asia.
Unfortunately, the missile firings were not a failure. The
confirmed fact from American observers is that the exercise was a
complete success.
Up till now, North Korea has had a first-strike policy where it,
as the intended aggressor, gets to prepare for a sneak attack by
prepositioning, fueling and firing its missiles against multiple
targets. The July 4th exercise was instead a rapid response test to
a simulated American air attack. Prior to the launch, the North
Korean rocket brigades dispersed into the countryside as if under
air attack. The military maintained radio silence to simulate the
confusion after America's first and second waves took down the
communications grids, as well as to practice the necessary
communication security under American surveillance. Then the
Taepodong-2 was fired, simulating a strategic weapon missile
launch, followed by tactical weapons chosen randomly from the
mobile brigades. The missiles landed in the Sea of Japan, but not
ineptly. North Korean trawlers were prepositioned at the landing
sites to observe the exercise. The Taepodong-2 missile performed
correctly, simulating a nuclear weapon strike on American allies or
assets.
Crucially, observing this exercise were 11 Iranian Revolutionary
Guards officers, including among them members of the elite command
and control group, the Partisans of the Mahdi (the Ayatollah
Khomeini). The Iranians had in part paid for the North Korean
exercise, because Iran is a North Korean arms client. The Iranians
were on hand because their own strategic and tactical missile
system is based upon the designs of, and built by, North Korean
technicians (from Chinese plans proliferated in the early 1990s).
The Iranians were preparing for the expected American air attacks
against Iran's strategic assets now being provoked in the proxy war
on Israel.
topics:
Military, Iran, Russia, Israel, United Nations, North Korea
