Russian-Central Asian armies exercise defense of US Caspian oil fields

France’s UN Ambassador Gerard Araud warned Wednesday, Sept. 28 that Iran runs a high risk of a military strike if it continues on the path to nuclear proliferation. “Some countries won’t accept the prospect of Tehran reaching the threshold of nuclear armament,” he said. “Personally I am convinced that it would be a very complicated operation …with disastrous consequences in the region.”
Ambassador Araud’s comment confirmed reports from debkafile‘s military sources in recent months that US and European sanctions against Iran had been ineffectual and the ayatollahs had no intention of slowing down on their drive for a nuclear weapon.
The French diplomat was not the only one to raise the alarm this week about regional war clouds circling over Iran.
Sept. 9-26, the Russian army, joined by Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, deployed 12,000 troops in a huge combined military exercise code-named Center-2011 which simulated an Iranian attack on Caspian oil fields operated by American firms in reprisal for a US strike against Iranian nuclear sites.

Russian intelligence postulated an instantaneous Iranian reprisal for this strike and based the war game staged by Russian-led Collective Rapid Force and the Collective Rapid Deployment Forces of the Central Asian Region –CSTO – on this assumption.
Our military sources disclose that the forces taking part in the exercise were briefed for a two-stage scenario:
Stage One: An naval attack on the Caspian Sea coast coming from the south (Iran).
Stage Two: A large-scale air and ground attack from the south by 70 F-4 and F-5 fighter-bombers, namely, the bulk of Iran’s air force, along with armored divisions, marine battalions and infantry brigades landing on the northern and eastern shores of the Caspian Sea.
The Russian briefing conjectured that the Iranian offensive would single out the Kazakh oil field at Mangustan on the Caspian coast, a field which debkafile reports Exxon Mobile is operating.

Moscow clearly attached the highest importance to the exercise and extreme credibility to the hypothetical scenario. Russian chief of staff Gen. Nikolai Makarov personally commanded the drills and on Monday, Sept. 26, President Dmitry Medvedev toured the field commands and units.

Tehran was not idle: Tuesday, the day before the war game ended, Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, commander of the Iranian Navy, stated that  Iranian warships would be deployed “close to US territorial waters,” since the Islamic Republic of Iran considers the US presence in the Persian Gulf “illegitimate and makes no sense.”

After Tehran rejected a recent US request to establish a “red phone” link between the countries to avoid unwanted confrontation between their armed forces in the Gulf region, Ali Fadavi, Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Navy chief, commented enigmatically: “When we are in the Gulf of Mexico, we will establish direct contact with the United States.”

A significant remark on the intentions of another nuclear rogue government came from Peter Hughes, the British Ambassador to North Korea, when he stopped over in Seoul on his way home from a three-year tenure in Pyongyang.
“I have had discussions with high-level officials, who have made clear to me their view that if Colonel Qaddafi had not given up his nuclear weapons, then NATO would not have attacked his country,” he said.

The ambassador therefore held out little hope of the long-stalled US-South Korea talks with the North resumed lately getting anywhere on Pyongyang’s denuclearization.

All these ominous events – pointed comments by French and British diplomats and the large-scale Russian-Central Asian war game – add up to widespread skepticism about any chance of halting Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon or disarming North Korea.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – The end

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the driving force behind Iran’s nuclear program and the most vocal of Israel’s enemies, is on his last legs as president. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stripped him of most of his powers and shut the door against his having any political future.
debkafile‘s Iranian sources report his loyalists have been deserting him in droves since he went to New York to deliver an address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 23. The Supreme Leader used his absence for the coup de grace: The removal of the president’s loyalists from the list of 4,000 contenders running for seats in parliament (the Majlis) next March.

That was easily arranged: Khameini handed his orders to Ayatollah Mohammad Kani, head of the Assembly of Experts, which In the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for screening all contenders for office. He was told to disqualify all the president’s associates. So, in the next Majlis, Ahmadinejad will be shorn of a loyal faction and any buddies sticking to him when his second presidential term runs out in May 2013 will be out of a job.

The Supreme Ruler degraded the president very publicly with one humiliation after another.

He waited for Ahmadinejad to go on the air in a US NBC interview on Sept. 13 to promise the release of Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, the two American hikers convicted of spying, before cutting him down by suspending their release until the Iranian president was being booed by protesters in New York for reneging on his promise.
Tehran’s political, religious and military insiders were not surprised by his downfall, our Iranian sources report. For some time he had been getting too big for his boots, accumulating more powers than any president before him and only getting away with it so long as he was Khamenei’s fair-haired boy.

But then, the favorite, whose election in 2005 and reelection in 2009, Khamenei engineered at the cost of violent anti-government protests in Tehran, rewarded him with ingratitude. He increasingly flouted the master and in some cases began chipping away at his authority – until Khamenei had had enough and decided to reel him in.

At the last minute, he cancelled a live Ahmadinejad interview on Iran’s second television network wide publicized for the eve of his departure to the United Nations.
The affronts followed him home to Tehran, where waiting for him were serious criminal charges linking his name to the disappearance of three billion dollars from Iranian banks. The name of the embezzler has not been released but our sources in Tehran reveal him as Amir Mansour Arya, an entrepreneur who started a business five years ago with Ahmadinejad’s encouragement and whose fortune grew a thousand fold within a suspiciously short time.
Arya is accused of using his presidential connections to secure multi-billion dollar loans from Iranian banks and then spiriting large sums out of the country.

Ahmadinejad denies any complicity in the crime. He tried fighting back by threatening to publish within 15 days “dozens of names” of rivals he claims are guilty of financial crimes. The deadline came and went without publication.

The betting in Tehran is that the Supreme Leader will not actually sack Ahmadinejad but let him last out his term as yesterday’s man,  lame duck in political isolation.
debkafile‘s Iranian sources: Two frontrunners for future president most mentioned recently are two hardliners, Majils (legislature) Speaker Ali Larijani, a former senior nuclear negotiator with the West, and ex-foreign minister Ali Akhbar Veliyati, who is a member of Khamenei’s kitchen cabinet as senior adviser on international relations.