Iran and Syria sign mutual defense pact

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Dec 12, 2009 23:39

Iran, Syria sign mutual defense pact

By JPOST.COM STAFF

Iran and Syria signed a defense agreement on Friday, according to an Iranian Press TV report.

The document, signed by Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi and his Syrian counterpart Ali Mohammad Habib Mahmoud, aimed to face "common enemies and challenges," the report said.

Vahidi praised Syria's great potential in the defense and military fields and said that "it is natural for a country like Syria - which has an inhumane and menacing predator like Israel in its neighborhood - to be always prepared [against possible foreign aggression]."

His visit to Syria comes a week after Saeed Jalili, Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, also visited Damascus.

Iran's treaty with Syria comes just as Western countries are warning Teheran that if it fails to respond to overtures intended to make its nuclear program transparent, it will face sanctions.

But as Iran was cementing its ties with Syria, the United States emphasized that its patience in waiting for a diplomatic response from Iran to its overtures is running thin.


In a Wall Street Journal interview published on Friday, White House National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones said that "Iran still controls its destiny on [the nuclear] issue." The door to the diplomatic process would "stay open as long as we could leave it open… but it's not going to stay open much longer."

According to Jones, the parties involved in negotiations with Teheran wish most of all that Iran's leaders would "give a clear statement of policy with regard to their future ambitions concerning the development of nuclear weapons and the delivery means to go with them."

"As long as there's an open question on both of those issues, then Iran is just asking the world to trust them," Jones stated.

"They think they can withstand anything the UN or the coalition of like-minded nations can put together. They might be right. They might be wrong."

"If Iran pivots and does the right thing, whether it's December 30 or January 20, that's what everybody wants," he concluded.

Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton questioned whether Iran had indeed any intention of coming clean on its nuclear program.

Speaking with Al-Jazeera TV of the West's offer of dialogue with Iran, Clinton said "[the Iranians] had first agreed in principle, and then I think because of internal disputes, they backed off from that, raising a lot of questions about what their true intentions are. Obviously, the secret facility at Qom was revealed. They now say they want 10 or 20 new nuclear power plants."

"It's not confidence building, let us say. And I think the international community really still wants to engage with Iran, but people are going to now turn to other routes like more pressure, like sanctions to try to change their mind and their behavior," Clinton said.

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If attacked, Iran wants Syria to hit back at Israel. Damascus hedges

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

December 10, 2009, 5:16 PM (GMT+02:00)

DEBKAfile's military sources report that this message Iran's defense minister Ahmad Vahidi brought to Damascus where he is attending a session of the high Iranian-Syrian defense committee which went into its second day Thursday, Dec. 10. Syrian defense minister Ali Habib is in the chair.

The Iranian visitor indicated that Tehran expects an Israeli attack within a month. According to Iranian intelligence, Jerusalem will take its green light from President Barack Obama's forced admission after Christmas that his policy of dialogue and stiffer sanctions have failed in the face of Tehran's rejection of the international proposal to send its enriched uranium for overseas processing.

"The countdown for war is coming close to its end," said Vahidi to the joint defense committee. "And we must get our strategic partnership in shape ahead of time."

The leitmotif of the Iranian defense secretary's talks in Damascus was the fate Iran and Syria share and their strategic partnership as the only safeguards against what he called "'American-backed Zionist aggression." Syria must commit itself to joint military action against Israel, because “stronger defense ties between Iran and Syria are elements of deterrence in confronting the Zionist regime's threats to the countries of the region.”

For the first, time,Gen. Vahidi openly threatened to respond to a possible Israel attack on Iran's nuclear facilities by striking Israel's "chemical, microbiological and banned nuclear weapons" production sites.

His message brought forth a tepid Syrian response: The Iranian news agency IRNA quoted [color=DarkRed"]Syrian Secretary of Defense Ali Habib as commenting early Thursday, December 10, that an attack on Iran by any party would be deemed an attack on Syria and draw commensurate retaliation.[/color]

But DEBKAfile's military sources point out that comment did not satisfy Tehran because it is short of clear language pledging specific military action. Iranian officials mean to stay in Damascus and keep up the pressure until they elicit a firm, binding Syrian commitment to strike Israel on its ally's behalf if Iran comes under attack.

Gen. Vahidi arrived in Damascus Tuesday aboard a special Iranian military aircraft. [color=Blue"]It carried the largest Iranian military delegation ever seen in the Syrian capital, representing every branch of Iran's armed forces, Revolutionary Guards Corps and intelligence. [/color]

Preparations for coordinated retaliation for a potential Israeli attack also brought a top Hizballah delegation incoming from Lebanon to Damascus Tuesday night, Dec. 8, headed by its secretary general Hassan Nasrallah.

When they met, Syrian and Iranian military officials proposed that Hizballah and the Palestinian terrorist organizations start heating up Israel's borders in the coming days to draw the attention from the world's focus on the Iranian and Syrian nuclear programs.

Sunday, December 6, DEBKAfile's Washington sources reported that the Obama administration was about to launch a campaign against Syria's covert military nuclear program based on the "smoking gun" of traces of highly processed plutonium found by UN inspectors at the bombed Syrian-North Korean facility at Dir a-Zur. The campaign will focus on this finding as evidence of Iran's covert nuclear activities and proliferation activities.