Fears orbit with Iranian satellite launch
By Walid Phares
The launching of an Iranian satellite into orbit, said to be about
"communications technology" and "earthquake monitoring", would have been a
normal news item not exceeding the greater coverage of India landing a space
craft on the moon last month.
But according to news agencies around the world, Western chanceries and
national security agencies have taken the development seriously. The Associated
Press and the BBC described reactions as "nervous". Although the debate about
the value of Iranian space technology and commercial rocket capacity usually
concludes that Tehran is far from reaching a respectable level, many defense
analysts dismiss the issue as being solely
about the industrialization of the Islamic Republic: in fact it is about the
"weaponization" of the satellite.
Named "Omid", Persian for "hope", the satellite has been described by Iran’s
state media as a data-processing device for research and telecommunications,
and was launched into a low Earth orbit. The launch coincided with the 30th
anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, and was overseen by President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad.
Iran sent its first satellite into orbit in 2005, on a Russian rocket, but
Omid’s launch was the first time Tehran was able to launch an Iranian-made
rocket from its own soil. According to the Fars news agency, the launch was
made using a modified long-range missile, a Safir 2 rocket, and was planned
under strict United Nations economic sanctions.
Obviously, this one launch may not be the crossing of the line, but it was the
first step and statements were made about the immediate following steps. The
quasi consensus today is about the strategic intention of Tehran's war room,
solidly in the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (Pasdaran). The
space program is one component of a regional strategic deployment. Hence it
deserves to be analyzed from this perspective.
The Associated Press revealed to the world on Tuesday that "according to
Tehran, Iran has successfully sent its first domestically made satellite into
orbit, as announced by Mahmud Ahmadinejad". But while the Iranian president
claimed the move was to develop "science for friendship, brotherhood and
justice", AP noted this was "a significant step in an ambitious space program
that has worried many international observers".
The debate over the Iranian space program is going to look like the cacophony
over its nuclear ambitions. Per AP, "Iran has said it wants to put its own
satellites into orbit to monitor natural disasters in the earthquake-prone
nation and improve its telecommunications."
Over the next weeks and months, Iran’s state propaganda machine and their
sympathizers in the West will rush to praise the genuine scientific goals of
the program while national security experts will look to find suspicious
components in the program. But the AP was quick to provide an eye-opener in its
first report, a golden revelation in words coming from Tehran: "Iranian
officials point to America's use of satellites to monitor Afghanistan and Iraq
and say they need similar abilities for their security." And that's the
beginning of the depths to which this problem sinks.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the first priority of the
Iranian regime as it launches this rocket: to achieve an intelligence
capability that only satellites can provide. They can not only intercept radio,
satellite and e-mail communications but they can - if highly enough developed -
also track the movement of military and economic assets.
Though Russia has sold Iran enormously capable anti-aircraft and anti-missile
systems to protect its nuclear facilities, they haven’t given Iran the global
detection capabilities that satellites do. Any attack on the Iranian nuclear
facilities would be vastly harder with satellite radars and detection systems
in place.
Iran’s apologists will rush to claim that Iran is still years away from
competing with the US and Europe in this field. But once one satellite is up
and observing and transmitting the next will bear more developed technology and
its military function can be morphed to even threaten the single greatest
vulnerability the US military and intelligence agencies have: defenselessness
satellite systems.
The AP reports: "Iran hopes to launch three more satellites by 2010, the
government has said." Once a web is installed, the strategic capacity of Tehran
in intercepting moves aimed at its nuclear and other installations will
increase. By 2010 and beyond Iran’s strategic weapons system is projected to
develop further. By 2012, it may have reached the feared benchmark of
possessing the nuclear weapons, the delivery systems and the satellite capacity
to detect any action against them.
The Iranian regime has a strategic agenda which is clear and pronounced:
expansion in the region. All other developments of military, intelligence and
technological nature are at the service of such a world view. Had Tehran not
been the seat of a radical ideological project with tentacles reaching as far
as Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza and the rest of the world, the placing of a
single communications satellite in space to "check earthquakes" would be a nice
news item. But the earthquakes the Iranian regime is looking for are of a
different nature: they involve a massive change in the political and identity
landscape of a whole region.
By now, the most realistic way to read the event is simple but worrisome: as
the new US administration is bracing for a sit down with the mullahs in an
attempt to reduce tensions on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pasdaran
power is already projected in space, in an attempt to seize influence in the
whole region.
Dr Walid Phares is the author of the Confrontation: Winning the War
against Future Jihad. He is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a visiting scholar at the European
Foundation for Democracy.
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