Iran military war games : A mere empty show of power

Amid Iran-EU talks in the effort to convince the Iranian regime to stop it’s suspicious nuclear program and in the run-up to the decision by the international community on how to tackle these efforts by the mullahs to obtain nuclear weapons, Tehran launched, beginning from August 19, a series of ridiculous war games on its frontiers with Iraq, Turkey and Pakistan. These drills continued until September 8.

The war games were clearly an attempt to prevent a firm international decision against Tehran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.

According to the deputy commander of the Iran’s ground forces Brig. Gen. Hosseini, in these maneuvers the regime’s military “changed face and transformed into a flexible army to carry out irregular operations.”

Internal sources say that contrary to regime’s propaganda that the maneuvers involved 12 military divisions, in reality only a handful of units took part in the drills from each division. The total number of involved personnel was hardly enough for a company or even a battalion. Tehran’s inability to deploy its military force was clearly evident in images that were broadcasted on state television.

Besides that fact, the armaments used were mostly old military hardware such as T-55 Tanks, mini-Katyusha guns and 130 and 155mm mortars which were used during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and had since been “renovated” by the regime’s defense industries.

Ridiculously, the 106mm guns that were introduced in these war games as “new coast-to-sea missiles” actually had entered Iran’s army in the 1950s and 60s.

A video clip that was also aired displaying the claimed all new “surface-to-surface missile” was a blatant forgery of an identical clip of the December 2005 maneuvers called “Peyravan Velayat” (Followers of the Jurisprudent) in which the same missile was exhibited as “Kerm Abrisham missile” (Silk warm missile).

Much of the images televised were repeats hastily put together from previous years to show the regime’s preparedness “against any form of foreign attack.”

Foreign observers and press ridiculed the crash of an instructor aircraft in Tehran on August 20 which occurred while the drills were ongoing and blamed it on wear and tear of the regime’s military equipment.  Military leaders rigorously denied any relation between this plane’s crash and the war games.

Despite the announcement that nationwide air exercises were to be held as part of the same war games, the regime only deployed several fighter jets on September 5 from Tehran to the western city of Tabriz.

What the war games actually put on display were clear indications of deep rooted, irresolvable problems waiting to surface in Iran’s theocratic regime.  What the mullahs have been hiding under their Turbans for the past 27 years, now that the pressure is mounting internationally, will soon be exposed for everyone to see.