AP reports that Israel’s leading aerospace contractor has inked a $1.6-billion deal to supply Azerbaijan with drones, missiles, and other advanced military hardware, which would be used to arm a potential frontline state in the war against Iran. Israel has used such arms deals to create intimate military and intelligence links with nations as varied as Georgia, Russia and India.
Sheera Frenkel also reported recently on Azerbaijan as a Wild West outpost. It plays a major role in the war of nerves among Iran, Israel and the west. She interviews a Mossad agent who has served years there and only set foot in the Israeli embassy once. She tells of a country riddled with spy networks working one or both sides of the street. The officials of the government seem to be available to the highest bidder. It’s a bit like a central American or Caribbean country packed with corrupt drug dealers using the country for trans-shipments of drugs and guns. Except that in Azerbaijan the drug dealers are spooks and assassins.
Iran accuses the country of being a safe harbor for the Mossad/MEK conspirators who’ve been knocking off Iran’s nuclear scientists. Though there are many Iranian Azeris living on both sides of the border, there seems little love lost among these two neighbors. Brotherly relations have become corrupted by money, power, oil and arms.
It is especially the sort of place where one side or the other will decide to make an example of Azerbaijan for its collusion with the other. If not a plot to bomb the Israeli embassy then some other suitably gory plan. Baku would be a perfect Sarajevo as a catalyst for regional war, just as the latter city was a site for the assassination that initiated World War I. the Azeris and their willing foreign co-conspirators are playing with fire and it’s only a matter of time before the conflagration breaks out with a vengeance.
That looks to me like an Azerbaijani irredentist map showing territory in Iran occupied by Azeri speakers as part of Azerbaijan. Tabriz is still in Iran.
What’s the bribe?
You mention a weapons sale, but where are you saying there was bribery?
The articles to which I linked talked about the wads of cash used by all interested parties to buy whichever Azeri officials need to be bought. If you think Bibi or the Mossad has any hesitation about playing this game too think again.
see also the OECD reports on azerbaijan. not much of importance gets done there without some liberal wheel greasing, which i suppose, unfortunately, is par for the course with these natural resource backwater boom towns.
bob, you really have to try harder. azerbaijan is ranked 143rd (out of 178 countries) by transparency international on its governmental corruption scale, being only sligthly less corrupt than nigeria or russia. if billion-dollar transactions are taking place in that country, it’s reasonable to assume malfeasance until proven otherwise.
Richard. If Saudi Arabia and Kuwait bankrolled Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, and France and Russia sold Iraq weapons, than why do Iranian’s chant, ‘Death to Israel’?
Why do millions of Israelis along with their PM & defense minister cry out for war against Iran when Israel has so many greater problems to resolve like its illegal Occupation, its social justice gap, discriminiation against its minority citizens, poverty, etc.?
Further your comment is OFF TOPIC & this is one of many times I have warned you about staying on topic in commenting. If you cannot, you will lose your comment privileges.
[comment deleted for violation of comment rules]
Richard. AZ’s comment above could easily be interpreted as genocidal but he gets a pass. Why is that?
Cool your jets. All you need to do is ask a simple question or write me a private e mail to inform me about something like this. I agree with you & deleted the comment. But enough with the whining already!
Because you have a poor ‘handle’ on the facts, of course! The ‘root-of-all-evil’ continues to be the United Snakes (US/Israel). Chemical weapons were delivered to Saddam’s Iraq by the Reagan/Cheney war criminals. The Merverik and Tow anti-tank missiles were provided by the US and the ‘good little Jews’ of Israel delivered them.
Azeris vote against Israel at the UN but sell her a lot of oil.
Mutual fear of Iran and Turkey explains Azeri-Israeli friendship.
http://www.economist.com/node/21543201
The Israel deal is nothing. Finance Minister Samir Sharifov has set up a corrupt deal with the Obama Administration in exchange for money from the Agency for International Development (AID). Oil kickbacks, military equipment, cash. It’s shame. The people of Azerbaijan deserve better.