US missile presentation against Iran was ‘comedy show’
Yamanyoon- 16 Dec 2017
The US government’s recent display of “evidence” to back up claims that Iran provides Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah fighters with ballistic missiles was nothing short of a “comedy sketch show,” a political commentator tells Press TV.
On Thursday, Nikki Haley, the US envoy to the United Nations (UN), went on live television to display debris purportedly from a ballistic missile that had been fired from Yemen at an airport in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
Calling an empty, charred tube behind her “concrete evidence” of the missile’s links to Iran, she called for the formation of “a united front in resisting this global threat,” referring to Iran.
Speaking to Press TV from London on Saturday, Hafsa Kara Mustapha said it was “embarrassing” to watch Haley present to the world what she thought would serve as a “smoking gun” to help push Washington’s anti-Iran agenda.
“I think it was borderline farcical and it is actually almost embarrassing now to watch a supposed ambassador representing an incredibly powerful nation actually speak in such comical terms and provide such theatrics in order just to push a very belligerent agenda,” she said.
The Yemeni launch had been a response to the brutal military aggression by Saudi Arabia and its allies, which has killed thousands of Yemeni civilians ever since it began in 2015. The Houthi movement has said it will continue to launch such retaliatory attacks against aggressor regimes.
Iran has already dismissed claims that the missile was provided by the Islamic Republic.
After Haley’s presentation, the UN, too, said it had no conclusive evidence to determine the provenance of the missile.
The US hype comes even as America and other Western countries, such as Britain, France, and Germany, are known to have struck major arms deals with the Saudi regime in the wake of the deadly war.
The US alone has sealed a deal worth 350 billion dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
Also speaking to Press TV was James Jatras, a former US Senate foreign policy adviser, who said the firing of the Yemeni missile had been a natural response to the Saudi-led war.
“Saudis have been destroying Yemen for month after month after month — do they really honestly think that the Houthi Ansarullah is not going to shoot back at them?” he said.
Jatras said after their failure in convincing the world that Iran was in breach of a landmark nuclear deal with the world powers, American officials were now trying to come up with another excuse for further pressure against the Islamic Republic.
US President Donald Trump has long been seeking an excuse to take the US out of the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which lifted sanctions against Iran and made it more difficult for Washington to muster international support for its anti-Iran policies.