<<Russia and Cuba are broke. I have been to Cuba and it's pathetic there. The people can hardly even afford to eat.
Russia's military might has decayed through lack of money for spare parts and so forth. They have become a second rate power except against their neighbors on the ground.>>
McCain Blasts Gore's Russia Deal
NewsMax.com Wires
Saturday, Oct. 14, 2000
GRAND RAPIDS, Iowa (UPI) – Sen. John McCain on Friday criticized a reported secret deal struck five years ago between Vice President Al Gore and Russia's then-prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to stop Moscow's weapons sales to Iran.
McCain said it undercut sanctions legislation Gore had sponsored with McCain when Gore was a senator from Tennessee in 1992.
"Clearly, the 1995 Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement was intended to evade sanctions imposed by legislation written in 1992 by the vice president and me," McCain, an Arizona Republican, said in a statement sent via e-mail to reporters.
The New York Times reported Friday that Gore and Chernomyrdin, meeting in Moscow, signed the clandestine deal, whereby Russia was to stop all sales of conventional arms to Iran by 1999. Russia, a major supplier of arms to Iran, would be allowed to complete weapons deals begun before the agreement, the deal said.
In exchange, the Clinton administration promised not to implement sanctions called for by the legislation that Gore and McCain had written three years before the Moscow deal was reportedly struck. The bipartisan measure calls for sanctions against countries that sell arms to nations listed by the State Department as sponsors of terrorism – such as Iran, North Korea and Libya, among others.
Gore's office defended the 1995 deal, saying it was in step with the Gore-McCain legislation because none of the arms sold in recent years involved advanced-technology weapons, which the legislation explicitly bans, nor did it threaten to alter the balance of power in the Persian Gulf region.
But McCain, in his statement Friday, said that Iran's arms purchases from Russia – including a Kilo-class submarine, hundreds of tanks, long-range torpedoes, sea mines and armored personal carriers – violated the letter and intent of the law that he and Gore had crafted.
"The administration position that Russian weapons deliveries to Iran did not meet the Gore-McCain definition of advanced conventional weapons is provably false," McCain said.
"Both Vice President Gore and I cited transfers of Kilo-class sub deliveries as weapons Gore-McCain intended to prevent.
"And it is highly debatable that the other conventional weapons transfers to Iran do not amount to destabilizing amounts of advanced weapons," the senator said. "They might not be state of the art, but they are good enough to affect the regional balance of power.
"Moreover," McCain added, "the administration has declined for nearly a year to use Gore-McCain sanctions to penalize Russia for violating the generous timetable in the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement. In short, the administration has simply nullified important legislation that was co-authored by the vice president."
Though Gore's deal had direct implications for the legislation he had written with McCain, the vice president did not notify the Arizona senator or any other member of Congress, and he failed to make any details of the agreement available to the public.
Gore did not mention the reported deal during his only public appearance Friday, an afternoon campaign rally in Grand Rapids, where he quickly left to attend an emergency meeting at the White House on the Middle East crisis.
Gore's chief foreign affairs spokesman, Matt Gobush, was not reachable for comment despite repeated calls by UPI Friday afternoon.
newsmax.com |
