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WSJ: "A new classified U.S. intelligence assessment concludes that Iran's leaders are locked in an increasingly heated debate over whether to move further toward developing nuclear weapons, saying the bite of international sanctions may be sowing discord. The new national intelligence estimate, or NIE, says Tehran likely has resumed work on nuclear-weapons research in addition to expanding its program to enrich uranium-updating a contested 2007 estimate that concluded the arms program had all but halted in 2003. But it doesn't conclude that Iran has relaunched a full-blown program to try to build bombs. According to the assessment, Iran's debate over whether to do so suggests international sanctions may be causing divisions in Tehran, U.S. officials said. The new assessment, which was shared this week with key congressional committees, comes as protesters in Tehran ramp up pressure on Iran's leaders, amid a wave of popular revolts sweeping the Mideast. Tehran took steps Wednesday to stifle passions inflamed by the killings of two students during protests." http://t.uani.com/eqgZWf
AP: "Two Iranian naval vessels withdrew a request Thursday to transit the Suez Canal after Israel expressed concerns over the plans, a senior canal official said. The official said no reason was given for the decision to withdraw the application. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said it was not known if the vessels intended to transit the waterway at a later date. The Suez Canal official identified the two vessels as the Alvand, a frigate, and the Kharq, a supply ship, and said they were en route to Syria. He said they were now in an area near Saudi Arabia's Red Sea port of Jiddah. Spokesmen for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Foreign Ministry refused to comment. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Wednesday that Iran was about to send two naval vessels through the Suez Canal for the first time in years, calling it a 'provocation.'" http://t.uani.com/fgC6Mq
AFP: "A group of US lawmakers Wednesday unveiled legislation to toughen sanctions on Iran for its nuclear energy program, calling for international companies traded on US exchanges to reveal investments in the Islamic Republic. 'If we can bring greater transparency to any investment being made in Iran, we can defund the nuclear militarization of one of the world's most hostile nations,' said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who is one of the sponsors of the bill. 'Companies must make a choice: do business with Iran, or have access to the US economy... We have to have a zero tolerance policy for any company that puts profit ahead our safety or the safety of our allies.' The legislation was co-sponsored by Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, and in the House of Representatives by Ted Deutch, a Florida Democrat, and Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana. The bill would tighten sanctions already in place by Washington and the United Nations on Iran, which is suspected of using its nuclear program for illicit atomic weapons. The lawmakers said the bill would require companies to disclose any sanctionable investments in Iran in their quarterly and annual reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and require US banks to report activities in Iran by their foreign correspondent banks." http://t.uani.com/hf0eB7
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
Radio Farda: "The U.S. State Department is investigation information that Venezuela violated U.S. sanctions by sending gasoline to Iran. Arturo Valenzuela, the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, told a congressional panel 'we are looking at that issue' and 'trying to determine if in fact there is a violation.' There have been recent reports that Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA sent two shipments of gasoline to Iran last month. The U.S. Congress passed sanctions last year that threaten to penalize foreign companies that do business with Iran." http://t.uani.com/id6pGf
Domestic Politics
Radio Farda: "Sanee Zhaleh and Mohammad Mokhtari, the two young Iranians who were shot dead in the February 14 protests, are now being referred to as 'Green martyrs,' along with about 70 other citizens who lost their lives in the 2009 protests over the disputed reelection of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Members of the Green Movement have accused the Iranian establishment of stealing the bodies of the two men in an attempt to depict them as government supporters who were killed by the opposition. 'The killers took away the bodies of those they killed,' one opposition supporter told 'Persian Letters.'" http://t.uani.com/hjdBdl
FT: " Ahmad Khatami, a senior conservative Iranian cleric, has accused opposition leaders of 'fighting against God', a charge that can bring the death penalty, amid mounting pressure by hardliners to further intensify a crackdown on the Green Movement. The Islamic regime is outraged that Mir-Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, presidential candidates in the disputed poll in 2009, urged their supporters to show solidarity with north African uprisings on Monday... 'Moussavi and Karroubi are the blatant examples of Mohareb [literally meaning someone who fights with God],' Mr Khatami, who is believed to have close ties with the elite Revolutionary Guards, told clerical students in the holy city of Qom. The punishment for a Mohareb can be execution according to Iran's sharia-based penal code." http://t.uani.com/f0tacJ
Opinion & Analysis
Ray Takeyh in WashPost: "As Iran's streets erupt with pro-democracy demonstrations, it is all too obvious that the only option the United States has in altering the Islamic Republic's behavior is to support the Green Movement. The clerical oligarchs have tried hard to prevent the contagion of democracy from afflicting their nation. Despite their maladroit attempt to establish a moral continuity between Iran's 1979 revolution and the recent uprising in Egypt, and their threats of violence and retribution toward those who protest, the mullahs have failed to reclaim their citizens. It is too facile to suggest that the wave of protests rocking the Middle East was born in Iran, but it is not too simplistic to stress that Iran will not be left behind in the march for freedom... As exhilarating as the early stages of the region's political transition may be, democratic upheaval is likely to narrow the conventional options of addressing the threat of Iran's nuclear program. Great powers such as Russia and China that place a premium on stability are unlikely to agree to more economic sanctions. The Arab states preoccupied with renegotiating their national compacts will be reluctant to participate in efforts to isolate the Islamic Republic. And the military option that was always unattractive has now become implausible; it would be rash to employ force against Iran's suspected nuclear installations and radicalize the Arab populace just as forces of moderation and democracy seem ascendant. All is not lost, however. The only durable solution to Iran's nuclear conundrum was always empowerment of the Green Movement. Tehran's callous leadership, indifferent to the financial penalties of its nuclear truculence, was hardly prone to make cost-benefit assessments and constructively participate in negotiations." http://t.uani.com/dScehH
Katherine Butler in The Independent: "Where next? That's what everyone from the tweeters and youth organisers credited with mobilising Egypt's revolution, to the King of Bahrain and Colonel Gaddafi, is asking. Who, just a few weeks ago, would have predicted protests on the streets of Manama or Tripoli? Yet, even if 2011 turns out to be the Middle East's answer to Europe in 1848, can we imagine the dominoes from Tunisia and Egypt tipping into Iran? Can we really see Ayatollah Ali Khamenei climbing into a helicopter and being airlifted off to exile? (Where, Brazil?) Can we imagine the jubilant crowds on Valiasr Street, the doors of the political cells in Evin prison flung open and Iran's women stamping on their chadors? The ferocity of the crackdown on street demonstrations in Tehran this week (as well as the frenzy of executions under way in the jails) are signs of a regime with a terrifying will to cling to power. But they are also signs of the regime's weakness. Divided and out of touch, it was caught unawares by the scale of protests, failing to anticipate that Mubarak's overthrow would be hailed, not as a mirror of the 1979 Islamic revolution, but of Iran's 'green' uprising of June 2009. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was so confident Egypt was on the brink of Islamic revolution that he said it was surely the work of the Twelfth Imam (a messianic Shia figure he believes in)... Yesterday, it was reported that one of the two main opposition leaders, Mehdi Karroubi, has said he is prepared to 'pay any price'. Are enough ordinary Iranians also ready for such sacrifice?... The Islamic regime will not be able to filter the internet and jam the BBC forever and the pressure cooker will, sooner or later, blow its lid. Unfortunately, this is a revolution that won't be bloodless when it happens." http://t.uani.com/fzCMVW
Azadeh Moaveni in FP: "More than a decade before Iran's politically disaffected had launched the Green Movement -- much less the latest protests that broke out across the country on Feb. 14 and were brutally put down by police -- they had the optimistic and incremental reform movement lead by the 'smiling cleric' and philosopher Mohammad Khatami. If the latter had worked according to plan, the former never would have been necessary. The reformers had hoped Iran would serve as a model of democratic governance for the rest of the Muslim world. Now they're taking their inspiration from the peaceful Arab uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Khatami was elected to two terms, beginning in 1997, with overwhelming support from young people and women, and he staked his tenure on the belief that the Islamic Republic could be peacefully transformed from within into a modern democracy. That era in the late 1990s came to be known as the 'Tehran spring,' an atmosphere of political openness then novel in the region. Civil society grew more confident, an independent press flourished, and reformists seemed ascendant within Iran's political system. Khatami promised Iranians that the Islamic system could rule more lawfully and that the regime had the ability and the obligation to offer its people greater freedoms. That was the theory, at least. In practice, incremental reform proved a spectacular failure. When Khatami was in power, his ideas were repeatedly vetoed by conservatives in a government resistant to democracy, before being definitively crushed by the police-state rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the aftermath of Ahmadinejad's 2009 election as president, the regime imprisoned tens of prominent reformist leaders and humiliated them in televised show trials. Khatami now finds himself swept up in a revolt that promises an altogether different and more volatile path to change. But where the Green Movement's other leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, have confronted the regime from the outside, explicitly challenging its legitimacy, the former president craftily continues to play the 'inside' game." http://t.uani.com/hqdOPe
José R. Cárdenas in FP: "Last October, Ambassador Roger Noriega, former Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere during the George W. Bush Administration, exposed Hugo Chávez's efforts to aid and abet Iran's illegal nuclear weapons program, including its efforts to obtain strategic minerals such as uranium and to evade international sanctions. Documentary evidence now suggests that Hugo Chavez's junior partner in Ecuador, Rafael Correa, is apparently forging his own dangerous alliance with the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regime, raising troubling questions about whether Iran continues to expand its global efforts to obtain uranium and other strategic minerals that are critical to Teheran's rogue nuclear program. According to sensitive official documents provided to me by knowledgeable sources in Ecuador and other countries and published here for the first time, Iran and Ecuador have concluded a $30 million deal to conduct joint mining projects in Ecuador that appears to lay the groundwork for future extractive activities. The deal, which was apparently finalized in December 2009, 'expresses the interest of the President of the Republic [of Ecuador] and the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum to boost closer and mutually beneficial relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran on a variety of fronts, among them mining and geology.' The deal calls for the establishment of a jointly run Chemical-Geotechnical-Metallurgical Research Center in Ecuador [Laboratorio Químico-Geotécnico-Metalurgico] and 'to jointly implement a comprehensive study and topographic and cartographic analysis of [Ecuadorean territory].' What is most concerning about developing Ecuadorean-Iranian ties in the mining sector is that, like Venezuela, Ecuador is known to possess deposits of uranium." http://t.uani.com/ejkuVp
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