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AP: "An international intelligence official says that NATO forces have seized the most powerful Iranian-made rockets ever smuggled into Afghanistan for the Taliban's upcoming spring campaign. The official said on Wednesday that about 50 122-millimeter rockets in a three-truck convoy were captured by NATO troops on Feb. 5th in southern Nimruz, near the Iranian and Pakistani borders. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters. The rockets can be fired up to 13 miles (22 kilometers) away from a target, and explode in a burst up to 80 feet (25 meters) wide - double that of the previous 107 millimeter rockets provided by Iran to the Taliban since 2006, the official says." http://t.uani.com/hpv5IZ
AFP: "Iranian security forces fired tear gas at anti-government protesters as they tried to hold a demonstration in Tehran on Tuesday, the opposition website Kaleme.com reported. 'Security forces blocked the roads to Enghelab (Revolution) Square (in central Tehran) and fired tear gas at people several times as they tried to stage anti-government demonstrations,' the website said. Kalame.com reported 'heavy security force deployments in several of Tehran's main squares.' Foreign media have been banned from on-the-spot reporting of any unauthorised gatherings. The reports of the demonstration came after Kaleme.com said that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and his wife Zahra Rahnavard were at their home and not in jail as it had previously reported... Earlier on Tuesday, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi reiterated that both couples were in their homes, dismissing previous claims by their websites that they had been moved to a prison... The Coordination Council of the Green Path of Hope, an umbrella group backing the two leaders, had called for fresh protests on Tuesday to mark International Women's Day." http://t.uani.com/e6OMvJ
AP: "The Obama administration warned Zimbabwe on Monday that it could face penalties if it cooperates with Iran's nuclear program in violation of U.N. resolutions. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the U.S. was troubled by recent statements from Zimbabwe's foreign minister that United Nations sanctions on Iran are unfair and hypocritical. He said Zimbabwe would be violating its international obligations and U.N. Security Council resolutions if it helped Iran extract uranium. 'We are concerned by statements that would suggest that Zimbabwe would be open to cooperating with Iran in ways that violate U.N. Security Council resolutions,' he told reporters. 'The foreign minister of Zimbabwe is entitled to his opinion but the government of Zimbabwe is still bound by its commitments to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions,' Crowley said. 'There are ramifications for countries that decline to observe their international obligations.'" http://t.uani.com/eLSMwN
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
Bloomberg: "World powers reiterated their willingness to negotiate with Iran, watering down a joint statement even as the Persian Gulf country's nuclear program races ahead, a top U.S. official said today in Vienna. The so-called P5+1 group, composed of China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K. and U.S., asked Iran in a one-page declaration to show 'a similarly constructive spirit' to engage. The compromise document, delivered at the IAEA's 35- member board of governors meeting, was weaker than U.S. and European statements. 'It's always a challenge,' U.S. International Atomic Energy Agency ambassador Glyn Davies said today at a press briefing. 'It was the sausage making of diplomacy.' It was the first joint statement issued by the P5+1 since the group's Istanbul talks with Iran broke down in January. Tensions rose in the wake of the Jan. 22 meeting where Iranian negotiators refused to discuss their country's nuclear work." http://t.uani.com/hIkWSt
AP: "The European Union has expressed concerns that Iran may be hiding work on developing a nuclear weapons program. It is also suggesting that Tehran was at fault for the abortive result of the last meeting between the Islamic Republic and the six world powers. Those December talks ended with Iran refusing to address international fears that its nuclear activities could be turned into making weapons... The EU comments were made Wednesday to a 35-nation board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The meeting is focusing on indications that both Iran and Syria have hidden nuclear activities from IAEA inspectors." http://t.uani.com/dUpX0z
Commerce
Bloomberg: "Iran and Syria will set up a joint bank in the coming months, Arman reported, citing Iranian economy and finance minister, Shamseddin Hosseini. Permits have been issued and the building in Syria where the bank will be set up has been purchased, Hosseini said. without giving further details, according to the newspaper." http://t.uani.com/g41iw4
Reuters: "Iran's biggest crude oil tanker operator NITC will need to review whether to send its vessels to Libya if it receives a new order, a senior NITC official said on Wednesday. An NITC tanker left the eastern Libyan port of Tobruk on Tuesday with around 1 million barrels of crude oil, said the official, who declined to be named. 'We have no programme to send more,' the official told Reuters from Tehran. 'There has not been any demand for Libya. If there was any demand we will have to think about it.'" http://t.uani.com/fomFyv
Domestic Politics
Reuters: "Iranian Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi said on Wednesday an Arab-style popular revolt would come soon to her country, driven by poverty and the fierce oppression of critics by its Islamic rulers. But Ebadi, a defence lawyer for Iranian dissidents who has lived outside Iran since 2009 but has close family still there, said human rights campaigners wanted the transition to happen peacefully and avoid a Libyan-style bloodbath. 'With the slightest breeze, there could be a conflagration,' she told a news conference on the fringes of a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council, at which Western countries want an investigation into Iran to be set up. 'As to what will spark that fire and when, it is difficult to predict. But I can say with certainty that it won't be long in coming,' she said." http://t.uani.com/gJqS6g
Foreign Affairs
AP: "As the family of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson marked the fourth anniversary of his disappearance, Iran and the United States tiptoed toward a collaboration that offers the best hope yet for bringing him home alive. Four days after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that Levinson is alive, Tehran and Washington traded carefully worded diplomatic messages Tuesday. Both sides described finding Levinson, a father of seven with a history of health problems, as a humanitarian issue. Iran continued to deny ever capturing Levinson but, in the most promising sign of cooperation since his disappearance, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Iran would cooperate 'on a humanitarian basis.' He called on the U.S. to provide more information about Levinson." http://t.uani.com/eQfgQE
AFP: "Iran's interior minister spoke out against a long-term US military presence in Afghanistan Tuesday, as the American Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited his country's troops in the warring country. '(Iran) is definitely against the deployment, presence of foreign forces and establishment of US permanent bases in Afghanistan,' Mostafa Mohammad Najjar told a press conference in Kabul. 'The permanent bases would further complicate the conditions in the region and in Afghanistan.' The minister's Afghan counterpart, Besmullah Mohammadi, praised Iran as a neighbour who 'has always helped in reconstruction and ensuring security in Afghanistan.'" http://t.uani.com/fCcVkp
Opinion & Analysis
Ilan Berman in WSJ: "Don't let the hype out of Tehran fool you. To hear Iranian officials tell it, the geopolitical earthquake now taking place in the Middle East and North Africa represents an 'Islamic awakening' that will forge a new regional order more sympathetic to the Islamic Republic and its great power ambitions. But the renewed anti-regime uprisings that have taken place in recent weeks in Tehran, Isfahan, Mashad, Shiraz and other cities-and the brutality of the Iranian government's response to them-tell a very different story. Clearly, Iran's ayatollahs are deeply worried that the 'Arab Spring' taking place in the region could end up bringing down their theocracy as well, and are working feverishly to prevent such an eventuality. Far less obvious is what the U.S. can and should do about it. Conventional wisdom within the Beltway is that the White House has only limited ability to influence the course of democracy within the Islamic Republic-and therefore shouldn't even try. In fact, there's quite a bit America can do, and do now, to aid Iran's opposition. To start with, the United States can help ensure that the leadership of the so-called Green Movement remains viable. Today, Iran's pro-democracy forces are headed by two most unlikely suspects. Mir Hossein Mousavi served as prime minister from 1981 to 1989, the period during which the Islamic Republic spawned the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah and restarted the Shah's nuclear program with a vengeance. Mehdi Karroubi was twice speaker of Iran's parliament-from 1989 to 1992, and again from 2000 to 2004-and in that capacity served as a rubber stamp for a broad range of repressive policies. Yet these establishment politicians have come to lead the opposition, helped along by their ability to bring crowds into the street and galvanize the popular imagination. The Iranian regime understands this, which is why recent weeks have seen a range of punitive measures levied against both. Together with their families, Messrs. Karroubi and Mousavi have lived under strict house arrest for weeks, and reports suggest that the two men were recently snatched up by the regime's security forces. Members of Iran's legislature, meanwhile, have called for the two to be put to death on charges of sedition. The regime clearly views containing Messrs. Mousavi and Karroubi as the key to crushing the Green Movement as a whole. To make sure that does not happen, America needs to ratchet up the international focus on their plight... At the same time, Washington should redouble its own outreach to Iran's captive population. America's public broadcasting is already quite popular." http://t.uani.com/gyUoGm
Tony Karon in TIME: "Prospects for significant reform within Iran's regime suffered a serious blow, Tuesday, with the news that former President Hashemi Rafsanjani has been unseated as chairman of the powerful Assembly of Experts, an 86-member body of clerics which has the authority to unseat the country's Supreme Leader -- and which will pick the replacement for the 71-year-old incumbent head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Although he has been replaced by the moderate conservative Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, the move represents a victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his hardline backers. Rafsanjani had been kingmaker in 1980 when he persuaded the Assembly to appoint Khamenei, who by standard of Shi'ite religious authority at that time was, essentially, a third-tier cleric. And he sided with the conservatives in the brutal crackdowns on reformist protest during the presidency of the more liberal Mohammed Khatami from 1997 to 2005. But the pragmatic conservative Rafsanjani led a faction of conservatives strongly opposed to the provocative foreign policies and economic mismanagement of President Ahmadinejad, who trounced him in the 2005 election. But Rafsanjani's power within the clerical establishment had long been deemed a threat by both Ahmadinejad, and even by Khamenei after the two men parted ways. In 2010, Rafsanjani had backed the opposition candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, and urged the regime to heed the calls of the Green Movement that emerged to protest alleged election fraud. But as the regime's brutal crackdown suppressed that movement, whose most prominent leaders -- former presidential candidates Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi -- are currently under arrest, Rafsanjani searched for compromise and even appeared to try and appease his conservative critics within the clergy by criticizing last month's attempt to revive the protest movement. Ahmadinejad and his backers, far stronger within the regime's security establishment than they are among the clerics, had made clear their determination to limit the influence of their arch-nemesis Rafsanjani over the selection of the next Supreme Leader. And they appear to have succeeded, even if they haven't necessarily put one of their own supporters in his position." http://t.uani.com/eAtRxm
Barbara Slavin in FP: "Iranian politics increasingly resemble a brutal game of musical chairs. Last month, two former senior politicians who ran against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009 disappeared into political detention. On Tuesday, March 8, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani -- a former president and for three decades one of Iran's most powerful politicians -- lost his post as head of the Assembly of Experts, the body of clerics that theoretically supervises the Supreme Leader of Iran and chooses his successor. Rafsanjani's replacement by Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, an elderly conservative who is bound to a wheelchair, is the culmination of a slow-moving purge by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who, ironically, acquired the top job at Rafsanjani's instigation in 1989. The apparent intent is to strip other Iranian institutions of any authority, further demoralize Iran's opposition Green Movement, and prove that the Arab uprisings of the past two months will stop at the border with Iran. It may work -- for now. However, by silencing so many of those who worked within Iran's complicated political system to institute reforms, Khamenei is narrowing his base of support and increasing the likelihood that Iranians will take to the streets or, at a minimum, boycott future elections and deny the regime any semblance of legitimacy. 'Rafsanjani was the last obstacle to consolidation of power of the hard-liners,' says Mehdi Khalaji, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His removal is 'the last nail in the coffin of reform in Iran.'" http://t.uani.com/fKdIHo
Daily Telegraph Editorial Board: "Iran's posturing on the world stage underwent a transformation following the Arab uprisings. The lurid bombast of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was replaced by a more nakedly militaristic show of muscle as two Iranian warships sailed through the Suez Canal, for the first time since 1979, en route for Syria, that other sponsor of state terrorism. It was a show of defiance from a regime that has actually been badly rattled both by events in the region and the impact of sanctions. Tehran has described the popular insurrections that have swept North Africa as an 'Islamic awakening', yet the regime is petrified of contagion. Ten days ago, the opposition leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi were arrested along with their wives, who are also political activists. As prominent figures in the green movement that was born after the disputed elections of 2009, they were detained the day before a planned street demonstration. Yesterday, the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, suspected by hardliners of being too close to the opposition, was replaced as head of the Assembly of Experts, the powerful clerical body that oversees supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. These are the actions of a nervous regime circling the wagons. It is not just internal pressure that is worrying the mullahs. Military, trade and financial sanctions imposed by the UN, the EU and the US are having a significant impact. Less orthodox measures have also proved effective, notably the Stuxnet computer virus which is thought to have set back Iran's nuclear programme by two years. This is a moment not to ease the pressure on Iran, but to intensify it. Its nuclear ambitions make it the most dangerous country in the Middle East; the turmoil elsewhere must not lead the West to take its eye off the ball." http://t.uani.com/gjPpGy
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