Top Stories
NYT: "Iran said it launched a satellite into orbit on Wednesday that Western aerospace experts said could be used for limited military reconnaissance and also to monitor crops and track damage from earthquakes, flooding and other natural disasters. It was the second time that an Iranian rocket had carried a satellite into orbit and took place more than two years after Iran joined the international space club by launching its first satellite. Iran released few details about the satellite, which it calls Rasad-1, or Observation-1. Western experts said it weighed about 100 pounds - meaning that the light payload and the modest rocket carrying it bore little resemblance to an intercontinental missile and its heavy warhead. Still, aerospace experts said the successful launching demonstrated Iranian engineers' growing skill and contrasted with the repeated failures endured by North Korea in trying to place payloads into orbit. 'It's a significant step forward for the Iranians,' said Charles P. Vick, an expert on Iranian rockets at GlobalSecurity.org, a private research group in Alexandria, Va." http://t.uani.com/mCchld
AFP: "The leaders of China and Russia on Wednesday pressed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to show more cooperation to resolve the Iranian nuclear standoff, in a rare meeting at a regional security summit. Presidents Hu Jintao and Dmitry Medvedev held separate meetings with Ahmadinejad but delivered a similar message of the need to improve dialogue, as the Iranian president again denounced the West as 'slavers and colonisers' ... But most attention was focused on Ahmadinejad, who was absent from last year's SCO meeting in Tashkent after the UN Security Council agreed sanctions against Iran and was making a rare appearance at a big international meeting. China urged Iran to participate in the six-party talks on nuclear energy and 'take substantial steps in respect of establishing trust' and 'speed up the process of dialogue,' the Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported. Tehran used to rely on Moscow as a dependable ally in its standoff over the nuclear programme but relations have rapidly deteriorated as Russia increased pressure on Iran after Medvedev became president." http://t.uani.com/mPMUuH
AP: "The United States has named China, Iran, Libya, North Korea and 10 other nations that it wants the U.N. to hold accountable for alleged human rights violations... Donahoe condemned the killing of an Iranian activist and criticized Burma for holding 2,000 political prisoners and Belarus for sentencing three opposition presidential candidates to prison." http://t.uani.com/mnAcnq
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
AFP: "Iran plans to send a live monkey into space in the summer, the country's top space official said after the launch of the Rassad-1 satellite, state television reported on its website on Thursday. 'The Kavoshgar-5 rocket will be launched during the month of Mordad (July 23 to August 23) with a 285-kilogramme capsule carrying a monkey to an altitude of 120 kilometres (74 miles),' said Hamid Fazeli, head of Iran's Space Organisation. In February, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled a space capsule designed to carry a live monkey into space, along with four new prototypes of home-built satellites the country hopes to launch before March 2012. At the time, Fazeli touted the launch of a large animal into space as the first step towards sending a man into space, which Tehran says is scheduled for 2020. Iran sent small animals into space -- a rat, turtles and worms -- aboard its Kavoshgar-3 rocket in 2010." http://t.uani.com/m3ALYV
Domestic Politics
Reuters: "Iran's central bank announced a raft of measures to prop up the rial currency on Wednesday after a rush for dollars forced a devaluation. The measures, including raising domestic interest rates, come after the bank said earlier this week it was injecting billions of dollars into the market to stabilise the currency. Central Bank Governor Mahmoud Bahmani said the Islamic Republic would also issue more bonds and abolish a sales tax on gold to make other investments more appealing to Iranians who have rushed to buy dollars in recent weeks, depressing the value of the rial... While high prices for Iran's oil exports will have replenished its foreign exchange reserves, analysts say a sanctions campaign, led by Western states, that has made cross-border financial transactions more difficult has contributed to pressure on the rial." http://t.uani.com/iqxvpQ
Opinion & Analysis
Suzanne Maloney & Ray Takeyh in NYT: "The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is being sidelined by religious fundamentalists, and it's bad news for American officials seeking to halt Iran's nuclear program. The same Iranian leader who dabbled in Holocaust denial and messianic fantasies was, paradoxically, also the theocracy's most ardent advocate of direct nuclear negotiations with Washington. As Mr. Ahmadinejad falls out of favor with Iran's hard-line religious leaders, the prospect of a nuclear deal between Tehran and Washington is diminishing. Once the darling of clerical conservatives, who only two years ago rigged the system to ensure his re-election, Mr. Ahmadinejad is now clinging to his post amid furious recriminations from his erstwhile allies. His fall from grace has been fierce and fast. In what is only the latest in a series of humiliating comedowns, Mr. Ahmadinejad was heckled recently at a service commemorating the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The most devastating blow came in May from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who publicly repudiated his hand-picked protégé in a clash over presidential powers. Iran's Islamist clerics deliberately made the presidency a weak office, due to their enduring suspicion of central authority and popular elections, and each of Mr. Ahmadinejad's predecessors plainly chafed at its limitations. The brash Mr. Ahmadinejad persistently sought to transcend these constraints. By deftly exploiting nationalist impulses and economic grievances, the president used every opportunity to build a power base and assert his influence. These same shrewd political instincts drove him to embrace the notion of negotiations with Washington, a proposition fundamentally at odds with the clerics' official ideology of anti-Americanism. Mr. Ahmadinejad's interest in dialogue was not motivated by any appreciation of American civilization or an impulse to reconcile. Rather, the provocative president saw talks as a means of boosting his stature at home and abroad while touting his vision of a strong nuclear-armed Iran. For a politician with delusions of his own grandeur, the idea of high-profile negotiations with Washington offered an opportunity to strut on the world stage as the champion of a new, anti-American world order. Iran's conservative establishment has long recognized Mr. Ahmadinejad's ambitions as a threat, both to their political domination and to their ideology. However, for as long as Mr. Ahmadinejad's rabble-rousing served the purposes of the regime, Mr. Khamenei indulged and even encouraged him - until the president's pretensions began to infringe on Mr. Khamenei's authority... Washington must appreciate that it is locked in a prolonged struggle for regional influence with one of its least predictable foes. To prevail in this conflict, Washington must abandon any expectation that Tehran can be seduced or coerced to the negotiating table. American policy should seek to maximize financial and technological constraints on the Iranian nuclear program, strengthen Iran's opposition, exacerbate the many fissures within its political class and insulate Iran's neighbors from its nefarious activities. The leaders of a revolution that has once again devoured its own can surely be thwarted by the United States and its allies." http://t.uani.com/kpGd0O
Homayoun Mobasseri & Nir Boms in WSJ: "At last month's Group of Eight meeting in France, world leaders observed that the 'Arab Spring' actually began in Iran. They were right: Today's Middle Eastern uprisings began when Neda Agha Soltan was shot to death in the streets of Tehran in the summer of 2009. She died with her eyes open as millions of people poured into the streets demanding change after rigged presidential elections that June. The demonstrators received little support from the democracies of Europe or America. Since then the would-be Iranian Spring has been brutally and persistently suppressed, though the country's democrats have persevered. Neda's state-sanctioned murder has been followed by hundreds more. Just this month came the news of activist Haleh Sahabi, who died of a heart attack after being beaten by plain-clothes security forces. Sahabi had been attending the funeral of her father, former parliamentarian and prominent dissident Esatollah Sahabi, who recently died of a brain hemorrhage. The funeral for Haleh Sahabi attracted still more demonstrators, who were again attacked and arrested by Tehran's agents. Then there are those who survive their encounters with the Islamic Republic. Saeed Pourheydar, a reformist journalist and ex-political prisoner who recently fled Iran, used a recent interview with the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran to paint a gruesome picture of life inside an Iranian prison. Mr. Pourheydar said that treatment includes hanging detainees upside down from a ceiling, dropping detainees into icy water, lashing them with cables and squeezing male detainees' testicles. Prison officials also engage in mock executions, while rape-or simply threats-against the daughters and wives of male detainees are another sadistic norm... The world will never have a peaceful Iran until it has a free Iran, and the West needs to do more to bring human-rights issues to the forefront of its dealings with Tehran. Mr. Obama and Ms. Merkel said they were waiting for the International Atomic Energy Agency's report this week before considering any 'additional steps' against the Islamic Republic. It's hard to see why Haleh Sahebi's recent death isn't reason enough." http://t.uani.com/ln9dFm
Josh Rogin in FP: "The Obama administration will expand sanctions on Iran and countries that do business with it, but new congressional legislation is unnecessary, according to Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg. The House and Senate have each unveiled a bill that would tighten existing sanctions, compel the administration to enforce penalties already on the books, and levy a host of new sanctions against members of Iran's regime and companies that aid Iran's energy, banking, or arms sectors. The bills are a follow-up to the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act (CISADA) that Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed in July 2010. Lawmakers are increasingly frustrated that the administration has decided not to use CISADA to penalize many companies from third-party countries such as China that are believed to be violating the sanctions, while only punishing a couple of firms from countries such as Belarus. The new bills are meant to force action on Chinese companies. But Steinberg said that the administration doesn't support another round of sanctions legislation and will proceed with enforcement on its own timeline. 'We think we have powerful tools, and we've welcomed CISADA and we think CISADA is a powerful tool, and what we've seen, not just with China but with everybody, is that the availability of that has caused countries and companies to stop doing things that they might otherwise do,' Steinberg told The Cable in a June 6 interview on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Security Dialogue in Singapore. Steinberg fundamentally disagreed with senators who believe that China has not been adhering to the sanctions and allowing its companies to backfill the business in Iran left open by the departure of firms from U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea. 'I think the [Chinese] record has been reasonably good in terms of what they've done. It's not perfect, and we continue to work with them, we continue to keep some actions of theirs under investigation and review,' he said... The lawmakers who spent months drafting the new sanctions legislation and who are planning to push it through Congress this summer fundamentally disagree with Steinberg's reading of Chinese behavior. 'I worry that the Obama administration has given Chinese banks and companies a get out of jail free card when it comes to sanctions law, and they should not,' Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) said at last month's AIPAC conference in Washington." http://t.uani.com/iQ3rL6
Ramin Jahanbegloo in CSM: "Celebrated in June 2009 as a model of nonviolent protest against autocracy, the Iranian Green Movement has lost much of its strength and mobilizing capacity inside Iran while the Arab Spring has toppled regimes across the region. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak is under arrest. But in Iran, the two defeated candidates in the disputed presidential elections of June 2009 who played such an important role in giving birth to the Green Movement - Mir Hossein Mousavi a former prime minister, and Mehdi Karroubi, a cleric and a former parliament speaker - are the ones under house arrest and denied any contact with the outside world. Unlike their predictions and those of many Iranian dissidents and protesters, the hardliners and especially the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps appeared in a far stronger position. What happened? And where does Iran's Green Movement stand two years later? No doubt, the price of speaking truth to power was higher than expected for the Iranian civic actors. It resulted in massive arrests, Stalinist-style show trials, torture, rape, and murder. Also, the nature of Iran's system, with its power split between two centers - the president and the supreme leader - has complicated and slowed down the process of change. Even so, the Green Movement has achieved its goal by gaining the moral high ground, revealing to the world the true face of the Islamic regime, and draining away much of its political legitimacy. Further, it has hastened the end of Khomeinism by exposing the existent political rifts within the Iranian political power. The current political crisis in Iran - mainly between the president, his advisers and ministers, on the one hand, and the conservative principalists in the Majlis and revolutionary guards, on the other - has brought the state to a standoff that is unlikely to end in a peaceful and amiable manner." http://t.uani.com/loSsw0
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