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AP: "A House panel on Wednesday unanimously approved harsher penalties against Iran, arguing that an economically weak Tehran will struggle in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. By voice vote, Republicans and Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee pushed forward two bills that would strengthen current sanctions while expanding the list of companies and individuals subject to penalties. Lawmakers cited recent allegations of an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States and insisted that such brazen behavior demands consequences... The latest legislation 'is designed to clamp new and tougher sanctions on Iran's energy sector, threatening the regime's existence if it refuses to halt its nuclear weapons program,' said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., the committee chairwoman. She called Iran's energy sector the country's Achilles heel... Among the new provisions, the House bills would restrict foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies from doing business with Iran, include bartering among activities that could be sanctioned and prohibits Americans from conducting commercial or financial transactions with the Revolutionary Guard... The committee, by voice vote, adopted an amendment by the panel's top Democrat, Rep. Howard Berman of California, that would require the president to determine within 30 days whether Iran's central bank is supporting the country's chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or missile programs, financing the purchase of advanced convention weapons, underwriting the Revolutionary Guard or aiding Iran's support for international terrorism. If the president makes such a determination, the administration would be required to impose penalties that would bar any foreign bank doing significant business with the central bank from U.S. economic activities." http://t.uani.com/w0LPBW
Guardian: "Britain's armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran amid mounting concern about Tehran's nuclear enrichment programme, the Guardian has learned. The Ministry of Defence believes the US may decide to fast-forward plans for targeted missile strikes at some key Iranian facilities. British officials say that if Washington presses ahead it will seek, and receive, UK military help for any mission, despite some deep reservations within the coalition government. In anticipation of a potential attack, British military planners are examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles over the coming months as part of what would be an air and sea campaign." http://t.uani.com/unrAep
Reuters: "Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday he had 100 'undeniable documents' proving the United States has been behind 'terrorist acts' in the Islamic state and elsewhere in the Middle East. His comments come after Washington accused Iran of being involved in a plot to kill Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, a claim Iran has dismissed as baseless. 'We have undeniable documents which show America was behind the curtain of terror in Iran and the region,' Khamenei said during a commemoration of the 1979 storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by revolutionary students. 'By presenting those 100 documents, we will disgrace America in the world,' he added. He did not say when he would produce the documents and to whom." http://t.uani.com/uWbAMa
Nuclear Program & Sanctions Reuters: "Russian and Chinese reluctance may complicate any Western campaign to parlay a U.N. watchdog report this month into political momentum for tougher sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear programme, diplomats and analysts say. The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), due next week, has exposed divisions among world powers on how to best handle the long-running row over Iranian nuclear activities the West fears are aimed at developing atom bombs. The IAEA document is expected to bare detailed intelligence pointing to military dimensions to Iran's nuclear programme but stop short of saying explicitly that Tehran is trying to build such weapons." http://t.uani.com/ufN9x9 Human Rights WashPost: "Two Iranian soccer players who engaged in 'inappropriate' celebratory behavior during a game broadcast on national television might face public lashings on the pitch, the semiofficial Fars News Agency reported Tuesday. Members of parliament, sports officials and judges have called for the 'swift punishment' of Mohammad Nosrati and Sheys Rezaei, two soccer stars who play for one of Iran's most popular clubs, Tehran-based Persepolis. After one of their teammates scored the winning goal of a 3-2 match on Saturday, ending a long losing streak, Nosrati pressed his hand into Rezaei's behind as they and their teammates jumped on one another in celebration." http://t.uani.com/uwtnau Domestic Politics
Bloomberg: "Iran's parliament refused to allow Ali Motahari, one of its members, to step down, after he said he was quitting in protest at the body's failure to question President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about allegedly illegal actions, the Tehran Times reported. The parliament rejected his resignation by 155 votes to 31, with 12 abstentions, the newspaper said. Motahari said on Oct. 12 that the parliament's lack of attention to a petition on Ahmadinejad's actions left him unable to protect the rights of the people he represented." http://t.uani.com/voaNsl
Foreign Affairs
Bloomberg: "Iran gave Cuba a 500 million-euro ($684 million) credit line for reconstruction of its energy system, the Tehran Times reported, citing Abel Salas, the vice president of Cuba's National Institute of Water Resources. Salas spoke in Tehran yesterday at a meeting with Iran's deputy energy minister, the newspaper said, without giving details." http://t.uani.com/sKvWLf
Opinion & Analysis
Julian Borger in The Guardian: "A report by the UN's nuclear watchdog due to be circulated around the world next week will provide fresh evidence of a possible Iranian nuclear weapons programme, bringing the Middle East a step closer to a devastating new conflict, say diplomats. The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is the latest of a series of quarterly bulletins on Iran's activities, but this one will contain an unprecedented level of detail on research and experiments carried out in Iran in recent years, which western officials allege could only be for the design and development of a nuclear warhead. 'This will be a game-changer in the Iranian nuclear dossier,' a western official predicted. 'It is going to be hard for even Moscow or Beijing to downplay its significance.' The key passage of the 'safeguards report' will be a summary of all the evidence collected over the years by UN weapons inspectors, including a substantial amount of hitherto unpublished data pointing to work in the past seven years. Western officials say Iranian work up to 2003 involved research and engineering, including the production of some prototype components of a warhead. From 2004, alarmed by the invasion of neighbouring Iraq, those officials say Iranian technicians pursued only design work and computer modelling to reduce the chances of being detected. Iran has consistently stated that its nuclear programme is for peaceful means. In the report to be circulated among IAEA member states, probably on Wednesday or Thursday of next week, the agency's director-general, Yukiya Amano, is not expected to draw definitive conclusions, as the US, Britain and France had hoped. But his inspectors will draw attention to experimentation with few, if any, applications outside nuclear weaponry. Some of the evidence has been supplied by US, British, Israeli and other western intelligence agencies, and those agencies are believed to have vetted it for publication, but diplomats say it will be cited only where IAEA experts have been able to corroborate the information independently. The report will almost certainly raise tensions in a region made volatile by this year's Arab revolutions and the turmoil in Syria. In the absence of a tough new UN security council resolution, the US will face the dilemma of acting militarily without an international mandate, or risk missing Iran's window of vulnerability to attack. How fast that window closes will be determined by the progress of Iran's nuclear programme. Western experts believe that if Iran decides to break out of international constraints and race to make a bomb, its technicians will take just months to solve the problems of fabricating a small warhead for missile delivery. The biggest challenge is making the fissile material to put inside it." http://t.uani.com/vEYO7I
Jackson Diehl in WashPost: "Every few months a new flurry of speculation erupts about whether Israel is about to launch a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. This week the subject is back again - and the smoke seems thicker than usual. The discussion got started this time in a relatively dramatic way: with a banner-headlined story in one of Israel's best-read newspapers, under the byline of one the country's most renowned journalists. Nahum Barnea normally writes a column for the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, but last Friday he produced a bombshell story under the headline 'Atomic Pressure.' His main point: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, are determined to attack Iran, and are pressuring Israel's reluctant military and intelligence chiefs to go along. 'Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak are the two Siamese twins of the Iranian issue,' Barnea wrote. 'A rare phenomenon is taking place here in terms of Israeli politics: a prime minister and a defense minister who act as one body, with one goal.' Barnea's story quickly touched off a frenzy in the Israeli media, which have followed up with several intriguing reports in recent days. Several accounts described a major Israeli air force exercise at a NATO base in Italy over the weekend, which was said to include all of the types of planes Israel would use in an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities... So why is this coming up now? Could an Israeli attack really be imminent? Iran, after all, has not shown any sign of launching a breakout to produce a bomb; even if it did, most experts in Israel as well as the West have said it would take the regime a year or more to complete a bomb... In reality, Israel is unlikely to launch any attack without the support of the United States, which could easily be drawn into the regional conflict an air strike would trigger. Like the Israeli military establishment, the Pentagon opposes any such venture - and it's hard to imagine President Obama signing on. If he acts in the coming weeks or months, Netanyahu would risk a rupture in the alliance that is the ultimate guarantor of Israeli security. The new burst of speculation, like those before it, does serve a couple of purposes for Israel, however. It refocuses attention on the Iranian threat, and takes it away from the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations; it raises the pressure on the United States and its allies to increase sanctions and other nonmilitary pressure on Tehran." http://t.uani.com/rU8DFg
Ray Takeyh in WashPost: "As the United States prepares to withdraw its forces from Iraq by year's end, a chorus of influential voices is insisting that the beneficiary of such a move is Iran. That is, a beleaguered Shiite theocracy overwhelmed by low-simmering opposition at home and growing isolation abroad is said to emerge as the local hegemon. Such views discount how Iran's contentious vision for the future of Iraq and its divisive tactics have alienated Iraqis across the sectarian spectrum. Iran may have been able to project its influence in an Iraq beset by civil war, but Tehran increasingly is on the margins as Iraq reconstitutes its national institutions. To begin with, Iran's governing template has no constituency among Iraqi Shiites. Iran's theocratic absolutism was always in contravention of Shiite political traditions, making its export problematic if not impossible. Iraq's most esteemed and influential cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, stands with mainstream clerics in rejecting the notion that proper Islamic governance mandates direct clerical assumption of power. Even the Shiite parties - the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Dawa (the party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki) - which have long-standing ties to Tehran - appreciate the untenable nature of the Iranian order. Adel Abdul Mahdi, an influential figure within ISCI, has pointedly stressed, 'We don't want either a Shiite government or an Islamic government.' Also hard to fathom is the notion that radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr can be a reliable agent of Persian predominance, given his brand of Arab nationalism and erratic behavior. In the end, Iraq's Shiites understand that their country's divisions require a different governing structure and the assertion of autonomy from the Shiite power next door. Beyond disagreements about the role of religion in politics, the two nations have conflicting aspirations for the future of Iraq. Iran has long sought to sharpen Iraq's sectarian cleavages as a means of unifying Shiites behind Iran's claims and preventing the rise of a cohesive state. Such a weak and divided Iraq would be too preoccupied with internal squabbles to effectively challenge Iran's regional assertions. The sectarian conflict, however, has largely ceased with the defeat of al-Qaeda and Sunni militias. As Iraq seeks to reconstitute itself as a nation-state, Maliki has come to recognize that Iranian-backed Shiite militias are as great a threat to his authority as they are to his country's Sunnis. In the summer of 2008, state power asserted itself over sectarian affinities as Maliki pushed forcefully into Basra, defeating militant Shiite forces allied with Iran. Today, it is not just Washington that complains about Iran's nefarious activities; Iraqis, too, have privately warned Iran about its mischievous conduct." http://t.uani.com/skVIno
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