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AFP: "US President Barack Obama, in a holiday message Tuesday to the Iranian people, said that the two nations despite their tensions share a 'common humanity,' as he pressed for greater freedom for those living in Iran. 'There is no reason for the United States and Iran to be divided from one another,' Obama said in a statement to Iranians on Nowruz, the Persian New Year, adding that 'the Iranian people are denied the basic freedom to access the information that they want.' 'To the people of Iran, this holiday comes at a time of continued tension between our two countries,' Obama said. 'But as people gather with their families, do good deeds, and welcome a new season, we are also reminded of the common humanity that we share.' But the message offered fresh criticism of the Iran government on human rights issues, saying Tehran has created an 'electronic curtain' for Iranians." http://t.uani.com/GAAt4F
NYT: "A classified war simulation held this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran forecasts that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials. The officials said the so-called war game was not designed as a rehearsal for American military action - and they emphasized that the exercise's results were not the only possible outcome of a real-world conflict. But the game has raised fears among top American planners that it may be impossible to preclude American involvement in any escalating confrontation with Iran, the officials said. In the debate among policy makers over the consequences of any Israeli attack, that reaction may give stronger voice to those in the White House, Pentagon and intelligence community who have warned that a strike could prove perilous for the United States." http://t.uani.com/GClLy2
AP: "Israel views the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran with greater urgency than the rest of the world, Israel's defense minister said Monday. Ehud Barak also reiterated recent Israeli assessments that Iran's nuclear program is on the verge of becoming immune to disruptions by a possible military strike. The remarks are likely to fuel already rampant speculation that Israel is preparing for a strike before Iran moves most of its nuclear facilities underground and beyond the reach of a precision attack. In testimony to parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Barak also said that harsher international sanctions against Iran would be needed to try to pressure Tehran to abandon the suspect elements of its nuclear program." http://t.uani.com/GAMXym
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
Reuters: "A key U.S. senator is close to unveiling legislation that would further isolate Iran by penalizing foreign companies that do any kind of business with an Iranian energy company, including providing services such as insurance and engineering, a congressional aide said on Monday. In an attempt to prevent major Iranian energy firms, such as Pars Oil and Gas, from profiting from international commerce, Republican Senator Mark Kirk is drafting a measure that would block any company from U.S. financial markets if it continued to deal with Tehran's energy sector, the aide said." http://t.uani.com/GCuqy5
Reuters: "Like everyone, Iranians need diapers. Fred Harrington has built a business by selling Iran the raw materials to make them. The Redmond, Washington, businessman, who exports to Iran under a humanitarian license from the U.S. Treasury Department, says he is owed close to $3.8 million by Iranian companies who cannot pay him because of the latest U.S. and European Union sanctions. He is not alone. U.S. firms from major drug makers like Merck & Co. to mom-and-pop outfits like Harrington's American Pulp & Paper Corp. are finding it hard to get paid even for medicines and other humanitarian exports explicitly allowed by the U.S. Treasury, according to officials, sanctions lawyers and the companies. 'Everything from aspirin to multivitamins - you name it - it's all jammed up,' said Cari Stinebower, an international trade lawyer with Crowell & Moring, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm, and a former counsel for the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)." http://t.uani.com/GCe7mQ
CNN: "Iran is buying American wheat for the first time in three years as it seeks to hedge against the growing impact of sanctions and weather-related crop shortages. Some 120,000 tonnes of hard red winter wheat grown in the Plains is on its way to the Islamic Republic, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The sale of another 60,000 tonnes has been finalized, according to trade sources, and Iran may ultimately buy some 400,000 tonnes of U.S. wheat this year. The purchases are part of a massive effort by the Islamic Republic to build up its grain stockpiles amid growing difficulties in financing imports of everything from steel to palm oil. At the same time, Iranian companies are devising elaborate workarounds to ensure find new markets for crude oil exports... According to USDA figures, 1,564,000 tonnes of U.S. wheat were exported to Iran in 2008, when the country was suffering a drought, and 312,000 tonnes the following year. Iran has also bought smaller amounts of U.S. soybeans and corn." http://t.uani.com/GCyNJg
WSJ: "The fresh wave of sanctions feeding panic in Iran's economy are hitting businesses in North Atlantic Treaty Organization-member Turkey, upending a boom in bilateral trade that was underpinned by improving diplomatic ties. Turkish exports to Iran, which surged 12-fold in the past decade to top $3.5 billion last year, plunged 25% in January from December, as sanctions pushed the real value of Iran's currency, the rial, as much as 55% lower against the dollar. All Turkish banks but one have stopped processing payments for Iranian customers, while higher costs have seen the number of Iranians visiting Turkey tumble." http://t.uani.com/GCaqh7
WSJ: "The United Arab Emirates is looking for ways to continue financing legitimate trade with Iran after the organization that handles world-wide banking transfers disconnected most Iranian banks from its systems over the weekend, according to U.A.E. Economy Minister Sultan Al Mansouri. Mr. Al Mansouri said he met his Iranian counterpart, Sayyed Shamsuddine Huseini, last week in Dubai and discussed trade relations and how to help U.A.E. and Iranian businesses caught up in the recent ban on banking transfers implemented by the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which is known as Swift." http://t.uani.com/GCaMnZ
Reuters: "European Union diplomats on Tuesday postponed a decision on whether to grant any exemptions to insurance provided for Iranian crude shipments when the bloc implements oil sanctions on Iran, an EU diplomat said. Asian oil importers have lobbied European governments for exceptions to ensure oil deliveries, but some EU capitals are wary of weakening the impact of EU measures on Iran, which aim to press the Tehran government to hold back on its nuclear work. On Tuesday, representatives in Brussels of EU governments debated a proposal to allow all insurance on Iranian crude bound for countries outside the EU to be extended until July 1. But there was no agreement." http://t.uani.com/GBysKU
Daily Telegraph: "So far this financial year 84 British companies have been found to have breached the strict sanctions regime which controls how firms can do business with Iran. This compares with just 40 cases in 2008/9, and 64 and 65 cases in the following two years, according to official figures from HM Revenue and Customs. Treasury minister David Gauke told MPs in the House of Commons that the increase in breaches was 'attributable to the increase in scope' of goods covered by the sanctions." http://t.uani.com/GAyqMg
AP: "Iran's supreme leader said Tuesday that more support for domestic industrial production can counter Western sanctions over Tehran's nuclear program. The statement by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei marking the Iranian new year is the latest in a series of displays of defiance by the country's senior leadership against the pressures - ranging from sanctions to the option of future military strikes - placed on Iran by the U.S. and the West." http://t.uani.com/GAP59f
Opinion & Analysis
Bret Stephens in WSJ: "To better understand the debate over the state of Iran's nuclear bomb building capabilities, it helps to talk to someone who has built a nuclear bomb. Tom Reed served as Secretary of the Air Force and head of the National Reconnaissance Office in the 1970s, but in an earlier life he designed thermonuclear devices at Lawrence Livermore and watched two of them detonate off Christmas Island in 1962. How hard is it, I asked Mr. Reed when he visited the Journal last week, to build a crude nuclear weapon on the model of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima? 'Anyone can build it,' he said flatly, provided they have about 141 lbs. of uranium enriched to an 80% grade. After that, he says, it's not especially hard to master the technologies of weaponization, provided you're not doing something fancy like implosion or miniaturization. Bear that in mind as the New York Times reports that U.S. intelligence agencies are sure, or pretty sure, that Iran 'still has not decided to pursue a weapon'-a view the paper says is shared by Israel's Mossad. The report echoes the conclusion of a 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran put its nuclear-weapons program on the shelf back in 2003. All this sounds like it matters a whole lot. It doesn't. You may not be able to divine whether a drinker, holding a bottle of Johnnie Walker in one hand and a glass tinkling with ice in the other, actually intends to pour himself a drink. And perhaps he doesn't. But the important thing, at least when it comes to intervention, is not to present him with the opportunity in the first place. That's what was so misleading about the 2007 NIE, which relegated to a footnote the observation that 'by nuclear weapons program we mean Iran's nuclear weapons design and weaponization work. . . . [W]e do not mean Iran's declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.' What the NIE called 'civil work' is, in fact, the central piece in assembling a nuclear device. To have sufficient quantities of enriched uranium is, so to speak, the whiskey of a nuclear-weapons program. By contrast, 'weaponization'-the vessel into which you pour and through which you can deliver the enriched uranium cocktail-is merely the glass. It's for this reason that Iran has spent the better part of the last several years building a redundant enrichment facility deep underground near the city of Qom. And thanks in part to the regular reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world doesn't need to rely on spies or shady sources to figure out just how much uranium the Iranians have enriched: At last count, more than five tons to a 5% grade, and more than 100 kilos to 20%. In other words, having a debate about the quality of our Iran intelligence is mostly an irrelevance: Iran's real nuclear-weapons program is hiding in plain sight." http://t.uani.com/GAYUSz
Jeffrey Goldberg in Bloomberg: "A widely held assumption about a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities is that it would spur Iranian citizens -- many of whom appear to despise their rulers -- to rally around the regime. But Netanyahu, I'm told, believes a successful raid could unclothe the emperor, emboldening Iran's citizens to overthrow the regime (as they tried to do, unsuccessfully, in 2009). You might call this the Museveni Paradigm. It's one of several arguments I've heard in the past week, as I've shuttled between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that have convinced me that Israeli national-security officials are considering a pre- emptive strike in the near future. Last week, I argued that Netanyahu's campaign to convince the West that Iran's nuclear program represents a threat -- not only to his country but also to the entire Middle East and beyond -- has worked so well that it could represent the perfect bluff. After all, on his recent visit to Washington, Netanyahu managed to avoid discussing the Palestinian issue with President Barack Obama, and he heard Obama vow that the U.S. wouldn't be content to merely contain a nuclear Iran. After interviewing many people with direct knowledge of internal government thinking, however, I'm highly confident that Netanyahu isn't bluffing -- that he is in fact counting down to the day when he will authorize a strike against a half-dozen or more Iranian nuclear sites. One reason I'm now more convinced is that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are working hard to convince other members of the Israeli cabinet that a strike might soon be necessary. But I also heard from Israeli national-security officials a number of best-case scenarios about the consequences of an attack, which suggested to me that they believe they have thought through all the risks -- and that they keep coming to the same conclusions. One conclusion key officials have reached is that a strike on six or eight Iranian facilities will not lead, as is generally assumed, to all-out war. This argument holds that the Iranians might choose to cover up an attack, in the manner of the Syrian government when its nuclear facility was destroyed by the Israeli air force in 2007. An Israeli strike wouldn't focus on densely populated cities, so the Iranian government might be able to control, to some degree, the flow of information about it... Some Israeli security officials also believe that Iran won't target American ships or installations in the Middle East in retaliation for a strike, as many American officials fear, because the leadership in Tehran understands that American retaliation for an Iranian attack could be so severe as to threaten the regime itself... The arguments I've outlined here -- and those I'll describe in my next column -- all lead to a single conclusion: The Israeli political leadership increasingly believes that an attack on Iran will not be the disaster many American officials, and some ex-Israeli security officials, fear it will be." http://t.uani.com/GALExr
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