Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Eye on Iran: India Cuts July Iran Oil Imports by Over 40 Percent







For continuing coverage follow us on Twitter and join our Facebook group.
  
Top Stories

Reuters:
"India's oil imports from Iran fell by more than 40 percent in July from June and a year ago, as imports by Tehran's biggest local client MRPL were hit by a shortage of ships and insurance cover caused by European Union sanctions. The U.S. and EU sanctions that took full effect on July 1 target Iran's nuclear programme which the West thinks is aimed at making weapons, but the Islamic Republic denies that. Refiners in India, Iran's biggest oil client after China, have struggled to find insurance and shipping for imports since the European Union brought in sanctions on July 1 banning most major insurance firms from covering Iranian oil shipments. India shipped in 201,860 barrels per day (bpd) from Iran in July compared with 346,600 bpd in June and about 338,900 bpd in July 2011, trade data made available to Reuters showed on Tuesday... Falling imports pushed Iran to sixth position in the list of India's biggest suppliers of oil in July, compared with the third position it enjoyed in June and No. 4 a year ago." http://t.uani.com/TRNYol

Reuters: "Iran unveiled on Tuesday what it said was an upgraded short-range missile and said it would build a new air defense site, in what appeared to be an attempt to show its readiness against any Israeli attack. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi attended a ceremony at which officials unveiled the fourth-generation Fateh 110 short-range missile, with a range of about 300 km (180 miles), and other upgraded hardware. Ahmadinejad said Iran's military upgrades were purely for defensive purposes and should not be taken as a threat, but said they would dissuade world powers from imposing their will on Iran." http://t.uani.com/RdcvEF

Economist: "The last time fruit and chicken were luxuries in Iran was back in the 1980s, when the country was fighting against Iraq. On the whole, Iranians believed that their young Islamic Republic needed protecting from Saddam Hussein and his Western backers. Non-combatants in the big cities generally accepted shortages and other privations with patriotic stoicism. Two-and-a-half decades on, Iran again gives the impression of a country at war even if, for the moment, the guns are silent. Prices of basic food, clothes and electronic goods have soared as a result of international sanctions and a plummeting currency; the rial has more than halved in value over the past year. Nobody believes the official figure of 24% for the annual rate of inflation. Civil servants have been reduced to moonlighting in menial jobs to make up for their shrinking buying power. The solidarity of the 1980s is conspicuous by its absence. Last month a limited sale of subsidised chicken prompted mini-riots... Ordinary Iranians are suffering from policies of confrontation on which they have not been consulted." http://t.uani.com/QlNMsV
Lebanon Banking Campaign 
Nuclear Program & Sanctions

Economist: "Iran has also become a lucrative market for Chinese products and services. China is investing $1 billion to improve Tehran's infrastructure. A Chinese conglomerate has already expanded the sprawling capital's underground railway, under a contract worth $328m... Navid, an Iranian trader, owns a midsized company that imports chemicals from China to supply Iran's plastics industry. Five years ago his suppliers were all in Europe but, after successive rounds of anti-Iranian sanctions, he now gets most of his chemicals from China. Most Iranians, however, bear no special love for either China or the Chinese. Many think China is just another country seeking to exploit their country's weakness." http://t.uani.com/NhH0nP

Reuters: "With international sanctions squeezing Iran, the Islamic Republic is seeking to expand its banking foothold in the Caucasus nation of Armenia to make up for difficulties in countries it used to rely on to do business, according to diplomats and documents. Iran's growing interest in its neighbor Armenia, a mountainous, landlocked country of about 3.3 million people, comes at a time of rising international isolation for Tehran and increasing scrutiny by Western governments and intelligence agencies of Iranian banking ties worldwide as they attempt to stifle the country's nuclear program... An expanded local-currency foothold in a neighbor like Armenia, a former Soviet republic which has close trade ties to Iran and is working hard to forge closer links to the European Union, could make it easier for Tehran to obfuscate payments to and from foreign clients and deceive Western intelligence agencies trying to prevent it from expanding its nuclear and missile programs." http://t.uani.com/PC7nJ0

Bloomberg: "An Iranian crude oil-tanker signaled it's sailing for Singapore after calling at Kharg Island, the Persian Gulf country's biggest export facility, ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg show. The Leadership, a very large crude carrier controlled by Tehran-based National Iranian Tanker Co., can go as low as 22.5 meters when filled with a 2 million barrel cargo. The vessel signaled for Singapore on Aug. 15 with a draft of 22 meters, according to data from IHS Inc. (IHS), an Englewood, Colorado-based research company. It had a draft of 11.3 meters on Aug. 14 and the depth change suggests cargo was loaded. At least 16 tankers calling at Iranian oil terminals unloaded or delivered cargoes in India, China, or Japan this month, or are signaling they'll arrive at Asian destinations in August, according to the tracking data." http://t.uani.com/MJ3670

Dow Jones: "Iran is asking French oil giant Total SA (TOT) to resume refuelling its passenger aircraft and has even raised the question with the French president, an Iranian official said recently. The move underscores Iran's hopes that the election in May of a new French administration could lead to a thaw between the two countries. Iran asked French President Francois Hollande last month to intercede with Total over the refuelling of its aircraft. "He said he would look into it," the Iranian official said. Under Mr. Hollande's predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, France led a European push to tighten sanctions against Iran, culminating in a European Union embargo July 1. But the Islamic Republic hopes France will soften its stance under Mr. Hollande, who was elected in May." http://t.uani.com/ShiR5J

Syrian Civil War

The National: "This is bad news for the opposition and its international backers, since Iranian military support will probably stiffen the regime's resolve and, at the least, prolong the conflict. Active Iranian military advisers help the regime in two ways. First, Iran can teach Syrians what few states know how to do effectively: defeat armed, non-state entities such as the ragtag groups now engaged in urban warfare. Iran knows all about such groups; it has created, trained and armed insurgent groups of this type for more than three decades - and with effect, as US and British forces found out in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. If anyone knows the tactics of such groups, Iran does. The Syrian regime can also draw some confidence from recent events in Iraq, and Iran's role there. Many Shia militias, battle-hardened from fighting against US and British forces, were under the guidance of Tehran's military commanders. Some of these groups are still intact." http://t.uani.com/OuBKjt

Human Rights

Bloomberg: "Iran's decision to forbid women from studying dozens of subjects including nuclear physics and oil engineering threatens to wipe out one of the last vestiges of gender equality in the country, a Nobel Peace laureate said... The new rules 'demonstrate that the Iranian authorities cannot tolerate women's presence in the public arena,' Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi wrote in an open letter to the United Nations dated Aug. 17. 'They are trying to push women back to the private sphere of their homes so they may abandon their opposition and legitimate demands.' The restrictions follow gender-segregation guidelines that Science Minister Kamran Daneshjou tried -- unsuccessfully -- to impose last year." http://t.uani.com/TRPgj5 

Domestic Politics 

NYT: "Energized by anger over widespread accusations that Iran's official relief organizations were not adequately helping survivors, they, and hundreds of others, spontaneously organized a 48-hour charity effort using text messages, Facebook and phone calls to gather money and goods. But instead of handing over their collection to the Iranian Red Crescent Society - which is close to the government - as the authorities had asked in the state media, these youths were determined to transport it themselves to the most remote hill villages ravaged by the earthquakes, which struck a rural Turkish-speaking part of the country. More than 300 people were killed and thousands left homeless." http://t.uani.com/NeglOH 

Foreign Affairs 

AP: "The Obama administration said Monday that Iran doesn't deserve to host a summit of non-aligned nations later this month but urged foreign leaders who decide to attend to press the Iranian government comply with international demands to come clean about its nuclear program. The State Department predicted Iran would use the Non Aligned Movement summit in Tehran to advance its own agenda and shift attention from its defiance of requirements to prove it is not trying to develop atomic weapons. The department also condemned anti-Israel comments made by Iranian officials last week. 'Iran is going to try to manipulate this NAM summit and the attendees to advance its own agenda and to obscure the fact that it is failing to live up to multiple obligations that it has to the U.N. Security Council, the IAEA and other international bodies,' spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters." http://t.uani.com/She3gN

AFP: "Iran and Egypt are moving towards restoring diplomatic relations which were severed more than three decades ago, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in an interview published on Tuesday. Salehi said in comments reported in Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram newspaper that Tehran was keen on establishing relations of 'friendship and brotherhood' with Cairo. 'Egypt is the cornerstone of the region and has a special stature in the Arab and Muslim countries... and we want relations of friendship and brotherhood with it,' Salehi said, adding that Tehran hoped to restore 'normal' relations with Cairo." http://t.uani.com/PCcOYn

Opinion & Analysis

Lyle Bacaltos & Andrea Stricker in ISIS: "On July 10, 2012 Abdollah Nouri, an Iranian reformist politician and cleric, proposed that Iran hold a national referendum that would give the Iranian people the power to decide the future of Iran's nuclear program. He argued that recent economic sanctions against Iran combined with threats of war were starting to have detrimental effects. Publics around the world and in Iran should support Nouri's call, despite the unlikelihood of the Iranian regime holding a referendum that would truly let the people of Iran decide the future of the country's nuclear policy. Nonetheless, an Iranian national debate on the nuclear issue is long overdue, and Nouri's call is a step in the right direction. The Iranian regime started its centrifuge program, the most sensitive part of the nuclear program, under great secrecy in the mid-1980s, revealing it publicly only in 2003 under intense international pressure.  It has hidden the true costs of its centrifuge and associated facilities behind a nationalist smokescreen, preferring to confront the West rather than face the fact that the program is uneconomical and often incompetent.  Unless the real reason the regime pursues this program is to build nuclear weapons the centrifuge program serves no worthwhile purpose.  The Iranian people should decide if it is worth the costs. It is also time for reformists and others to stop defending the charade of Iran's 'fundamental right' to uranium enrichment. Iran does not have a right to enrich uranium under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as the regime falsely claims.  The NPT provides a conditional right to nuclear energy, including enrichment, based on the state being in conformity with Articles I and II; the latter prohibits non-nuclear weapon states such as Iran from building nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has stated for years that Iran's compliance with Article II is in doubt. Thus, the IAEA and the U.N. Security Council have judged that they are well within their legal mandate to demand a suspension to Iran's centrifuge program and more transparency over its entire nuclear program, including past and possibly on-going activities related to building nuclear weapons.  It is wrong to defend Iran's centrifuge program as a 'right.' This obvious distortion serves mainly to intensify the suffering of the Iranian people and block any resolution of this controversy with the international community. Reformists and pragmatists both in Iran and abroad should instead focus on Nouri's argument that the nuclear issue should not be allowed to 'threaten all of (Iran's) national interests.' The need for all to question the costs and benefits of the Iranian regime's nuclear program is essential." http://t.uani.com/PywNFD

Jeffrey Goldberg in Bloomberg: "It has been a tumultuous couple of weeks in the Iran-Israel War, and it hasn't even started yet. Over the past few days, Iranian leaders have promised Israel's coming destruction about half a dozen times, and have gotten so overheated they've begun to mix metaphors: There has been much talk about wiping the cancerous tumor of Zionism from the map, and so on. The Iranians' language has become sufficiently genocidal that even the secretary general of the United Nations, not generally known as a hotbed of Zionist feeling, said he was 'dismayed by the remarks threatening Israel's existence.' Israel's leaders are also 'dismayed.' But their dismay is prompted by something much deeper than rhetoric. They understand that much of the civilized world is prepared to live with a nuclear Iran, and they harbor seemingly ineradicable fears that U.S. President Barack Obama, and his Western allies, might secretly be willing to do the same. The Israelis -- Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in particular -- have been suggesting to the news media these past two weeks that the time is nearly at hand for a strike on Iran's nuclear sites. Of course, Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been discussing the existential threat posed by Iran since they came into office. (Netanyahu, in an interview with me three years ago, said Iran was led by a 'messianic, apocalyptic cult,' and told me he thought the two great tasks before Obama were fixing the U.S. economy and stopping Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.) ... Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence (and one of the pilots in the 1981 Israeli raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor), argues that Obama should visit Israel to deliver a face-to-face message that stopping Iran is a vital U.S. national security interest. A visit to Israel would do more to delay a strike on Iran than any other step the administration could take. The beauty of this idea is that Obama won't have to say anything new. He's on record explaining why the idea of containing a nuclear Iran isn't an option; he's on record promising to stop Iran by whatever means necessary; and he's on record explaining why a nuclear-free Iran is in the interests of the U.S. 'If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, this would run completely contrary to my policies of nonproliferation,' he told me in an interview this year. When I asked him what his position would be if Israel were not in the picture, he answered: 'It would still be a profound national-security interest of the United States to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.' These words, delivered in the Oval Office, are powerful. But delivered in Jerusalem, before the Knesset, they would deeply reassure the prime minister and the Israeli public. What could be more effective than the U.S. president explaining to Israelis, in Israel, that their two countries share the same interests? Yes, Obama is running for re-election, and it is hard to leave Ohio and Florida. But a trip to Israel -- a place he hasn't visited as president -- would put Iran on notice that Obama is deadly serious about thwarting their plans." http://t.uani.com/QlW97K

Frida Ghitis in The Miami Herald: "In recent days, much attention has focused on signs from Israel that an attack on Iran's nuclear installations may be imminent. Amid the flurry of analysis, little attention has gone to what Iran is telling the world about its views. We would do well to listen closely. The world should never become jaded, immune to the genocidal hatred spewed by leaders of a nation that is still treated as a full-fledged member of international institutions. On Aug. 17, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed that Israel's existence is an 'insult to all of humanity.' A couple of weeks earlier, he told a gathering of Muslim diplomats that, 'anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime.' Ever the optimist, the president explained that this would help 'solve all the world's problems.' Global attention has lately centered on the news from Israel. Observers and analysts have posed valid questions about whether or not attacking Iran is the best course of action, and about whether Israeli officials are bluffing or are truly preparing for a new armed conflict. Israel's plans, of course, are a legitimate subject of debate. But we should not take our eyes away from Iran, not just its actions in pushing ahead with its fast-growing nuclear enrichment program, but also its words, the rhetoric of its leaders - the men who set the country's agenda - for hints into their worldview. Ahmadinejad is not the country's top leader. But that should offer little comfort. The views of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei are even more chilling. A few months ago, Khamenei declared that Israel is a 'cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut.' Then he pledged his support to anyone willing to participate in carrying the operation. 'From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help.' The rhetoric coming from Tehran is so extreme that it strikes against a western tendency to simply dismiss ideas that clash too violently against our own. There's just no place in our minds, in civilized society, to file the repulsive words disgorging from the Ayatollah and his acolytes. In case anyone doubted him, Khamenei openly admitted for the first time something everyone already knew. 'We have intervened in anti-Israel matters,' he said, boasting of Iran's participation in wars between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas in recent years. If you want to understand the larger ideology, Ahmadinejad told Muslim ambassadors in Tehran that 'It has now been some 400 years that a horrendous Zionist clan has been ruling the major world affairs,' saying the Jews control 'the major power circles in political, media, monetary and banking organizations in the world.' Now, where have we heard this before?" http://t.uani.com/NXT1Rm

Matthew Levitt in The Weekly Standard: "Over the past few months, Iran has demonstrated a renewed willingness to carry out attacks targeting its enemies. From India and Azerbaijan to Cyprus and Thailand, recent Iran directed plots have targeted diplomats and civilians, Israelis, Americans, Saudis, and more. To execute these attacks, Iran has sometimes dispatched its own agents, such as members of its elite IRGC Quds Force. Other times Iran has relied on trusted proxies like Hezbollah. In a number of cases Quds Force and Hezbollah operatives have worked together to execute attacks abroad. Now, evidence has emerged indicating Tehran is employing another type of agent-the unlikely surrogate assassin-to target Iranian dissidents abroad, including here in the United States. Last October, dual U.S.-Iranian citizen Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri, a commander in Iran's Quds Force, the special-operations unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), were charged in New York for their roles in an alleged plot to murder the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. According to the Department of Justice, Arbabsiar told a Drug Enforcement Administration confidential source posing as an associate of an international drug cartel that "his associates in Iran had discussed a number of violent missions" for the source and his associates to perform, including the murder of the ambassador. When the DEA source noted that others could be killed in the attack, including U.S. senators known to frequent the restaurant where they planned to target the ambassador, Arbabsiar allegedly dismissed these concerns as 'no big deal.' Later, after Arbabsiar was arrested and confessed to his role in the plots, he reportedly called Shakuri at the direction of law enforcement. Shakuri again confirmed that the plot should go forward and as soon as possible. 'Just do it quickly. It's late,' he said. For many pundits, the plot was deemed too outlandish and unprofessional to be taken seriously. Surely Iran's vaunted Quds Force was too clever to tap a failed used car salesman to carry out an operation as sensitive as this? In fact, Iran has relied on fairly unskilled and simple operatives to carry out attacks in the past. For example, Iran and Hezbollah relied on Fouad Ali Saleh to run a cell of twenty operatives responsible for a series of bombings in Paris in 1985 and 1986. Saleh, a Tunisian-born Frenchman (a convert from Sunni to Shia Islam) who sold fruits, vegetables, and clothing in the Paris subway, was as unskilled and unlikely an operative as Arbabsiar, the Iranian-American car salesman arrested in the al-Jubeir assassination plot. In fact, this is no new tactic, but a tried and true operational model Iran has used to target political opponents in the United States as early as 1980. Recently, ProPublica's Sebastian Rotella offered the most detailed account to date of the July 2009 arrest of Iranian-American house painter Mohammad Reza Sadeghnia. Arrested in California, Sadeghnia a Michigan resident, had conducted surveillance of an Iranian dissident who hosted a Farsi language radio program. He hired an Iranian immigrant with a criminal record as an accomplice, and the two planned their assassination. But his accomplice got cold feet and alerted police to the plot. Sadeghnia suspected his accomplice wanted out, and threatened to have his family in Iran killed. 'I have done other missions around the world,' he warned." http://t.uani.com/Sj22cb 

Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please email Press@UnitedAgainstNuclearIran.com

United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons.  UANI is an issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of nuclear weapons.






United Against Nuclear Iran | PO Box 1028 | New York | NY | 10185

No comments:

Post a Comment