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Top Stories
NYT:
"The first clues appeared in Kenya, Uganda and what is now South
Sudan. A British arms researcher surveying ammunition used by government
forces and civilian militias in 2006 found Kalashnikov rifle cartridges
he had not seen before. The ammunition bore no factory code, suggesting
that its manufacturer hoped to avoid detection. Within two years other
researchers were finding identical cartridges circulating through the
ethnic violence in Darfur. Similar ammunition then turned up in 2009 in a
stadium in Conakry, Guinea, where soldiers had fired on antigovernment
protesters, killing more than 150. For six years, a group of independent
arms-trafficking researchers worked to pin down the source of the mystery
cartridges. Exchanging information from four continents, they concluded
that someone had been quietly funneling rifle and machine-gun ammunition
into regions of protracted conflict, and had managed to elude exposure
for years. Their only goal was to solve the mystery, not implicate any
specific nation. When the investigators' breakthrough came, it carried a
surprise. The manufacturer was not one of Africa's usual suspects. It was
Iran." http://t.uani.com/RS2H4L
Reuters:
"Two European airlines said on Saturday they were halting services
to Iran, a sign of the crumbling purchasing power of Iranians as their
economy buckles under the weight of Western sanctions. Air France-KLM
will suspend its Amsterdam-Tehran service starting April 2013, a
spokesman for the carrier said. It currently flies to Iran four times a
week. Austrian Airlines, a unit of Germany's Deutsche Lufthansa, is
cancelling its services to Iran due to a lack of demand, a spokesman
said. The carrier's last flight from Vienna to Tehran will be on January
13. It used to fly to Tehran four times a week, but reduced that to three
in November... A spokesman for Lufthansa said the German carrier was
continuing to fly to Tehran five times a week. Italian airline Alitalia
also flies to Iran, according to its website." http://t.uani.com/VZS5PC
AP:
"Elections to pick Iran's next president are still five months away,
but that's not too early for some warning shots by the country's
leadership. The message to anyone questioning the openness of the June
vote: Keep quiet. A high-level campaign - including blunt remarks by
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - seeks to muzzle any open dissent
over the process to select the successor for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and
likely usher in a new president with a far tamer political persona.
Public denunciations are nothing new against anyone straying from Iran's
official script. But the unusually early pre-emptive salvos appears to
reflect worries that the election campaign could offer room for rising
criticism and complaints over Iran's myriad challenges, including an
economy sputtering under Western-led sanctions, double-digit inflation
and a national currency whose value has nosedived." http://t.uani.com/UYGiBt
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
Reuters:
"U.S. regulators are expected to order JPMorgan Chase & Co to
correct lapses in how it polices suspect money flows, two people familiar
with the situation said, in the latest move by officials to force banks
to tighten their anti money-laundering systems... The inquiry on
JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank, dates back several months, the sources
said. The first public signs that JPMorgan had issues with its
transaction monitoring systems emerged in August 2011. At that time
JPMorgan agreed to pay $88.3 million to settle Treasury Department
allegations that it engaged in prohibited transactions linked to Cuba and
Iran." http://t.uani.com/101aPDJ
Bloomberg:
"Iranian Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani said government
officials should take steps to offset economic hardships, Etemaad
newspaper reported. Iranians are struggling with inflation and
unemployment, Larijani said. 'It isn't in the nation's interest for
people to endure more economic pressure,' he said, according to
Etemaad... 'Even at a time of sanctions, if we use all the existing
skills and aim for local production certainly inflation will lessen and
jobs will be created,' he told a rally in the central city of Natanz,
according to the Tehran-based newspaper." http://t.uani.com/V9rUY8
AP:
"Spanish police have arrested two people and seized equipment made
by a Spanish company that was to be illegally shipped to Iran for use in
its nuclear program, officials said Friday. Police officers stopped a
tractor trailer at a highway toll booth in the northern town of Durango
on Wednesday and after an inspection arrested the two people and seized
the cargo, an Interior Ministry statement said. It said the police
'dismantled a ring trafficking material for the development of the
Iranian nuclear program.'The seized objects included 44 valves made of an
alloy 'containing more than 25 percent nickel and 20 percent chromium by
weight, which ... makes them particularly suitable for use in the nuclear
industry,' the ministry said. It said police also confiscated mounting
accessories, export documents to Iran, bank statements and computer
information. The ministry identified the Spanish company as Fluval, which
was founded in the 1970s and is located in the northern town of
Amurrio." http://t.uani.com/Y5jtkl
Regional
Meddling
Reuters:
"Iran is working with southern secessionists in Yemen to expand its
influence and destabilize the strategic region around the Straits of
Hormuz, the U.S. envoy to Yemen was quoted as saying on Sunday. Yemen's
state news agency Saba cited U.S. Ambassador Gerald Feierstein as
accusing Iran of supporting south Yemeni leaders trying to revive the
formerly independent state of South Yemen, and naming Ali Salem al-Beidh,
who runs a pro-independence satellite TV station from Lebanon, as one of
them. 'There is evidence that proves Iran's support to some extreme
elements of the southern movement (al-Hirak),' Feierstein was quoted by
Saba as saying in remarks reported in Arabic." http://t.uani.com/10tXTY8
Human Rights
The Age:
"Could Australia soon have its first heavy-metal refugee? A
28-year-old man detained at Manus Island says he fled to Australia after
being an underground metal drummer in Iran, where executions are 'as
common as eating a piece a cake'. He said he finally fled Iran after 60
heavy-metal fans were arrested at an unauthorised concert, and music
teachers were arrested and jailed. Restrictions on music and dancing are
commonplace in Iran, where hundreds of young people have been arrested at
unauthorised concerts. 'Because heavy metal is completely prohibited and
illegal in Iran, and as I mentioned before because of the religion and
misjudgments, it's known as Evil Music,' the man - who asked not to be
identified - wrote in a lengthy email from Manus Island." http://t.uani.com/SxP1xq
Opinion &
Analysis
Doyle McManus in
LAT: "Here's a prediction I don't think I'll have to
apologize for at the end of the year: Some time in the coming months,
probably this spring, there will be another crisis over Iran's nuclear
program. It's become an annual event on the diplomatic calendar: The
United States and its allies press Iran to stop enriching uranium, Iran
says no, Israel warns that its patience is running out, and the United
States persuades Israel to stay its hand. That's how the crisis has
unfolded over the last two years. But there are several reasons to
believe that 2013's crisis will be different, and that Tehran will either
agree to limit its nuclear program, or Israel and the United States will
move toward military action. For one thing, President Obama's reelection
gives him a freer hand to make a deal or to consider military action if a
deal can't be reached. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about
to get reelected too, and he will head an even more hawkish government.
And one more element has changed: Over the past year, Obama has hardened
his warnings that the United States will not allow Iran to go nuclear,
even if that requires military action. 'A nuclear-armed Iran is not a
challenge that can be contained,' he told the U.N. General Assembly in
September. 'The United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from
obtaining a nuclear weapon.' The president still has doubters in both the
United States and Israel. When Obama hardened his position against Iran,
they note, it was an election year, and he needed to sound tough to stave
off Israeli military action and placate pro-Israel voters. Now that he's
been reelected, his true antiwar beliefs will resurface, they predict. As
proof, they say, there's his nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel as
secretary of Defense - a Republican who has been one of his party's most
vocal skeptics about the wisdom of military action against Iran... But
that was the old Hagel, before he was nominated for secretary of Defense.
Last week, as he prepared for his confirmation hearings, Hagel took pains
to reassure senators that he is falling fully in line with Obama's
tougher position on Iran. 'He strongly supports the president's position
on Iran,' one official told me after speaking with Hagel at the Pentagon.
'He agrees that military action should be on the table.' In a
conversation with Dennis Ross, Obama's former advisor on Iran, Hagel went
a step further into the hawkish camp. 'He was very clear that he believes
we can't live with an Iran that has nuclear-weapons capability,' Ross
told me. Is that the Washington equivalent of a deathbed conversion - a
sudden change of view on the eve of confirmation hearings? Maybe. But
it's also a sign that Obama isn't softening his stance on Iran for his
second term, and that embracing Obama's view was a price of Hagel's
nomination... But anyone who expected Chuck Hagel to become a strong
force for restraint in Obama's second term may be disappointed. Instead,
we are likely to have an antiwar president and an antiwar secretary of
Defense, both bent on convincing Iran that they are willing to go to
war." http://t.uani.com/WG7hQt
Conrad Black in
the National Post: "The odds are that Iran will
acquire a nuclear military capacity in the next year or 18 months. The
subject has been bandied about for so long that the implications of such
a step are now widely accepted with resignation - much as with North
Korea, when it joined the nuclear club. And the United States is duly
distributing anti-missile defense around the Persian Gulf. Barack Obama
never formally took the military option 'off the table.' Nevertheless -
if the United States, especially with John Kerry and Chuck Hagel in the
State Department and the Pentagon - lifts a finger to prevent Iran from
crossing this threshold, it would be the greatest Middle Eastern backflip
since Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem. It would also be a welcome sight.
North Korea is essentially a puppet of China's, which the People's
Republic unleashes on the West for its own amusement from time to time,
but which it can contain. Iran, as the noted behaviourist Monty Python
would say, is something completely different. All that is good that can
be said about the Iranian nuclear initiative is that it exposes the
nuclear disarmament regime as the fraud that it is... Iran is of more
concern because its leaders have spoken almost ceaselessly of destroying
the Jewish state, and they have often claimed a wish to die for the cause
of militant Islam. They certainly have no shortage of followers ready to
make such a sacrifice. But - as is indicated by the conduct of the Hamas
leaders when Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon had the Israeli Defense
Forces kill the head of Hamas after each terrorist outrage in Israel, and
of Osama bin Laden, hiding like an animal behind high walls against
American retribution - militant Islamist leaders tend to be more careful
with their lives than their rhetoric might suggest. Those truly
determined and eager to die, especially if they are in positions of
power, have no difficulty doing so. Iran's leaders have not done so yet, nor
come close to doing so. But there will be terrible consequences if Iran
obtains these horrible weapons, even if they do not use them. Turkey,
Egypt and Saudi Arabia will feel obliged to do the same, and a general
movement will then spread to replace the present furtively expanding club
of sensible nuclear hypocrites, arming themselves to deter aggression but
not initiate it, with a vast nuclear club of unlimited membership. Like a
neighbourhood that leaps from gradually slipping gun control to being universally
armed to the teeth, the world will bristle with nuclear weaponry like
hand guns and switchblades on Saturday night in an American slum. This
will continue to deter most countries, though most do not need to be
deterred, but it will make nuclear exchanges inevitable, eventually, and
deterrence will then have to regress to early Cold War massive
retaliation, which will only accelerate and spread the arms race. It is
not quite too late to institute and enforce a policy of insistence on
denial of nuclear weapons to countries that do not plausibly renounce
first use, but the chances are eroding every day, through the
irresolution and misjudgments of the U.S. government. If Iran becomes a
nuclear military power, the consequences are easily foreseeable, are as
described, and they will be terrifying." http://t.uani.com/UjJiIJ
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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
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