Eye on Iran: Despite Sanctions' Toll on Iran, U.S. Sees No Shift in Nuclear Behavior

For continuing coverage follow us on Twitter and join our Facebook group.    Top Stories WashPost: "Harsh economic sanctions have taken a serious toll on Iran's economy, but U.S. and European officials acknowledge that the measures have not yet produced the kind of public unrest that could force Iranian leaders to change their nuclear policies. Nine months after Iran was hit with the toughest restrictions in its history, the nation's economy appears to have settled into a slow, downward glide, hemorrhaging jobs and hard currency but appearing to be in no immediate danger of collapse, Western diplomats and analysts say. At the same time, the hardships have not triggered significant domestic protests or produced a single concession by Iran on its nuclear program. Although weakened, Iran has resisted Western pressure through a combination of clever tactics, political repression and old-fashioned stubbornness, analysts say. The mixed results from the sanctions complicate the West's bargaining position ahead of the next round of nuclear talks with Iran, in early April." http://t.uani.com/YlZJ7l AFP: "Iranian and foreign nuclear experts gathered in Istanbul on Monday to discuss Tehran's controversial atomic programme, a European Union spokeswoman said. 'The meeting is taking place at the expert-level as planned,' said Maja Kocijancic, spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who is leading talks between Iran and the so-called P5+1 -- Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany. The closed-door meeting is being held in a secret location in the Turkish city, Kocijancic added." http://t.uani.com/ZUIzil AFP: "US Treasury sanctions chief David Cohen will travel to Asia next week to discuss the implementation of sanctions against North Korea and Iran, the Treasury Department said Friday. Cohen, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, will meet with senior government officials and private-sector leaders in Japan, South Korea and China on his March 18-22 trip, the department said in a statement. Cohen will be accompanied by a State Department official, the department said in the brief statement." http://t.uani.com/ZUHqay   Nuclear Program Bloomberg: "Representative Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee, said 'pressure is mounting' for action other than economic sanctions to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. 'Everybody agrees that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program,' Rogers, a Michigan Republican, said on CNN's 'State of the Union' program today. 'The last part of it is, can they take the highly enriched uranium, weaponize it and put it on a missile for use? And there's the debate: How long would it take to accomplish the last piece of that?' President Barack Obama told an Israeli television station last week that his administration believes that Iran is at least a year away from developing a nuclear weapon. Rogers said he wasn't as certain as the president on the timing of when Iran may have the capability to launch a nuclear strike. 'The Israelis believe it is sooner than that, and that's why the pressure is mounting for some action, maybe other than sanctions for Iran, so they get the signal that we really won't tolerate them getting a nuclear weapon and then proliferating nuclear weapons across the Middle East,' Rogers said." http://t.uani.com/WyGeuE Sanctions  Bloomberg: "Royal Dutch Shell Plc sold two high-sulfur oil cargoes to Mangalore Refinery & Petrochemicals Ltd. (MRPL), the biggest state-run Indian buyer of Iranian crude, as supplies from the Persian Gulf state may be disrupted because of global sanctions. Mangalore, a unit of Oil and Natural Gas Corp., bought 650,000 barrels each of Oman and Banaco Arab Medium crude from Shell for loading next month, according to four traders who asked not to be identified because the information is confidential. The grades are similar to Mangalore's imports from Iran, the traders said. Indian refiners may halt Iranian crude purchases as local insurers refuse to cover the risks for using the oil, P.P. Upadhya, the managing director at Mangalore, said March 8. The company, known as MRPL, has an contract to buy 5 million metric tons a year from the Islamic Republic." http://t.uani.com/XTWOIJ The Hindu: "India may slash import of crude oil from Iran by as much as 27 per cent this fiscal because US and European sanctions have made it difficult to ship oil from the Persian Gulf nation. India may, in the financial year ending March 31, import just about 13 million tonne of crude oil from Iran, down from 18.1 million tonne shipped in the 2011-12 fiscal, official sources said. US and EU have shut down the use of their financial systems for Iranian crude trade, and Washington recently imposed more treasury sanctions on trade with Iran - making imports from the Islamic nation even more difficult - in the hope of starving Tehran of cash that would force it to give up its nuclear programme." http://t.uani.com/ZMV8Lf Terrorism AFP: "Interpol said Friday it was not lifting arrest warrants for Iranians suspected of involvement in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, despite Tehran's steps to co-operate. Argentine Foreign Minister Hector Timerman read from a letter announcing the international police organization's decision at a press conference. He noted that while an agreement between Argentina and Iran to set up a truth commission over the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was 'positive,' it did not mean the arrest warrants would be lifted. The 1994 bombing killed 85 people and wounded 300. The agreement between the two governments was reached last month but it has been sharply criticized by Israel, Argentina's Jewish community and opposition politicians." http://t.uani.com/146NMJI Human Rights WashPost: "Google's much-dreaded announcement on the coming demise of Google Reader has alarmed users in Iran - and drawn attention to the scale and complexity of online censorship there. As Quartz's Zach Seward explained in a great post yesterday, Google Reader is one of the few ways Iranians can access Web sites blocked in Iran. (According to ViewDNS, a site that monitors servers, the government censors roughly one in three news sites and one in four of all sites on the general Web.) To quote Seward: 'Many RSS readers, including Google's, serve as anti-censorship tools for people living under oppressive regimes. That's because it's actually Google's servers, located in the U.S. or another country with uncensored internet, that accesses each feed. So a web user in Iran just needs access to google.com/reader in order to read websites that would otherwise be blocked.' Unfortunately for Iranian Internet users, government censors had it out for Google Reader long before Google itself did. The government blocked all of Google's sites - including Reader, Gmail and Youtube - for about a week in late September, only restoring them after widespread outrage." http://t.uani.com/YjLYsJ Domestic Politics AP: "Iran's official news agency reports that parliament has approved the appointment of a new health minister by the tightest of margins. It is the latest sign of acrimony between outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the conservatives who dominate the legislature. The Sunday report by IRNA says 113 of the 224 lawmakers present voted for Mohammad Hasan Tarighat Monfared. He was made caretaker of the ministry in December, when Ahmadinejad removed Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, Iran's sole serving female Cabinet member, after her ministry criticized the government for not providing money to import medicine." http://t.uani.com/WxqyJq Opinion & Analysis Michael Eisenstadt & Mehdi Khalaji in The National Interest: "Iranian experts are set to meet their P5+1 counterparts in Istanbul next week to discuss the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. They are likely to reprise a long-standing claim: Iran will never build nuclear weapons, because Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa banning 'the bomb.' (In fact, Khamenei restated his position on this matter just a few weeks ago.) They will explain that this fatwa is an important confidence-building measure that the P5+1 have yet to adequately acknowledge. But there is more to consider than what will likely be conveyed during these expert-level talks. Khamenei has spoken on this topic numerous times in the past decade, and such oral pronouncements do indeed have the same legal standing as a written fatwa. Khamenei's precise formulation, however, has varied. He has at times appeared to tacitly permit the development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, but not their use. On other occasions, he has categorically forbidden stockpiling and development, as well as the use of nuclear weapons. This should not be surprising. Fatwas are not immutable, and can be altered depending on circumstances. The founder of the Islamic Republic, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, modified his position on a number of issues-taxes, military conscription, women's suffrage, the legitimacy of the Shah's monarchy, and apparently even chemical weapons. And Ayatollah Khamenei could alter his fatwa regarding nuclear weapons should he deem it necessary. Because this could undermine the value of the fatwa as a confidence-building measure, some former Iranian officials have suggested that the Iranian parliament could pass legislation making the fatwa the law of the land. Conversely, Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has suggested that the fatwa could be adopted as an official UN document as a way of building confidence. Yet these proposals would not solve the confidence problem, because it is the principle of maslahat (the interest of the regime) that guides the formulation of Iranian policy. Before he died, Ayatollah Khomeini ruled that the Islamic Republic could destroy a mosque or suspend the observance of the tenets of Islam if its interests so dictated. And the constitution of the Islamic Republic invests the Supreme Leader with absolute authority to determine the interest of the regime. He can therefore cancel laws or override decisions by the regime's various deliberative bodies, including the Majlis (parliament), the Guardian Council, and the Expediency Council. Likewise, Iran's checkered history of adherence to UN documents and resolutions (such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a raft of UN resolutions pertaining to its nuclear program) raises questions about the utility of making the fatwa a UN document. Further muddying the waters, spokesmen for the Islamic Republic have a habit of proffering convenient interpretations when it comes to fatwas and foreign policy. When Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie sparked a crisis in relations with Europe, Iranian foreign-ministry officials tried to downplay its importance, claiming that the fatwa only reflected Khomeini's personal opinion and was not binding on the Iranian government. Now Iranian foreign-ministry officials want the international community to believe that Khamenei's fatwa is a binding religious ruling that would prevent the Islamic Republic from getting the bomb. So which one is it?" http://t.uani.com/ZDzniv Vali Nasr in NYT: "For the first time since 2009, there may be signs of a break in the deadlock over Iran's nuclear program. Iran entered the latest talks with a slightly softened position. That is good news, but the United States will have to change its negotiating strategy to take advantage of it. Economic sanctions are biting hard in Iran. Meanwhile, its strategic position is crumbling because of the turmoil in its ally Syria and the rise of militant Sunni Islamism throughout the Arab Middle East. Together, these forces seem to have forced Iran to reconsider its own bargaining position. So rather than strengthen sanctions another notch, America should give Iran a little tit for tat: begin negotiating directly, and put on the table the prospect of lifting sanctions, one by one, as bargaining chips. The United States should shift from trying to further intimidate Iran to trying to clinch an agreement. The sanctions have given America leverage, and we should use it to seek a deal that would finally restrict Iran's ability to make bomb fuel, rather than ratchet up the pressure in the hopes of getting either a broader deal now or a total surrender later. The problem with just standing tough is that it is likely to backfire; Iran is understandably nervous, and if it thinks America is intransigent, it might double down on its nuclear program, speeding it up past a point of no return. Hints of progress were seen at the round of talks in Kazakhstan last month. The United States, negotiating together with Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany, proposed only small steps that would slightly ease American-imposed restrictions (allowing Iran to again trade in gold and silver, and to obtain spare parts for civilian aircraft), while insisting on stringent demands that Iran give up its ability to highly enrich uranium and use it to build nuclear weapons. Somewhat surprisingly, Iran said the proposal was welcome but not enough - and that it would respond in a few weeks. That contrasted with its previous pattern of flatly rejecting the other side's proposals... In other words, insecurity drives Iran's nuclear ambition, and it leaves Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, convinced that if he were to give up Iran's nuclear program entirely, as Libya did in the last decade, he would only invite the fate of Muammar el-Qaddafi. That logic - if Iran is going to face sanctions anyway, better to face them with the bomb than without - has produced a saying in Tehran these days: 'Better to be North Korea than Iraq.' Still, Iran's leaders and citizens clearly want the sanctions lifted, and they may now be signaling a way out of the deadlock. It's time for the United States to test the leaders' real intentions and offer them a path to rejoining the international community. The committee of six nations involved in the Iran talks has achieved its original goal: to confront Iran with a united front. So the other five, whose differing agendas inevitably complicate the bargaining, should step aside and leave the United States to one-to-one talks with Iran. And rather than offering only vague promises that serious concessions might be rewarded someday by dropping all the sanctions as a package, Washington should offer to do away with specific sanctions, piece by piece, in exchange for specific Iranian concessions. In that way, both sides might begin dismantling the most dangerous aspects of Iran's nuclear program in incremental, verifiable ways. Of course, Iran might lose enthusiasm for negotiations as the sanctions disappear. But by then, if its first concessions had been substantial, it would have given up critical pieces of its nuclear program, leaving the world a little safer." http://t.uani.com/119wbzZ Arash Abadpour & Collin Anderson in The Iran Media Program: "The narrowing space for dissent and free exchange of ideas in the Iranian public sphere and in public space has been one of the driving forces behind Iranians' use of cyberspace as a mechanism for expression. The Internet is one of the few remaining platforms where Iranians can practice some level of open debate, less susceptible to social and political limitations. Research on Internet use in Iran sheds light on a large online community engaged in a diversity of activities and expanding at a significant pace. This study seeks to complement standard online research techniques by providing a richer picture of Iranian Internet users. The novel research method utilized in this study features 'archetypes' whose characteristics are described in vignettes, and who are defined based on their relationship with the Internet. Taking this approach, our study considers the Internet as an ecosystem, and works toward providing a more realistic narration of the diversity of Iranian Internet users and online environments." http://t.uani.com/ZmFOaF 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.