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Stories
Bloomberg:
"The U.S. wants to make Iran's currency useless in global commerce
through an executive order that gives financial institutions a July 1
deadline to stop dealing in rials or face sanctions, Treasury official
David Cohen said. President Barack Obama issued the order June 3, and
'the purpose of the one-month phase-in period is to give financial
institutions currently holding rials the opportunity to dump them,' said
Cohen, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for terrorism and
financial intelligence, in an interview today in Washington. 'The idea is
to cause depreciation of the rial and make it unusable in international
commerce,' he said. ;On July 1 we will have the ability to impose
sanctions on any foreign bank that exchanges rial to any other currency or
that holds rial-denominated accounts.' The move is intended to toughen
sanctions that so far failed to press the Islamic republic to halt its
nuclear program. According to the Treasury, the rial has lost more than
two-thirds of its value in the past two years, trading at 36,000 per U.S.
dollar as of April 30, compared with 16,000 at the start of 2012. That's
deprived Iran, the source of the world's No. 4 proven oil reserves, of a
large portion of energy revenue." http://t.uani.com/15SdSyH
NYT:
"Americans are increasingly skeptical about whether the United
States should thrust itself into conflicts overseas, according to the
latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, but that reluctance does not extend
to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. After 12 years of war
and amid signs of a sustainable economic recovery, nearly six in 10
people said the United States should not take a leading role among all
other countries in trying to solve conflicts, the poll found, while only
about a third said it should remain at the forefront. On Iran, however,
the same proportion of people - 58 percent - favored the United States
taking military action to stop Iran from manufacturing a bomb, an action
that President Obama has repeatedly warned the Iranian government is a
'red line' for the United States." http://t.uani.com/17tPnuS
YnetNews:
"The Pentagon has recently completed a series of field exercises on
US soil as part of which a replica of an underground nuclear facility was
destroyed, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Friday. The tests were declared a
resounding success having exceeded all expectations. The results of the
experiment were relayed to friendly nations with the aim of reassuring
them as to the US's ability to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities in a
single strike. It was also meant to convey that the US is serious in its
intentions to attack Iran should circumstances allow it. The experiment
included the firing of several bunker buster bombs first introduced by
the US Defense Department in July 2012. The GBU-57 B bomb is mounted on a
B-2 bomber and as part of the experiment penetrated the underground
facility's concrete ceilings." http://t.uani.com/19OUIw7
Sanctions
Reuters:
"Essar Oil more than halved its oil imports from Iran in April, the
first month of the contract year, from a year ago, data from trade
sources showed, helping New Delhi win the latest renewal of a waiver from
U.S. sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear plans. Essar, India's
second-biggest private refiner after Reliance Industries, shipped in
55,600 barrels per day (bpd) from Iran in April compared with 117,600 bpd
a year ago, tanker arrival data made available to Reuters showed.
However, the imports have jumped nearly 70 percent compared with March,
the last month of the contract year, when the private refiner was trying
to meet a planned 15 percent cut in its annual imports from Tehran."
http://t.uani.com/15SmBRr
June 14
Elections
AP:
"At the height of Iran's internal political clashes in late 2011,
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei became so exasperated that he
warned the Islamic Republic could someday drop the office of an elected
president. The threat was quickly dismissed as a show of force. But it remains
an instructive moment to help explain next week's election to pick the
successor to Khamenei's ally-turned-outcast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Khamenei, the pinnacle of Iran's Islamic power structure, has come to
both fear and debase the country's highest elected office. The worries
were evident when Khamenei's election overseers blocked from the ballot
former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad's protege
Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei." http://t.uani.com/11oQyEz
BBC:
"'I don't know who I will vote for but I cannot sit idly by,' says
Arastoo, a 37-year-old shopkeeper in the ancient bazaar in Kashan, some
225km (140 miles) south of Iran's capital, Tehran. Ahead of the
presidential election on 14 June, people here are closely following the
campaigns of the eight candidates. 'I am watching them all to see who
presents a better economic plan, not better economic slogans,' says
Arastoo. 'I am fed up with politicians' empty promises.' A small crowd
gathers around us, listening to our conversation. Some think I am a
representative for one of the candidates. 'We cannot make ends meet,' a
middle-aged man chips in." http://t.uani.com/11JxhfX
AFP:
"Press cartoonists say they are dodging 'moving red lines' in the
run-up to a June 14 presidential election in Iran, a country where a
satirical image can get a newspaper banned or an editor jailed. There
have always been no-go areas, such as caricaturing the Islamic Republic's
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or the military, but there has
still been a certain freedom of tone during the campaign. Two leading
cartoonists, working at reformist newspapers, told AFP their job remains
fraught with difficulty as the restrictions have not been clearly
defined. Several others from across the political spectrum declined to be
interviewed by AFP about their election coverage. Jamal Rahmati, 40,
artistic director of reformist newspaper Etemad, told AFP that, "in
general, before the elections we get relative freedom, to a surprising
degree. We can touch on every topic except clerics. 'Nowadays, there may
be a problem with any topic because the boundaries are not clearly
defined,' he added." http://t.uani.com/18b2e6g
FT:
"According to some opinion polls in pro-fundamentalist media, the
gap between Mr Qalibaf and his rivals is growing and could push him into
an expected second round of the elections. His main rivals include not
only Mr Jalili but also Ali-Akbar Velayati, a former foreign minister and
adviser to the supreme leader. Those who vote in large cities are likely
to favour Mr Qalibaf over the other two. But senior western diplomats in
Tehran say Iran's supreme leader may be weary of Mr Qalibaf's political
ambitions, particularly after his experience with Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, who
tried to build an independent power base through the presidency and went
as far as to defy the leader." http://t.uani.com/16PA1RZ
Opinion &
Analysis
Dieter Bednarz in
Der Spiegel: "On June 14, the leadership in Tehran
will deceive the Iranian people. It won't be the regime's first lie, but
it is characteristic of the most recent history of the Islamic Republic.
On Friday of next week, 55 million Iranian eligible voters will elect the
future president from a selection of more than half a dozen candidates.
The propaganda machine of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 74, is
leading them to believe that they can indeed shape their country's
future. If they weren't as afraid of the regime, many Iranians would not
only laugh out loud at his audacity, but would also go to the barricades
against this phony democracy. But in the last four years, Iran has become
a republic of fear. The prisons are filled with countless activists and
dissenters, and some of them may be there because they laughed too loudly
at Khamenei at some point. Sometimes it doesn't take much to be arrested,
interrogated and locked away. But the fear is mutual. While the people
tremble at the thought of being apprehended by the regime's henchmen, the
leadership is also nervous about new demands for more freedom and
democracy. In the 2009 election, Khamenei made the mistake, disastrous
from his standpoint, of allowing candidates to run who aroused hopes of
liberalization. After three decades of being ruled by the turban-wearing
ayatollahs, merely the prospect of a small measure of freedom was enough
to drive millions to the polls and then into the streets, when they
believed that their "green movement" had been cheated of its
rightful victory. This time Khamenei has deliberately obstructed a large
number of potential candidates who have shown only the slightest
potential of wanting to question the pure doctrine of the Islamic
Republic that the revolutionary leader fiercely defends. The ayatollah is
so fearful that he didn't even permit the candidacy of former President
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Despite being a staunch supporter of the
system, Rafsanjani did cautiously side with the opposition four years ago
and could very well have developed into the leader of a protest movement.
Instead, the political stage is now filled with a group of especially
lackluster apparatchiks. The favorites include conservatives from the
ayatollah's machinery of power: his foreign policy advisor Ali Akbar
Velayati, 67, and Saeed Jalili, 47, Iran's chief negotiator in the
nuclear conflict, who served as Khamenei's chief of staff for four years.
Could the ayatollah have picked more loyal candidates?" http://t.uani.com/12wbHmG
Michael Makovsky
& Blaise Misztal in The Weekly Standard: "Six
months after it was first hinted at, and a month after widespread reports
surfaced, the United Nations, Britain, and France have all just confirmed
the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Yet, there has been no U.S.
response to Syria's increasingly clear violation of President Obama's
publicly stated red line. This lack of action raises serious questions
about the resoluteness of U.S. policy when it comes to another potential
'game-changer' in the region: Iran developing a nuclear weapon. Rather
than deterring Syria or Iran from using or pursuing illicit weapons, the
administration's red lines appear to be eroding U.S. credibility and
national security. The lesson learned from Syria is that preventing
a nuclear Iran will require an actionable and verifiable red line. This
should include a credible mechanism for assessing Iran's progress toward
the red line and warning of its crossing. To be effective, red lines must
be possessed of three virtues. First, a red line must be actionable. In
Syria, the United States drew the red line at the very action it hoped to
prevent-the use of chemical weapons-leaving no time to act. A red line
ought not be confused with the undesirable event it seeks to stop.
Instead it is a moat around that event, designed to trigger action before
it occurs. Thus, to be effective the red line must be set sufficiently
ahead of the event it seeks to prevent to allow time for detection,
mobilization, and reaction. Second, any red line ought to be verifiable
by a realistic and pre-determined evidentiary standard. To be able to
react if a red line is crossed, the United States must be able to detect
and verify that transgression, having established beforehand what kind
and quality of evidence suffices. In the case of Syria, the post facto
decision to require United Nations confirmation of the use of chemical
weapons has rendered the red line effectively unverifiable. Third, to be
actionable, the verification of the red line must be credible.
Policymakers and the public alike must trust the evidence of any
transgression to support a response, especially a military one. But following
the Iraq war's intelligence failures, U.S. intelligence agencies will be
reluctant to declare, and Americans disinclined to trust, any 'smoking
gun.' Unfortunately, the U.S. line for Iran-'we're not going to accept
Iran having a nuclear weapon'-does not meet these three standards; it is
not actionable, verifiable, or credible. Merely possessing the components
of a nuclear device-a delivery mechanism, the explosive device, and
fissile material-would not trigger this red line. Only the assembly of these
components could. That can be done quickly in a small facility. Thus,
with the red line drawn at the possession of nuclear weapons, the United
States is committed to detecting and acting on Iran's decision to screw
together a bomb. It would be next-to-impossible to verify such a
decision, and any source that could detect it would necessarily be
covert, and thus, not widely credible. Even if the information were
verified and credible, it is unlikely there would be enough time
available to take action. To reestablish the credibility and efficacy of
his Iranian red line against Iran, President Obama should reformulate it
so that it is actionable, verifiable, and credible." http://t.uani.com/19OXWQi
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Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against
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