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Top Stories
Reuters:
"Fresh U.S. sanctions over Iran's disputed nuclear program being
debated behind closed doors in the Senate aim to slash the country's oil
sales in half within a year of the plan being signed into law, an
influential senator said this week. Robert Menendez, the chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told a meeting of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in New York on Monday that a package of
sanctions ready to move in his chamber has a goal of cutting Iran's
current oil exports to no more than 500,000 barrels per day. The
reduction being sought is about 500,000 bpd less than a more severe bill
passed by the House of Representatives in July, which aimed to slash
exports to nearly zero. The Senate bill, which has yet to be introduced
by the banking committee, has been widely expected to be weaker than the
House bill, which some analysts had said was not realistic. Since the
beginning of 2012, U.S. and European sanctions have already cut Iran's
oil exports to about 1 million bpd from about 2.5 million bpd, costing
the Islamic Republic crude sales worth billions of dollars a month, and
helping to spike inflation and unemployment." http://t.uani.com/1gc49KS
Free Beacon:
"Iran's oil minister said that the country has skirted U.S. sanctions
by exporting at least one million barrels of crude oil a day, according
to regional media reports. Iranian oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh
dubbed U.S. economic sanctions on Iran ineffective during public remarks
delivered on Monday and said that the country can be run solely from oil
sales. 'We have learnt from the sanctions that we can run the country by
exporting one million barrels of oil per day,' Zanganeh was quoted as
saying on Monday during an Iranian economic conference, the country's state
run Fars News Agency reported. If Tehran exports another 1.5 million
barrels a day it will earn 'an annual income of $54.5 billion which can
result in more than $800 billion of more investment in the oil industry
in the next several years,' according to Fars... The managing director of
the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) said in August that Iran had
'bypassed' oil embargoes and amassed some $1.8 trillion in oil reserves.
'Iran has been able to post a record in terms of the value of its oil
discoveries despite the pressure from economic sanctions,' NIOC head
Ahmad Qaleban said at the time." http://t.uani.com/HpI1hv
NYT:
"Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency said Tuesday that
they had held a 'very productive' two-day meeting in Vienna aimed at
resolving questions on the disputed Iranian nuclear program and would
reconvene their discussions on Nov. 11 in Tehran... The announcement on
Tuesday, made in an unusual joint statement in Vienna, the headquarters
of the nuclear monitoring agency, did not specify what progress had been
made, but it said Iran had presented a new proposal for responding to the
agency's questions. Both sides held 'a very productive meeting covering
past and present issues on the 28th and 29th' of October in Vienna, Tero Varjoranta,
the agency's deputy director general for safeguards, said in the joint
statement, which was posted on the agency's website. 'Iran presented a
new proposal on practical measures as a constructive contribution to
strengthen cooperation and dialogue with a view to future resolution of
all outstanding issues,' the statement said, and both sides agreed to
hold a meeting on Nov. 11 in the Iranian capital 'to take this
cooperation forward.' ... Access to Parchin, a restricted military site
near Tehran, is at the forefront of the nuclear agency's concerns because
of information that suggests that Iran has used a building at the site to
test trigger devices for a nuclear weapon." http://t.uani.com/Hs8hrL
 Nuclear
Program
AFP: "Iranian
Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi said on Wednesday that four people
accused of sabotaging one of the country's sensitive nuclear sites were
only thieves, Mehr news agency reported. 'These four people were not
saboteurs. They cut the fences and entered the area to collect scrap iron
and steel and sell it on the market,' Mehr quoted Alavi as saying. 'In
fact, they were thieves not nuclear saboteurs,' said Alavi, adding they
were 'villagers who had done this before'. Alavi did not specify at which
nuclear site the arrests were made. Iran's nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi
said earlier this month that four people suspected of attempting to
sabotage one of Iran's nuclear plants were arrested." http://t.uani.com/1aTcdZB
Sanctions
Politico:
"Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will
hold a top-secret briefing with senators on Thursday about the impact of
U.S.-led sanctions on Iran as the White House tries to head off new
congressional action on the Middle Eastern country. Kerry and Lew will
also meet with Senate Democratic leaders Thursday, Democratic sources
said. And Kerry is holding a breakfast meeting on Wednesday with Sen. Bob
Corker (R-Tenn.), ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Chairmen and ranking members of Senate committees in charge of national
security issues as well as Senate leaders will also be briefed Wednesday
by senior administration officials about Iran's pursuit of nuclear
weapons. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee,
said he would wait to hear from administration briefers before making a
decision on supporting a new round of sanctions. But he sounded skeptical
of the administration's arguments. 'As of now, all I see is Iran
continued to move forward unabated and not suspending anything - whether
it's centrifuges, whether it's enrichment or anything else,' Menendez
told POLITICO. 'And I don't understand how one unilaterally suspends when
the other side continues to move forward. So someone will need to explain
to me why that is good foreign policy.'" http://t.uani.com/1dN9pUp
JPost:
"White House national security advisor Susan Rice, her deputies Ben
Rhodes and Tony Blinken and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman met
with the leaders of four major American Jewish organizations on Tuesday
afternoon in an effort to dissuade them from lobbying the Senate towards
passing harsh new sanctions against Iran, just as bilateral negotiations
have resumed between the two nations. The White House meeting witnessed
forceful exchanges between the two sides on the merits of the sanctions
package, sources tell The Jerusalem Post." http://t.uani.com/17swpqb
Human Rights
Rooz:
"As pressure on Iran's media increases, culminating this week in the
closure of Bahar newspaper, bringing despair to supporters of Hassan
Rowhani's administration who looked forward to an opening of the
political and media atmosphere in the country, the spokesperson of the
judiciary Gholam-Hossein Ejhei announced that the Association of Iranian
Journalists, the AIJ (Anjomane Senfie Ruznamenegaran) would remain
shut... AIJ was shut in 2009 on the order of infamous judge Saeed
Mortezavi, depriving journalists of having their professional cards
renewed, their insurances suspended etc. With some 40 journalists behind
bars, Iran continues to be one of the countries with the largest number
of journalist prisoners in the world." http://t.uani.com/1dph0Wr
Opinion
& Analysis
Eli Lake in The Daily Beast:
"Western intelligence agencies have had great success in the past
sleuthing out Iran's undeclared nuclear facilities. But the Iranians have
gotten better at hiding their tracks, according to some current and
retired United States intelligence officers who say it could prove very
difficult for the world to catch Iran again if it tries to build a
nuclear weapon in secret. Since 2009, when the second uranium enrichment
facility was revealed in Qom, Iran has taken several steps to better
conceal a weapons program, these people say. It has beefed up security of
its cyber networks, for example, after the Stuxnet computer worm infected
computers in Iran's largest uranium enrichment site. Its Revolutionary
Guard has also established a cyber warfare command. The division's
commander died mysteriously earlier this month. Iran has also improved
security procedures for protecting personnel in its nuclear program,
following a string of attacks on its scientists, allegedly by Israel.
Finally, as Iran's declared uranium enrichment facilities in Natanz and
Qom have expanded, so has the country's infrastructure for building
centrifuges, the machines that enrich that uranium. The current and
former U.S. intelligence officials say this means it's easier for Iran to
siphon off material for secret facilities with more nefarious purposes, if
it chose to do so. 'There have been successes in finding secret Iranian
sites but we know they are getting better at this,' said David Albright,
a former U.N. weapons inspector and president of the Institute for
Science and International Security, a nonprofit think tank. 'They are
better at keeping better secrets, better at compartmentalization of their
program and they are better at cyber security.' Iran's leaders have
publicly said they don't intend to build a nuclear weapon. The U.S.
intelligence community's official estimate since 2007 is that Iran
stopped work on developing a warhead, while continuing to work on the
much more challenging process of enriching weapons grade fuel. But the
latest U.S. estimate, according to current and former U.S. intelligence
officials, is that Iran has mastered the process for making the highly
enriched uranium needed to build a nuclear weapon. One recently retired
senior U.S. intelligence official said he believed Iran was trying to
build a weapon, but stressed that it's a slow process. This official also
said it would be easy to hide a secret enrichment facility in a warehouse
in downtown Tehran. To start, it is difficult to detect uranium
enrichment through measuring the changes in atmosphere around a physical
plant. The lack of these kinds 'signatures' means that the U.S. has to
rely more on human assets as opposed to sophisticated satellites and
other kinds of technical intelligence gathering to know if enrichment was
taking place in a specific location... 'It's much more likely that Iran
would try to build nuclear weapons in a secret enrichment plant than one
of the safeguarded plants,' said Gary Samore, who was the White House
Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction during
President Obama's first term. 'If they tried to use one of their
safeguarded plants it would be detected in a matter of weeks. It's much
safer for them to do it secretly. Once they have built a couple of
nuclear weapons they would be in a position to test one to show the world
and there is not much we can do about it.' Samore said he still has faith
in America's ability to detect secret Iranian activities. But he also
said it was no guarantee. 'We detected both Natanz and Qom before they
were completed. Whatever magic we are using, it's still available to us.
It's not 100 percent guaranteed, of course not,'" he said. http://t.uani.com/19S8AWc
Suzanne Maloney in
Brookings: "In a recent presentation at the
Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, my colleague
Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Einhorn outlined the requirements for an
acceptable, negotiated solution to the Iran nuclear issue, including a
strictly limited uranium enrichment program and a rigorous monitoring
system. Einhorn argues that while such a solution may not be ideal,
but makes a compelling case that a diplomatic resolution that
incorporates significant transparency, verification, and constraints on
the possibilities of an Iranian nuclear breakout offers a significantly
better outcome than alternative means of dealing with the issue,
particularly the use of military force and active efforts to promote
regime change. Until his departure from the Obama Administration in June,
Einhorn played a central role in U.S. policy toward Tehran in his role as
Secretary of State's Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms
Control. He participated in each of the negotiations between Iran and the
P5+1 from 2009 to mid-2013, and he helped craft the sanctions strategy
and spearhead the diplomacy that generated the first serious multilateral
pressure on Iran. I'd urge all those who are interested in a detailed
discussion of the possible scope of a nuclear deal with Iran, and the
relative merits of such a deal in comparison to other U.S. policy
options, to read the speech in full here. I want to highlight a few of
the most important points that Einhorn makes in this speech, which offers
both a broad view of U.S. diplomacy and a very specific proposition for
the scope of a nuclear agreement. The best mechanism for preventing Iran
from acquiring nuclear weapons capability would entail a permanent ban on
enrichment in Iran, as well as a ban on retaining stockpiles of enriched
uranium stocks and the dismantlement of the Fordow enrichment facility
and the Arak reactor. Einhorn argues that such a 'perfect' deal is almost
surely unattainable, simply because Tehran has demonstrated its
unwillingness to accept terms that its leadership considers 'tantamount
to surrender.' ... Einhorn does the world a real service in his speech by
fleshing out the components of a nuclear deal with Iran, which he
describes as a structured set of arrangements intended to prevent an
Iranian nuclear breakout. He envisions a two-step framework, with
simultaneous agreement on interim measures and the central components of
a more wide-ranging final deal. As with the P5+1 proposal presented to
Iran in Almaty last year, the interim steps are intended to build
confidence and political space for hammering out the ultimate agreement.
In Einhorn's framework, however, the interim steps are significantly
expanded, and there would be an integral relationship between the two
phases, in the sense that each of the preliminary confidence-building
measures would help lock Tehran into the final, more ambitious set of
required actions. The Einhorn plan includes interim measures such as:
cessation of production of 19.75 percent enriched uranium; measures to
address existing stocks of 19.75 percent enriched uranium; measures to
address concerns about the Fordow enrichment facility; no start-up of the
Arak heavy water reactor; no installation of additional IR2m centrifuges
and no enrichment via currently installed IR2ms; no installation any
additional P1 centrifuges; and measures to address the threat posed by
stockpiles of 3.5 percent enriched uranium. In describing his vision of a
final deal, Einhorn tackles one of the most central dilemmas for
Washington and its partners since the initial revelations of Iran's
then-clandestine nuclear program more than a decade ago, namely - how to
handle Iran's dogged insistence on retaining uranium enrichment
capabilities? Einhorn acknowledges what no senior U.S. official has been
willing to say on the record to date: that we are now almost surely
beyond the point of rolling back Iranian enrichment. In his INSS speech,
he notes that 'I think this is a genuine red line for the Iranians. If
there is to be an agreement, I believe it will inevitably provide for a
domestic enrichment program in Iran.' Instead of an end or a long-term
suspension of enrichment, Einhorn outlines an array of alternative
mechanisms for limiting Iran's breakout capability - in other words, the
ability for the Iranian government, under the cover of a civilian
enrichment program, to race toward weapons capability more quickly than
the world could act to forestall this. The final agreement measures
Einhorn proposes to provide this assurance include: intensified
monitoring and inspection that incorporates the Additional Protocol to
the NPT and goes well beyond, including technical and/or human oversight
on a daily basis; additional monitoring and inspection measures on Iran's
uranium mines and mills; its centrifuge production and assembly
facilities; and its trade in uranium and sensitive dual-use goods; limits
on Iran's enrichment capacity and its stockpiles of enriched uranium and
uranium hexafluoride, at a scale and level of purity substantially below
current capabilities; dismantling the Fordow enrichment facility or
converting it to prevent production of weapons-grade uranium; and
dismantling, converting or otherwise neutralizing the Arak heavy water
reactor. Einhorn finally suggests bolstering the credibility of such a
final deal with a United Nations Security Council resolution committing
the international community to a robust response to any Iranian
non-compliance of the terms." http://t.uani.com/Huv855
Zalmay Khalilzad
in The National Interest: "Favorable rhetoric
notwithstanding, the deal that Tehran is pursuing would not satisfy U.S.
concerns. Without becoming an official nuclear state, Iran seeks the
capability to produce a large number of nuclear weapons within a short
time period. In his outreach to U.S. policy experts in New York, Rouhani
affirmed that the fuel needs of its civilian nuclear-power plants should
determine the size of Iran's enrichment capability. Nor has the regime
agreed to ship enriched nuclear fuel to Russia. Iran claims a right to
industrial production of enriched uranium as well as a stockpile of
partially enriched material-in effect, an industrial-level enrichment
capability that could cloak the development of enough enriched material
for a nuclear arsenal. Allowing Tehran to maintain a stockpile of low and
medium-enriched uranium would limit the warning time that the
international community would have in responding to an Iranian breakout.
According to IAEA estimates, Iran, as of mid-August, was maintaining a
stockpile of 6,774 kg of low-enriched uranium gas, 186 kg of
medium-enriched uranium gas, and the equivalent of 187 kg of
medium-enriched uranium gas held in oxide form. Still, the prospect for a
more reasonable agreement, however small, warrants negotiations on two
tracks. The immediate challenge is to ensure that Iran does not enhance
its nuclear capabilities during the negotiating period. Washington should
stick with the current sanctions policy unless inspectors can verify that
Tehran has frozen the nuclear program. A verified freeze could open the
door to a deal that addresses three core issues: Iran's enrichment of
uranium, the heavy water plant at Arak, and Iran's acceptance of a
verification regime. Given Iran's violations of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty and various UN Security Council resolutions, any
comprehensive deal should ideally force Tehran to cease all
enrichment." http://t.uani.com/1itORxL
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Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against
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