Eye on Iran: Time to Tackle 'More Difficult' Issues with Iran, IAEA Head Says

For continuing coverage follow us on Twitter and join our Facebook group.    Top Stories AFP: "After recent progress with Iran, it is time to tackle 'more difficult' nuclear issues such as allegations of past weapons work, the head of the UN atomic watchdog told AFP in an interview. 'We started with measures that are practical and easy to implement, and then we move on to more difficult things,' said Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. 'We certainly wish to include issues with possible military dimensions in future steps ... We have already discussed it and will continue to discuss it at the next meeting' between the IAEA and Iran on February 8, he said. A November 11 agreement with the IAEA towards improved oversight over Iran's programme included six steps such as this week's visit by IAEA inspectors to the Gachin uranium mine and to a new reactor plant at Arak in December." http://t.uani.com/1fqknxJ Reuters: "Asian buyers cut their purchases of Iranian crude by 15 percent in 2013 and shipments to Tehran's biggest oil customers are expected to recover only slightly this year, even after a deal with the West eases some sanctions. China, India, Japan and South Korea together cut imports from Iran to an average of 935,862 barrels per day (bpd) in 2013, government and industry data showed. That would mean a revenue loss of $46 billion for Tehran, based on pre-sanction crude exports of about 2.2 million bpd... Iran's biggest oil customer, China, reduced imports by 2.2 percent to 428,840 bpd in 2013, the thinnest cut among the top four buyers. Without the November deal between Tehran and Western powers, the small size of the reductions made by China could have exacerbated tensions between Washington and Beijing. The deepest reductions in Iranian oil imports were made by India, which slashed the volume of crude it shipped in by 38 percent to 195,600 bpd. South Korea cut purchases by 14.3 percent last year to 134,008 bpd. Japan, the last of the four major Asian buyers to release data, reduced imports by 6.4 percent to 177,414 bpd, marking its lowest daily crude imports from Iran since 1981." http://t.uani.com/1n2JCYl Reuters: "Global powers and Iran are still discussing when and where to convene talks on a deal for Tehran to rein in its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief, the European Union said on Friday, contradicting a Russian media report. The Russian news agency Interfax had quoted Mikhail Ulyanov, head of the Foreign Ministry's security and disarmament department, as saying earlier on Friday that an agreement had been reached to hold new talks on February 18 in New York... 'Discussions on the timing and venue for the next round of talks with Iran are still ongoing. When a decision is taken, we will announce it,' said Michael Mann, spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton." http://t.uani.com/1kk3FBS     Sanctions Bloomberg: "A unit of Dutch aerospace company Fokker Technologies Holding BV is poised to secure a reprieve from criminal charges that it violated U.S. sanctions against Iran, two people briefed on the matter said. The Justice Department doesn't plan to charge any executives and is prepared to offer Fokker Services a deferred-prosecution agreement for selling aviation parts and maintenance services to at least one Iranian company before 2010, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter isn't public. The pending accord, which the people said would include fines, would protect other Fokker units that supply the Pentagon's F-35 fighter program from possibly losing their eligibility to work on that project. The U.S. has struck similar agreements with banks since stepping up its pursuit of trade with countries including Iran, Sudan and Libya in 2008." http://t.uani.com/1nvtjX5 Reuters: "Japan's crude oil imports from Iran fell 21 percent in December from a year earlier to 165,295 barrels per day (bpd), or 815,675 kilolitres for the month, according to Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry data released on Friday. For the 2013 calendar year, the imports fell 6.4 percent to 177,414 bpd, the lowest level Japan has taken from Iran since 1981." http://t.uani.com/1fDAarO Human Rights Al-Monitor: "The head of Iran's judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, criticized an upcoming UN human rights report on Iran. Upon receiving a draft, Larijani said that the body would not cave to pressure. Before Ahmed Shaheed, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation on Iran, releases his reports to the public, an early draft of the report is sent to Iran to give Iranian officials time to respond. From the judiciary to the justice minister to Iran's own office of human rights, all have dismissed the yet unreleased report... Earlier this week, in a play on words, Larijani referred to Ahmed Shaheed as 'ahmagh shareer,' which loosely translates as 'wicked fool' in Persian." http://t.uani.com/1iTBrjx Domestic Politics NYT: "Iran is facing a water shortage potentially so serious that officials are making contingency plans for rationing in the greater Tehran area, home to 22 million, and other major cities around the country. President Hassan Rouhani has identified water as a national security issue, and in public speeches in areas struck hardest by the shortage he is promising to 'bring the water back.' Experts cite climate change, wasteful irrigation practices and the depletion of groundwater supplies as leading factors in the growing water shortage. In the case of Lake Urmia, they add the completion of a series of dams that choked off a major supply of fresh water flowing from the mountains that tower on either side of the lake." http://t.uani.com/1bH4ejs Opinion & Analysis Gabriel Schoenfeld in The Weekly Standard: "President Obama is rushing to implement the six-month interim agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran that went into effect last week. Together with five other world powers, he is now working to negotiate a long-term agreement aimed at keeping Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. He regards his opening to Iran as a signature achievement of his presidency and has proudly declared that diplomacy opened a path to 'a future in which we can verify that Iran's nuclear program is peaceful and that it cannot build a nuclear weapon.' If we assume that negotiations do not collapse and some sort of long-term accord is struck, there will still be thorny questions. A preeminent one concerns Iranian compliance. How much confidence can we have that the ayatollahs will not press ahead with their nuclear program in clandestine facilities, as they have done in the past? And if they do press ahead, how much confidence can we have that our intelligence agencies will catch them? Obama's faith that 'we can verify' Iranian compliance glides over the fact that the U.S. track record in unmasking covert nuclear programs is checkered at best. This is not because our intelligence agencies are incompetent-although sometimes they are-but because the task is exceptionally hard. Just last week, a three-year study by a Pentagon subunit, the Defense Science Board, concluded that U.S. intelligence agencies 'are not yet organized or fully equipped' to detect when foreign powers are constructing nuclear weapons or adding to existing arsenals. What is more, their ability to find 'small nuclear enterprises designed to produce, store, and deploy only a small number of weapons' is 'either inadequate, or more often, [does] not exist.' Past intelligence lapses in the nuclear realm go back to the dawn of the atomic age and include a failure to foresee the first Soviet A-bomb test in 1949, the first Soviet H-bomb test in 1953, and the first Indian nuclear test in 1974. After the first Gulf war, the U.S. intelligence community was astonished to learn that Iraq was only months away from putting the final screw in a nuclear device. In the run-up to the second Gulf war, the CIA blundered in the opposite direction, declaring with high confidence-'a slam dunk' in CIA director George Tenet's notorious phrase-that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. He was not. More recently, North Korea constructed a uranium enrichment facility that, despite intense scrutiny by American intelligence, went unnoticed until the North itself chose to reveal it. The case of Syria is especially pertinent to our efforts to monitor Iran... Only in 2007, just as the reactor was ready to be loaded with uranium fuel, did U.S. intelligence conclude that Syria had built a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor. It reached this judgment not by dint of its own collections efforts but thanks to incontrovertible evidence provided by Israel: photographs of the building's interior. Under our eyes but without our seeing, the Syrians had come breathtakingly close to possessing an operational generator of the nuclear bomb ingredient plutonium. 'This was a significant failure on the part of U.S. intelligence agencies,' writes former defense secretary Robert Gates in his new memoir. Gates notes that 'Syria for years had been a high-priority intelligence target for the United States' and that 'early detection of a large nuclear reactor under construction in a place like Syria is supposedly the kind of intelligence collection that the United States does superbly well.' The failure clearly shook Gates and led him to ask President Bush: 'How can we have any confidence at all in the estimates of the scope of the North Korean, Iranian, or other possible programs?' That was the right question to ask in 2007 and it remains the right question to ask about Iran today." http://t.uani.com/1n2LHTX Emily Landau in Haaretz: "The debate in the United States over the past few weeks on the Iranian nuclear issue has been focused primarily - indeed, almost exclusively - on one thing only: The fate of sanctions legislation circulating in Congress. This legislation's new sanctions would only be triggered if Iran does not uphold the interim deal, or does not move to a comprehensive deal. Despite this, the White House has framed the debate as one that pits 'diplomacy' against 'war'. It has been equating Congressional support for more leverage in the next stage of negotiations with Iran as a call for war, and Democratic Senators that support the legislation have been denounced as warmongers. But there is shaky ground beneath the administration's fixation on rejecting sanctions legislation. A single intelligence report from December 2013 has been quoted as the evidence that supports the administration's position: More sanctions will end negotiations... But the bigger problem is that the sanctions debate has become an exclusive focus, almost an end in itself, with the effect of precluding necessary discussion on the Joint Plan of Action (JPA) itself. Indeed, attention to America's internal debate comes at the cost of playing down or ignoring altogether Iran's reaction to the deal, and, most importantly, the new nuclear realities that are already being established on the ground. These are going ahead even though the deal was only meant to 'freeze' the situation and allow time for further negotiations. While the administration has been hailing the new Iranian cooperation and the halt of enrichment to 20 percent, much more serious issues - such as Iran's belief that the interim deal grants it an unfettered right to continue work on any aspect of research and development of more and more advanced generations of centrifuges, and continued work related to the Arak facility - barely find their way into media reports and commentary. Of course, the problem with the leverage available to the P5+1 states in the talks with Iran relates not only to sanctions legislation, but also to the sanctions relief for Iran, a snowball that is already rolling as part of the interim deal. Moreover, the claim that 'if Iran cheats, sanctions will be reimposed' ignores the unfolding dynamic of how Iran has been able to maneuver in these negotiations for over a decade. Iran will probably never let a clear case of violation be determined - indeed, because everything will turn on interpretation, Iran will strongly resist any attempt to claim it has cheated. And with Iran part of the very Joint Commission to be set up as part of the JPA to oversee compliance, the chances of determining that it has not upheld the deal are obviously even lower still. Of perhaps greater concern is the growing sense that the U.S. - and the P5+1 as a group - do not really want to find Iran in noncompliance with the deal. It is their keen desire that negotiations continue, no matter what. Therefore, like a chorus, they are all emphasizing what a positive development the JPA is, and how a path has now been established for moving forward to a final deal... The P5+1 should be keeping their eyes firmly on the real action - what Iran is doing to push its interpretation of the JPA, to insult and embarrass the other side, and to ensure that the critical elements of its nuclear program - that will enable breakout to military nuclear capability - remain firmly in place. All the while, Iran will be trying to maneuver its way to getting as much sanctions relief as possible." http://t.uani.com/1ddwCcL 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. 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