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Fars News (Iran):
"Iranian President Hassan Rouhani underlined that the western
sanctions couldn't weaken the country's determination to make more
progress in different fields, and said Iran is leaving the embargoes
behind. 'Thanks God, Iran is leaving behind the sanctions as it has
already come out of recession or is getting out of it,' Rouhani said on
Wednesday. Referring to his government's policy of reaching out to the
world, he underlined the necessity of economic interaction with the world
to achieve prosperity." http://t.uani.com/1qYmfH0
Reuters:
"Iranian and U.S. officials met in Geneva on Thursday for the first
time since the Islamic state and six world powers agreed to extend talks
to resolve a decade-long dispute over Iran's nuclear ambitions. When they
last met on July 19, Iran, the United States, Britain, France, Germany,
Russia and China agreed to extend the deadline to reach a comprehensive
agreement under which Iran would curb its nuclear activities in exchange
for the easing of economic sanctions to Nov. 24 from July 20. Announcing
the talks in Washington on Wednesday, the State Department said Deputy
Secretary of State Bill Burns would lead the U.S. delegation, which also
includes Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Jake Sullivan, the
national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden... Iran's state
news agency IRNA said on Thursday the talks had started, with deputy
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi leading the Iranian delegation. 'The talks
between Iran and America in Geneva will help overcoming differences over
the remaining disputes,' an unnamed Iranian nuclear negotiator told
IRNA." http://t.uani.com/1otJtNl
AFP:
"Iran and six world powers will hold a new round of nuclear talks
before the UN General Assembly, which starts on September 16, a spokesman
for lead negotiator Catherine Ashton said Thursday. 'We expect to hold an
EU-led/E3+3 round of talks in advance of the ministerial meetings at UNGA
at a location to be determined,' said Michael Mann, spokesman for EU
foreign policy chief Ashton. 'We will also likely hold a meeting on the
sidelines of UNGA -- as we did last year -- possibly with ministers
participating in some way,' Mann said in an emailed statement. 'The
specific details remain to be worked out.'" http://t.uani.com/V0CrIY
Sanctions Relief
Reuters:
"Iran's oil exports slipped for a second month in July, yet sales
remained above the limit set by the West under an interim deal aimed at
curbing Iran's nuclear programme, according to sources who track tanker
shipments. Iran and six world powers, known as the P5+1, agreed to extend
nuclear talks by four months after they failed to reach a July 20
deadline for a permanent resolution. Under the interim agreement, Iran's
crude exports were supposed to be held just above 1 million barrels per
day (bpd). Shipments higher than that have not drawn serious criticism
from Washington, partly because U.S. officials say the increased volumes
are made up of condensate, a light oil which they say is allowed under
the sanctions, as well as Iranian gifts of oil to Syria which they do not
view as 'sales'. One source who tracks tanker movements said Iran's crude
oil exports reached 1.14 million bpd in July, slightly lower than 1.18
million bpd in June. 'Japan took less crude. At the same time, China and
India took more oil in July to make up for lower amounts in the previous
month,' the source said. July's shipments also included a cargo that
appeared to have gone into Egypt's Sumed pipeline, the source said."
http://t.uani.com/1svGs54
Terrorism
Times of Israel:
"A high-ranking Iranian official has criticized Hamas for failing to
protect civilians in the Gaza Strip during the conflict with Israel,
saying the group should in future allow civilians to hide in its tunnels.
'They use the tunnels to launch missiles, but they should also use them
to protect civilians,' Mohsen Rezaei, a member of the Iranian government
and an adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told Iran's
Al-Alam news network. 'They should think of a way to protect the
civilians,' he said in comments relayed by the Middle East Media Research
Institute. 'They could dig tunnels and when a war breaks out, the people
could take refuge in these tunnels. All the people could go underground.'
The politician noted Iran's responsibility for Hamas's rocket arsenal,
saying Tehran had supplied Hamas with the know-how to construct the
weapons. 'How do you think these missiles were produced?' he says. 'All
these missiles are the fruit of the technology provided to
Palestine.'" http://t.uani.com/1kp0KMz
Human Rights
ICHRI:
"After two weeks of silence by Iranian officials on the reason for
the detention of husband-and-wife journalists Jason Rezaian and Yegabeh
Salehi and their whereabouts, media with ties to security and
intelligence organs believed to be holding them have begun leveling baseless
charges of spying against them, revealing the intentions of interrogators
to fabricate a case in order to justify their actions... Vatan-e Emrooz,
a Tehran newspaper close to security-intelligence organizations, on
August 5 published an article resembling an indictment against Rezaian on
spying charges. The article claimed the existence of 'evidence' and
'documents' that explain the reasons for the arrest of the Washington
Post reporter. While the article failed to provide any of its alleged
'evidence,' it was forceful in issuing a guilty judgment. Also on August
5, a letter published in the Tasnim website close to the Revolutionary
Guards, repeated spying charges against Rezaian, issued a guilty verdict
and called on the Judiciary to implement 'the harshest possible sentence
for American spies.' The letter was attributed to a group called 'Basiji
Legal Experts.'" http://t.uani.com/1oH81Xs
AP:
"A policeman convicted over the death of a detained blogger in 2012
has been sentenced to three years in jail and another two in internal
exile, the semiofficial ISNA news agency reported Thursday. Blogger
Sattar Beheshti, a little-known activist, was detained Oct. 30, 2012 for
alleged cybercrimes and taken to the Evin prison in Tehran the next day,
where he was handed over to cyber police for interrogation. He died Nov.
3 and had 'signs of wounds' on his body, according to an official report
released by Iran's judiciary in 2012. ISNA said the policeman was
sentenced to three years in jail, 74 lashes and two years of internal
exile in the remote southern town of Borazjan. The prison time was for
assaulting Beheshti and the lashes were for insulting and cursing the
blogger. ISNA quoted Giti Pourfazel, a lawyer hired by Beheshti's mother,
as saying the sentence was too light considering the nature of the crime.
'While journalists are sentenced to six years in this country, it's
surprising that a murderer is sentenced to three years in jail,' the
lawyer was quoted by ISNA as saying." http://t.uani.com/1sAeKTT
ICHRI:
"The prominent human rights activist and lawyer Massoud Shafiee, who
represented three American hikers detained in Iran in 2009, told the
International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that since the hikers
left Iran, he has been summoned and interrogated several times, and has
been kept from finding new clients or traveling abroad. 'I have not been
able to work for the past three years. They took my passport and banned
my foreign travel. My passport was even stamped with an exit stamp, which
means that I am abroad right now! If anything should happen to me, it
would be as if I were not on Iranian soil!' Shafiee told the
Campaign." http://t.uani.com/1ojHj7Y
Opinion &
Analysis
Robert Joseph in
NRO: "President Obama's decision to permit Iran a
'limited capacity' for enrichment meant the abandonment of his stated
goal of denying Iran the capability to build a nuclear weapon. In its
place, according to Secretary Kerry, the United States would seek the
much more limited objective of strict limits on the numbers and types of
centrifuges that would extend the time of breakout for Iran to acquire a
nuclear weapon from two months to six-twelve months. But this new goal
would be hard to enforce in practice - as it has been hard even to agree
on the details of the agreement ahead of implementation. The goal is
unenforceable because the administration has never explained how the
United States, the IAEA, or others would be able to detect with
confidence any covert cheating that would erode the six-to-twelve-month
barrier to breakout or, even if cheating were detected early, what we
could do diplomatically in that period to stop Iran from moving forward.
Experience has taught us that Iran is very adept at deception and denial
and that the international community is both slow and reluctant to take
firm action. In some cases, it has taken years to detect Iran's
violations of its safeguard agreements and additional years before the
Security Council acted... The revised goal has also proven to be
unachievable in the negotiations. Abandoning the position of 'no
enrichment' was a huge concession made to secure an agreement. In fact,
it served to complicate the negotiations by opening up many more
questions than it resolved: What number of centrifuges would ultimately
be agreed to? What about restrictions on replacing current-generation
centrifuges with much more efficient models? What about restrictions on
research and development of follow-on generations? What restrictions will
prevent materials and equipment imported and manufactured by Iran from
being used in a covert program, rather than the declared facilities? And,
of course, how long will Iran be bound by the provisions? Not one of
these issues has apparently been agreed upon in the talks. As for those
issues on which administration officials have claimed progress, such as
the Arak reactor, Iran has publicly denied any agreement on any issue.
Regarding the number of centrifuges to be allowed, the initial U.S.
position reportedly was a ceiling of 1,000, but that quickly was raised
to 6,000. If accurate, 6,000 centrifuges would probably position Iran for
breakout in fewer than six months, because Iran has been permitted to
undertake a number of 'routine maintenance' procedures since the signing
of the interim agreement that improved the efficiency of some of its
centrifuges by as much as 25 percent. Presumably, this 'maintenance' will
be allowed to continue under any future agreement... To break the impasse
over centrifuges, the negotiators reportedly are considering a different
metric to limit Iran's uranium-enrichment capability: separative work
units, or SWU, as the concept is known. SWU can be used to measure either
the capacity of the enrichment process or the actual amount of enriched
uranium produced. If SWU is used for the former, the calculation is based
primarily on the number, efficiency, and configuration of the centrifuges
in operation. This would require the parties to agree to a specific
number of centrifuges and, therefore, would not break the negotiation
logjam. If, on the other hand, production is limited to a specified SWU
level, the calculation is affected by other factors, including the amount
of feedstock, the rate of spin, and the length of time that the
centrifuges operate. Any of these, along with the number of centrifuges,
can be altered while remaining under the permissible SWU level. Moving to
this more complex and malleable SWU yardstick might be seen as a way
forward, but only for those willing to accept a bad agreement. On the
surface, SWU provides a politically defensible means to measure output
for enrichment. It is a unit of calculation used widely in the
nuclear-energy industry, as well as by the IAEA in its quarterly reports
on Iran's nuclear program. But using SWU as a substitute for limiting the
number of centrifuges is nothing more than sleight of hand. While it is
necessary for any agreement to limit how much enriched material Iran can
produce and stockpile, this is not the stated U.S. goal. That goal - to
extend the time of breakout - requires strict and verifiable limits on
centrifuges along with additional prohibitions on next-generation
replacements and effective constraints on maintenance, research, and
development... The motive is clear: Using SWU, instead of a low limit on
centrifuge numbers, as the measure of production could permit Tehran to
install any number of centrifuge cascades, including advanced models.
Iran could, for example, operate multiple cascades for short periods of
time and thereby stay within the permitted SWU limit. While operationally
inefficient, this would permit Tehran to maintain a reserve capacity to
enrich uranium far in excess of that suggested by the SWU allowance.
Thus, when a decision is made to break out, there would be thousands of
centrifuges ready to produce an abundance of material at a high level of
enrichment in a short period of time. Using SWU in this manner would make
an agreement much more achievable as it would render moot the key
differences not only on the number of centrifuges, but on next-generation
replacements and on research and development. But the price tag is giving
Iran what the Supreme Leader has always insisted on: a nuclear program
that could quickly provide the regime with nuclear weapons. It seems from
the concessions made to date that the P5+1 negotiators might have already
concluded that the choice before them is either a bad agreement that's
consistent with the Supreme Leader's dictates or no agreement at all. If
a limit on SWU is adopted in place of a limit on centrifuges, it would confirm
that the P5+1 has chosen the former. It would mean the failure of even
the limited goal of extending the time of breakout. Moving away from a
centrifuge limit to the SWU metric would represent the next step to a
failed outcome. But whether SWU is adopted or not, if there are no
restrictions on missiles, no effective constraints on R&D, only
managed access on inspections, no tight controls on imports and
manufacture of equipment, and other gaps that Iran can and will exploit
(such as failing to come clean on past weaponization activities), the
agreement will allow Iran to remain what it is today: a
nuclear-weapons-threshold state. The result, as predicted by Secretary
Clinton, will be a nuclear arms race in the region. Perhaps if diplomacy
were practiced differently than it has been in Syria, in Ukraine, in the
Iran negotiations, and elsewhere, there would be a greater chance of its
success." http://t.uani.com/1otLg52
Michael Doran in
Mosaic: "All across the Middle East, the traditional
allies of the United States, just like the Israeli Left, feel that Obama
has betrayed them. Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, Emiratis, and Turks,
despite the very real differences among them, nurture grievances similar
in kind to those expressed on the pages of Haaretz. Ravid's
question-'What was Kerry thinking?'-deserves to be recast. It would get
closer to the heart of the matter to ask what the president was thinking.
The answer is as simple as it is surprising: the president is dreaming of
an historical accommodation with Iran. The pursuit of that accommodation
is the great white whale of Obama's Middle East strategy, and capturing
it is all that matters; everything else is insignificant by comparison.
The goal looms so large as to influence every other facet of American
policy, even so seemingly unrelated a matter as a ceasefire between
Israel and Hamas. During the latter decades of the cold war, American
presidents developed a strong sense of 'our team' and 'their team' when
it came to the Middle East. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, that
attitude persisted-even as 'their team' transformed itself from the
Soviet camp into Iran's so-called Resistance Alliance, which includes
such otherwise disparate partners and proxies as Syria, Hizballah, and
Hamas. Obama has abandoned that conception entirely. To be sure, he still
pays lip service to countering Iran's malign influence in the region. But
in practice, nothing could be farther from his mind. Last January, he
offered what is undoubtedly a more accurate account of his thinking when
he mused about Iran becoming a stabilizing force in the Middle East.
'[I]f we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion,' he
told David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, 'you could see an
equilibrium developing between . . . [Sunni] Gulf states and [Shiite]
Iran in which there's competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active
or proxy warfare.' Two key assumptions inform this line of reasoning.
First, the president posits that Iran is now a defensive power. Holding
on for dear life in the volatile Middle East, it has no sustained
interest in undermining the United States, which might even serve as its
ally in countering Sunni extremism. Second, Hamas and Hizballah are
similarly defensive-and ready, under the right circumstances, to moderate
their aggressive hostility. In brief, President Obama now thinks of the
region's politics in terms of a roundtable. Everyone seated at it is
potentially equal to everyone else, and the job of the United States is
to narrow the gaps among antagonists in an effort to bring the system to
the desired state of 'equilibrium.' It was precisely this concept that
informed American diplomacy over the Gaza ceasefire. Although the
administration was quickly forced to backpedal and abandon its proposal in
the face of opposition from Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, the incident
illustrated starkly how its Ahab-like fixation on a grand bargain with
Iran has created a culture that makes stiffing American allies just a
normal part of doing business. Is it necessary to point out that those
allies see the politics of the region very differently? They envisage not
a round table but, at best, a rectangular one, with their team sitting on
one side and Iran and its proxies on the other. They expect the United States
either to join their side or to tilt heavily in their favor. They also
see something else: the complex and multiform divisions on the ground
that make the Middle East so challenging. In addition to the rift between
Iran and its opponents, there also exists a rivalry between those states,
preeminently Turkey and Qatar, that support the Muslim Brotherhood and
those, preeminently Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that oppose it. Because Hamas
is both an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and a proxy of Iran, these two
rivalries have intersected in the Gaza war-which is why, in the eyes of
Egyptian and Saudi leaders, Hamas represents a double threat. Even though
the spectacle of a Jewish military victory over a Palestinian adversary
is profoundly unpopular on their own streets, they are eager to see
Israel crush that threat. When John Kerry developed his ceasefire
proposal, he largely ignored all this, and particularly the preferences
of Riyadh and Cairo. Not only was he enhancing Hamas's power and prestige
but, through his courtship of Turkey and Qatar, he was also offering it a
path out from under the thumb of the Egyptians. Still worse, Kerry's
proposal was a windfall for the Iranians, who have played an
indispensable role in building Hamas's military machine and who, even as
Kerry was working to settle the conflict, egged Hamas on against Israel.
Whether Kerry consciously intended to benefit Iran is immaterial. The
roundtable approach to Middle East problems, the fruitless search for
equilibrium, automatically works to Iran's advantage. No wonder, then,
that Obama's policies are in a shambles. It is impossible to succeed in
the Middle East without partners, and so long as he remains bent on
empowering Iran and its proxies (who, for their part, continue to make no
secret of their loathing for the United States), America's traditional
allies will withhold their own support for Washington's
initiatives." http://t.uani.com/V0EBbD
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