Thursday, August 7, 2014

Eye on Iran: Iranian President Downplays Effects of Sanctions








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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

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.

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