Eye on Iran: Administration and Lawmakers Clash over Iran Policy

Join UANI           Top Stories AP: "A day after President Obama threatened to veto any sanctions bill against Iran, lawmakers on Wednesday clashed with top administration officials over U.S. strategy in nuclear talks with the Islamic republic and indicated that they would drive headlong toward tougher legislation. The determination of a group of bipartisan lawmakers to pass measures they believe will raise pressure on Iran escalates a high-stakes battle with the Obama administration... Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, wants the administration to submit any final deal to Congress for approval. Other key lawmakers want legislation that would impose a series of escalating penalties should the talks fail. Still others suggested a nonbinding resolution stating Congress's intent to impose crippling sanctions if negotiations fail. Whatever the approach, members from both sides of the aisle are insisting on a role in shaping the outcome of the talks, pushing back against the administration's appeal to give diplomacy room to work. 'Over the past 18 months, we have been moving closer to their [the Iranians'] positions on all key elements,' said Sen. Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, at a testy three-hour hearing. 'The more I hear from the administration in its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Iran.'" http://t.uani.com/1CU1HAM The Hill: "A senior U.S. State Department official on Wednesday said negotiations on Iran's illicit nuclear effort could require extending the talks for a third time. 'We might want a little more time,' Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 'That's possible. I wouldn't want to rule it out.' In his prepared testimony, Blinken said negotiators wanted to 'conclude the major element of the deal by the end of March and then to complete the technical details by June.' Talks between Tehran and Western powers have twice missed self-imposed deadlines for striking a bargain. Each time has elicited bipartisan howls from Capitol Hill lawmakers who believe Iran is stringing the U.S. and others along while Tehran works to boost its nuclear capacity. 'I share your concerns that the Iranians are playing for time,' Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the panel's top Democrat, said to chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)." http://t.uani.com/185MCTl NYT: "Intercepted conversations between representatives of the Iranian and Argentine governments point to a long pattern of secret negotiations to reach a deal in which Argentina would receive oil in exchange for shielding Iranian officials from charges that they orchestrated the bombing of a Jewish community center in 1994. The transcripts were made public by an Argentine judge on Tuesday night, as part of a 289-page criminal complaint written by Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor investigating the attack. Mr. Nisman was found dead in his luxury apartment on Sunday, the night before he was to present his findings to Congress. But the intercepted telephone conversations he described before his death outline an elaborate effort to reward Argentina for shipping food to Iran - and for seeking to derail the investigation into a terrorist attack in the Argentine capital that killed 85 people. The deal never materialized, the complaint says, in part because Argentine officials failed to persuade Interpol to lift the arrest warrants against Iranian officials wanted in Argentina in connection with the attack. The phone conversations are believed to have been intercepted by Argentine intelligence officials. If proved accurate, the transcripts would show a concerted effort by representatives of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's government to shift suspicions away from Iran in order to gain access to Iranian markets and to ease Argentina's energy troubles." http://t.uani.com/1GBarSx     Nuclear Program & Negotiations WSJ: "The U.S. and Iran will hold further talks on Tehran's nuclear program later this week as they seek to advance the slow-moving negotiations. The State Department said Wednesday that senior U.S. officials would hold talks in Zurich on Jan. 23 and 24 with their Iranian counterparts... A full round of nuclear talks involving all six powers and Iran has already been fixed for early February... The U.S. negotiating team will be led by Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman who will first attend a meeting in Berlin of senior officials from the Group of Seven developed nations. Also attending the Zurich U.S.-Iran talks will be senior EU negotiator Helga Schmid." http://t.uani.com/1BKSjCC RFE/RL: "A 15-minute stroll in Switzerland with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has landed Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in hot water.  The two men took a stroll in downtown Geneva and along the Rhone River on January 14 as part of bilateral talks to reach a lasting deal over Iran's nuclear program. Iranian hard-liners say the stroll was a grave mistake and that it damaged Iran's authority. Hard-liners are also irked over a short trip Zarif took to Paris last week to meet his French counterpart, Laurent Fabius, to narrow the differences over Tehran's nuclear activities. The pictures of the stroll, which could give the impression of friendliness and closeness between Kerry and Zarif, were widely shared on social media and news sites. The head of Iran's paramilitary Basij force, Mohammad Reza Naghdi, said by walking with Kerry and sharing a friendly moment with an 'enemy of humanity,' Zarif showed disrespect to tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq War. 'Zarif's walk with U.S. Secretary of State [Kerry] was a [violation] of the blood of the martyrs,' Naghdi said in an interview with the conservative Dana.ir site." http://t.uani.com/1yMYe6y Congressional Sanctions Politico: "Republicans are eager to rumble with the White House over sanctions on Iran, but they may have trouble getting President Barack Obama's Democratic critics to go along. A day after Obama vowed to veto any bill that could jeopardize nuclear talks with Tehran, Republicans were working on two pieces of legislation that could move in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress on Feb. 11. But it quickly became clear that Republicans have a problem: Senate Democrats who might not like Obama's policies on Iran but may not be ready to override their president, especially after the forceful arguments he made in the State of the Union. In interviews Wednesday, several Democrats who had supported a previous version of Iran legislation sponsored by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said they are reconsidering their positions. Meanwhile, a previous version of an Iran bill offered by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) did not have any Democratic co-sponsors." http://t.uani.com/1yJfsDo WashPost: "Republicans in Congress moved quickly Wednesday to reject many of President Obama's proposals from the State of the Union address - and invited the prime minister of Israel to rebut Obama's Iran policy from the same congressional podium next month. That invitation to address Congress, extended by House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, marked a sharp rejection of Obama's plea for Congress to stay out of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. If Congress votes to sanction Iran, Obama had warned, it could upset delicate and long-running talks. Boehner said he would ignore the president's demand, taking the unusual step of inviting a foreign leader directly into an American political debate. Obama 'expects us to stand idly by and do nothing while he cuts a bad deal with Iran,' Boehner told fellow Republicans at a closed-door meeting Wednesday morning, according remarks provided by a senior GOP aide. 'Two words: Hell no! ... We're going to do no such thing.'" http://t.uani.com/1wq4xIO Sanctions Reuters: "India has asked its refiners to slash oil buys from Iran in the next two months to keep the imports in line with the previous fiscal year's levels, sources with knowledge of the matter said, days ahead of President Barack Obama's visit to New Delhi. India has raised its crude shipments from Iran around 40 percent over the first nine months of the current fiscal year, when as part of the temporary deal that eased some sanctions on Tehran it was meant to hold them steady. India and the United States will discuss the status of the Iran nuclear negotiations, Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor in the White House told reporters in a teleconference detailing Obama's visit. India's higher imports from Iran would also be on the agenda, the two sources in India said. 'The refiners will have to virtually halt Iranian oil imports in February-March to retain purchases at last year's levels,' said one of the sources with knowledge of the matter... India's imports from Iran rose 41 percent to 250,200 bpd in April-December compared with the same period a year ago, according to tanker arrival data made available to Reuters." http://t.uani.com/1uxZyMe Domestic Politics AFP: "Mohammad Reza Rahimi, Iran's first vice president under former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been sentenced to five years in prison and fined, state media said Wednesday. Appointed by Ahmadinejad after a controversial election win in 2009, Rahimi is the most senior official from that era to have been convicted. The Supreme Court's verdict came after a long-running trial on what Iranian media said were corruption charges. The official IRNA news agency said the ruling was final and Rahimi, 66, would serve five years and 91 days in jail and be fined 10 billion rials (about $364,000). It did not state what his crimes were, but noted that a previous court had sentenced him to 15 years of prison. Rahimi was also ordered to pay 28.5 billion rials as restitution, but the report did not say to whom." http://t.uani.com/1t1XmeD Foreign Affairs AFP: "Thousands gathered in Tehran Wednesday at a funeral procession for a Revolutionary Guards general killed by Israel, after his commander warned the Jewish state it should 'await destructive thunderbolts'. General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi died alongside six fighters from Lebanon's Hezbollah group in the attack Sunday near Quneitra on the Syrian-controlled side of the Golan Heights. Allahdadi's coffin was draped in an Iranian flag as it was carried into a Guards base in southeast Tehran. He is to be buried on Thursday in Pariz, a town in the southern province of Kerman. 'The path of martyr Allahdadi is unstoppable and will be continued until the liberation of the Holy Quds (Jerusalem) and obliteration of the Zionist regime,' Guards commander Major General Ali Jafari said at a ceremony at the base, according to the official IRNA news agency. The mourners chanted 'Death to Israel' and burned two Israeli flags." http://t.uani.com/1JcSLKE Reuters: "The deadly attack by Islamist gunmen on the offices of French newspaper Charlie Hebdo drew a somewhat unexpected response from Iranian clerics and officials: They condemned it. Many Westerners had expected an altogether different reaction to the killings two weeks ago at the Paris weekly that had published satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. Still fresh in their memory is the 'fatwa' issued in 1989 by Iran's first religious Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ordering the death of British author Salman Rushdie for allegedly insulting the Prophet in his book 'The Satanic Verses'.  Some 25 years on, Iran's stance must be viewed in light of the bitter sectarian rivalry in the Middle East between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims, political analysts say... And rather than this Iranian reaction representing any reversal, it simply reinforced Tehran's standard line of condemning Sunni 'terrorism' and blaming the West for inciting it, said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace... 'The Iranian government prevented journalists from marching in solidarity with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre yet it organized flag-burning protests against the French embassy,' Sadjadpour said. 'That hasn't ingratiated them to a French nuclear negotiating team that is deeply cynical about the nature of the Iranian regime.'" http://t.uani.com/1JlJ8Yv FT: "Efforts to reopen Britain's embassy in Iran have been stalled by a dispute over Tehran's demands to inspect two containers of secure communications equipment destined for the mission and British concerns over Iranian immigrants. Hopes of a rapprochement between Iran and Britain grew after William Hague, the former foreign secretary, announced the time was right to consider restoring the UK's mission in Tehran last June, after months of careful diplomatic footwork." http://t.uani.com/1yMXgqI Opinion & Analysis Glenn Kessler in WashPost: "Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran, where, for the first time in a decade, we've halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material." -President Obama, State of the Union address, Jan. 20, 2015 "This was a bold statement by the president regarding the interim 'Joint Plan of Action' governing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. In defending the talks against efforts in Congress to pass a sanctions package if the talks fail, the president made two key points: one, progress on Iran's nuclear program has been 'halted' and two, Iran's stockpile of nuclear material has been 'reduced.' We realize that White House speechwriters probably don't want to be bothered with technical issues in such a high-profile speech but here's a case where some further wordsmithing was needed... So has progress been halted and the amount of nuclear material reduced? ... But nuclear experts we consulted said that the president simplified it too much in his State of the Union address by saying the nuclear program has been 'halted' and the stockpile of nuclear materials has been 'reduced.' Olli Heinonen, who headed the IAEA's safeguards section during the 2003-2005 talks between Iran and three European powers (United Kingdom, France and Germany), said 'it is true that 20-percent enriched uranium stocks have decreased, but Iran is still producing uranium enriched up to 5-percent uranium. The latter stocks have actually increased when you talk about stocks of UF6 [uranium hexaflouride] and other chemical compounds.' Moreover, while there has been no installation of new centrifuges, 'it appears that the production of centrifuge components continues. Same with the Arak reactor. No new nuclear components have been installed, but it does not mean that the production of those came to halt.' As Heinonen put it, 'the  JPOA is just a step to create negotiation space; nothing more. It is not a viable longer term situation.  The nuclear caravan of Iran continues and sets a step after a step another fait accompli.' David Albright, who heads Institute for Science and International Security, said the president's language was 'a little bit odd.' He said that the halt in Iran's program from 2003 to 2005 was a more substantial suspension of enrichment activities... Moreover, Albright said it was not correct that the 3.5-percent enriched stock had been reduced; instead it has been converted from one form ('hexafluoride') to another ('oxide'), a step that he said was taken largely for cosmetic (political) purposes. A significant portion of 20-percent enriched material has also been retained as scrap, rather than converted into fuel for a research reactor. A key aspect of the talks is to extend the 'break out' period under which Iran could manufacture a nuclear weapon, but he said as a practical matter the conversion of 3.5 percent to oxide form would only add about two weeks to the break-out period, since Iran could reconvert it back into hexaflouride. (Here's his report on this issue; this paragraph was updated for clarity.) In effect, the amount of nuclear material available to Iran has gone up 'about a bomb's worth during the JPOA,' Albright said. This is where Obama's speechwriters went awry. Iran's stock of low enriched uranium - a 'nuclear material' by the IAEA's definition - has gone up during the negotiations, largely as a consequence of the dilution of the near 20-percent material... Words have consequences, especially in a State of the Union address. The president could have claimed that 'we've slowed the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of the most dangerous nuclear material.' But instead he choose to make sweeping claims for which there is little basis. Thus he earns Three Pinocchios." http://t.uani.com/1xDDbjT Laurent Fabius, Philip Hammond, Frank-Walter Steinmeier & Federica Mogherini in WashPost: "In this context, our responsibility is to make sure diplomacy is given the best possible chance to succeed. Maintaining pressure on Iran through our existing sanctions is essential. But introducing new hurdles at this critical stage of the negotiations, including through additional nuclear-related sanctions legislation on Iran, would jeopardize our efforts at a critical juncture. While many Iranians know how much they stand to gain by overcoming isolation and engaging with the world, there are also those in Tehran who oppose any nuclear deal. We should not give them new arguments. New sanctions at this moment might also fracture the international coalition that has made sanctions so effective so far. Rather than strengthening our negotiating position, new sanctions legislation at this point would set us back. Let us be clear: If Iran violates its commitments or proves unwilling to agree to a comprehensive, verifiable understanding that meets the international community's bottom line, we will have no choice but to further increase pressure on it. For the first time, however, we may have a real chance to resolve one of the world's long-standing security threats - and the chance to do it peacefully. We can't let that chance pass us by or do anything to derail our progress. We have a historic opportunity that might not come again. With the eyes of the world upon us, we must demonstrate our commitment to diplomacy to try to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue within the deadline we have set. That is the surest path to reaching a comprehensive, lasting solution that will make the world and the region safer." http://t.uani.com/1ywHDoy        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.