|
Join UANI
Top Stories
WSJ:
"President Barack Obama said on Monday that the U.S. won't approve
another extension of Iran nuclear talks if negotiations remain at a
substantive impasse this spring, telegraphing a decision designed to
ratchet up pressure on Tehran to agree to a final deal. Mr. Obama said
differences with Iran and world powers have been 'sufficiently narrowed
and sufficiently clarified' at this stage in the talks. At a White House
news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr. Obama said it
is now up to Iran's leaders to decide if they want a deal. 'We are at a
point where they need to make a decision,' he said. 'We now know enough
that the issues are no longer technical. The issues now are, does Iran
have the political will and desire to get a deal done?' He said U.S.
options in the absence of an agreement are 'narrow, and they're not
attractive,' a reference to the possibility of future military action
against Iran. Mr. Obama's comments helped define a negotiation process
that Western officials said has slowed in recent weeks, with Tehran
refusing to move on a central demand to significantly curtail uranium
enrichment." http://t.uani.com/1zGubiv
AFP:
"Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Tuesday that world powers
must 'seize the opportunity' of a landmark nuclear deal, saying Tehran
had taken the 'necessary steps' for an accord. Rouhani's remarks appeared
to be a response to US President Barack Obama, who on Monday said: 'The
issues now are -- does Iran have the political will and the desire to get
a deal done?' 'Right now good progress has been made although we are some
distance away from the final agreement,' the Iranian president said,
during a meeting in Tehran with India's national security adviser Ajit
Doval. 'Iran has taken necessary steps and now it's the other side's turn
to seize the opportunity.'" http://t.uani.com/1M9fCcB
Press TV (Iran):
"South Korea's tech giant Samsung - that has just finished a major
oil project in Iran - says it is determined to continue working in the
Iranian oil industry. Sun Lee, a top Samsung official in Iran, has told
reporters that his company hopes to win new projects in that sector. He
also said the company will continue offering maintenance and spare parts
supply services for a mega floating oil export terminal for Iran that it
finished on 8 February. Sun emphasized that the construction of the
terminal - dubbed Persian Gulf - was made possible through overcoming
severe financial problems, the Persian-language newspaper Forsat-e Emrooz
reported. He said the high quality of the terminal is proportionate to
Iran's crude export conditions, adding that this terminal will play an
important role in Iran's oil industry. The Persian Gulf terminal - that
has been described as the world's largest - has a total capacity of 2.2
million barrels and can store some 200,000 barrels per day of heavy crude
oil produced in Iran's offshore oil fields of Soroush and Nowruz. South
Korea's Samsung started building the terminal in 2008 and finished it on
8 February 2015 at a cost of about $300 million." http://t.uani.com/1DADCla
Sanctions Relief
Reuters: "India's central bank has ordered banks to tighten
monitoring of export finance deals after investigators uncovered an
invoicing scam they suspect is part of a multi-billion-dollar scheme to
exploit Western financial sanctions against Iran. Although the Reserve
Bank of India's ruling made no mention of the scheme that targeted UCO
Bank, an RBI source familiar with the matter said it was related to a
probe into the suspected misuse of up to $3.2 billion in export advances
paid out by the bank... Under a provision in U.S. sanctions law, Iran can
accumulate oil export revenues with its Asian buyers and use the funds to
buy essential imports. According to sources familiar with the
investigation by the Enforcement Directorate, a group of nine Iranians
who entered India on student visas set up shell companies in a provincial
city to tap into these funds held at state-owned UCO Bank...
Investigators have confirmed 9.25 billion rupees ($150 million) in
suspect transactions involving eight firms. The real figure could be as
high as 200 billion rupees ($3.2 billion), according to the RBI
source." http://t.uani.com/1vggkdp
Sanctions
Enforcement & Impact
Reuters: "A legal attempt by Iran's main oil tanker firm NITC to
stop the European Union from reimposing sanctions on it over its disputed
nuclear programme has failed in a London court, setting back Tehran's
efforts to ease trade restrictions... EU governments were due imminently
to re-include NITC, a major carrier of Iran's oil, on a blacklist of
people and entities targeted by the bloc's sanctions, High Court Judge
Nicholas Green said on Monday. The NITC case is part of an effort by the
EU to mount a challenge against Iranian companies that have been winning
court cases aimed at lifting sanctions against them. NITC had been on an
EU sanctions blacklist since 2012 until a European court ruled in July
last year that there were no grounds to keep it on the list. The firm
announced in October that EU sanctions against it had been annulled. It
is still blacklisted by the United States." http://t.uani.com/1KItqr0
Iraq Crisis
RFE/RL: "A commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps
(IRGC) has been killed in Iraq, Iranian media reported. The Tasnim news
agency, said to be affiliated with IRGC, says Reza Hosseini Moghadam was
in Samarra to confront militants of the Islamic State (IS) when he was
killed on February 7. 'He [Moghadam] was martyred in the vicinity of the
Al-Askari [Shi'ite] shrine in Samarra,' Tasnim reported. Hard-line news
sites reported that Moghadam, who they said was a veteran of the
1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, was killed by IS snipers and buried in Najaf...
Moghadam is the second senior IRGC member reported killed in Iraq in less
than two months." http://t.uani.com/1M9gDRM
Al-Monitor: "As US forces pound IS from the air, however, concerns
are increasingly being expressed in Washington, as well as among Sunni
Arab members of the anti-IS coalition, that Iran will be the ultimate
beneficiary. For some critics, these concerns are compounded by the
prospect of a nuclear deal between the United States and Iran. 'What if
we defeat [IS] but lose Iraq in the process?' asked Michael Knights, a
leading US expert on the Iraqi military. Referring to what he called 'a
Hezbollization of the Iraqi security sector,' Knights told an audience at
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on Feb. 6 that this was a
'Yalta moment' similar to the 1945 conference in Crimea where the United
States acquiesced to Soviet control of post-war Eastern Europe. The
United States needs to step up its security cooperation with the Baghdad
government and 'outperform the Iranians' to prevent Iraq from becoming an
Iranian satellite, Knights suggested. That will require 'a visionary
decade-spanning relationship' with the Iraqi government, he said, that
will include a larger US military presence." http://t.uani.com/1AfHLtL
Human Rights
HRW: "Iran's judiciary immediately should halt plans to execute a
man convicted at age 17 of terrorism-related crimes for an armed
opposition group and vacate his death sentence. Iran's Supreme Court
affirmed the death sentence for the man, Saman Nasim, in December 2013.
His lawyer and family fear that authorities may carry out the sentence in
less than two weeks despite an absolute ban on the execution of child
offenders in international law. Iranian media reports indicate that Iran
has executed at least eight child offenders since 2010. Reports by
Amnesty International and other rights groups, however, suggest as many as
31 child offenders may have been executed during that period, making it
one of the countries with the world's highest number of reported child
offender executions. 'This is an open-and-shut case since there is no
dispute that Saman Nasim was under 18 when security forces arrested him,'
said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director. 'Nasim
and his family should have never suffered mental anguish associated with
being on death row for months on end, let alone facing imminent hanging.'
Nasim's lawyer and a source close to the family told Human Rights Watch
that they have received information suggesting that the judiciary's
implementation division has cleared the path for Orumiyeh prison, where
he is being held, to execute him on or about February 19, 2015." http://t.uani.com/179nbA3
Domestic
Politics
Al-Monitor: "Eleven cities in Iran's southwest Khouzestan province
have shut down offices and schools over excessive dust particles in the
air. Iranians tweeted pictures of buildings and streets covered with dust
with the hashtag #Khouzestancantbreath while officials and politicians
used the opportunity to take a shot at the administration for its lack of
a comprehensive plan to address the crisis... Tehran Mayor Mohammad
Bagher Ghalibaf, a conservative who ran in the last presidential
elections, said, 'Today our main problem is the environment, and we
cannot say that the environment is endangering people's lives - we must
say that the environment is taking people's lives.'" http://t.uani.com/194WSf1
Foreign Affairs
Free Beacon: "Iran's newly appointed ambassador to the United
Nations is facing criticism for his anti-Israel views and past comments
urging Muslims to 'unite around resistance' to the Jewish state. Iranian
diplomat Gholamali Khoshroo, a relative of President Hassan Rouhani, was
appointed to the post in late January, after more than a year of
controversy over Tehran's previous pick, Hamid Abutalebi, whom the United
States refused to grant a visa due to his connections to the 1979 hostage
crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran... While touted by some as a more
moderate choice for the post, Khoshroo has displayed much of the
anti-Israel animus common among Iran's leading politicians and diplomats,
according to his past remarks. Khoshroo, for instance, recently dubbed
Israel as the 'main problem' in the Middle East and urged Muslims to
'unite around resistance' to it, according to comments reported in July
2013 by the Iranian press. 'In my view if we focus on the main problem of
the region (Middle East) which is Israel, then Islamic and Arab countries
can unite around resistance against Israel, get back their pride and
please their people,' Khoshroo said, according to an independent
translation of his remarks... In a September 2013 remarks, Khoshroo
stated that the President Obama could solve America's problems with Iran
by putting 'some distance' between the United States and the 'Zionist
lobby,' according to Iranian reports." http://t.uani.com/1KE7UFL
Opinion &
Analysis
UANI Advisory Board
Member Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest:
"Suddenly, we seem to be having the conversation the administration
didn't want to have: a conversation about just where President Obama's
approach to Iran is taking us. A Washington Post editorial has put the
issue on the agenda in a way that it will be hard for the spinners and
Iran-apologists to dance past, and there are signs that bipartisan
concerns are beginning to grow... As the Post points out, a cavalcade of
distinguished American foreign policy voices, including Henry Kissinger
and George Schultz, have issued warnings that the White House seems to
have lost its way as it tries to navigate the complex minefield that is
U.S.-Iranian relations. As my colleague Michael Doran has recently
pointed out in an article that contributed to the rising disquiet about
the administration's Iran strategy, the approach to Iran has been the
centerpiece of the administration's Middle East strategy from 2009 to the
present day. What's interesting is that the growing disquiet about our
Iran policy isn't over the basic decision to negotiate with Iran.
Although as usual the White House tries to portray its opponents as hot
heads whose unreasoning hatred of Iran combines with a love of war to
create a blind opposition to the President's sensible and rational
preference for diplomacy, the debate is not about whether to negotiate
with Iran. It is about how to ensure that those negotiations advance
important American interests. The debate over Iran negotiations is really
a debate over Middle East strategy as a whole. The Iran apologists inside
the administration and out have a case that basically looks like this:
Iran is the best possible long term partner for the United States in the
region and American and Iranian interests are strategically aligned. The
Saudis, who call themselves our allies, export religious extremism and
are fundamentally committed to a backward form of political organization.
The Saudi monarchy is a ticking time bomb that will one day explode when
the population tires of a greedy, corrupt and incompetent royal family.
Iran, by contrast, has a large and educated middle class; flawed as its
current political system may be, forces are at work that will soon make
Iran a much more modern and democratic country than any of the backward
Arab states with whom the United States is currently allied. An end to
U.S.-Iranian hostility over the nuclear issue will do more than lay a
dangerous dispute to rest. It will open the door to a much wider and more
fruitful relationship. The goal of American policy should therefore be to
create a relationship of trust between the two capitals based on this
community of interest. When the regime feels less threatened by the
United States, and when it understands that the United States wants to
work with it towards a regional order that is in the interests of both
countries, Iran will begin to work 'within the system' and become a
responsible stakeholder rather than an exporter of subversion. Moreover,
an end to sanctions combined with better relations with the United States
will contribute to the democratization of Iranian society. The
revolution, Iran apologists argue, is old and decrepit. The rising
generations are tired of clerical rule and hunger for western modernity.
The United States is actually popular among Iranian youth. The clerics
and their repressive allies are only clinging to power because the sense
of encirclement and danger drives nationalists into their camp and
because the sanctions undermine the middle class and concentrate economic
power in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard and other regime allies. By
offering a face-saving compromise on the nuclear issue, ending sanctions
and opening the door to a wider role for Iran in the region, the Obama
administration can stabilize the region and democratize Iran while
reducing the American profile-and reducing our dependence on unsteady and
problematic allies like the Gulf states... But the growing chorus of
sober and informed critics of the White House approach to Iran aren't for
the most part attacking the idea of negotiations over the nuclear issue
or even of a possible future rapprochement with Iran. This isn't even
primarily an argument about exactly how many centrifuges the nuclear
talks allow the Iranians in the end - or about any of the other technical
details of a proposed nuclear understanding. The skeptics are criticizing
what looks like a disjointed and misguided approach to the relationship
with Iran that threatens to further destabilize the Middle East. It is possible
that the administration has good answers for them, but up until now the
White House has preferred not to engage with the serious arguments
against its Iran approach. The longer the President and his top aides
keep pretending that critics have no concerns that are worth taking
seriously, the more they feed the narrative that the White House is in
over its head on Iran-that it has lost sight of some important
considerations in a headlong drive to get a deal. That perception, unless
refuted (rather than mocked, caricatured or ignored) will ensure that
neither Congress nor the country will allow the White House to pursue an
Iran strategy that lacks public buy-in and consent." http://t.uani.com/1ASZ7xX
WSJ Editorial:
"One big question coming out of the Munich security conference this
weekend is whether Iran and the U.S. can strike a nuclear deal before the
next, and perhaps final, deadline in March. But the better question may
be what happens if they succeed-what happens if they sign an accord close
to the parameters of the talks as we now know them? The Obama
Administration may be underwriting a new era of global nuclear
proliferation. That's the question Henry Kissinger diplomatically raised
in recent testimony to the Senate that deserves far more public
attention. The former Secretary of State is the dean of American
strategists who negotiated nuclear pacts with the Soviets in the 1970s.
This gives his views on the Iran talks particular relevance as President
Obama drives to an accord that he hopes will be the capstone of his
second term. On Jan. 29 Mr. Kissinger appeared before the Senate Armed
Services Committee with two other former Secretaries of State, George
Shultz and Madeleine Albright. Here's how he described the talks in his
prepared remarks: 'Nuclear talks with Iran began as an international
effort, buttressed by six U.N. resolutions, to deny Iran the capability
to develop a military nuclear option. They are now an essentially
bilateral negotiation over the scope of that capability through an
agreement that sets a hypothetical limit of one year on an assumed
breakout. The impact of this approach will be to move from preventing
proliferation to managing it.' Mull that one over. Mr. Kissinger always
speaks with care not to undermine a U.S. Administration, and the same is
true here. But he is clearly worried about how far the U.S. has moved
from its original negotiating position that Iran cannot enrich uranium or
maintain thousands of centrifuges. And he is concerned that these
concessions will lead the world to perceive that such a deal would put
Iran on the cusp of being a nuclear power. Administration leaks to the
media have made clear that Secretary of State John Kerry 's current
negotiating position is that Iran should have a breakout period of no
less than a year. But as Mr. Kissinger told the Senators in response to
questions, that means verification and inspections become crucial. 'In
the space of one year, that will create huge inspection problems, but I'll
reserve my comment on that until I see the agreement,' Mr. Kissinger
said. 'But I would also emphasize the issue of proliferation. Assuming
one accepts the inspection as valid' and 'takes account of the stockpile
of nuclear material that already exists, the question then is what do the
other countries in the region do? And if the other countries in the
region conclude that America has approved the development of an
enrichment capability within one year of a nuclear weapon, and if they
then insist on building the same capability, we will live in a
proliferated world in which everybody-even if that agreement is
maintained-will be very close to the trigger point.' ... A world with
multiple nuclear states, including some with revolutionary religious
impulses or hegemonic ambitions, is a very dangerous place. A
proliferated world would limit the credibility of U.S. deterrence on
behalf of allies. It would also imperil U.S. forces and even the homeland
via ballistic missiles that Iran is developing but are not part of the
U.S.-Iran talks. President Obama would claim the inspection regime is
fail-safe, but Iran hid its weapons program from United Nations
inspectors for years. That's why the U.N. passed its many resolutions and
the current talks began. Iran also hid its facility at Qum. All of this
shows how difficult it is to maintain a credible inspection regime in a
country determined to evade it. Or as Mr. Kissinger delicately put it,
'Nobody can really fully trust the inspection system or at least some
[countries] may not.'" http://t.uani.com/1z4gAxy
John Bolton in
LAT: "Any administration's national security
strategy written for public consumption inevitably involves platitudes,
vacuous rhetoric and self-congratulation. But the strategy announced last
week for President Obama's final two years in office sets new records in
all these categories. As a sleep aid, it cannot be underestimated.
Indeed, diverting attention from America's rapidly deteriorating global
strategic posture was likely a prime objective, as were his answers at
Monday's news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In her
defense of the strategy, National Security Advisor Susan Rice criticized
'alarmism' by Obama's critics, arguing in a speech on Friday that we do
not face 'existential' threats as we did in World War II and the Cold
War. That's true, but no thanks to Obama's policies, which have weakened
the United States and in coming years will encourage aggressors rather
than deter them. The president fails to grasp that the function of
statecraft is precisely to be alert to small threats and crises, and to
prevent them from growing to existential levels... The security
strategy's detachment from reality is most egregiously displayed in its
discussion of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and
specifically Iran's nuclear-weapons program. Obama is proud he is
reducing America's nuclear capabilities, even as he admits that threats
posed by 'irresponsible states or terrorists' using nuclear weapons are
the gravest America faces. Unfortunately, the idea that diminished U.S.
capabilities will in some way induce those 'irresponsible states or
terrorists' to modify their own behavior seems chilling and palpably
inaccurate. Surely, a weaker America is an incentive to the irresponsible,
including states like Russia and China, not a model. On Iran, Obama says
that the 2013 'interim' deal (agreed to by the U.N. Security Council's
five permanent members and Germany) 'has halted the progress of Iran's
program.' This is flatly untrue and as a basis for policy, it almost
certainly obscures a growing 'existential' threat for America and our
allies. It assumes we know everything about Iran's nuclear-weapons
program, which is a dramatically unrealistic characterization for both
the extent of, and our confidence in, the information we actually
possess. There is simply no evidence that Iran has done anything other
than make temporary, easily reversible concessions regarding uranium
already enriched to reactor-grade levels. Nothing in the interim agreement
even addresses the likelihood of Iran's efforts to weaponize highly
enriched uranium and to develop a plutonium nuclear-weapon option. Nor
does the agreement curtail its missile development program. The missile
work of Iran's partner, North Korea, has already led U.S. and South
Korean commanders to warn that targeting America's West Coast is within
Pyongyang's reach. Even more fundamentally, Obama's security strategy
fails to acknowledge that recognizing an Iranian 'right' to enrichment
reverses the most basic premise of more than a decade of negotiation with
Iran begun in 2003 by Britain, France and Germany. From 2003 until Obama,
the West agreed that Iran had to forgo unconditionally all
enrichment-related activity to assure the world its program was entirely
peaceful. Obama's retreat on this critical point is comparable to the
'existential' mistakes made by Western appeasers in the 1930s." http://t.uani.com/1zshl2x
WashPost
Editorial: "Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad
Zarif, like several other senior officials in his country, has made it
clear that he is uncomfortable with the detention of The Post's
correspondent in Iran, Jason Rezaian, who as of Monday had been unjustly
held for 202 days. Asked Sunday about the case during a conference in
Munich, Mr. Zarif said: 'I hope he will be cleared in a court of law... I
hope once the court process is completed, we will have a clear-cut case
or we will have his acquittal.' Those words might offer grounds for
optimism that Iran will soon cease its outrageous mistreatment of Mr.
Rezaian, a 38-year-old California native who, since being arrested with
his wife July 22, has not been informed of the charges against him or
been allowed to speak with a lawyer. Yet Mr. Zarif's words are
contradicted - as they have been in the past - by the actual developments
in Mr. Rezaian's case. Late last month, a human rights group reported
that his trial had been referred to the court of a notorious
Revolutionary Court judge known for imposing harsh sentences in political
cases. As Mr. Rezaian's family noted in a statement, Judge Abolghassem
Salavati was sanctioned in 2011 by the European Union for 'gross human
rights violations.' In 2009, he sentenced two American hikers, arrested
near Iran's border with Iraq, to eight years in prison on groundless
espionage charges. To suggest, as Mr. Zarif did, that Mr. Rezaian will be
treated fairly in such a court strains credulity; it raises the question
of whether the foreign minister was seeking to deflect an embarrassing
inquiry with an empty expression of hope. Some analysts of Iran have
speculated that the persecution of Mr. Rezaian is an attempt by
'hard-liners' and their allies in the judiciary to undermine the
'moderate' government of President Hassan Rouhani and the nuclear negotiations
being conducted by Mr. Zarif. If that is true, the case raises a question
about the talks: If Mr. Zarif is not able to obtain justice for an
innocent journalist he has called 'a good reporter,' can he be expected
to obtain necessary concessions on a nuclear program that has been the
focal point of Iran's national security apparatus for more than a decade?
Whether there is a power struggle in Tehran or not, the Rezaian case
illustrates a profound imbalance in the nuclear negotiation. While an American
citizen is openly wielded as a human pawn, at enormous cost to his
well-being and that of his family, the Obama administration fastidiously
refrains from any action it believes might offend Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - from seeking the downfall of Syrian dictator
Bashar al-Assad to tolerating a vote in Congress on sanctions that would
be imposed in the event the talks failed. Mr. Zarif asserted that he had
'tried my best to help [Mr. Rezaian] in a humanitarian way, providing for
his mother's visit.' But such palliatives are not a substitute for
justice. It's time for him and Mr. Rouhani to use their influence to free
Mr. Rezaian - and demonstrate that the Iranian government can deliver on
its words." http://t.uani.com/1z4dppP
|
|
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. |
|
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment