|
|
|
Join UANI
Top Stories
NYT:
"With only five weeks remaining for a basic agreement to be
reached with Iran on the fate of its nuclear program, the world's
nuclear inspectors reported on Thursday that Iran was still refusing to
answer their longstanding questions about suspected work on nuclear
weapons and designs. The report, by the International Atomic Energy
Agency, was issued just as an American negotiating team heads to Geneva
for four days of talks that will, by Sunday, include Secretary of State
John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Most of
those negotiations focus on the future, particularly on the question of
how much nuclear fuel Iran would be permitted to produce and stockpile.
But a lurking issue has been whether, as part of any final accord, Iran
will be compelled to answer all questions that the I.A.E.A. has put to
it about evidence of past work on designing weapons. For more than
three years Iran has refused, maintaining the evidence was fabricated
and insisting its nuclear intentions are peaceful... 'We've been
stonewalled on all those questions,' one European official involved in
the talks said recently. 'And the question is, does it make sense to
lift sanctions against Iran before it satisfies the inspectors?'" http://t.uani.com/1Edieml
FT:
"World powers and Iran are making 'significant' progress towards a
deal to curb Tehran's ability to build an atomic bomb - so much so that
even hawks in the Israeli government consider some form of agreement
increasingly possible in the coming weeks... 'The gap is narrower than
before' [on key areas], Yuval Steinitz, Israel's intelligence,
international relations and strategic affairs minister said in Munich.
'I can see progress on two or three central items.' Though not directly
involved in the talks, Mr Steinitz is the Israeli point man on the
issue... Mr Steinitz outlined four key areas of concern in the talks:
the number of centrifuges Iran is permitted to continue operating; its
stockpile of enriched uranium; its research into more advanced
centrifuges; and the storage and dismantling of mothballed centrifuge
arrays. 'On the first issue of the number of centrifuges ... there is
some progress or gaps which have been narrowed. But this is mainly
because the P5+1 made too many concessions,' Mr Steinitz said. Tehran
initially wanted a minimum of 9,000 centrifuges, and the P5+1 is
considering 4,500 and possibly 6,000." http://t.uani.com/1F2PIBK
IHR:
"The Kurdish political prisoner Saman Naseem who was sentenced to
death for offences he allegedely committed at 17 years of age, was
executed in the prison of Urmia (Northwest of Iran). Iran Human Rights
(IHR) reported earlier that Saman's family was contacted by the
authorities yesterday to meet at the prison to collect Saman's
belongings on Saturday. According to several independent sources,
Saman's family has been asked earlier today to collect Saman's body
tomorrow, Saturday 21 February. It is still unclear whether Saman
was executed yesterday (Thursday) or today." http://t.uani.com/1LiP4Cj
Nuclear Program & Negotiations
AP:
"Israel's prime minister said Thursday that he knows the details
of the deal being forged with Iran over its nuclear program and asked
'what is there to hide' after the U.S. said it was withholding some
information on the talks. Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks come a day after
the Obama administration said it is keeping some specifics from Israel
because it fears the close U.S. ally has leaked sensitive information
to try to scuttle the talks - and will continue to do so. 'We know that
Tehran knows the details of the talks. Now I tell you that Israel also
knows the details of the proposed agreement,' Netanyahu said. 'I think
this is a bad agreement that is dangerous for the state of Israel, and
not just for it. If anyone thinks otherwise what is there to hide
here?' he said." http://t.uani.com/1DAlJnL
Al-Monitor:
"As the March deadline for a deal between Iran and the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) over
Iran's nuclear program approaches, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh
Afkham is under fire for making statements that critics say implied a
two-step deal, something the supreme leader has opposed. At a press
conference Feb. 18, Afkham said that while according to the interim
deal in Geneva, the deadline for the negotiations is the end of June,
'An internal understanding in the Geneva talks took place to have a
political 'understanding' by the end of March in order to discuss the
details later.' ... While the November 2014 interim deal stipulates a
soft March deadline, some in Iran believe that this violates the
guidelines set by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Feb. 8
when he said that he opposed a multi-step deal in which the parties
agree to 'general principles in one step, then get to specifics
[later].' Rather, Khamenei, who has the final say on Iran's nuclear
program, said everything should be agreed upon and signed in one step.
Afkham was attacked by a number of conservative figures for her
comments about separating a political 'understanding' from a final
'agreement.'" http://t.uani.com/1ASwUYB
Military
Matters
WT:
"A flotilla of warships from Iran passed southward across the
equator Thursday as part of a voyage from Sri Lanka toward Indonesia
that Iranian officials said was designed to show the nation is 'active
and powerful' in the Indian Ocean. The Iranian Navy's 33rd flotilla,
comprised of martyr vice-admiral Naqdi destroyer and Bandar Abbas
logistic warship, embarked on the voyage after berthing in early
February at Sri Lanka's port of Colombo, where the ships were 'welcomed'
by 'Sri Lankan navy commanders,' Iran's state-run Fars News Agency
reported. Fars quoted Col. Ebrahim Rouhani, Iran's military attache in
Sri Lanka, as saying the 'Indian Ocean is a stage for the big powers to
display the power of their fleets, and the presence of this flotilla
shows that we are active and powerful on this stage too.'" http://t.uani.com/1GbJ39I
Opinion &
Analysis
David Ignatius
in WashPost: "The public rift between President
Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Iranian
nuclear issue is often described as a personality dispute. But a senior
Israeli official argued this week that the break has been building for
more than two years and reflects a deep disagreement about how best to
limit the threat of a rising Iran. Yuval Steinitz, Israel's minister of
intelligence, outlined his government's view in an interview Wednesday.
He said that the nuclear agreement contemplated by Obama would ratify
Iran as a threshold nuclear-weapons state, and that the one-year breakout
time sought by Washington wasn't adequate. And he stressed that these
views aren't new. 'From the very beginning, we made it clear we had
reservations about the goal of the negotiations,' he explained. 'We
thought the goal should be to get rid of the Iranian nuclear threat,
not verify or inspect it.' Steinitz, who helps oversee Iran strategy
for Netanyahu, said he understands the United States wants to tie
Iran's hands for a decade until a new generation takes power there. But
he warns: 'You're saying, okay, in 10 or 12 years Iran might be a
different country.' This is 'dangerous' because it ignores that Iran is
'thinking like an old-fashioned superpower.' Netanyahu's skepticism
reached a tipping point last month when he concluded that the United
States had offered so many concessions to Iran that any deal reached
would be bad for Israel. He broke with Obama, first in a private phone
call Jan. 12, and then in his public acceptance of an offer by GOP
House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress on March 3 and, in
effect, lobby against the deal. The administration argues that the pact
taking shape, although imperfect, is preferable to any realistic
alternative. It would limit the Iranian program and allow careful
monitoring of its actions. Angered by what it sees as Netanyahu's
efforts to sabotage the agreement, the administration decided in early
February to limit the information it shared with Israel about its
bargaining with Iran. The discord goes back to 2012, when the Obama
administration began secret contacts with Iran through Oman. The
Israelis were angry that they weren't informed and insulted that the
United States would think they wouldn't find out through their
intelligence channels. Netanyahu denounced the interim agreement,
reached in November 2013, because it formally accepted that Iran could
enrich uranium.Despite Netanyahu's view that it was a 'great mistake'
to accept any Iranian enrichment, Steinitz said that 'we got the
impression that it might be symbolic. The initial figure [discussed by the
United States and its negotiating partners] was 'a few hundred
centrifuges.' ' Now, he said, the United States is contemplating
'thousands.' According to Israeli press reports, the United States has
offered to allow Iran to operate at least 6,500 centrifuges... Steinitz
concluded the conversation with an emphatic warning: 'Iran is part of
the problem and not part of the solution - unless you think Iran
dominating the Middle East is the solution.' People who think that a
nuclear deal with Iran is desirable, as I do, need to be able to answer
Steinitz's critique." http://t.uani.com/1JtScQl
Jacob Siegel in
The Daily Beast: "There's a gnawing contradiction
at the center of a high profile White House summit being held this week
dedicated to curbing violent extremism: The U.S. is heading the
opposition to extremism at the same moment the country is increasingly
allied with violent extremists in the fight against ISIS. It's one of a
number of inconvenient issues as national and global leaders gather to
figure out what to do about the radicals in their midst. Critics,
including former administration officials and terrorism experts, are
skeptical about the effectiveness of government initiatives. Many
question whether the summit amounts to much more than a feel-good PR
spectacle. The 'Countering Violent Extremism' conference, which began
Tuesday and runs through Friday, has drawn elected leaders and
lawmakers from around the world, U.S. law enforcement officials,
religious leaders, and experts on radical ideologies and their
adherents. Participants are supposed to address a broad range of
extremist threats, but it's clear from President Obama's own remarks
that ISIS and the threat from jihadist groups have an outsized presence
at the summit. Few details about the summit's agenda were released
ahead of the event but even before it began there was debate over how
extremism would be defined. The White House was accused, variously, of
'avoiding the world Muslim' in its discussion of extremist threats and
focusing too narrowly on Islamic radicalism at the exclusion of other
violent groups. The terms of that debate miss another distinction. As
the war against ISIS illustrates, there are extremist groups the
government is willing to tolerate, and in some cases work alongside,
and others it is not. In Iraq, the U.S indirectly funds and supports
Iran-backed militias to counter ISIS. The current dynamic pits one
group of religious radicals, U.S.-backed Shia militias, against
another, the Sunni jihadists of ISIS. Violent extremism is the only
constant in that equation. Shia militias have played a crucial role
battling ISIS. Some of the groups are more radical than others but none
have been disqualified from receiving U.S. support based on their
extremist beliefs. Asaib Ahl al-Haq, an Iran-backed militia known for
carrying out lethal attacks on American soldiers in Iraq, has operated
with U.S. air support during operations against ISIS." http://t.uani.com/19CCQcj
Michael Young in
NOW Lebanon: "There has been much partisan discussion
in Washington over the Obama administration's efforts to reach a
nuclear deal with Iran. However, a different concern emerged this week
in newspaper articles and commentaries, namely how the actions of
pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq were undermining the campaign to
defeat ISIS. In a column for the Washington Post, David Ignatius echoed
this view, noting that Iraqi Sunnis were wary of cooperating with the
government of Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi, because it had allowed
Shiite militias to operate in mainly Sunni Anbar Province. Implicit in
these readings was a sense that because the United States and Iran have
a shared interest in fighting ISIS, it makes no sense for pro-Iranian
militias to behave in ways that damage the aim of rallying anti-ISIS Sunnis
against the terrorist group. Reflecting this atmosphere, in December US
Secretary of State John Kerry described Iranian attacks against ISIS
this way: '[T]he net effect is positive.' Gen. Martin Dempsey, the
chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, also observed: 'As long as the
Iraqi government remains committed to inclusivity of all the various
groups inside [Iraq], then I think Iranian influence will be positive.'
Dempsey's caveat about inclusivity notwithstanding, both statements
displayed a limited grasp of what Iran's strategy in the Middle East is
all about, or how it only makes more likely the emergence and survival
of groups such as ISIS. The reality is that during the last decade Iran
has been actively pushing for fragmentation of the Arab world. Early on
the Iranians encouraged their Iraqi Shiite allies to advance a divisive
sectarian agenda, alienating Sunnis and making impossible the
rebuilding of a unified Iraq under a national central government. In
Syria, the Iranians have helped preserve Bashar al-Assad's control over
parts of Syrian territory - namely Damascus, the coastal areas and
communication lines in between - while allowing large swathes of mainly
Sunni territory to fall outside regime control. This effective
partition of Syria may have resulted from a realistic reading of
Assad's limitations, but early on the regime and the Iranians also
sought to make it permanent. They engaged in sectarian 'cleansing,'
pushing large numbers of Sunnis out of their areas. On the Palestinian
front, too, the regime has played on the divisions in Palestinian
ranks, exploiting the differences between Fatah and Hamas. Tehran's
ability to exploit the contradictions in the Arab world, a policy
pursued in Lebanon and Yemen as well, has been a recurring feature of
Iran's behavior in the Middle East for some time. What is the
rationale? Quite simply that an Arab world deeply divided, shattered
into sectarian entities, and weakened represents fertile ground for
Iran to impose its hegemony regionally. In such a context one can
understand better Iran's efforts lately to open new fronts against
Israel. In the broad Iranian vision, the only serious regional rival it
has is a nuclear-armed Israel... The Iranians are more than willing to
allow the United States and the Arab states to bombard ISIS, as the
group represents an irritant in that it straddles vital Iranian supply
lines between Iraq and Syria. But ISIS hardly represents a strategic
threat to Iran; on the contrary, by drawing Western attention to the
terrorist problem, it distracts Western governments from Iran's larger
project in the Middle East... The Obama administration should remember
this as it argues that the United States and Iran have a common benefit
in collaborating against ISIS. The fact is that ISIS is a direct
consequence of Iranian policies in Iraq and Syria - policies Iran is
still implementing. The Americans are deaf, but they don't have to be
dumb and blind." http://t.uani.com/1CSzXuW
|
|
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