Eye on Iran: U.S. General on Naval Confrontations with Iran: 'The Big Concern Here is Miscalculation'

Join UANI       Top Stories WashPost: "The head of U.S. Central Command warned Iran against provocative naval maneuvers on Tuesday, saying that operations by 'rogue' Iranian commanders could result in direct U.S.-Iranian military engagement. 'I think the big concern here is miscalculation,' Gen. Joseph Votel told reporters at the Pentagon. 'I am concerned about rogue commanders, rogue Iranian Quds force naval commanders who are operating in a provocative manner and are trying to test us.' The Quds force is an elite unit within Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The United States has blamed the IRGC ships for a series of naval confrontations in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz. Last week, a U.S. vessel fired into the water after an Iranian ship came within several hundred yards of a U.S. naval group, the latest in a series of close calls at sea. Votel, who oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, said that close maneuvering by Iranian ships was not a novel phenomenon, but that the spate of recent incidents was worrying. 'What I see is this is principally the regime leadership trying to exert their influence and authority in the region,' he said. 'And they are trying to do it in provocative ways that are unsafe, unprofessional and really I think work against their - their objectives in the long term here.'" http://t.uani.com/2bRJQb5 Reuters: "Iran has signed seven new initial agreements with foreign oil companies, Ali Kardor, managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), was quoted as saying by the oil ministry's news agency SHANA on Tuesday. The contracts to study Iranian oilfields were signed with firms including Austria's OMV, France's Total , Germany's Wintershall, Indonesia's Pertamina, Russia's Lukoil and Zarubezhneft, he said. Iran needs foreign investment to repair and upgrade its oil and gas fields and is also seeking the transfer of technology to its oil industry after a decade of isolation. Many Western and Asian oil firms are still waiting for Tehran to unveil oil and gas contracts (IPCs) with new terms." http://t.uani.com/2c0fm5L WSJ: "German companies hoped the opening of Iran's economy following the lifting of international sanctions in January would let them rekindle longstanding commercial ties and quickly strike gold. Despite a jump in exports, the results have left Germans disappointed... In the first six months of this year, German exports to Iran climbed 15%, to €1.13 billion ($1.26 billion), according to the German Federal Statistical Office. Germany's worldwide exports during the period totaled €603.2 billion. But many German business and government leaders had predicted the lifting of sanctions on Iran would trigger a bonanza for their industrial firms, which want to sell Iran equipment to help rebuild its aging infrastructure. Disappointed Germans are now blaming the shortfall primarily on remaining U.S. prohibitions on some transactions with Iran. 'The development lags behind our expectations by far, because of the [U.S.] sanctions still in place,' said Gregor Wolf, director of European and international affairs at the Federation of German Wholesale Foreign Trade and Services. 'Companies are afraid of U.S. retaliation,' he added. Many Western financial institutions are hesitant about engaging with the Iranian market for fear of facing U.S. fines, Mr. Wolf said. That reticence complicates payments." http://t.uani.com/2bS3SAI Nuclear & Ballistic Missile Program Free Beacon: "Iranian officials announced on Tuesday that the country is preparing to launch three new satellites into space, renewing concerns from defense experts about Iran's ongoing research into long-range ballistic missile technology that could help it fire a nuclear weapon at Western nations. Mohsen Bahrami, the director of Iran's space agency- which has long been suspected of providing cover for weapons research-announced that Iran would launch its newest satellite, dubbed 'Friendship,' later this year. 'The Dousti (Friendship) satellite (built) by (experts at) Sharif University of Technology is the first satellite which will be launched in the second half of this (Iranian) year,' which began on March 20, Bahrami was quoted as saying by the country's state-controlled press. Defense experts and former U.S. officials told the Washington Free Beacon that the test is likely cover for Iran to pursue illicit intercontinental ballistic missile technology, which could enable the Islamic Republic to fire a nuclear weapon over great distances." http://t.uani.com/2bBOd4P Sanctions Relief Mehr (Iran): "Directors of Brazil's Embraer S.A. have arrived in Tehran to hold negotiations with Iranian counterpart while OFAC's permit for aircraft sales to Iran is still pending. Purchase of new aircraft by Iran has turned into a controversial debate in the aviation industry. Huge contracts with Airbus and Boeing, though not finalized yet, remain as important issues since, upon completion, they could bring about major developments in aviation industry of the region. One issue hindering conclusion of agreements between Iranian airliners and world manufacturers is the need to obtain necessary permits from Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the US Treasury Department charged with planning and execution of economic and trade sanctions in support of US national security and foreign policy objectives... Meanwhile, the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) has already confirmed its interest to support sustainable growth of air transportation in Iran by financing the potential deal between the two sides." http://t.uani.com/2bOIgCD Mehr (Iran):  An official has announced that seven new power plants will be constructed inside the country by Russian and South Korean companies. Mohsen Tarztalab, the General Manager of Iran's Thermal Power Plant Holding (TPPH), described signing of new contracts for designing and construction of new power stations in collaboration with foreign investors during the post-JCPOA era saying 'a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been recently inked with Russian contractor Technoprom energy firm for building a 1400MW power plant in the southern Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas.' ... Moreover, South Korea's Hyundai Engineering Company (HEC) and Korea Electric Power Corp (KEPCO) have signed agreements with Iran over joint construction of three other power generating plants in Zanjan, Qom and Bafgh cities. http://t.uani.com/2bPkafo Gulf Business: "KLM Royal Dutch Airlines will resume services to the Iranian capital of Tehran from October 30, 2016, it has announced. Four weekly services will be operated between Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport and Tehran, and will complement the Paris-Tehran service operated by Air France since April 16, 2016. Flight KL0433 will depart from Amsterdam at 17.40 on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, arriving in Tehran at 01.20 (local time). The return flight, KL0434, will depart from Tehran at 03.20, arriving in Amsterdam at 06.45. The flights will be operated with a Boeing 777-200 in a three-class configuration with 34 business seats, 40 seats in economy comfort and 242 seats in economy. KLM operated services to Tehran from July 1991 until it suspended the route in April 2013. Airline officials said at the time of stopping the route that the decision was based on economic rather than political reasons." http://t.uani.com/2ceuNrg Reuters: "Imports of Iranian oil by four major buyers in Asia in July jumped 61.1 percent from a year earlier, marking the biggest percentage gain since April 2014, reflecting Tehran's aggressive moves to recoup market share, lost under international sanctions. Iran is regaining market share at a faster pace than analysts had projected since sanctions were lifted in January, and Iran's senior government official said it sees its oil production at 4 million barrels per day by year-end. The four countries, South Korea, Japan, China and India, imported 1.64 million barrels per day (bpd) in July, government and ship-tracking data showed." http://t.uani.com/2c0a8XF Foreign Affairs Fox News: "Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro made room in his high-pressure agenda to receive Iran's foreign minister over the weekend, and he made sure the meeting was broadcast on national TV. Maduro gave Mohammad Javad Zarif a warm welcome in the Presidential Palace of Miraflores. They shook hands as they announced an alliance to stabilize oil prices. 'We continue to build common ground and a new consensus on stabilizing oil markets, strengthening industries, strengthening OPEC, to strengthen the closeness and alliance with the production countries of OPEC,' said Maduro as he greeted Zarif, the highest-ranking Iranian official that has visited Venezuela since 2013... 'I've visited Iran more than 20 times, I deeply know the good nature, the good, deep spirit of the Iranian people and I love it. I love Iran as much as I love our Commander Chavez,' Maduro said during the visit. He then announced the appointment of a new ambassador to the Islamic nation, Gen. Jesus Gonzalez Gonzalez, and proclaimed the start of a 'new stage' in the countries' relationship... Critics say the alliance should be seen as troubling. Miami Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said Iran was using its growing clout in Latin America to expand 'Iran's radical extremist network.'" http://t.uani.com/2c0ccih Syria Conflict Daily Mail: "Iran is shoring up the Syrian regime from a secret HQ in Damascus nicknamed 'the Glasshouse' - and commanding a huge covert army in support of Assad, according to leaked intelligence passed by activists to MailOnline. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) claims that the theocratic state's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has spent billions in hardware for its ally Bashar al-Assad in the last five years  - and runs operations on the ground from a five-floor monolith near Damascus airport... The allegations are contained in a dossier of reports apparently leaked by senior sources inside Iran's Revolutionary Guards and collated by the dissident activists who oppose the Iranian regime. If the activists' claims are accurate, this would mean that the fundamentalist Tehran regime and its Shia proxies are far more powerful than has been estimated. Western analysts have so far placed the total Iranian-led Shia force at just 16,000. The dissidents make the claim that Iran now commands about 60,000 Shia troops in Syria." http://t.uani.com/2cerQqR Yemen Crisis Gulf News: "In a further provocation amid an American peace push in Yemen, Al Houthi militants are planning to send a delegation to Tehran to seek more funds from their chief backer, according to Arabic press reports. This comes despite US Secretary of State John Kerry's recent statements in Jeddah criticising Iranian support of Al Houthis. Kerry confirmed Iran had shipped weapons to the militant group and warned Tehran that it must stop. The visit, if confirmed, would be an escalation and a sign that Al Houthis are opting to escalate the conflict despite the peace bid... 'We see Iran supporting Al Houthis in Yemen and trying to take over the government, supply weapons to Al Houthis, smuggle explosives to Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia,' Saudi Foreign Minsiter Adel Al Jubair said Wednesday in Beijing." http://t.uani.com/2bC2lyk Human Rights Al-Monitor: "When the website of late Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri posted an audio recording of his objections to the execution of thousands of people, mostly members of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) in the late 1980s, it revealed little new information beyond what had been printed in Montazeri's autobiography. One thing the recording does confirm, however, is the identities of the individuals involved in carrying out the executions, some of whom hold important positions in the Islamic Republic today. No one has more vociferously defended their actions from that time than Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi, who was the Intelligence Ministry's representative at Evin Prison when the executions took place. Pourmohammadi and three other individuals were in charge of the committee that oversaw the executions. Using the religiously charged term 'hypocrites' to refer to MEK members, Pourmohammadi told reporters Aug. 28, 'You cannot show mercy to the hypocrites, because if they can bloody and soil you, they will.' He added, 'We take pride in executing the orders with respect to the hypocrites.'" http://t.uani.com/2cqQp59 Domestic Politics Al-Monitor: "According to an Iranian news outlets, Tehran's City Council is caught up in a corruption scandal involving Tehran real estate. Memari News reported Aug. 27 that it had acquired documents showing that 1,100,000 square meters of government-owned property, including apartments and villas, had ended up in the possession of various individuals, including government officials, sometimes sold at a 50% discount." http://t.uani.com/2bPt5eX Opinion & Analysis WSJ Editorial: "Iran seems bent on exposing the nuclear-deal illusions of President Obama even before he leaves office. The latest sign came Sunday, when Iran's state-run media aired footage of the S-300 air-defense system maneuvering around Fordow. That would be the underground nuclear facility south of Tehran whose existence was first disclosed by Western powers in 2009. Mr. Obama at the time called it a 'direct challenge to the basic foundation of the nonproliferation regime.' ... Meanwhile, the Obama Administration refuses to sanction Moscow for the transfer. Congress has enacted at least three bills either requiring or authorizing the President to sanction actors that help Iran acquire or develop advanced, destabilizing weapons like the S-300. Yet so far Washington has done little more than grumble and vow to 'monitor' Iran's S-300 capability. President Obama made nonproliferation one of his priorities, but he will leave office amid a spreading nuclear threat thanks in part to his infinite patience with global rogues." http://t.uani.com/2bVmm2p David Axe in Reuters: "Four times last week, speedboats belonging to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - a sort of government-sanctioned Islamic militia - harassed four American vessels patrolling the Persian Gulf. The incidents, while tense, ended bloodlessly. Still, they offered a glimpse into the kinds of methods Tehran could employ to potentially devastating effect during a shooting war. Outgunned by the United States' much larger and more sophisticated weaponry, Iran's troops have, for decades, honed so-called 'swarm tactics' that could reduce America's technological advantage... But the United States isn't just rolling over in the face of the guard corps' naval harassment. Historically, the U.S. Navy has trained and equipped its forces for battles with other well-armed navies also operating their own large warships. Its main weapons for such battles are large, multimillion-dollar cruise missiles, of which most ships can only carry a few. The threat from large numbers of nimble, inexpensive guard corps speedboats compelled the Americans to think differently. In the 1980s, the Navy began bringing U.S. Army attack helicopters aboard some of its ships in the Persian Gulf. The Army copters' missiles and guns were ideal for blasting Iranian boats. In 1988, U.S. and Iranian forces fought a brief, violent skirmish that damaged or destroyed several Iranian vessels. The U.S. fleet began adding Army-style missiles to its own helicopters. And in 2012, the sailing branch went a step further when it finally fielded a custom-made guided rocket of its own that is specifically optimized for defeating swarms of boats. The Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System is a 2.75-inch-diameter rocket with a laser seeker. Navy and Marine Corps helicopters, as well as other aircraft, can carry pods, with each containing up to seven of the rockets. The copter shines a laser on enemy boats, or other targets, then fires. Each APKWS rocket heads for a different boat, in essence swarming the swarm with tiny lethal munitions. The guided-rocket system has a 95-percent hit rate, according to the military. 'This will give the helicopters a potent capability against swarming fast inshore attack craft,' noted Jane's, a defense trade publication. And that's not all. In 2014, the U.S. Navy fitted a new, large laser gun to the amphibious ship USS Ponce, which is permanently stationed in the Persian Gulf, where it acts as an at-sea base for helicopters, small boats and special operations forces. Big, slow and otherwise lightly armed, Ponce was uniquely vulnerable to the guard corps boat swarms. The so-called Laser Weapon System, aimed by an operator holding a video-game-style controller, shoots a 30-kilowatt laser over a distance of several miles. As LaWS doesn't fire conventional missiles or bullets, instead drawing power from a generator, it essentially never runs out of ammunition. Perfect for wiping out a swarm. The laser system is a one-off weapon - and, at $40 million, it didn't come cheap. But having proved that a laser can work in real-world conditions, the Navy is planning to build more and bigger lasers and, potentially, outfit all its front-line warships with them. If that happens, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps swarms might finally meet their match." http://t.uani.com/2bBOiFE Ziba Mir-Hosseini in FP: "The phone calls started about six weeks ago. Men who didn't introduce themselves, working for Iran's security agencies, rang the country's most prominent women's rights activists and demanded they show up for interrogations. All the activists were told the same thing: 'Don't tell anyone we've called you here. Don't speak to the media, don't breathe a word to anyone.' But word seeped out, first in Tehran's feminist circles and then among political activists, who traded accounts of interrogations and lines of questioning. The Iranian government's crackdown on feminists, one of the Islamic Republic's periodic intimidation campaigns against women's rights activists, is still underway. But the present iteration isn't just a push-and-pull struggle between the government and civil society, or between the censors and the country's most prominent women's magazine - it's a proxy battle between the president and the country's hard-liners. Iran's women's rights activists, both religious and secular, seized the space offered by President Hassan Rouhani's 2013 election to emerge from the underground and engage again in public life. The Revolutionary Guards and the clerical establishment have responded by charging a vast international 'feminist conspiracy' to undermine the Islamic Republic, funded by wealthy Western donors, intellectually articulated by feminist academics based abroad, and conducted by foot soldiers inside Iran - and even inside the president's cabinet. Iran's hard-line clerical and military authorities have always been wary of women's gender activism, whether by secular 'feminists' or religious 'gender justice' advocates. They seem especially incensed, however, by Iran's homegrown Islamic feminists, who work for gender equality from a faith-based perspective, arguing from progressive readings of the Quran and fiqh, or the Islamic legal tradition, for greater participation in the labor force and better legal safeguards. This 'egalitarian Islam' poses a special threat to hard-liners, because it challenges, from within the Islamic tradition, their conservative interpretation of the sacred texts in which they have invested so much since the revolution." http://t.uani.com/2bJc98e         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.