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TOP STORIES
Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo on Thursday took the White House's aggressive anti-Iran
message to a U.S.-sponsored meeting in Poland on peace and security
in the Middle East. Pence used his address to the conference in Poland's
capital Warsaw to demand that European countries withdraw from the
nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that President Donald
Trump's administration has already abandoned.
Iran is capable of producing a
nuclear weapon within two years, if it steps up work on its nuclear
program and violates the 2015 deal with the West, according to a
recent Israeli intelligence assessment. The assessment was released
as the controversial US-led summit against Iran opened in Warsaw,
where Israel is expected to pressure the European Union against
trying to prop up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action following
the American withdrawal last May.
The Trump White House has
accelerated a secret American program to sabotage Iran's missiles and
rockets, according to current and former administration officials,
who described it as part of an expanding campaign by the United
States to undercut Tehran's military and isolate its economy.
Officials said it was impossible to measure precisely the success of
the classified program, which has never been publicly acknowledged.
But in the past month alone, two Iranian attempts to launch
satellites have failed within minutes.
UANI IN THE NEWS
The Trump administration is meeting in Warsaw today with
leaders from dozens of countries at a critical moment in the effort
to stop Iran's dangerous behavior. Tehran's support for terrorism and
its illegal missile development program are top priorities, but the
people coming to Warsaw will face headwinds. The effort to make real
and sustainable progress on these matters has been impaired by the
European Union's stubborn adherence to the Joint Comprehensive Plan
of Action (JCPOA) - a nuclear framework which didn't make sense when
it was signed and doesn't make sense today.
...David Ibsen, president of
United Against a Nuclear Iran, pointed out that the ambivalence of
European nations to confronting Iran was enabling its regional and
international agenda. Not just Britain over Yemen but also the German
and French stance towards salvaging the 2015 nuclear deal was
undermining US efforts to put pressure on Tehran, he said. "Iran
has furthered its terrorism against the West, facilitated criminal
activities, and advanced its ambitions of regional hegemony."
The growing support for the BDS movement that promotes
the boycott, divestment, and sanctioning of companies doing business
with Israel is deeply troubling.The fact that proponents of the
movement have been silent on the human rights abuses, terrorism, and
regional mayhem unleashed by the Islamic Republic of Iran raises a fundamental
question: Is there no limit to the hypocrisy of supporters of BDS?
SANCTIONS, BUSINESS RISKS, & OTHER ECONOMIC
NEWS
John Bolton did not get his
wish. A few months before he was appointed National Security Adviser
last year, Bolton wrote an op-ed arguing that: America's
declared policy should be ending Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution
before its 40th anniversary. The anniversary is upon us and the
revolution remains, stubbornly resisting 40 years of war, sanctions,
flashes of internal dissent and any number of bellicose op-eds.
But if things haven't changed much in Tehran throughout that period,
they certainly have in the industry that defines its economy and its
neighborhood: oil.
An international court Wednesday
ruled Iran can proceed with a bid to unfreeze assets in the United
States, rejecting Washington's claims the case must be halted because
of Tehran's alleged support for international terrorism. Washington
had argued that Iran's "unclean hands" - a reference to
Tehran's suspected backing of terror groups - should disqualify its
lawsuit to recover $2 billion in assets frozen by the US Supreme
Court in 2016.
TERRORISM & EXTREMISM
Jaish al Adl, a militant group
operating in southeast Iran, claimed responsibility on Wednesday for
an attack against Iran's Revolutionary Guards which left 20 dead,
according to the Fars news agency. A bus carrying members of
the Guards was targeted by a suicide car bomb, the Guards reported in
a statement on Wednesday.
Iran will take revenge for a
suicide attack against the Revolutionary Guards which left at least
20 dead, foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi said on Wednesday,
according to the Fars news agency. "The self-sacrificing
military and intelligence children of the people of Iran will take
revenge for the blood of the martyrs of this incident," Qassemi
said, according to Fars.
Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad
Javad Zarif is linking a suicide bombing targeting the country's
elite Revolution Guard to an ongoing, U.S.-sponsored Mideast meeting
in Warsaw. Zarif tweeted Wednesday night: "Is it no coincidence
that Iran is hit by terror on the very day that (hashtag)
WarsawCircus begins? Especially when cohorts of same terrorists cheer
it from Warsaw streets & support it with twitter bots?"
PROTESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS
Azam Jangravi's heart was
pounding when she climbed atop an electricity transformer box on
Tehran's busy Revolution Street a year ago. She raised her headscarf
in the air and waved it above her head. A crowd formed. People
shouted at her to come down. She knew all along she was going to be
arrested. But she did it anyway, she says, to change the country for
her eight-year-old daughter.
U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS & NEGOTIATIONS
Iran is in possession of improved and dangerous weapons
systems that give Tehran the ability to threaten some of the world's
most important waterways, according to the top American admiral in
the Middle East. "They have a growing capability in cruise missiles,
they have a growing capability in ballistic missiles, they have a
growing capability in unmanned surfaced systems, all these things
that we watch that are offensive, and destabilizing in nature,"
Vice Adm. James Malloy, the commander of US Naval Forces Central
Command, told a small group of reporters in Bahrain on Wednesday.
The US and Poland host a Middle
East conference Thursday that's meant to address a broad range of
security challenges, but looks set to be dominated by Iran, which has
become a source of tension between the US and allies and is
reportedly causing friction within the administration as
well. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the tone
Wednesday, declaring the gathering in Warsaw important because it
gives Arab countries and Israel a chance to meet openly "to
advance the common interest of war with Iran."
From its beginning 40 years ago
this week, the Islamic Republic of Iran has enjoyed the generous
benefit of the doubt from credulous observers in the West. History
hasn't been kind to their sympathy. "The depiction of him as
fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems
certainly and happily false," wrote Princeton's Richard Falk of
the Ayatollah Khomeini in an op-ed for The Times on Feb. 16, 1979.
"Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the
most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a
desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world
country."
Inside the government, some
officials called her "Wayward Storm." Her real name was
Monica Elfriede Witt, an exemplary Air Force counterintelligence
agent who had studied Farsi and carried out covert missions in Iraq,
Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But by mid-2013, Ms. Witt had become
disillusioned with the government - why, exactly, remains a mystery -
and had left the military.
The Trump administration had
delicately said the meeting of five dozen nations in Warsaw would
focus on "Middle East security." But the unmistakable voice
of Rudolph Giuliani, an avowed proponent of regime change in Iran,
set a different tone. Hours before the meeting began, Mr. Giuliani,
the former mayor of New York and President Trump's lawyer, told an
anti-Iran rally outside Warsaw's main stadium that Iranian leaders
are "assassins, they are murderers and they should be out of
power."
Divisions over Iran are
hindering the Trump administration's efforts to build consensus with
NATO allies on Middle East policy, with European powers balking
at joining top U.S. officials in Poland's capital for an event on
regional security. Washington has made isolating Tehran a focus of
its foreign policy. Its major North Atlantic Treaty Organization
allies, including Britain, Germany and France, seek to preserve ties
with Tehran and salvage the 2015 multilateral nuclear
accord from which the U.S. withdrew last year, before reimposing
sanctions.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani
blamed the United States and its regional allies on Thursday for a
suicide bombing in southeastern Iran that killed 27 members of
the country's elite Revolutionary Guards, Iranian state TV reported.
The force said on Wednesday a suicide bomber driving a vehicle laden
with explosives had attacked a bus transporting members of the Guards
in the province of Sistan-Baluchestan.
Iran can only lose by
negotiating with the United States and must be careful to limit any
dealings with some "untrustworthy" European states, the
Islamic Republic's top leader said on Wednesday. Tensions ramped
up between the United States and Iran after President Donald Trump
withdrew from a multilateral nuclear deal last year and reimposed
sanctions. The U.S. sanctions are putting unprecedented pressure
on Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last month.
Dismissing U.S. objections,
judges at the International Court of Justice on Wednesday ruled that
the U.N. body has jurisdiction to hear a claim by Iran to recover
$1.75 billion in assets frozen by Washington. The ruling opens
the way for the court to hear the case on its merits, a process that
could take years. The case filed in June 2016 centers on assets
from the Iranian national bank, Bank Markazi, seized by U.S. courts
to compensate families of victims of a 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine
Corps. base which Washington blames on Iran.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
said Thursday at a security conference in Warsaw that Iran is the top
threat in the Middle East and confronting the country is key to
reaching peace in the entire region. Pompeo met with Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the opening session at the
conference and said "pushing back" against Iran was central
to dealing with all the region's other problems.
When Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo first described this week's big international conference in
Warsaw, he left little doubt about its purpose. At the
meeting, he said last month, America and its allies would
discuss "how it is we together can get Iran to behave
like a normal nation." Now Pompeo is in Warsaw, and official
discussion is about everything butIran.
IRANIAN INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS
A suicide bomber killed at least
27 members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and wounded 13
on a bus in a restive region of southeast Iran on Wednesday, Iranian
media reported. It was among the deadliest attacks in Iran in years.
The Revolutionary Guards, an elite Iranian paramilitary force,
quickly blamed the United States for the assault, which came during
the week that Iran's leaders have been celebrating the 40th
anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, which overthrew the
American-backed shah in 1979.
Since last year, the United
States has been ramping up economic pressure on Iran and has plans to
redouble the pain later this spring with even tighter sanctions. Will
that financial chokehold be enough to strangle the Iranian economy
and bring America's bête noire to heel? The balance of expert opinion
is that there is still a lot of resistance left in Iran's
oft-proclaimed "resistance economy."
RUSSIA, SYRIA, ISRAEL, HEZBOLLAH, LEBANON & IRAN
Foreign publications reported that Hezbollah fighters
and Iranian forces set up a network of observation posts just a few
kilometers away from the Golan Heights border fence to keep track of
IDF forces in the area, according to Walla! news. If Hezbollah did
conduct this activity in the area, it would contradict Russia's
promise that foreign forces would keep their distance from the
border.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week that
Hezbollah "has active cells" in Venezuela, adding that it
and Iran are "impacting the people of Venezuela and throughout
South America. We have an obligation to take down that risk for
America." Some observers dismissed Pompeo's remarks as an
escalation in the war of words between the US and Venezuela's
President Nicolas Maduro - rhetoric without basis in reality.
Russian President Vladimir Putin
is hosting the leaders of Turkey and Iran for talks about a Syria
peace settlement as expectations mount for an imminent and final
defeat of the Islamic State group. The talks are expected to kick off
in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Thursday. Russia, a key backer of
Syrian President Bashar Assad, is getting increasingly impatient
about militants in Syria's Idlib province.
Israel's prime minister on
Wednesday sent out a belligerent rallying cry to his Arab partners at
a U.S.-backed Mideast conference, saying he planned to focus on the
"common interest" of confronting Iran. Netanyahu made the
comments during an off-the-cuff interview with reporters on a Warsaw
street, shortly after meeting Oman's foreign minister.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu startled Iranians and even the White House on Wednesday
with a strident call for Israeli-Arab action against the government
in Tehran that was translated by his office as urging "war with
Iran." Although Israeli officials tried to soften the reference
by altering the English translation, the provocative comment was
likely to further the perception that Israel, its Gulf Arab neighbors
and the United States are interested in using military action to
topple the government of Iran.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu said on Wednesday, in what could be a possible gaffe, that
his meetings with Arab leaders in Poland are "in order to
advance the common interest of combating Iran." The comments
were made to reporters on the sidelines of the Warsaw Middle East
ministerial following Netanyahu's meeting with the Sultanate of
Oman's Minister Responsible for Foreign Affairs, Yusuf bin Alawi.
GULF STATES, YEMEN, & IRAN
An Iranian-linked terrorist
group has released a statement threatening attacks on American and
British targets in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Saraya al-Ashtar, recognized
by the United States and the United Kingdom as a terrorist
organization, accused "American and British intelligence"
of operating in Bahrain, and said: "so we say to the
conspirators against our people that your support for the occupying
Khalifa regime will carry a high price for you and will make you a
legitimate target for our attacks."
OTHER FOREIGN AFFAIRS
US and Israeli leaders gathered
Wednesday in Warsaw for a conference they hope will pile pressure on
Iran, just as the country's elite Revolutionary Guards were hit by
one of the deadliest attacks in years. Opening with a dinner at the
Royal Castle in Warsaw's old town, the two-day meeting looks to
promote a US-led vision of the Middle East but is as notable for its
absences as its attendees.
France and Iran are close to
exchanging ambassadors after Paris suspended nominating an envoy to
Tehran last year over claims Iranian intelligence officials had
planned an attack on an opposition group in Paris, France's foreign
minister said. "We protested vigorously against an
attempted attack that was stopped in the Paris region which led us to
suspend the nomination of our ambassador to Tehran and Tehran
responded reciprocally," Jean-Yves Le Drian told parliament's
foreign affairs committee.
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