Eye on Iran: Iran Says Saudi Arabia Should Move to Curb Oil Price Fall

Join UANI           Top Stories Reuters: "Falling world oil prices will hurt countries across the Middle East unless Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest crude exporter, takes action to reverse the slump, Iran's deputy foreign minister told Reuters. Hossein Amir Abdollahian described Saudi Arabia's inaction in the face of a six-month slide in oil prices as a strategic mistake and said he still hoped the kingdom, Tehran's main rival in the Gulf, would respond. Oil prices closed on Wednesday at a 5-1/2 year low, registering their second-biggest ever annual decline after OPEC oil exporters, led by Saudi Arabia, chose to maintain oil output despite a global glut and calls from some of the cartel's members - including Iran and Venezuela - to cut production. 'There are several reasons for the drop of the price of oil but Saudi Arabia can take a step to have a productive role in this situation,' Abdollahian said. 'If Saudi does not help prevent the decrease in oil price ... this is a serious mistake that will have a negative result on all countries in the region,' Abdollahian said in an exclusive interview on Wednesday evening." http://t.uani.com/1BqKb6j Rudaw: "Sunni tribal leaders accuse the Iraqi government of handing over military power to Iranian advisors, referring to the killing of an Iranian commander in the country last week as further proof. 'Since the outbreak of the conflict Iran has wanted to turn Iraq into its own backyard through its agents,' said Anbar tribal chief Sheikh Abdul Qadir al-Nael. 'Now the military presence of Iran in Iraq has become clear as it has exceeded the Iranian advisers to thousand of other soldiers.' Sepah News, the news agency of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, said that Hamid Taqawi, commander of Iranian forces in Samarrah, was killed on Saturday by an Islamic State (ISIS) sniper. Sunni tribes in Anbar saw the death of the Iranian commander as Iran's entrenchment in Iraqi affairs, especially in the fight against ISIS. 'The Iraqi government is a tool in the hands of Iran,' said Sheikh al-Nael." http://t.uani.com/1wJOg1b Al-Monitor: "The new Republican-controlled Congress will likely start 2015 by demanding an up-or-down vote on any nuclear deal with Iran, a leading Senate hawk told US public radio. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told NPR he's 'prepared to vote for additional sanctions today.' But he predicted that Congress would instead initially demand a say, with more sanctions to come if a deal doesn't meet lawmakers' expectations. 'Probably the first vote in my sense will be something that will require any deal to come before Congress for approval, the way a treaty would,' Rubio told the 'Morning Edition' program in a year-end interview scheduled to run on New Year's Day. 'That's my sense of where we would initially go.' ... Rubio's description tracks closely with legislation introduced over the summer by the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. Rubio was an original co-sponsor of that bill along with Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., John McCain, R-Ariz., Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis. The bill would bar the White House from reducing sanctions as part of a deal with Iran if Congress adopts a joint resolution of disapproval." http://t.uani.com/1EUkf9k     Human Rights FT: "For Hassan Amini, Friday prayers are a weekly reminder of the 'humiliation' faced by Iranian Sunni. The dissident Sunni cleric, who lives in Iran's Kurdistan province, notes that Sunni worshippers must listen to sermons by imams appointed by Shia rulers in faraway Tehran, a reminder that they cannot choose their own religious leaders or run their own religious schools. Although Iran's constitution guarantees equal job opportunities and freedom of (recognised) religion for all Iranians, the country's Sunni say they are deprived of their rights because they are unable to choose their own clerics, have no mosque for the hundreds of thousands of Sunni in the capital and are obliged to follow the Shia religious calendar, which differs from the Sunni calendar and makes it difficult to hold some religious ceremonies. Although Iran's Sunni, estimated to number about 10m, follow a moderate school of Islam, religious discrimination is fuelling discontent, adding to fears that the minority could become prey to the extremism espoused by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), which has swept through neighbouring Iraq." http://t.uani.com/1Amrwul JPost: "The fight against foreign influences in Iran is more important than the Islamic Republic's efforts to achieve nuclear weapons, according to a senior commander in Iran's Basij militia, the paramiltary volunteer corps which is part of the Revolutionary Guards. Iran's IRNA news agency quoted Abdul Reza Dashti, the head Basij commander in Bushehr, as saying that 'the battle against satellite TV and social networks on the Internet is more important than the effort of achieving chemical and atomic weapons.' Dashti said  that the way of fighting these foreign influences is through 'education aimed at the future generation of our society.'" http://t.uani.com/1xmm5KR Opinion & Analysis UANI Executive Director David Ibsen in JPost: "As we enter January 2015 it is worth noting that negotiations over Iran's illicit nuclear program have now made an imprint on three calendar years. Nevertheless, defenders of the seemingly never-ending bargaining process between the US, its allies and Iran continue to spin the original interim agreement struck in November 2013 (the Joint Plan of Action or 'JPA') - as well as the two extensions of the agreement struck in 2014 - as a success. But missing from the spin are cold hard facts. Most notably, despite the JPA and its two extensions, Iran continues to operate centrifuges, research and develop more advanced nuclear technology and missiles, and stonewall international nuclear inspectors with impunity. At the same time, the Iranian regime's extremist behavior and meddling in the region have continued unabated, as have its brutal repression and human rights abuses at home. The unprecedented economic pressure applied to Iran has also subsided. The inability of the parties to strike a final agreement in six months as initially set out under the terms of the JPA in 2013 should make it clear that Iran cannot, or will not, take the steps necessary to verify the peaceful nature of its nuclear program. This is despite the fact that the international community has made a number of considerable concessions to Iran, including an easing of sanctions pressure and recognition of Iran's right to enrich uranium. After more than a year of negotiations, there is simply no evidence to suggest that additional attempts to incentivize the Iranians to change course through more concessions or sanctions easing will be effective. Rather, Iran's refusal to make significant and timely concessions warrants a re-imposition and ratcheting up of sanctions. Between 2010 and 2013 a broad coalition of nations imposed a wide array of effective sanctions measures. Sanctions on Iran's banking and financial sectors, for example, significantly hindered the regime's ability to access international capital markets. Western powers effectively curtailed purchases of Iranian oil, bucking conventional wisdom that reductions in global supply would shock energy markets (something reconfirmed by the recent plunge in oil prices). These measures had a significant impact. Revenues from Iranian oil exports plummeted and industries dominated by the regime such as petrochemicals, shipping and auto manufacturing were considerably degraded. The resulting pressure unquestionably drove Tehran back to the negotiating table. This trajectory of increasing pressure was stopped in its tracks by the signing of the JPA in November 2013. As a result, international trade delegations are lining up to re-enter the Iranian market and the International Monetary Fund predicts that Iran's economy is set to grow some 2.3 percent in 2015. In exchange for this economic lifeline, Iran has given little in return. If the US and its partners continue to offer concessions without requiring Iran to take substantive steps to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, then they are complicit in any Iranian scheme to exploit the negotiating process to pocket concessions (such as sanctions easing and a right to enrich nuclear material), while buying time to further develop its nuclear capabilities... Iran is using stalling tactics and the implied threats of blowing up negotiations on the one hand, and increasing mischief in the region on the other, to reap the economic and technological benefits of endless negotiations. The US must not allow this. The US has spent enough time around negotiating tables in Geneva, Vienna and New York. It is time to go back to the effective policies of sanctions and economic pressure that brought Iran to the negotiating table in the first place. Iran must understand that there will be catastrophic economic consequences resulting from a failure to reach a final and acceptable agreement. Rudyard Kipling wrote, 'if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane.' A hundred years later, the analogy is clear: we are indeed paying the Dane, an extremist theocratic terrorist state dangerously close to acquiring nuclear weapons capability. Let us heed Kipling's words." http://t.uani.com/1xedGcE Michael Rubin in CNN: "Grand jury dismissal of charges against police officers in the July 17, 2014, chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York has returned racism to the forefront of the American political debate. The entrance of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei into the fray, with tweets condemning American police and racism and using the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, has turned the debate into a farce. It's the equivalent of David Duke condemning anti-Semitism or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un condemning prison overcrowding. But perhaps Khamenei's tweets can be a teachable moment, for Iranians and Americans both, about racism and injustice in Iran... While many Western commentators consider new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani a reformer, he is anything but. Sure, he purged IRGC veterans from his cabinet, but he replaced them not with liberals but with VeVAK veterans. The increasing rate of public executions since Rouhani took office shows that neither justice nor compassion are high priority values. What about racism? Here, too, Iranians might learn a lesson from America about tolerance and honest introspection. Some of these themes were explored tangentially in the 1986 Iranian art house drama, 'Bashu, the Little Stranger.' After the dark-skinned title character flees war and finds himself on a farm in northern Iran, the woman who finds him tries to scrub the darkness off his skin (many southern Iranians have dark skin, in part a legacy of the east African slave trade). The irony here is that Iran's minister of culture at the time, one Mohammad Khatami, initially banned the film for its negative depiction of war and its feminist overtones. Shining a spotlight on Iranian racism is the rule rather than the exception. Haji Firouz, a black-faced minstrel or clown, is a fixture in Iranian New Year gatherings in Iran. In a November 11, 2008, commentary, the Borna News Agency, an outlet close to then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called U.S. President Barack Obama a 'house slave.' After Obama's election, Jomhuri-ye Eslami, a daily newspaper close to Iran's Supreme Leader and intelligence services, dismissed Obama as 'a black immigrant.' And while the Revolutionary Guards' weekly, Sobh-e Sadegh, declared after Obama's election that 'A Dark Person Rises to Remove Darkness from America,' it then continued to criticize him for hiring a Jewish chief of staff. Nor are blacks alone targeted. While some Iranians bend over backward to depict Iran as a tolerant community and home to the second largest Jewish community in the Middle East, they omit that this community is only one-sixth the size of what it was before the revolution, and declining steadily against the backdrop of both official and unofficial discrimination. Repeated rhetoric about Israel being a cancer-sometimes without any differentiation between Jews and Israel-takes a toll. In 2006, an Iranian newspaper published a cartoon depicting Azerbaijanis, Iran's largest ethnic minority, as cockroaches. In 2012, Iranian authorities in Isfahan banned Afghans from a public park. Iranian Arabs fare little better. Obama is right to say that the American willingness to confront problems head-on 'should make us optimistic.' As a Nobel peace laureate and an important voice on the world stage, Obama might cast moral and cultural equivalence aside and use his bully pulpit to respond to Khamenei, reminding the Iranian leader that the United States is far less racist than Iran." http://t.uani.com/1K6IlxK      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. 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