Friday, February 20, 2015

Eye on Iran: Inspectors Say Iran Is Evading Questions as Nuclear Talks Enter a Crucial Stage






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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

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