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AFP:
"Iran's president said Wednesday that the world needs its help to
stabilise a troubled Middle East, in remarks pointing to the wider
ramifications of a deal over Tehran's disputed nuclear programme. In a
live televised speech marking the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic
revolution, Hassan Rouhani implicitly linked ongoing nuclear talks with
world powers to resolving bloody conflicts in Iraq and Syria... And
although Iranian and US officials have said the turmoil gripping the
Middle East falls outside the remit of negotiations, analysts say both
governments acknowledge an agreement could have a broader impact. 'If
there is going to be peace and stability in the region, and terrorism is
to be uprooted, there is no other way than with the presence of the Islamic
Republic of Iran,' Rouhani said... On Wednesday, as is customary at major
rallies, US, British and Israeli flags were burned. And in a nod to the
Islamic republic's origins, Rouhani said nothing could diminish its
characteristics. 'The roots and principles of the revolution remain
unchangeable,' he said. Zarif, also at Azadi Square, said what was needed
for a historic nuclear agreement was political will from the major
powers. 'If they have the will, we can reach an agreement today. If not,
the negotiations will not succeed, even in 10 years,' he said." http://t.uani.com/16TfuNI
AP:
"Iran marked the anniversary of its 1979 Islamic Revolution on
Wednesday with massive rallies, with many chanting against the U.S. and
Israel as the country tries to reach a permanent deal with world powers
over its contested nuclear program. State television aired footage of
commemorations in Tehran and elsewhere across the country. Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani, addressing a crowd of thousands in Tehran,
pledged to 'spare no effort' to protect the Islamic Republic's rights as
it negotiates. 'The sanctions have not forced Iran to enter the talks but
the impracticality of the all-out pressures on Iran and the significant
advancements in Iran's peaceful nuclear program made the United States
come to the negotiation table,' Rouhani said. 'Iran is seeking a
'win-win' outcome in the nuclear talks with world powers.'" http://t.uani.com/1DhFDT1
Bloomberg:
"Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said he's seeking the removal of
all sanctions against his country during negotiations with world powers
on a nuclear deal. 'We want an agreement that protects our dignity and
respect,' Rouhani said in Tehran as he addressed a few thousand people at
a rally to mark the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that
deposed the U.S.-backed shah. The speed at which sanctions are rolled
back under a possible deal emerged as one of the main sticking points in
earlier rounds of talks... Rouhani said on Wednesday that since taking
office in 2013 his government had been able to escape a 'dead end' in its
relations with the outside world... At Wednesday's rally, conservative
demonstrators held placards saying 'Death to America' and chanted
slogans, including 'An agreement without conditions; America has to
remove sanctions!'" http://t.uani.com/1EY9v8U
Nuclear Program & Negotiations
Politico:
"Bob Menendez warned President Barack Obama to keep his promise to
walk away from talks with Iran if an agreement isn't reached by a March
deadline. Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who has been leading the push
to increase sanctions on Iran, said he's taking Obama at his word that
there will be no more extensions of the timeline for an agreement on
dismantling Iran's nuclear weapons program. 'It can't be an endless
string of continuations of the status quo,' Menendez said Tuesday as he
left a classified briefing for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
with White House officials. 'I don't think there is any congressional
appetite for endlessly continuing the status quo.' Obama tried to set a
hard deadline Monday. 'We're at a point where they need to make a
decision,' Obama told reporters. 'We now know enough that the issues are
no longer technical. The issues now are: does Iran have the political
will and desire to get a deal done?' ... But Iran skeptics questioned how
firm Obama's deadline really is. 'I hope he means it. The question is
will he actually do it? We'll see,' said Senate Banking Committee
chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who'd oversee any new sanctions
legislation." http://t.uani.com/1ygsFOX
AFP:
"Five of the six world powers negotiating with Iran over its nuclear
program have stepped back, leaving Washington to hammer out a deal with
Tehran, a key US lawmaker said Tuesday. 'It's evident that these
negotiations are really not P5+1 negotiations any more,' Senate Foreign
Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker said as he emerged from a
closed-door briefing by Obama administration officials on the status of
nuclear talks with Iran. 'It's really more of a bilateral negotiation
between the United States and Iran... Corker and the Democrat he replaced
as committee chairman, Senator Robert Menendez, left the latest briefing
expressing concern about the administration basing negotiations on the
need to maintain Iran's potential nuclear weapons 'breakout' time to at
least one year. 'One of my major concerns all along that is becoming more
crystal clear to me, is that we are, instead of preventing proliferation,
we are managing proliferation,' Menendez said. Having Iran just one year
away from building a bomb would be 'a different world and a far more
challenging world,' he added." http://t.uani.com/1Ch0Vw5
IranWire:
"US President Barack Obama said on Monday, February 9, that there
was no reason to extend nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 countries.
There must be an agreement on the 'bottom line,' he said - that Iran is
not pursuing a nuclear weapon - and it was time for Iran to show
'political will.' ... Many of Iran's key officials were hostile to the US
warnings. Speaker of the Parliament Ali Larijani said, 'The Americans
think they are bargaining in a fruit market. The West must convince us,
not pressure us or try to deceive us.' It is a popular argument with
those who oppose a nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 countries:
the US is deceptive and cannot be trusted. Former President Hashemi
Rafsanjani, Chairman of the Expediency Council, weighed in, referring to
some Western leaders' statements as 'irrational'. 'If we decide that they
are violating our rights,' he said, 'we will quit negotiations and bid
them farewell.' From the perspective of some Iranian politicians, this is
all too familiar. For them, the US is behaving as it always does. Former
Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Velayati, who is now the senior international
affairs advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei, said comments from Obama and Kerry
- who he dismissed as inexperienced and inconsistent - were a stalling
technique, a bid to string out negotiations for as long as
possible." http://t.uani.com/1DhI1Jf
Terrorism
Reuters:
"German exchange operator Deutsche Boerse faces a renewed legal
battle in the United States over dealings by its Clearstream subsidiary
with the central bank of Iran, U.S. court documents show. Hundreds of
U.S. plaintiffs are seeking access to $1.7 billion in assets belonging to
Iran's central bank, Bank Markazi, and held by Clearstream, owned by
Deutsche Boerse, in Luxembourg, the documents show. The potential tug of
war may test the reach of U.S. law in Europe. 'This could be a
precedent,' said Stephane Ober, who heads the Luxembourg office of law
firm Simmons&Simmons. The plaintiffs are the families of U.S.
soldiers who were killed or wounded in the bombing of the Marine barracks
in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983. A U.S. court ordered Iran to pay $2.65
billion in compensation to the families, who blamed Iran for the attack.
In a similar case in late 2013, Clearstream agreed to transfer to the
plaintiffs $1.8 billion of Bank Markazi's funds held in a Clearstream
account at Citigroup in the United States. The plaintiffs hope they can
use U.S. law to force Clearstream in Luxembourg to do the same." http://t.uani.com/1zLpKTr
Domestic
Politics
Guardian:
"A suffocating dust storm sweeping across western Iran has disrupted
life in an unprecedented fashion, closing down schools and government
offices, bringing flights to a standstill and provoking protests. A large
group of people in the western city of Ahwaz, the capital of Iran's
oil-rich Khuzestan province, gathered in protest at the government's
handling of the environmental crisis on Tuesday. Protesters demanded the
administration of President Hassan Rouhani to act, holding up placards
saying that 'healthy air is our right'. Many others took to social
networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook, sharing harrowing pictures
of how ordinary citizens are grappling with an enormous amount of dust
and sand in the air, which are reported to be tens of times above the
healthy limit. 'We are breathing dust here, not oxygen,' said one Twitter
user. 'It is really, really terrifying,' said another. As well as
Khuzestan, the dust storm has also hit other western Iranian provinces,
such as Ilam, Lorestan, Kurdistan and Kermanshah." http://t.uani.com/1McLpcv
Foreign Affairs
Bloomberg:
"The crowd packed into the soccer stadium in the Yemeni capital,
Sana'a, fell silent as three giant screens flickered to life with the
image of the country's de-facto leader, Abdulmalik al-Houthi. In his
half-hour speech, al-Houthi told thousands of supporters that he had
dissolved parliament, but he pledged to talk with all parties and make
Yemen a force for 'stability and peace.' Yet his message of
reconciliation in the Feb. 7 appearance bore a darker undertone, with a
style reminiscent of radical Shiite cleric Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon.
Al-Houthi's backers responded with chants of 'Death to America, Death to
Israel,' slogans echoed on badges, headbands and posters in the stadium.
The rise of al-Houthi is raising concerns in Saudi Arabia and among its allies
in the Gulf about the emergence of a radical Shiite front, backed by
Iran, along the southern border of the world's largest oil producer.
Saudi Arabia last year designated the Houthis -- a Shiite religious
militia founded in 2004 by al-Houthi's brother -- a terrorist group. 'The
Houthis' link to Iran is a deep worry,' said Mustafa Alani, an analyst at
the Gulf Research Center in Geneva. 'In the long-term, the Houthis could
even be more dangerous than al-Qaeda. Look at Lebanon,' where Hezbollah
has become the most powerful political force." http://t.uani.com/1KIKmzn
Opinion &
Analysis
Matthew Levitt in
Politico: "The CIA doesn't assassinate often
anymore, so when it does the agency picks its targets carefully. The
story uncovered last weekend by the Washington Post and Newsweek the
CIA's reported role in the February 2008 assassination of Hezbollah
master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh is the stuff of a Hollywood spy thriller.
A team of CIA spotters in Damascus tracking a Hezbollah terrorist wanted
for decades; a custom-made explosive shaped to kill only the target and
placed in the spare tire of an SUV parked along the target's route home;
intelligence gathered by Israelis, paired with a bomb built and tested in
North Carolina, taking out a man responsible for the deaths of more
Americans than anyone else until 9/11. And yet, while the 'what,'
'where,' 'when' and 'how' of the story shock and amaze, the 'who' should
not. Most people-including Hezbollah-assumed it was the Israelis, acting
alone, who killed Mughniyeh. The Israelis certainly had the motive, given
Mughniyeh's role in acts of terrorist targeting Israelis and Jews around
the world, from infiltrating operatives into Israel and shooting rockets
into Northern Israel, to terror attacks targeting Israeli diplomats and
local Jewish communities in places like Buenos Aires. Speaking by video
teleconference at Mughniyeh's funeral in 2008, Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah quickly threatened Israel with 'open war' for the killing of
Hajj Radwan (aka Mughniyeh). But the CIA had motive too, and for the many
within the agency-indeed, as a matter of institutional memory-the hunt
for Imad Mughniyeh was personal. Mughniyeh was behind the 1983 bombing of
the US embassy in Beirut, which took out the entire CIA station there as
well as the visiting head of the agency's Middle East analysis branch.
(In fact, word of the CIA's role in Mugniyeh's killing first leaked in a
biography of that officer, Robert Ames, by Kai Bird, published last
year.) Mughniyeh reportedly planned the 1984 bombing of the U.S. Marine
barracks and watched the attack unfold through binoculars from the top of
a nearby building. His hand touched Hezbollah plots from Germany to
Kuwait and from Argentina to Thailand. This bloody history alone would
have placed Mughniyeh in a league of his own, but there was something
else that made the hunt for Mughniyeh a deeply personal vendetta. There
was a reason more than one CIA operative reportedly refused reassignments
and passed up on promotions to remain on the Hezbollah account. His name
was Bill Buckley. Long before ISIL's current kidnapping and hostage spree
has swept up a media frenzy, Hezbollah originated the high-profile Middle
East hostage crisis. Hezbollah's kidnapping spree in Lebanon lasted
almost a decade, and it was not always a straightforward business. Some
kidnappings were carried out by Hezbollah factions or clans-each with its
own alias-in an opportunistic fashion to secure, for example, the release
of a jailed relative. Others involved poorly trained muscle to grab
people off the streets; several people were kidnapped because they were
mistaken for American or French citizens. Captors assigned to guard the
Western prisoners were often 'unsophisticated but fanatic Muslims,' as
one captive put it. In contrast, the March 1984 abduction of CIA station
chief William Buckley indicated careful target selection and operational
surveillance, likely supported by Iranian intelligence. According to one
account, some of the intelligence Hezbollah used to identify Buckley as
the local CIA chief was provided by Iran based on materials seized during
the US embassy takeover in Iran in 1979. As for Buckley, he was sent to
Beirut in 1983 to set up a new CIA station after the previous one had
been decimated in the April US embassy bombing. His kidnapping was a
devastating blow to the CIA. 'Bill Buckley being taken basically closed
down CIA intelligence activities in the country,' commented one senior
CIA official. But the CIA had adequate sources to determine within six months
that Hezbollah was holding Buckley. For CIA director William Casey,
finding Buckley was an absolute priority, the CIA official added. 'It
drove him almost to the ends of the earth to find ways of getting Buckley
back, to deal with anyone in any form, in any shape, in any way, to get
Buckley back. He failed at that, but it was a driving motivation in
Iran-Contra,' the official said. 'We even dealt with the devil... the
Iranians, who sponsored Hezbollah, who sponsored the kidnapping and
eventual murder of Bill Buckley.'" http://t.uani.com/1ygx9Fs
John Hannah in FP:
"One of the more astounding features of the current controversy over
the Iran nuclear negotiations is the extent to which Congress is being
set up to take the blame if the talks go south. A Senate proposal to
impose new sanctions on Iran - mind you, if and only if the parties fail
to reach a comprehensive deal by a July deadline that they themselves
set; and if and only if President Obama decides not to exercise his
waiver authority because he's unable to certify that progress is being
made - has somehow become a mortal threat to world peace. According to
the president, himself, such deadline-triggered sanctions would be viewed
by Iran and our international partners as a supreme act of bad faith.
Sanctions would unravel. Iran would walk away from the table and
accelerate its nuclear program. The risk of war would rise dangerously.
This campaign to demonize Congress is deeply troubling for any number of
reasons... Beyond the issue of the nuclear talks, Tehran has exploited
Obama's over-eagerness for a deal by going on a rampage across the Middle
East to advance its hegemonic agenda and threaten U.S. allies. Iran's
Revolutionary Guards have all but invaded Syria and Iraq - the latter
with what amounts to an American blessing. On the Golan Heights, they and
their Hezbollah proxies are looking to establish a new base of operations
on Israel's borders. In Yemen, the former government - a critical U.S.
counter-terrorism partner - has just been routed by Iranian-backed
rebels. Yet good luck searching for a serious presidential word - much
less any credible action - warning Iran off its current offensive. On the
contrary, you're far more likely to find him bleating on to some
sympathetic journalist for helping the Islamic Republic fulfill its
potential as 'a very successful regional power.' And then there's the
nuclear issue itself. Where to begin? Since the JPOA was agreed almost 15
months ago, Iran has methodically pushed every boundary, exploited every loophole,
taken advantage of every oversight in the interim deal to advance its
nuclear program. Even the short list is depressingly long... That is the
context for understanding the disturbing paradox we see today. On the one
hand, an Iran on the march throughout the region, plotting terror attacks
in the Western Hemisphere, and actively seeking to advance key elements
of its nuclear program in the middle of a negotiation whose very purpose
is to end that program - yet greeted with nary a word of serious opposition
from the president of the United States. On the other hand, an
increasingly anxious Congress contemplating a rear-guard action to
increase U.S. leverage and stop Iran's weapons program before it's too
late - smeared at every turn as warmongers and political opportunists,
apparently posing the single greatest threat to peace in our time.
Something is indeed terribly amiss with this picture. Yet the prospects
for correction at this late date seem, unfortunately, exceedingly dim.
The president appears hell-bent on the course he has chosen and Congress,
for all its valiant efforts over the years, looks poorly equipped to
outmatch him in the head-to-head confrontation that he has forced. Is
there a Scoop Jackson among them, or a Republican contender for 2016 with
the chops to take the president on, sound the alarm and have the country
respond? There's no sign of them yet. As a result, while it may be true
that nothing is written, it increasingly looks like Iran's future as a
nuclear-threshold state might be the next closest thing." http://t.uani.com/16SaqsF
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