Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Eye on Iran: Senator Bob Corker May Move on Iran Nuclear Bill Next Week






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Politico: "The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is planning to act as soon as next week on a bipartisan bill that would allow Congress to approve or reject any nuclear agreement that President Barack Obama reaches with Iran. The panel's chairman, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), said Monday he hopes to move forward on the measure as early as March 25, one day after a rough deadline set by the White House for a deal to wind down Iran's nuclear program. The move would be a stern rebuke to the president: In a letter released last weekend, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough told Corker that moving on his Iran legislation would 'potentially prevent any deal from succeeding.' 'That is my hope, yes,' Corker said when asked if he will move forward next week. 'I just think waiting until the 25th certainly should accommodate many of the Democrats' ... concern. I would hope to mark it up next Tuesday or Wednesday.' Given the crowded Senate calendar - only two weeks remain until a lengthy Easter break - Corker doesn't expect his bill to have any chance of reaching the Senate floor before mid-April. Corker also warned that he had to work out scheduling the markup of his legislation with ranking member Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who led a group of 10 Democrats in vowing not to move on the Corker legislation until March 24." http://t.uani.com/1BQ8Mo3

AP: "Iranian negotiators meeting with U.S. officials Monday expressed concern over a letter from Senate Republicans warning that a nuclear deal with President Obama might not outlast his time in office. A senior administration official said the Iranians broached the subject in the almost five hours of discussions led by Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif... The negotiators face a self-imposed deadline of March 31, set when an interim agreement was extended in November... 'We are trying to get there. But, quite frankly, we still do not know if we will be able to,' the administration official said. 'Iran still has to make some very tough and necessary choices to address the significant concerns that remain about its nuclear program.'" http://t.uani.com/1CpcfKS

NYT: "Iran's use of the death penalty is rising and its repression of political critics is worsening despite promises by President Hassan Rouhani of a less restrictive society, a United Nations human rights monitor said on Monday... Iran has one of the highest execution rates in the world and continues 'to harass, arrest, prosecute and imprison members of civil society who express criticism of the government or who publicly deviate from officially sanctioned narratives,' Mr. Shaheed told reporters in Geneva... Over all, he said, human rights in Iran have deteriorated since Mr. Rouhani took office in 2013, either because of hard-liners who have sought to undermine him, or because of his insufficient attention to such issues. Mr. Shaheed pointed to an accelerating pace of executions, tighter constraints on political freedoms and the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities. Iran executed 753 people in 2014, including at least 13 juveniles, and 252 people in the first 10 weeks of this year, Mr. Shaheed said. Most were sentenced for drug-related offenses, which under international law are not considered sufficiently grave to warrant capital punishment. Some of those who received the death penalty appeared linked to political offenses, Mr. Shaheed said, including an individual executed for contributing financially to a television station the government deemed hostile." http://t.uani.com/1GitFIi

   
Nuclear Program & Negotiations

Reuters: "After months of deadlock, there have been areas of progress in the talks recently, Iranian, U.S. and European officials say. The number of enrichment centrifuges Iran wants to operate over the long term, one of the biggest sticking points in the talks from the beginning, is likely resolvable if Tehran can keep around 6,500 of the machines that purify uranium, they say. There are also discussions about the size of Iran's uranium stockpiles and how much would be relocated to Russia or another country, Western officials say. Originally, Iran wanted to enrich 2.5 tonnes of uranium per year, but could settle at half a tonne, a senior Iranian official said. The remainder would be turned into fuel rods or sent to Russia, he added. Recently the United States and France agreed to consider the possibility of a swift suspension of U.N. nuclear sanctions at the outset of any deal, in addition to freezing some of the most painful U.S. and European energy and financial sanctions." http://t.uani.com/1wVbVme

Reuters: "Iran and major world powers have been making headway in identifying technical options for a historic nuclear deal as an end-March deadline nears but difficult issues must still be addressed, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday... 'We have definitely made progress in terms of identifying technical options for each of the major areas,' the U.S. official told reporters on condition of anonymity. 'There is no way around it. We still have a ways to go ... But even within this space, we have some tough issues to address.' The official said any framework agreement settled this month would need to have key details, including numbers. 'If there is an agreement, I don't see how it could be meaningful without having some quantitative dimensions,' he said, without elaborating." http://t.uani.com/1DwotTF

AFP: "Iranian MPs will not derail a nuclear deal with the West, as US lawmakers have threatened to, if the country's supreme leader gives it his backing, parliament's top official said Monday. Speaker Ali Larijani said lawmakers and the government would be unified if an agreement gets the nod from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on all policy matters in the Islamic republic. 'Parliament and the government are following the same path,' Larijani told reporters. 'We don't have problems like those in the United States,' he said, alluding to the split between President Barack Obama's White House and the US Congress over nuclear talks... Larijani lambasted a letter from Republican senators last week that said a final agreement could be rescinded by another US administration after Obama leaves the White House. 'What the US Congress did was really amateurish,' Larijani said." http://t.uani.com/1BMpS4V

Vice: "'You can't have a discussion about Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability without talking about the nature of the Iranian regime and its elected officials,' says David Ibsen, executive director of United Against a Nuclear Iran, a...US organization with a name that's pretty self-explanatory. 'If you look at... how they treat their own population, you're going to see some concerning things that certainly impact young people living in the country... I don't think anyone believes all Iranians think Death to America is a great slogan. But unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear policy or state support of terrorism by the regime and individuals who are in power, their brutality is what you have to observe when you decide whether Iran is to be trusted.'" http://t.uani.com/18C7sJW

Sanctions Relief

AP: "Iran said it began producing more natural gas from a giant field shared with Qatar on Tuesday as part of efforts to expand gas production and alleviate setbacks caused by international sanctions... During a ceremony marking inauguration of the expansion project, President Hassan Rouhani claimed the increased gas production proved Western sanctions, imposed over Iran's s disputed nuclear program, were ineffective. 'We succeeded in finalizing huge projects during the sanctions,' said Rouhani. 'By inaugurating this project, we announce to the world that the era of pressures ... is over.'" http://t.uani.com/19vzmIG

Tehran Times: "Iran's gross domestic product grew by 3.6 percent in the first nine months of the current Iranian calendar year(March 21- December 21, 2014), compared to the same period last year, the Central Bank of Iran reported... On March 10, Mohammad Baqer Nobakht, the head of Iran's Management and Planning Organization, said the country's GDP is forecast to grow 2.5 percent in the next Iranian calendar year, which begins on March 21... The World Bank forecasted in its Global Economic Prospects report that Iran's GDP will grow 2 percent and 2.3 percent in 2015 and 2016, respectively." http://t.uani.com/1ATdYTj

Press TV (Iran): "Iran's exchange market on Sunday witnessed an unprecedented appreciation of the Iranian rial against the US dollar in what many see as the result of an overwhelming positive speculation by the country's businesses toward the outcomes of nuclear talks now underway in Lausanne, Switzerland. Media reports say the exchange rate for the US dollar that was 35,700 rials two weeks ago has declined to as low as 31,800 rials at the end of the trading on Sunday. This marks a fall of around 11 percent." http://t.uani.com/1EYYfte

Reuters: "South Korea's imports of Iranian crude oil dropped 50 percent in February from a year earlier, and the country's oil shipments from the OPEC country in the first two months of this year met international sanction requirements. Seoul imported 557,174 tonnes of crude oil from Tehran last month, or 145,860 barrels per day (bpd), compared with 1.1 million tonnes a year ago, preliminary customs data from the world's fifth-largest crude oil importer showed on Sunday. The world's fifth-largest crude importer brought 830,800 tonnes or 103,216 bpd of crude from the Middle Eastern country in the first two months of this year, below last year's average at 125,000 (bpd). Iranian crude shipments in 2014 were 6.2 million tonnes, or 124,497 bpd, down 7.1 percent from the 2013 average of 134,000 bpd, according to the data and Reuters calculations in January." http://t.uani.com/1EYPWxC 

Iraq Crisis

NYT: "Iran has deployed advanced rockets and missiles to Iraq to help fight the Islamic State in Tikrit, a significant escalation of firepower and another sign of Iran's growing influence in Iraq. United States intelligence agencies detected the deployments in the past few weeks as Iraq was marshaling a force of 30,000 troops - two-thirds of them Shiite militias largely trained and equipped by Iran, according to three American officials. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence reports on Iran. Iran has not yet launched any of the weapons, but American officials fear the rockets and missiles could further inflame sectarian tensions and cause civilian casualties because they are not precision guided. Their deployment is another dilemma for the Obama administration as it trains and equips the Iraqi military and security services to help defeat the Islamic State, but unlike Iran is unwilling to commit fighters and advisers who join Iraqi forces in the field." http://t.uani.com/1EYRozW

Human Rights

NYT: "Increasingly desperate to return to the United States, a Marine veteran of Iranian descent who has been incarcerated in Iran for three and a half years has renounced his Iranian citizenship, requested deportation and accused Iran of using American prisoners as 'bargaining chips,' his family said Monday. 'Once deported, he promises never to return,' the family of the Marine veteran, Amir Hekmati, a dual citizen of the United States and Iran, said in a statement. The statement also detailed what it described as a litany of previously undisclosed torture and other abuses - including feet whippings, Taser hits to the kidneys, sleep deprivation and extended solitary confinement - suffered by Mr. Hekmati in the Iranian penal system since he was arrested in August 2011." http://t.uani.com/1BQ3rgG  

Foreign Affairs

NBC News: "A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who served in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations said Sunday that Iran poses 'a much more difficult challenge' than the threat posed by the terrorist group ISIS. Iran is an 'incredibly complex country that we don't understand very well. We've had no relations with them for 35 years,' Retired Adm. Michael Mullen said on NBC's 'Meet the Press.' Mullen said the United States will have to accept the role Iranian militias play in the fight against ISIS in northern Iraq. While the number one priority is to defeat ISIS, Mullen said it's worth remembering that the Iranian regime committed acts of terrorism, which led to the war in Iraq." http://t.uani.com/1Cpd4U8

Opinion & Analysis

Michael Knights in Foreign Affairs: "A battle is unfolding in Saddam Hussein's old tribal capital of Tikrit. Unthinkable just a decade ago, the main government forces leading the battle are Shiite fighters -- the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs) that are under the control of militia leaders. These forces' main partners are Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah. U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey has called the situation 'the most overt conduct of Iranian support' since the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) began. But it doesn't have to be a bad thing, he hinted, as long as such forces refrain from inflaming sectarian tensions. His comments get to the heart of the debate over Iran's role in Iraq and the appropriate division of labor between the U.S.-led international coalition and Tehran in the fight against ISIS. The White House seems to view growing Iranian involvement in the war as a reality that cannot be wished away, which is probably true, but also as a step forward in U.S.-Iranian relations, which is arguably naive. Events on the ground in eastern Iraq suggest a different way of looking at the issue. If anything, the battle for Tikrit has shown that there is a whole side of the war from which the international community has been deliberately excluded. Iran and its Iraqi proxies have been carving out a zone of influence in eastern Iraq for well over a decade. And this zone, as Dempsey noted, is expanding. Iraq, in short, could be experiencing what Lebanon did decades ago as Hezbollah fighters took the Bekaa Valley. In this case, the land in question is Mesopotamia and the forces are PMUs, but the result will be the same: a swath of land in which the government is gradually ceding ground to powerful paramilitary factions with strong terrorist connections. There is a natural blending of Iraq and Iran in their shared border provinces. Large Shiite populations extend northwest from Baghdad to Iran along the Diyala River Valley. To the southeast are the largely Shiite border provinces of Wasit and Maysan, where the border with Iran dissolves into ungovernable marshes. Trade, smuggling, and religious pilgrimages along age-old crossing points and rivers permanently link these places. But since 2003 Iran has gone beyond these traditional ties by enmeshing the border provinces through subsidizing shared electricity grids, medical services, and refined oil products. Eastern Iraq has also been a literal and figurative battlefield between Iranian-backed Iraqi militants and the Iraqi state... Indeed, one of the least recognized facts about the fall of the Saddam government in 2003 was that two invasions took place: one from the south by the U.S.-led coalition and another from Iran, down the Diyala River Valley, by Iranian-backed Badr columns. During the Iran-Iraq War, the Badr Corps had fought as a 10,000-strong division alongside the Iranian military against Saddam's government; they did it again in 2003." http://t.uani.com/1BMuIzf

UANI Advisory Board Member Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest: "But our second point, initially very controversial but now acknowledged by Secretary Kerry, is that as a matter of law, the senators are right. Any deal negotiated between President Obama and Iran will not be legally binding-either on the United States or Iran. The President has the authority to bind himself through an agreement with a foreign power; he does not have the authority to bind the Congress, the courts, or his successors. The Iranians, it seems clear from their initial reaction, did not fully understand this before the senatorial letter and the State Department acknowledgement. Now they do. As a matter of practice, the question of how binding President Obama's John Hancock on an MOU with Iran will be is a tricky one. Since the agreement isn't just with Iran, but with the Permanent Members of the Security Council and Germany, there will be a real cost to American credibility if we try to back out of it later. If the U.S. backs out of the deal, Iran can also walk away from its commitments-and there is no guarantee that other countries will support any sanctions that the United States would like to reimpose. And any president who reneges on President Obama's pledge would be undercutting the credibility of any executive agreements he or she might make as well. All this makes the President's signature much more than an empty gesture, and by suggesting that any Iran deal would be embedded in a Security Council Resolution, the administration has opened the door to an even more contentious U.S. debate. But however the deal is finally hammered out, Iran policy is so contentious and the stakes are so high that one simply cannot rule out the possibility that at some point in the future the United States would repudiate any agreement that President Obama may make. While the Cotton letter is the center of the current Iran uproar, the real question isn't whether the Senators did a smart thing by sending their open letter to Iran, but whether President Obama is pursuing a smart and sustainable policy with respect to Iran." http://t.uani.com/1MISuyU

David B. Rivkin, Jr. & Lee A. Casey in TNI: "The recent open letter by 47 Republican Senators, putting Iran on notice that the US Constitution fundamentally limits the President's ability unilaterally to conclude a durable nuclear weapons agreement, has prompted strident criticisms from both the American and Iranian officials, giving some tantalizing hints on how a 'nuclear deal' with Iran will be achieved. Despite some carefully-phrased statements to the contrary, it appears that the administration plans to evade the Constitution's clear requirement that the Senate approve all treaties by having the UN Security Council adopt a resolution implementing the deal... This deception aside, the Security Council-centric approach, while solving some of the Administration's political problems, would impose very significant long-term costs on the United States, and would not ultimately achieve a binding deal that cannot be altered. The Constitution's framers purposely divided the treaty-making power between the president and Senate, requiring that the Senate consent to any treaty by a two-thirds supermajority, both to limit presidential power and to ensure that all such international undertakings by the United States enjoyed broad domestic support. This bedrock requirement cannot be avoided by claiming that an agreement ordering critical aspects of our relationship with another country is somehow not a 'treaty,' or by reference to another treaty like the UN Charter. Ratification of the Charter committed the United States, like other UN members, to comply with certain Security Council resolutions and those resolutions may impose binding international obligations on the United States. Specifically, Chapter VII of the Charter indicates that the 'Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace...and shall...decide what measures should be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.' By invoking Chapter VII, the administration intends to bypass the Senate and Congress as a whole. The Charter, of course, does not and cannot reorder the Constitution's division of power between Congress and the president. As the Supreme Court noted in a recent case, involving U.S. obligations to implement International Court of Justice decisions under the Charter, where it found that ICJ decisions were not automatically binding as a matter of domestic law '[t]he President may comply with the treaty's obligations by some other means, so long as they are consistent with the Constitution.' Nevertheless, having the Security Council drive an Iranian agreement will have several deleterious legal and policy consequences. First, while the Iranian nuclear deal would not be binding on the United States as a 'signatory' to the agreement, rendering Secretary Kerry's statement to this effect technically correct but utterly misleading, it would bind the United States as a UN member. Second, as is common with Chapter VII resolutions, the Iranian nuclear weapons resolution would keep the Council seized of the matter. This means that the resolution could be revised only by future Security Council action, which the United States cannot guarantee. For example, the United States and its allies would be unable to extend the proposed 10-year sunset provision, even if that became necessary based on Iranian conduct, since Iran would surely oppose the measure with the backing of Russia and China, who can veto any change. This point is worth emphasizing, since the administration's main oft-articulated reason for choosing the 10-year time frame for the nuclear deal is its belief that over this time period Iran's regime would lose its revolutionary character and become a responsible regional power. This optimistic assumption has been strongly challenged by Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states, who point out that Tehran hasn't mellowed over the last several decades." http://t.uani.com/1CrtMns
        

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.

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