The U.S. Treasury Department’s claim of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda, which had become a key argument by right-wing activists who support war against Iran, has been discredited by former intelligence officials in the wake of publication of documents from Osama bin Laden’s files revealing a high level of antagonism between Al-Qaeda and Iran.

Three former intelligence officials with experience on Near East and South Asia told IPS they regard Treasury’s claim of a secret agreement between Iran and Al-Qaeda as false and misleading.

That claim was presented in a way that suggested it was supported by intelligence. It now appears, however, to have been merely a propaganda line designed to support the Barack Obama administration’s strategy of diplomatic coercion on Iran.

Under Secretary of Treasury David S. Cohen announced last July that the department was “exposing Iran’s secret deal with Al-Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” The charge was introduced in connection with the designation of an Al-Qaeda official named Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions.

The Treasury claim has been embraced by the right-wing Weekly Standard and others aligned with hardline Israeli views on Iran, as primary source evidence of an alliance between Iran and Al-Qaeda.

But Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, told IPS the allegation of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda “has never been backed up by any evidence that would justify such a term” and that it is “a highly misleading characterisation of interaction between Iran and Al-Qaeda….”

Pillar said the recently released bin Laden documents “not only do not demonstrate any agreement in which Iran condoned or facilitated operations by Al-Qaeda, they contradict the notion that there was any such agreement.”

“I’ve never seen anything that suggests that happened,” said another former intelligence official, referring to an Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. “I’m very sceptical about that.”

A third former intelligence official said Treasury’s “secret deal” claim “doesn’t pass the BS test” and noted that it is perfectly aligned with the Obama administration’s policy of pressure on Iran.

The official said the Treasury Department’s push for its “secret deal” line is emblematic of a larger split in the intelligence community between those for whom intelligence is secondary to their role in “counterterrorism” policy and the rest of the community.

“The counterterrorism types are like used car salesmen,” the former official told IPS. “They are always overselling something. They have to show that they are doing important work.”

The actual text of the Jul. 28, 2011 “designation” of Yasin al-Suri suggests that the claim of such a “secret deal” is merely a political spin on the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri on the release of prisoners.

It says that Yasin al Suri is an Al-Qaeda facilitator “living and operating in Iran under agreement between Al-Qaeda and the Iranian government”. Iranian authorities, it said, “maintain a relationship with (al-Suri) and have permitted him to operate within Iran’s borders since 2005”.

The designation offers no other evidence of an “agreement” except for the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri in arranging the releases of Al-Qaeda prisoners from Iranian detention and their transfer to Pakistan.

The official notice of a 10-million-dollar reward for al-Suri on the website of the “Rewards for Justice” programme under the Diplomatic Security office of the State Department also indicates that the only “agreement” between Iran and Al-Qaeda has been to exchange prisoners.

“Working with the Iranian government,” it said, “al-Suri arranges the release of al Qaeda personnel from Iranian prisons. When al Qaeda operatives are released, the Iranian government transfers them to al- Suri, who then facilitates their travel to Pakistan.”

Neither the Treasury Department nor the State Department, which joined the February 2012 press briefing on the reward for finding al- Suri, referred to the fact that Iran had been forced to deal with al- Suri and to release Al-Qaeda detainees in order to obtain the release of the Iranian diplomat kidnapped by Pakistani allies of Al-Qaeda in Peshawar, Pakistan in November 2008.

In one of the documents taken from the Abbottabad compound and published by West Point’s Counter-Terrorism Center last week, a senior Al Qaeda official wrote, “We believe that our efforts, which included escalating a political and media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw (we are capable of), to be among the reasons that led them to expedite (the release of these prisoners).”

In response to the IPS request for clarification of the “secret agreement” claim, John Sullivan, a spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, declined to answer any questions on the subject or to allow IPS to interview Eytan Fisch, the assistant director of the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence office.

In briefing journalists on al-Suri last February, Fisch had again invoked the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda “secret agreement” last February.

Sullivan defended the Treasury Department’s position on the issue, however, against criticism based on the publication of the bin Laden documents. “We based our action on Yasin al-Suri on a broad array of information that far exceeds what was recently made public,” Sullivan said in an e-mail to IPS.

Asked about the hint by the Treasury spokesman that department officials used still-classified material as the basis for the claim of a “secret agreement”, former national intelligence officer Pillar called it “disingenuous”.

The origins of the Treasury Department’s “secret deal” claim indicate that it was intended to generate press stories that would increase political and government support for pressure on Iran through economic sanctions and military threats.

The designation of Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions Jul. 28, 2011 did not have any impact on Al-Qaeda funding. The objective was to allow Treasury to generate press coverage of its charge of a secret Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. The timing of the move coincided with a shift in Obama administration strategy from diplomatic engagement to maximising pressure on Iran.

During the period when neoconservatives were pushing for an explicit policy of support for regime change in Iran during the first George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials frequently talked as though any Al-Qaeda presence in Iran was evidence of Iran’s cooperation with the terrorist organisation.

But as ABC News reported on May 29, 2008, Bush administration officials were acknowledging privately that they were not complaining about Iranian policy toward Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran, because Iran had “kept these al Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate”.

One official said Al-Qaeda officials under Iranian control, “some of whom are quite important,” were “essentially on ice”.

Israel has continued, however, to use its relations with friendly news media, especially in the UK, to generate disinformation about alleged joint Iranian-Al Qaeda planning for terrorist actions.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News carried a story Feb. 15, 2012 citing “intelligence sources” from an unnamed state as suggesting that Iran had been supplying Al-Qaeda with “training in the use of advanced explosives” as well as some funding and a safe haven “as part of a deal first worked out in 2009….”

The report quoted the intelligence sources as saying that Iran wanted to use the threat of Al-Qaeda retaliation against Western targets as “revenge for any military strike against Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

After weeks of wrangling between the Iranian parliament and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the appointment of a highly controversial former judge to direct the country’s Social Security Organisation, the parliament has once again failed to impose its will on the president.

Today, the former judge, Saeed Mortazavi, who has been indicted for serious human rights abuses, including “complicity in murder”, remains at his post despite a promise to key members of Parliament that he would resign.

The latest turn of events has led to widespread speculation on the role that Mortazavi may be playing between Ahmadinejad and Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and has highlighted both the opacity and complexity of the regime.

The public display of discord went as far as a procedural call for the impeachment of Mortazavi’s boss, Minister of Labour and Welfare Abdolreza Sheikholeslami, who hinted that Mortazavi’s appointment had been imposed on him by the president.

The parliament cannot actually remove Mortazavi, as its impeachment privileges do not include sub-ministerial appointments. But MPs ultimately decided not to impeach the minister in late April, after former speaker of the parliament Gholamali Haddad Adel publicly stated that Mortazavi had taken an “oath of honour” to resign.

Although Mortazavi did not show up to work for a few days, this lasted only a short while. He told one journalist that MPs were lying about his resignation.

The series of events have badly embarrassed Haddad Adel, whose efforts to resolve the conflict were initially seen as an attempt to increase his chances of becoming speaker of the newly elected parliament.

The 45-year-old Mortazavi is a highly controversial figure in the Islamic Republic. He became a judge when he was just 20 years old, despite lacking legal training, and rapidly climbed the judicial ladder.

He ended up as the chief press judge during the reformist era (1997- 2005) and was responsible for the closure of many reformist papers and the arrest of journalists and bloggers. Repeated complaints about his extralegal activities, including those lodged by members of the reformist members of parliament, went nowhere.

In 2002, Mortazavi was chosen as Tehran’s chief prosecutor, and it was in this position that he was later accused of killing Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist. Evidence of physical abuse again led members of parliament to attempt Mortazavi’s removal, but to no avail.

At that time, the prominent reformist MP Mohsen Armin explicitly commented upon the possibility of support for Mortazavi from higher levels. “I know that Judge Mortazavi is not at the level to engage in such acts without support,” Armin said.

Conservatives too have been unhappy with Mortazavi, accusing him of ethical and financial misconduct. In 2008, when the illegal sale of questions for the competitive entrance examination to Iran’s largest private university, the Azad University, was being investigated, the hard-line MP Alireza Zakani accused Mortazavi of destroying the evidence of the crime and losing key files that eventually made the pursuit of the case impossible.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2009 election, Mortazavi was identified as being responsible for sending peaceful demonstrators to the overcrowded Kahrizak prison, where prisoners were severely mistreated, resulting in the deaths of five young men.

Even Khamenei, who many have identified as one of Mortazavi’s main supporters, acknowledged violations at that time, ordering the closure of Kahrizak and promising prosecutions. But Mortazavi was merely demoted from his position as prosecutor general and continued working as deputy prosecutor.

It was only in 2010, following a parliamentary commission’s probes of the Kahrizak affair, that Mortazavi was finally relieved of his post. Eventually he was indicted for “complicity in murder”, “violation of citizens’ rights”, and “dishonouring Iran’s security forces”.

Yet even as these charges awaited prosecution, Ahmadinejad appointed Mortazavi to head the Task Force on Drug Trafficking. In March 2012, Ahmadinejad further elevated Mortazavi to his most recent posting, as director of the Social Security Organisation, the government’s largest social welfare agency.

It was this move that created an uproar in the parliament, particularly since Mortazavi had no background in running such a large agency.

Yet with Mortazavi continuing in his position, many are increasingly coming to believe that his survival could not be possible without direct support from Ayatollah Khamenei. In this, observers point to Haddad Adel’s intervention to avert the ministerial impeachment, highlighting the fact that Hadded Adel’s daughter is married to Khamenei’s son.

According to the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji, Mortazavi is one of many to have carried out Khamenei’s orders – and who is now being protected by the Leader.

Others argue that given the key posts that Mortazavi has held in the past, the government is now forced to deal with him leniently, lest he reveal regime secrets. The opposition website Jaras has even suggested that Mortazavi has left secretive material on a CD in the United States, to be released if necessary.

Some dismiss such conspiracies. A university professor, speaking anonymously, doubts that Khamenei’s direct orders were behind Kazemi’s murder, the Kahrizak crimes, or even Mortazavi’s appointment to the Social Security Organisation.

“To the same extent that Ayatollah Khamenei did not know about these crimes or appointments in advance, he is incapable of punishing individuals upon whom he relies for the repression of his opponents,” the professor says.

The issue is a “management problem”, he suggests, along with an over- reliance on repressive forces. “People like Ahmadinejad and Mortazavi have made it their business to create dossiers on others, including Khamenei himself,” the professor notes.

“Khamenei is forced to remain quiet on Mortazavi out of the fear of what he may reveal. Meanwhile, by hiring Mortazavi, Ahmadinejad essentially keeps under his wing a walking dossier against the Leader.”

If on Sep. 4, exit polls confirm what opinion polls currently predict – the reinstatement of a right-wing government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu – Israelis might still ask themselves, what was this general election about?

The one who, this week behind the scene, will call for the dissolution of the Knesset parliament, and thus will lead the demise of the Netanyahu-led coalition is no one but Netanyahu himself.

Yet, the current government is stable, and powerful; the economy is booming, at least in macro-economic terms. So, why elections now and not in November 2013 as planned, pundits ask?

The two-state solution loathed by so many amongst the Prime Minister’s coalition partners (and maybe also by himself) seems unattainable, even farther away than it was in 2009 when Netanyahu was chosen to lead his country.

Three years on, the Israeli leader has successfully repelled U.S. pressures to provide at least a modicum of decorum on a solution to the conflict with the Palestinians; settlements are in full bloom.

And, he’s managed to turn the tables. Not the threat of an anti-Israel “diplomatic tsunami” as a result of a unilateral Palestinian bid for statehood recognition at the United Nations, but that of unilateral Israeli action against Iran’s suspicious nuclear programme has prompted the Security Council to vote more anti- Iran economic sanctions.

Domestically, the Israeli leader seems to be doing fine. Though observing the seven-day mourning period in self-imposed silence for the passing away of his father Bentzion Netanyahu at 102 years of age, he read last week’s headlines that he is still perceived as most suited to lead Israel.

According to a poll published in the liberal daily Haaretz, he enjoys 48 percent support amongst respondents.

Moreover, an absolute majority (51 percent) disagree with the somehow contemptuous assessment of former Shin Bet internal security chief Yuval Diskin that the “messianic” leadership of both Netanyahu and his defence minister can’t be trusted as far as Iran is concerned. In contrast, only 25 percent agree with the damning opinion.

Diskin was in charge of an anti-terror apparatus. But his statement is being corroborated by former security and political ‘gurus’, and by surveys showing steady opposition to a unilateral strike on Iran. Only between 19 percent and 31 percent would favour such course of action.

Yet, all polls point to Netanyahu’s re-election – which seems to indicate that most Israelis might not value Netanyahu’s threat of military action against Iran as more than what it ought to be – a bluff destined to force the U.S. into military action of its own.

The catalyst for early elections is in the so-called ‘Tal Law’ which exempts ultra-Orthodox religious students from mandatory military service. In February, the controversial law was ruled unconstitutional by the High Court of Justice, and is to expire in August. The government has been forced to grapple with the legislation of a new enlistment law. It’s a problematic endeavour, given the current coalition that includes ultra-orthodox ministers determined to preserve their constituency’s privileges.

But there’s a legal hitch. According to the Knesset’s legal advisor, early elections automatically extend laws abrogated by the High Court to at least three months into the new parliament – this, in order to avoid hasty enactments of demagogic laws by legislators motivated by immediate electoral gains.

The legal opinion relies on a clause of one of the so-called ‘Basic Laws’. Due to the absence of a clear-cut separation between state and religion, the Jewish State has no constitution per se but a set of fundamental laws.

So, if the enlistment law doesn’t constitute the real reason behind elections, then what is?

If elections are to be held this summer, Iran’s nuclear threat might not be that urgent, note analysts. Hence, political wisdom has it that from now on until September, Netanyahu’s election campaign will neutralise any likelihood of a military campaign against Iran.

Though in 1981, former prime minister Menachem Begin’s decision to attack the Iraqi nuclear reactor Osirak led to his re-election, a strike on Iran’s nuclear installations might expose Netanyahu to worldwide accusations that he sabotaged the effectiveness of economic sanctions for the sake of, and held world peace hostage to, his own political future.

Besides, were such attack to fail, or to engulf Israel in an all-out war, his chance of re-election might be compromised.

Netanyahu is not a ‘va-t-en-guerre’ leader, experts concur. He’s excellent at one thing – bluffing and doing nothing, his critics say.

That precisely may be the reason why the incumbent prime minister is favoured as the candidate to succeed himself. An aficionado of polls, Netanyahu knows it’s safer to keep Iran on the backburner.

He’ll insist that Tehran’s nuclear intentions – not the fast-approaching impossibility of achieving a two- state solution to the conflict with the Palestinian that would ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic state – constitute the real existential threat to Israel’s security; and he’ll do nothing before Election Day.

But what if Netanyahu risks an attack on Iran during the interim period between Sep. 4 and Nov. 6? That would surely be perceived as gross interference in U.S. elections, augmenting the incumbent president’s discernible loathing of the Israeli leader.

That’s exactly the scenario Netanyahu might envision – U.S. President Barack Obama’s re-election. And that might be the true reason behind his decision to advance elections – the conviction that being at the helm for four more years will already now compel Obama to take into account his unyielding vision, and that a unilateral attack on Iran is still a viable option.

During the interim period between Israeli and U.S. election days, Netanyahu believes he’ll be in a better position to project the image that he can call the shots on Iran. His reaffirmed power would then be much more than ‘Much Ado about Nothing’.

Last week, in a lecture hall at the University of Illinois Chicago, 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi took a reality many of us working in human rights know well, and drove it home with a story from her own nation, a land her government says she is no longer allowed to call home.

She reminded us that women’s rights are a gateway to democracy and to prosperity across society. She spoke about the strength of the feminist movement in Iran, a nation where more than 60 percent of college students are women, and where both men and women understand that by building women’s rights, they strike a blow against government oppression everywhere.

On Day 2 of the 12th Annual Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, at the Women Forging Peace panel, we had the honour of hearing five leaders in human rights talk about the role of women in peace-building, including Ms. Ebadi. Together they spoke about the impact women’s groups have already had on the fight for universal freedom.

Caryl Stern, president of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, told us about a meeting she held in a refugee camp in Darfur. A group of women had requested the meeting, she was told, to talk about building their camp’s first-ever childcare centre, a solution to a string of infant injuries at the camp wells where so many mothers must spend their day pumping fresh water.

The women arrived, and she readied herself to explain that, unfortunately, the recovery mission might not have the resources to provide the bricks, build a facility, and staff the daycare.

She was shocked when the women waved her concerns aside – they had already gathered the bricks for the facility. They had already worked out a staffing schedule between themselves. And they had already calculated the resources -water in particular – that each family would have to sacrifice to create this safe refuge for their children.

All that these refugee women needed from UNICEF, it turned out, was a bit of cement to lay between the bricks of a women’s centre they had already founded.

At that moment, Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel Peace Laureate, spoke about the experience of being a female Nobel Peace Laureate. She said that in more than 110 years, only 15 women have won the award, but that they were all united around a common goal, and all eager to combine one another’s successes and lessons to build a greater movement.

These Laureates, together with leaders like those joining Ms. Williams and Ms. Ebadi during the Nobel Summit panel, are spreading a message of collaboration and achievement that every young person needs to hear.

Toward the end of our session, a teenage student from the Chicago Public Schools who studied the RFK Center‘s Speak Truth to Power curriculum had the opportunity to pose a question to the panel. She asked Ms. Ebadi her advice on balancing a desire to raise a family with the drive to change the world.

And Ms. Ebadi shared an experience that, as a mother of daughters, I understood firsthand. She said that, far from being a deterrent against action, the birth of her daughter was a driving force behind her decision to keep fighting for the future of women and for the human rights of everyone around us.

And that struck me as a message that runs throughout our events in Chicago this week. Women’s rights are not separate from human rights. Refugee rights are not separate from human rights. LGBTI rights – like the ones our Human Rights Laureate from Uganda, Frank Mugisha, is in Chicago to speak about – are not separate from human rights.

All of us are here willing to do the work to build a more equal world, one that lives up to the vision my father Robert Kennedy was speaking about when he said, “The future is not a gift; it is an achievement.”

More than ever before, women and young people are part of building that future we hope to achieve, and as Day 2 of our Summit drew to a close, I was more eager than ever to hear what we all think of next.

*Today’s post is one in a series of dispatches from Kerry Kennedy during the 12th Annual World Summit of Nobel Laureates in Chicago, Illinois.

The threat of a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities this year appears to have substantially subsided over the past several weeks as a result of several developments, including the biting criticisms voiced recently by former top national security figures of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Ehud Barak.

That a war seems significantly more remote than during the winter months, when tensions reached an all-time high, was confirmed to some extent Monday when the U.S. “newspaper of record”, the New York Times, ran a front-page article entitled ‘Experts Believe Iran Conflict is Less Likely’ .

But, judging by actual bets placed on the on-line trading exchange, Intrade, the chances that the U.S. or Israel will indeed conduct air strikes against Iran before the end of the year have fallen by more than half since the high reached in mid-February – from just over 60 percent to about 28 percent as of Monday.

That’s still a substantial percentage – about twice what it was before the latest round of Israeli sabre-rattling was launched in November.

And it’s difficult to find any close observer of U.S.-Israeli-Iran relations who believes that war clouds could not suddenly reappear, particularly if the next meeting of the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, and France – plus Germany) with Iran scheduled for May 23 in Baghdad should break down or be delayed.

For its part, the administration of President Barack Obama shown little inclination to reduce pressure – and the threat of military action – on Tehran.

Not only has it moved more minesweepers and F-15 fighter jets into the Gulf region, but the Air Force announced Friday that it has deployed an undisclosed number of advanced F-22 stealth fighter- bombers to the area, specifically to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to the industry publication Aviation Week.

Despite those moves, fears of a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran this year have clearly receded, especially since all sides left the last P5+1 meeting in Istanbul Apr. 14 seemingly satisfied with the seriousness of the exchanges and guardedly optimistic that a diplomatic solution could yet be achieved.

The meeting’s success was made possible by signalling on both sides of their readiness to make concessions on key issues: on Tehran’s part, by stating explicitly that it could halt its enrichment of uranium to 20 percent, transfer its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium out of the country, and accept greater scrutiny by international weapons inspectors under the right circumstances; on Washington’s, by stating more clearly than ever that it could accept Iran’s continued uranium enrichment of up to five percent under the right circumstances.

Whether the “right circumstances” can be accommodated by all sides, of course, will determine the ultimate success or failure of the negotiations.

Meanwhile, however, those voices, both here and in Israel, that have been most disdainful of the diplomatic route and most insistent that only military action can dispose of the alleged threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme have found themselves increasingly on the defensive since tensions reached a peak in early March.

It was then that Obama declared to the annual convention of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that “the loose talk of war” by the main Republican presidential candidates was dangerous and counterproductive.

At the time, AIPAC was pressing Congress for quick passage of both a new round of unilateral sanctions against Iran and a Senate resolution that would define the U.S. “red line” for taking military action as Tehran’s development of a “nuclear-weapons capability” rather than the administration’s “red line” of developing an actual nuclear weapon.

“Once the president put the argument about the ‘loose talk of war’, the momentum shifted quite dramatically,” according to Jamal Abdi, policy director of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). He noted that Democrats who had previously bowed to AIPAC’s hawkish line have since become more deferential to the White House.

One token of the change was an anti-war ad run last week by former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a cheerleader for the Iraq invasion 10 years ago and who is now running to reclaim his old seat. In it, he warned that a war against Iran would make “Iraq and Afghanistan look like a cakewalk”.

“It’s a much different debate now,” Abdi told IPS. “It’s now ‘diplomacy versus war’, not ‘war now or later’.” While sanctions legislation is still pending, he said, “There doesn’t seem to be much of a push to get it done, at least before the Baghdad meeting anyway. Congress is in a kind of ‘wait-and-see’ mode.”

Ironically, the hawks have also been set back by the intensifying appeals by neo-conservatives, in particular, for Washington to intervene militarily in Syria.

Not only has that debate diverted time and energy that many of the fiercest hawks would otherwise devote to Iran. It has also exposed divides, similar to those that surfaced last year over the intervention in Libya, between interventionists on one hand and realists and libertarians on the other within the Republican Party.

“Talking about war with Iran at the same time that you want us to get involved in a civil war in Syria is not a popular message this year,” according to one Congressional staffer who cited recent public opinion polls suggesting that Republicans have become almost as war- weary as Democrats. “Given Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, it’s a bit much.”

Similarly, the unprecedented public criticism by former senior Israeli national security officials of Netanyahu and Barak has given new ammunition to those who favour diplomacy.

In recent weeks, the former head of the Israel’s Mossad spy agency, Meir Dagan, reiterated his long-held views that an Israeli attack on Iran would be “stupid” on the most-watched U.S. public affairs television programme, “60 Minutes”.

His successor and current Mossad head, Tamir Pardo, subsequently publicly questioned whether an Iranian nuclear weapon would pose an “existential” threat to Israel, as repeatedly alleged by Netanyahu.

Last week, the head of the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, offered that Iranian leaders, contrary to Netanyahu’s views, were “very rational” and were likely to stop short of developing a nuclear weapon.

But perhaps the most damaging attack to date came on Friday when Yuval Diskin, the immediate past chief of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, denounced both Netanyahu and Barak as acting out of “messianic feelings” and predicted that an Israeli attack would likely accelerate Tehran’s nuclear programme.

“I saw them up close, they are not messiahs,” he said. “… My main problem on this issue is that I don’t have confidence in the current leadership of the State of Israel – that (they) could lead Israel into something of the order of magnitude of a war with Iran or a regional war.”

Diskin’s remarks, which were defended by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Gantz’s predecessor, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi (ret.) at a rancorous conference in New York this weekend, will almost certainly give pause to Netanyahu who, despite his messianism, is also famously risk-averse as a politician, according to Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator.

“He knows that if anything goes wrong (in an attack on Iran), there are very well-respected non-political Israeli figures who will be there to ferociously attack him,” he said, adding that Netanyahu in the coming weeks will likely call an election for September or October.

“That makes the relative unlikelihood of a strike in 2012 even less likely,” he told IPS.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

In a major speech commemmorating the Nazi Holocaust, U.S. President Barack Obama Monday announced several steps his administration will take to curb mass atrocities abroad, including in Syria where he is under continuing pressure to intervene with military force.

Among other measures, he announced that Washington will now impose sanctions against individuals, government agencies and private companies that use or provide advanced communications or computer technologies to track, disrupt or target opposition activists for violent repression.

In the first use of such sanctions, the U.S. Treasury said Monday it was applying the new measure against Iranian and Syrian intelligence agencies, Syria’s state-controlled mobile phone company, an Iranian internet provider, and several individuals for their involvement in repression in both countries.

“These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them,” Obama declared at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “It’s one more step that we can take toward the day that we know will come – the end of the (Bashar al-) Assad rebime that has brutalised the Syrian people.”

In his speech, Obama also announced the formation of a much- anticipated Atrocities Prevention Board (APB), a high-level inter- agency body that will report directly to the White House on the potential outbreak of genocide, war crimes, or other mass atrocities and possible options to prevent or contain them.

The Board, which will meet at least monthly, will be chaired by the senior director for multilateral and humanitarian affairs, Samantha Power, a long-time close adviser to Obama who authored a book about the 1994 Rwanda genocide and reportedly played a key role last year in persuading him to intervene militarily as part of a NATO force in Libya.

In addition, Obama announced that the 17 agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence community will for the first time prepare a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the risk of mass atrocities and genocide as part of an effort to, in his words, “institutionalise the focus on this issue”.

“In short, we need to be doing everything we can to prevent and respond to these kinds of atrocities – because national sovereignty is never a license to slaughter your people,” Obama said.

On his visit to the museum, Obama was accompanied by the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who, in an interview with the Times of Israel last week, had rebuked Benjamin Netanyahu for repeatedly comparing the alleged threat posed by Iran to Israel with the Holocaust, as the Israeli prime minister did last Thursday at a memorial in Jerusalem in a particularly hawkish speech that drew widespread notice in elite foreign policy circles here.

But, in introducing the president Monday, Wiesel echoed some of Netanyahu’s themes. Reciting the West’s failure to challenge the Nazis as they perpetrated “the greatest tragedy in history”, he suggested that the West was playing a similar role today with respect to Assad and Iran.

“How is that Assad is still in power? How is that the Holocaust’s No. 1 denier, (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad is still president?” he asked. “He who threatens to use nuclear weapons destroys the Jewish state.”

“Mr. President, we are here in this place of memory. Israel cannot not remember. And because it remembers, it must be strong, just to defend its own survival and its own destiny,” he said.

In his remarks, Obama noted that his administration had repeatedly rejected attempts to condemn Israel at the U.N. and other international forums.

“When faced with a regime that threatens global security and denies the Holocaust and threatens to destroy Israel,” he said, “the United States will do everything in our power to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” he stressed.

But most of his remarks were directed both at his administration’s efforts to prevent mass atrocities around the world – in Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, Libya, and in Central Africa with the ongoing hunt for Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) – and his promise last August to make “preventing mass atrocities and genocide …a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America.”

It was in that context that he also cited the steady build-up of U.S. sanctions against Damascus – including its documentation of atrocities allegedly committed by the Assad regime and its backing for the multinational “Friends of Syria” that supports the opposition – and announced the latest measure to punish those who use or supply “technologies to monitor and track and target citizens for violence”.

The U.N. estimates that more than 9,000 Syrians have died in the violence of the past 13 months.

The use of information technology by repressive governments constituted a “new and growing human rights threat”, according to a White House fact sheet distributed to reporters.

The new sanction, it stressed, is aimed not only against governments, but also “the companies that enable them with technology they use for oppression and the ‘digital guns for hire’ who create or operate systems used to monitor, track, and target citizens for killing, torture or other abuses.”

While this sanction is directed exclusively at Syrian and Iranian companies for now, it could potentially apply to others that sell technology to repressive governments, if there is reasonable ground to believe that the technology will be used to track and target dissidents, according to independent analysts.

“The Obama administration has made a significant decision today to attack the accomplices of mass atrocities by employing targeted sanctions against high-tech industries abroad and enforce such controls here when such trade empowers regimes that kill their own people,” said George Lopez, of the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

“These U.S. actions have real potential to disrupt, if not end, (commerce in) such goods and services.”

At the same time, the fact sheet stressed the administration’s recognition of the “importance of preserving the global telecommunications supply chains for essential products and services.”

Human rights and conflict-prevention groups, meanwhile, hailed the formation of the APB, which held its first meeting Monday afternoon, as a major bureaucratic breakthrough. First introduced by a bipartisan commission headed by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former Pentagon chief William Cohen in 2008, the idea of the APB has won approval from both sides of the aisle in Congress.

“It will be coordinating all the information both in and outside the government and meeting on a regular basis,” Mark Schneider, vice president of the International Crisis Group (ICG), told IPS. “And the aim is not simply to bring together the information, but to force a response. That’s new. The U.S. government has never had a focal point on this issue in that way.”

“This new ‘all-of-government approach’ reflects hard-learned lessons from tardy responses to past humanitarian crises,” said Frank Jannuzi, a former top Congressional staffer who heads advocacy for the U.S. chapter of Amnesty International.

Albright and Cohen also praised the initiative but cautioned that it “should not be viewed as a new doctrine for humanitarian intervention or global adventurism, as some might suggest.

“Rather, it is a clear-eyed and pragmatic attempt to expand our government’s toolbox to meet the challenges posed by tyrants who pose an extraordinary threat to their civilian populations. This toolbox is about more than sending in the Marines,” they added.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

The Barack Obama administration’s new interest in the 2004 religious verdict, or “fatwa”, by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei banning the possession of nuclear weapons, long dismissed by national security officials, has prompted the New York Times to review the significance of the fatwa for the first time in several years.

Senior Obama administration officials have decided to cite the fatwa as an Iranian claim to be tested in negotiations, posing a new challenge to the news media to report accurately on the background to the issue. But the Apr. 13 New York Times article by James Risen rehashed old arguments by Iran’s adversaries and even added some new ones.

Former Obama White House Iran policy coordinator Dennis B. Ross, known for his close ties with Israel and hardline views on Iran, was quoted as suggesting that Khamenei may not be committed to nuclear weapons after all. But Ross implies that the reason is U.S. sanctions and perhaps the threat of war rather than that the 2004 fatwa was a genuine expression of policy.

The Times report repeated a familiar allegation, attributed to unnamed “analysts”, that the fatwa is merely a conscious deception justified by the traditional Shi’a legal principle called “Taqiyyah”. But a quick fact check would have shown that “Taqiyyah” is specifically limited to hiding one’s Shi’a faith to avoid being killed or otherwise seriously harmed if it were acknowledged.

Risen also cited unnamed “analysts” who argued that Khamenei’s recent statements that Iran had not and would not develop nuclear weapons were contradicted by remarks he had made last year “that it was a mistake for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya to give up his nuclear weapons program”.

But the quote from Khamenei complained that “this gentleman wrapped up all his nuclear facilities, packed them on a ship and delivered them to the West and said, ‘Take them!’ ” Khamenei then added,”Look where we are, and in what position they are now.”

Khamenei’s references to “all his nuclear facilities” – not to his nuclear weapons programme, as claimed by Risen – and to the contrast between the ultimate fate of the Gaddafi regime and the Islamic Republic’s survival appear to have been suggesting that merely having a nuclear programme without nuclear weapons can be a deterrent to attack.

That same point has been made by other Iranian officials who cite the Japanese model as one for Iran to emulate.

In another effort to discredit the fatwa, Risen wrote that Khamenei’s predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, reversed his initial opposition to the Shah’s nuclear programme as inconsistent with Islam in 1984, and “secretly decided to restart the nuclear weapons program”.

Risen cited no source for that statement, but it is apparently based on an article by David Albright in the Tehran Bureau’s “Iran Primer”. Albright wrote, “A 2009 internal IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) working document reports that in April 1984, then President Ali Khamenei announced to top Iranian officials that Khomeini had decided to reactivate the nuclear program as the only way to secure the Islamic Revolution from the schemes of its enemies, especially the United States and Israel.”

Even if that report, coming from an unidentified IAEA member country, was accurate, Risen misreported it, again substituting “nuclear weapons program” for “nuclear program”.

But the claim cited in the IAEA working document is also demonstrably false, because it is well documented that the Islamic Republic had decided to continue Iran’s nuclear programme in 1981 and even made a formal request in 1983 for the IAEA to help it convert yellowcake into reactor fuel.

Missing from the Times article was any reference to Iran’s refusal to retaliate with chemical weapons for Iraq’s repeated chemical weapons attacks on Iranian cities, based on U.S. intelligence on Iranian troop concentrations, killing 7,000 immediately and severely injuring at least 100,000.

Although U.S. military officers disseminated reports during the war alleging Iranian use of chemical weapons against Iraq, the most authoritative study of the issue, Joost Hilterman’s 2007 book “A Poisonous Affair”, shows those reports represented U.S. disinformation. Hilterman concludes that no reliable evidence ever surfaced that Iran used such weapons during the war.

In a dispatch from Qom Oct. 31, 2003, Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei, one of the highest ranking clerics in Iran, as saying in an interview that Iran never retaliated against Iraqi chemical attacks with its own chemical weapons because of the strong opposition of Iranian clerical authorities to the development of WMD.

“You cannot deliberately kill innocent people,” Saanei said.

The only reference in the Times report to Khamenei’s role in the 2003 nuclear policy turning point was the statement that Khamenei “ordered a suspension of Iran’s nuclear weapons program….”

In fact, however, Khamenei did far more than “suspend” nuclear weapons work. He invoked the illicit nature of such weapons in Islam in order to enforce a policy decision to ban nuclear weapons work.

There is evidence that there was a long-simmering debate within the Islamic Republic behind the scenes over whether Iran should leave the door open to a nuclear weapons programme or not. Both Khamenei and Rafsanjani had publicly opposed the idea of possessing nuclear weapons in the mid-1990s, but pressure for reconsideration of the issue had risen, especially after the aggressive posture of the George W. Bush administration toward Iran.

In 2003, the debate came to a head, because Iran was reaching the stage where it would either have to cooperate fully with the IAEA or be accused of violating its commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, provoking serious international consequences.

The Atomic Energy Organization, which had gotten much more freedom from bureaucratic control in 1999-2000, was dragging its feet on cooperation with the IAEA, and some scientists, engineers and military men did not want to give up the option to develop a nuclear weapons programme.

Under those circumstances, in a Mar. 21, 2003 speech in Mashad, Khamenei began speaking out again on Islam’s opposition to weapons of mass destruction. “We are not interested in an atomic bomb. We are opposed to chemical weapons,” he said, adding, “These things are against our principles.”

In July, he repeated his renunciation of all weapons of mass destruction.

When the IAEA passed a resolution demanding that Iran suspend enrichment and adopt an intrusive monitoring system in September, the Atomic Energy Organization and its bureaucratic and political allies were arguing that there was no danger of being taken to the U.N. Security Council because Russia and China would protect Iran’s interests.

And hardliners were arguing publicly that Iran should withdraw from the NPT rather than make any effort to convince the West that Iran did not intend to make nuclear weapons.

Sometime in September and October, Khamenei ordered the designation of the Secretary of Supreme National Security Council Hassan Rohani, who reported directly to him, as the single individual responsible for coordinating all aspects of nuclear policy.

A key task for Rohani was to enforce Khamenei’s ban on nuclear weapons. Later, Rohani recalled telling then President Mohammed Khatemi that he wasn’t sure all agencies “were willing to cooperate 100 percent” and predicted “both disharmony and sabotage”.

It was Rohani himself who announced on Oct. 25, 2003, that Khamenei believed that nuclear weapons were illegal under Islam.

A few days later, one of Khamenei’s advisers, Hussein Shariatmadari, president of Kayhan newspapers, told Collier, “Those in Iran who clandestinely believed they could develop nuclear weapons have now been forced to admit that it is forbidden under Islam.”

Ever since then, Iranian officials have often referred to Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons.

Sceptics have questioned whether such a fatwa exists, arguing that no published text of the fatwa can be found. But even Mehdi Khalaji of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy acknowledged in an essay published last September that Khamenei’s oral statements are considered fatwas and are binding on believers.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

U.S. and Iranian officials were optimistic about renewed talks over the weekend between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany, but analysts here urge the United States to keep its expectations in check and establish clear goals for future negotiations.

“If the question is Iran coming out of the cold completely”, said Vali Nasr, an international politics professor who has advised the administration under President Barack Obama, “I don’t see that happening”.

“But if the notion of a deal is much more narrow, if it’s around a certain percentage of uranium enrichment, if its about a certain agreement that would essentially allow the status quo to continue, that’s a different story,” he said as part of a panel of speakers featured by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Monday.

Diplomats from the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany) and Iran reconvened for talks in Istanbul on April 13 after more than a year of silence, global fear and speculation about Israeli military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

While Israel is not expected to strike Iran while negotiations are in progress, U.S. and Israel relations with Iran remain tense as Iran struggles to cope with the increasing strain of sanctions and covert actions on its soil.

A day before the first meeting, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi repeated that Iran does not want nuclear weapons. He emphasised in a Washington Post op- ed published last Thursday Iran’s long-standing desire to be treated as an equal negotiating partner.

“If the intention of dialogue is merely to prevent cold conflict from turning hot, rather than to resolve differences, suspicion will linger,” wrote Salehi. “Despite sanctions, threats of war, assassinations of several of our scientists and other forms of terrorism, we have chosen to remain committed to dialogue.”

On Saturday, Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, described the meeting with Iran as a “a positive first step” in a “constructive atmosphere”. Rhodes added that Iran needs to prove its nuclear program is only geared toward peaceful purposes.

“We have indicated along with the P5+1 that we would be open to a step-by-step process and reciprocal action if the Iranians demonstrate that seriousness,” he said.

No deal has been reached on Iran’s nuclear program, but Nasr said the meetings ultimately fulfilled their purpose. “What’s really been on the table, both from the Iranian and American side, is not a massive breakthrough, but a maintenance of status quo. I think in some ways, Istanbul (was) really about that,” he said.

Nasr added that U.S. President Barack Obama would not attempt significant diplomatic breakthroughs with Iran before presidential elections in November because it would be difficult to “sell” to Congress, which strongly favoured extending sanctions and in some cases even limiting diplomatic options with Iran.

On Saturday, Elliott Abrams, who previously served as George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy, criticised positive interpretations of the talks. Iran’s moves, he suggested, were guided by its desire to prevent Israeli military action rather than negotiate its nuclear program.

“Perhaps there is reason to be hopeful, but from what we can see today that depends on what you are hoping for: stopping Israel, or stopping Iran’s nuclear program,” he wrote on his blog at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticised the outcomes of negotiations in Istanbul. “Iran now has 5 weeks during which it can continue to enrich uranium without limit,” he said on Sunday. The next round of talks is scheduled for May 23 in Baghdad.

The entire Carnegie speaker panel agreed that pursuing war with Iran was the worst option, the CFR’s Ray Takyeh stated that the threat of more punitive measures should be kept on the table.

“There has to be some punitive measures here for the credibility of the international legal process, for the credibility of the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty), for the credibility of the international security resolution and for the credibility of non-proliferation norms,” said Takyeh, recently an advisor at the State Department.

“We can denigrate that process…we can emasculate it, but I think we pay a certain price in terms of the credibility of this legal authority if we do so,” he said.

George Perkovich, the director of Carnegie’s nuclear policy program, responded that Iran has “already been punished” for failing to disprove the international community’s suspicions about its alleged nuclear ambitions.

He added that the Iranians are unlikely to commit to anything that is will compromise “leverage” in the negotiating process, “because their view is that the minute they give up leverage, there is going to be regime change”, said Perkovich.

“But if you design a deal that leaves them some leverage, they have less an incentive to cheat and if we try to screw them they can (return to their former position), ” he said.

On Monday, Laura Rozen reported in Al-Monitor that the Iranians had requested “100 times” for a delay in the European oil embargo scheduled for July and had “rebuffed” requests for bilateral meetings with all the delegations except China.

While Rozen concluded that substantial progress is unlikely to result from the Baghdad talks, Nasr said today that the Iranian government’s public insistence that Iran does not want nuclear weapons, demonstrates Iran’s willingness to stay behind Obama’s “red line” on its program.

Although Iran’s words are subject to interpretation, the Supreme Leader’s fatwa, or religious ruling, against building nuclear weapons should also be taken into account, he said. “It’s not 100 percent, it’s not ironclad, but it’s significant,” he noted.

Iran has “established a line” that will allow for political leverage and should not be dismissed, Nasr stated. “Say that we accept that you’ve established the upper limit,” he recommended. “Now we’re going to focus on making sure you keep it.”

The Barack Obama administration has adopted a demand in the negotiations with Iran beginning Saturday that its Fordow enrichment facility must be shut down and eventually dismantled based on an understanding with Israel that risks the collapse of the negotiations.

It is unclear, however, whether the administration intends to press that demand regardless of Iran’s rejection or will withdraw it later in the talks. Washington is believed to be interested in obtaining at least an agreement that would keep the talks going through the electoral campaign and beyond.

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, has been extremely anxious about the possibility of an agreement that would allow the Iranian enrichment programme to continue. So it hopes the demand for closure and dismantling of Fordow will be a “poison pill” whose introduction could cause the breakdown of the talks with Iran.

In an interview with IPS, Reza Marashi, who worked in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs from 2006 to 2010, said, “If the demand for Fordow’s closure is non-negotiable, the talks will likely fail.”

Iran has already rejected the demand. Responding to the reported demands for halting of 20 percent enrichment and the closure of the Fordow facility, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said, “We see no justification for such a request from the P5+1.”

The Obama administration apparently accepted Israel’s demand for inclusion of the closure of Fordow in the U.S.-European position in return for Israel going along with a focus in the first stage of the talks only on Iran’s 20 percent enrichment.

It is widely believed that a limited agreement could be reached to end Iran’s 20 percent enrichment and to replace existing Iranian stocks of 20 percent enriched uranium with foreign-fabricated fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor if Iran believed it would get some additional substantive benefit from the deal.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak revealed Apr. 4 that he had held talks with U.S. and European officials in late March with the aim of getting them to accept Israeli demands for the closure of Fordow, transfer of all 20 percent enrichment out of Iran, and transfer of most of the low enrichment uranium out of country as well.

Barak did not reveal the results of those talks, but three days later, the New York Times reported U.S. and European officials as saying they would demand the “immediate closure and ultimate dismantling” of the Fordow facility as an “urgent priority”, along with the shipment out of the country of its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent.

Reuters reported Apr. 8 that a “senior U.S. official” said the suspension of 20 percent enrichment and closing the Fordow facility were “near term priorities” for the U.S. and its allies.

Reuters also reported that same day that Israel had agreed in March to a “staged approach” in the nuclear talks that would focus in the first stage on halting Iran’s uranium enrichment to 20 percent.

Nothing has been said by either Israel or Western states about shipping low enrichment uranium out of the country, suggesting that the issue remains unresolved.

The high-level talks and obvious linkage between the positions leaked to the media by U.S., European and Israeli officials leaves little doubt that such an understanding had been reached.

Responding to an IPS query, an administration official said she was not aware of any explicit U.S. agreement with the Israelis on the U.S. position in the nuclear talks. But she added, “We have very close consultations with them on Iran policy. We don’t have to have an explicit agreement.”

Israel’s main leverage over U.S. and European policy was the continuing threat of an attack on Iran. Only the day before Barak revealed his consultation with U.S. and European officials on negotiating strategy, the Jerusalem Post reported that “senior defense officials” had said the possible attack on Iran “may be postponed until 2013”, because the “defense establishment” was waiting for the outcome of the nuclear talks.

Barak has long pointed to Iran’s ability to move centrifuges into Fordow, which was constructed in a tunnel facility deep in the side of a mountain, as denying Israel’s ability to destroy most of the country’s enrichment capabilities in an airstrike. That has been the sole justification offered in recent months for threatening an Israeli military strike.

In a blog post in The National Interest, Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, wrote that the “Western message to Tehran” seems to be, “(W)e might be willing to tolerate some sort of Iranian nuclear program, but only one consisting of facilities that would suffer significant damage if we or the Israelis later decide to bomb it.”

Greg Thielmann, senior fellow at the Arms Control Association,” said in an interview with IPS, “There are Americans who believe it is important to keep all Iranian facilities at risk in case Tehran decided to build a nuclear weapon.”

But Thielmann, former director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office in the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said the reported demand for the closure and dismantling of the Fordow site “is more an interest of the Israelis than of the United States”.

Reza Marashi, the former State Department specialist on Iran and now research director at the National Iranian-American Council, said U.S. officials have been concerned about Fordow, but that it is the Israelis who have “turned their inability to destroy Fordow into a major issue”.

Thielmann said he hopes the administration is “doing this for the Israelis and that it wouldn’t push it once it is rejected.”

While the demand on Fordow clearly responds to a U.S. need to accommodate Israel, it is also in line with Obama administration efforts to intimidate Iran by emphasising that it has only a limited time “window” in which to solve the issue diplomatically. The administration has implied in recent weeks that Israel would strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in the absence of progress toward an agreement guaranteeing Iran would not go nuclear.

That emphasis on threat corresponds to the approach championed by hardliners since the beginning of the Obama administration. Former Obama adviser Dennis Ross, who is still believed to maintain personal contact with Obama, was quoted in the New York Times Mar. 29 as saying, “For diplomacy to work there has to be a coercive side. If the Iranians think this is a bluff, you can’t be as effective.”

In a recent article, Ross makes clear that what he calls “coercive diplomacy” would not involve the promise of lifting sanctions, because the U.S. would continue to demand change in Iran’s “behavior toward terrorism, its neighbors and its own citizens”.

If such a “coercive diplomacy” underlies the administration’s negotiating strategy, it would explain the absence of any leaks to the press about what it plans to offer the Iranians in return for the concessions being demanded. Reza Marashi noted that administration officials have been “holding their cards very close to their chest” in regard to what they intend to offer Iran.

The absence of any groundwork for significant incentives leads Marashi to believe the administration plans to rely on threats rather than incentives to get Iran to agree to its demands.

The Obama administration appears to be counting heavily on the one incentive it is prepared to offer in the talks: the recognition of Iran’s right to enrich uranium on Iranian soil. The U.S. and Europeans will certainly demand strict limits on the number of centrifuges and the level of enriched uranium Iran could maintain.

Iranian agreement to such limits would require major changes in U.S. policy toward Iran, including dismantling sanctions and accepting a major Iranian political-diplomatic role in the region as legitimate.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

By - - and Correspondents
DOHA, Qatar, Apr 11 2012 (IPS)

Kofi Annan, the joint United Nations-Arab League envoy on Syria, has welcomed Iranian support for his efforts to secure peace in the country, telling Tehran that it can be “part of the solution”.

Annan was speaking in Tehran on Wednesday following talks with Ali Akbar Salehi, the Iranian foreign minister.

But while endorsing Annan’s peace plan, which calls for a ceasefire by Thursday, Salehi said Syria’s government needed to be given time to implement reforms.

Tehran is considered a key regional ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who faces growing international pressure over the crackdown by security forces that has seen cities shelled and thousands of people killed.

Annan stressed again the urgency of finding a way to end the killing and to provide humanitarian assistance to those in need, before getting all parties to the table.

“The political process must be Syrian-led and respect the aspirations of the Syrian people,” Annan said. “What is important is that governments in the region and beyond work with Syria to resolve the crisis.

“The geopolitical position of Syria is such that any miscalculation can have unimaginable consequences.”

Regarding a ceasefire agreement which requires Syrian government forces to halt operations by Apr. 12, Annan said he had received assurances that the deadline would be honoured.

“If everyone respects it I think by six in the morning on Thursday we shall see improved conditions on the ground,” Annan said.

Answering a question whether he supported calls by some countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to arm the Syrian opposition, Annan said “any further militarisation will be disastrous”.

Salehi offered qualified Iranian support for Annan’s efforts.

“We believe the people of Syria, like other countries, have the right to enjoy all the rights enjoyed by other world nations, such as freedom of political parties, freedom of elections, a constitution that encompasses all the wishes of a nation,” he said. “At the same time, we have announced that we oppose interference in the affairs of all countries, including Syria. The government of Bashar al-Assad has promised change to meet the demands of the people… and in fact the opportunity must be given to the Syrian government.”

Ceasefire deadline

Annan’s peace plan, presented last month, calls on the Syrian government to withdraw troops from towns and end the use of heavy weaponry. Under the plan, both the army and opposition fighters must adhere to the ceasefire.

Walid al-Muallem, the Syrian foreign minister, on Tuesday demanded guarantees from Annan that rebels would also honour any truce.

“We will not ask the terrorist groups, which are killing, kidnapping and destroying infrastructure, for guarantees. We want Annan to give us these guarantees,” Muallem said during a visit to Moscow.

Syria failed to observe a Tuesday deadline to withdraw its forces from urban areas, and activists reported fresh violence on Wednesday.

The Local Co-ordination Committees said there was shelling of several opposition-held neighbourhoods in the central city of Homs.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said “tens of army vehicles” were deploying in the southern town of Maaraba amid intense shooting.

The Syrian National Council’s spokeswoman Basma Kodmani said that if Assad does not show sign of adhering to the ceasefire, the U.N. Security Council must set an ultimatum with the will to enforce by power.

“What we would like to see is a unanimous decision by members of the Security Council that sends an ultimatum to the regime with a deadline that is not too far down the road that says on such and such a date enforcement measures will intervene,” Kodmani told Reuters.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, was expected to meet Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, in Washington.

“We will have another go at trying to persuade the Russians that the situation is deteriorating and the likelihood of regional conflict and civil war is increasing,” she said on Tuesday.

Assad’s forces have killed more than 9,000 people in the past year, according to a U.N. estimate. Damascus says rebels have killed more than 2,500 soldiers and security personnel.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

Ties between Turkey and Iran appear to be headed downward in the wake of Tehran’s statement earlier this week that it would prefer not to hold the negotiations with the P5+1 group on its nuclear programme in Istanbul, as had been announced last week by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and U.S. State Secretary Hillary Clinton.

The P5+1 is a group of countries, composed of the five United Nations Security Council permanent members, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany, which have been seeking assurances from Tehran since 2008 that its nuclear programme is intended for civilian purposes only and is not designed to produce a nuclear weapon.

The next round of negotiations, which had been scheduled to begin next Friday after more than a year’s hiatus, is widely seen, among the group’s Western members in particular, as critical to assessing whether or not Tehran is willing to make serious concessions, including possibly transferring its growing stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium outside Iran, in exchange for easing ever-tighter economic sanctions.

Turkey has attempted on several occasions in the past to reassure the West of Tehran’s peaceful intent.

“Islam does not allow for use of weapons of mass destruction,” Erdogan told reporters last week on his return from an official visit to Iran during which he reportedly conveyed a personal message from U.S. President Barack Obama to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But, after Tehran’s suggestion that it preferred not to meet in Istanbul, Erdogan’s tone changed sharply. “We have to be honest. Because of the lack of honesty they (the Iranians) are continually losing their international prestige,” he told reporters. The head of the Iranian parliamentary committee for national security and foreign policy, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, and members of the government close to him had publicly opposed Istanbul as the venue, proposing instead Baghdad, Beijing, Beirut and Damascus.

“The offers going round at the moment, Damascus or Baghdad, are a waste of time; it means (the meeting) won’t happen, because (the Iranians) know the other side won’t come to Damascus or Baghdad,” Erdogan fumed.

While officials here who have been in touch with their Iranian counterparts have since suggested that Tehran may yet agree to have the Turks host the meeting, media analysts speculate that Erdogan’s outburst may have reflected more growing bilateral tensions over Syria, Iran’s closest Arab ally.

Once-warm relations between Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar al- Assad have deteriorated steadily over the year due to Damascus’ violent crackdown against the opposition to the point that Ankara now finds itself close to Qatar and Saudi Arabia in their call for arming rebel forces, some of which are based in Turkey.

Ankara has already reportedly drawn up contingency plans for forcibly setting up refugee safe zones inside Syria, even without U.N. Security Council authorisation, if the violence, which has already taken more than 9,000 lives according to the U.N., worsens.

And last weekend, Turkey hosted the second meeting of the “Friends of Syria”, consisting mostly of Western and Arab League nations that have called for Assad to step down without delay, even as former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan, a special U.N.-Arab League envoy, tries to arrange a cease-fire between the two sides of what has effectively become a civil war.

Despite the secular nature of Assad’s regime, Iran has long been Syria’s most important regional ally, and is widely believed to be, along with Russia, its biggest source of security and military assistance during the year-long crackdown.

Their strategic alliance has been based in part on their “resistance” to Israel, but they also share, along with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the ruling coalition in Iraq, common sectarian roots in Shi’a Islam. The Assad family and the top ranks of the Syrian army and security forces are Alawis, who also make up about 13 percent of the country’s population. Alawi Islam is a Shi’a offshoot.

Sunni Islam, on the other hand, is the dominant faith in Turkey, as well as in North Africa and in all of the Arab kingdoms, except Bahrain. And while Erdogan himself has defended Turkish secularism, his AKP party is avowedly Islamist, and its leadership is predominantly Sunni.

Fanned by fears of an Iran-led “Shi’a Crescent” in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, propagated in particular by Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the Greater Middle East has found itself increasingly divided by sectarian differences both within societies and between states. Over the past year’s “Arab Spring”, those rivalries appear to have intensified.

In their own relationship, Iran and Turkey have largely avoided such conflict, even as they competed for influence after the “regime changes” that took place in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, all three with overwhelmingly Sunni populations. And even though Turkey was cited as a possible “model” for new governments to follow, the influence of both countries has been limited, in major part due to the fact that neither is Arab.

The Syrian revolt, on the other hand, appears to have changed the Turkish-Iranian entente. Turkey has joined the anti-Assad coalition, composed of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both Sunni states supported by the U.S., Britain and France.

This is apparently making Iran reconsider its foreign policy with its Western neighbour, especially at a moment when Iraq, with a majority Shi’a population, is seeking good relations with both countries and trying to position itself as a peace broker between Tehran and Washington, a position to which Ankara has been aspiring all along.

In spite of the tension, Ankara and Tehran still need each other, although to different degrees and for different reasons.

Bilateral trade last year exceeded 15 billion dollars. Not only has Iran become an important market for Turkish goods, but Iranian oil and gas account for roughly half of Turkey’s annual energy supplies. Until now, Turkey remains one of the last countries, along with India, China, Russia, and Iraq, to resist Western pressure efforts to cut economic ties.

But if political tensions worsen, that could change. Indeed, just last week, and only one day after Erdogan concluded his visit to Iran, Turkey announced it would reduce oil imports from Iran by 20 percent and intended to make up the difference with imports from Libya.

The vast majority of political power in Iran today lies in the hands of old bearded men in robes and turbans, plus the minor exception of a short cartoonish-looking man with a penchant for provocation and Members Only jackets.

That reality, however, is bound to change in the years to come, as young Iranians start entering the political sphere.

As the driving force behind the massive protests that followed the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the summer of 2009, Iranian youths have demonstrated that they are committed to democracy, as well as social and political reform.

Over 70 percent of Iranians are under the age of 35, and with increasing political corruption and rising unemployment and inflation (not to mention the constant annoyances of censorship, absurd “morality” laws and archaic dress codes), these young Iranians are growing progressively more disenchanted with the current regime.

The pro-democracy Green Movement that emerged in 2009 had been brewing for at least a decade. The largest mass protests before that summer occurred a decade earlier, in the summer of 1999. Again, youth were at the forefront.

Thus, the series of demonstrations in 2009 that drew over a million protesters into the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities represented a kind of sequel to the 1999 student demonstrations that drew thousands.

The fact that by 2009 the number of demonstrators had increased several hundred-fold since 1999 speaks to the growing discontent among Iranian youths and their determination to seek social and economic reforms. Likewise, it speaks to the great potential for a trilogy.

While the 2009 demonstrations didn’t lead to an Egypt-style revolution, they did permanently alter the landscape of Iranian politics. For one, thanks to the most-recent disputed presidential election in which the results were announced before the votes were counted, voter confidence in the legitimacy of the current regime is arguably at its lowest levels since the revolution.

Furthermore, because the regime has been unable to increase employment opportunities for growing numbers of university graduates, many young, educated and unemployed youths are falling victim to the trappings of desperate economic times.

For example, despite the Iranian regime’s routine executions of drug dealers and even mere users, drug abuse has become a serious problem, one that has disproportionately affected youth. The latest drug of choice is a new form of condensed heroin, known on the streets as “crack”, that is much more potent and addictive. It has ravaged futures and families alike.

Iran has also become a hub for human trafficking, and unfortunately for humans, the government has been far more committed to pursuing those trafficking drugs than people.

Finally, while official statistics are hard to come by, suicide also appears to be on the rise – yet another plague that unduly targets youth.

In short, the current social, political and economic climate has left many young Iranians with few choices. In hopes of avoiding a future of poverty, drugs, crime and/or violence, many are trying to emigrate. Few succeed, and even for those who do, success is marred by a constant state of longing and dislocation.

With all of this in mind, one might expect that the majority of young Iranians have become hopeless. Not so.

Despite all of these devastating realities, there remains an overall sense of optimism. Perhaps this seems irrational, but for the descendants of over 2,500 years of Persian civilisation, defeat isn’t easily accepted.

Furthermore, the increasing infighting between Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad has given even more hope to the many young Iranians in the pro-democracy movement. The infighting between these leaders is more than an indication of their lack of popular support. It is a sign of their weakness and myopia, not to mention a golden opportunity for young reformers to swoop in.

It may happen during the next presidential election in mid-2013 or it may happen sooner, but whatever the case, sometime soon political power will land in the laps of young Iranians. When it does, change will follow.

In the meantime, the children of the Islamic Revolution are still stirring, and as the old chaps fight among themselves, young women and men are setting the stage for a new day in Iranian politics.

*Melody Moezzi is a writer, commentator, speaker, activist, author and attorney. She is also the Executive Director of the interfaith non- profit organization, 100 People of Faith.

© 2012 Global Experts, a project of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations.

A striking feature of the Israeli political landscape in recent months has been the absence of a serious debate on the issue of the threat of war with Iran led by national security figures.

It is well known that many prominent former military and intelligence officials believe an attack on Iran would be disastrous for Israel. After an initial blast at the idea of striking Iran by two former high-ranking officials last year, however, very little has been heard from such national security figures.

The reason for this silence on the part of the national security sector, just as the Israeli threat of war was escalating sharply, appears to be a widespread view among Israeli national security analysts that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat to attack is a highly successful bluff.

Some critics of Netanyahu’s threat to go war against Iran have expressed concern about the failure of national security figures to speak out publicly against the policy. Former Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner, who now blogs for the independent web-based magazine 972, wrote last month that there are “crowds” of former military and intelligence officials who privately oppose an attack on Iran and could slow the “march to war” by speaking to the news media.

But he complained that “Israelis aren’t hearing their voices….”

Yossi Alpher, a former Mossad analyst and later head of the Jaffee Center for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, has noted the same problem. “Plenty of people are calling for public debate on the issue of striking Iran,” he told IPS in an interview. “But it isn’t happening.”

Former Mossad director Meir Dagan launched the first attack on Netanyahu’s policy by a former national security official last June, asserting that an attack on Iran would provoke a regional war and would ensure that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons.

Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit, who was chief of military intelligence in the 1970s, also disassociated himself with the policy, declaring, “An Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear reactor will lead to the liquidation of Israel.”

Like Dagan, Gazit warned that it would cause Iran to immediately decide to become a nuclear power and he added that it would increase international pressures for the abandonment of “the territories”.

Those shots across Netanyahu’s bow have not been followed, however, by similar criticisms by other former military and intelligence figures.

In fact, Gazit himself appeared to backtrack from his earlier harsh verdict on the option of attacking Iran in a recent television interview.

On Russia Today Mar. 12, Gazit did not voice any of his previous objections to the threatened Israeli strike against Iran. Instead he emphasised the readiness of Israel to carry out a strike, even without U.S. approval if necessary, played down the cost to Israel of an Iranian response, and said an Israeli strike would result in delaying the Iranian nuclear programme by “two or three years at least”.

Gazit reaffirmed to IPS, however, that he has not changed his mind about the dangers to Israel attending a strike against Iran he had raised last June.

The publicly discussed reason for the absence of dissent from the national security sector is lack of information. Nathan Sharony, who heads the Council of Peace, with over 1,000 former high-ranking security officials with dovish views, told Derfner the reason ex- national security officials were not speaking up was that they lack the “solid information” necessary to do so.

Gazit gave IPS the same explanation for the failure of former officials to oppose a strike against Iran publicly.

But the main reasons for opposing war with Iran do not require access to inside information. The more compelling explanation for the silence of former military and intelligence officers is that they, like journalists and other policy analysts, think that Netanyahu is probably bluffing and that they perceive the bluff as working.

Retired Brig. Gen. Uzi Rubin, the former head of Israel’s missile defence programme, recalls being on a television programme a few months ago with Ari Shavit, senior correspondent at Haaretz, on which Shavit declared, “Netanyahu is playing poker for all of us. We shouldn’t call out his cards.”

Shavit was suggesting that the success of the prime minister in the high stakes poker game requires that influential Israelis not question his claims about Israel’s willingness and capability to attack Iran’s nuclear sites.

That struck a Rubin as a significant factor in the politics surrounding Netanyahu’s policy. “People who think we shouldn’t attack Iran believe Netanyahu is playing poker,” said Rubin in an interview with IPS. “So they think they shouldn’t speak up.”

“Netanyahu speaks like he’s very convinced Iran has to be stopped by force,” said the former missile defence chief. “Does he mean it?” Rubin said he doesn’t know the answer.

Alpher agrees. He told IPS the reason high-profile expressions of dissent by Dagan and a few others have not provoked more lively debate on Iran policy among national security figures is that “they don’t want to spoil Bibi’s successful bluster.”

Netanyahu’s bluffing on Iran has “kept the international community on edge”, Alpher suggested, and thus achieved the latest round of sanctions and heavier pressure on Iran.

Both the poker game metaphor and the view that he has been successful at it have been central elements in media coverage of Netanyahu’s policy in recent weeks.

While the prime minister was in Washington last month, Aluf Benn, the editor-in-chief of Haaretz, wrote that Netanayhu had “managed to convince the world that Israel is on the verge of a preemptive war” and that he is “playing poker and hiding his most important card – the IDF’s true capabilities to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.”

Just last week, Benn’s colleague, Ari Shavit, referred to the threat to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities before the end of 2012 that he and a handful of other journalists had heard from senior officials. Shavit acknowledged, however, that “we cannot exclude the possibility that senior Israeli officials briefing us are bluffing”, noting that the officials had a “vested interest” in exploiting such a threat.

One factor that may have fed the reluctance of some former military and intelligence officials to go public with criticism of the option of war against Iran is that Netanyahu has a reputation for being far less aggressive on Iran in practice than his rhetoric would indicate.

Benn told IPS there is a perception of Netanyahu as a “hesitant politician who would not dare to attack without American permission”.

A former national security official, who did not wish to be identified, told IPS some people who have worked with Netanyahu have said he is less decisive than former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Iran, although he personally disagrees with that assessment.

The widespread impression among the Israeli national security elite and press corps that Netanyahu’s threat of war against Iran is a bluff does not guarantee that Netanyahu will not attack Iran. But it does help explain why there has not been a much bigger outcry against a war option that is widely regarded as irrational for Israel.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling Israelis that Israel can attack Iran with minimal civilian Israeli casualties as a result of retaliation, and that reassuring message appears to have headed off any widespread Israeli fear of war with Iran and other adversaries.

But the message that Iran is too weak to threaten an effective counterattack is contradicted by one of Israel’s leading experts on Iranian missiles and the head of its missile defence programme for nearly a decade, who says Iranian missiles are capable of doing significant damage to Israeli targets.

The Israeli population has shown little serious anxiety about the possibility of war with Iran, in large part because they have not been told that it involves a risk of Iranian missiles destroying Israeli neighbourhoods and key economic and administrative targets.

“People are not losing sleep over this,” Yossi Alpher, a consultant and writer on strategic issues and former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, told IPS in an interview. “This is not a preoccupation of the public the way the suicide bombers were a decade ago.”

Alpher says one reason for the widespread lack of urgency about a possible war with Iran is that the scenarios involving such a war are “so nebulous in the eyes of the public that it’s difficult for them to focus on it”.

Aluf Benn, the editor in chief of Haaretz, told IPS in an interview, “There is no war mentality,” although he added, “that could change overnight.” One reason for the relative public calm about the issue, he suggested, is the official view that Iran’s ability to retaliate is “very limited”.

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in Bloomberg Mar. 20 that “Some Israel officials believe Iran’s leaders might choose to play down the insult of a raid and launch a handful of rockets at Tel Aviv as an angry gesture rather than declare all-out war.”

But Uzi Rubin, who was in charge of Israel’s missile defence from 1991 to 1999 and presided over the development of the Arrow anti- missile system, has a much more sombre view of Iran’s capabilities.

The “bad news” for Israel, Rubin told IPS in an interview, is that the primary factor affecting Iran’s capability to retaliate is the rapidly declining cost of increased precision in ballistic missiles. Within a very short time, Iran has already improved the accuracy of its missiles from a few kilometres from the target to just a few metres, according to Rubin.

That improvement would give Iran the ability to hit key Israeli economic infrastructure and administrative targets, he said. “I’m asking my military friends how they feel about waging war without electricity,” said Rubin.

The consequences of Iranian missile strikes on administrative targets could be even more serious, Rubin believes. “If the civilian government collapses,” he said, “the military will find it difficult to wage a war.”

Rubin is even worried that, if the accuracy of Iranian missiles improves further, which he believes is “bound to happen”, Iran will be able to carry out pinpoint attacks on Israel’s air bases, which are concentrated in just a few places.

Some Israeli analysts have suggested that Israel could hit Iranian missiles in a preemptive strike, but Rubin said Israel can no longer count on being able to hit Iranian missiles before they are launched.

Iran’s longer-range missiles have always been displayed on mobile transporter erector launchers (TELs), as Rubin pointed out in an article in Arms Control Today earlier this year. “The message was clear,” Rubin wrote. “Iran’s missile force is fully mobile, hence, not pre-emptable.”

Rubin, who has argued for more resources to be devoted to the Arrow anti-missile system, acknowledged that it can only limit the number of missiles that get through. In an e-mail to IPS, he cited the Arrow system’s record of more than 80 percent success in various tests over the years, but also noted that such a record “does not assure an identical success rate in real combat”.

The United States and Israel began in 2009 developing a new version of the Arrow missile defence system called “Reshef” – “Flash” – or “Arrow 3”, aimed at intercepting Iranian missiles above the atmosphere and farther away from Israeli territory than the earlier version of the Arrow. The new anti-missile system can alter the trajectory of the defensive missile and distinguish decoys from real missile reentry vehicles.

Until last November, the Arrow 3 system was not expected to become operational until 2015. And that plan was regarded by U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) as probably too ambitious, because such a system would normally take a decade from conception to deployment.

But Xinhua news agency reported in November that Israeli Air Force officials said they expected Arrow 3 to become operational by mid- 2013, cutting even that abbreviated timeline for development of the system in half.

Nevertheless, the ability of the Arrow 3 system to shoot down an incoming missile still has not been announced, although an Israeli official said Mar. 1 that such a test would take place after the meeting between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu.

In December 2008, Western intelligence sources were reported by Israel’s Ynet News as saying the improved version of the Shahab 3 missile had gone into production earlier that year and that Iran was believed to be able to produce 75 of the improved missiles annually.

Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, then IDF chief of staff, told a visiting Congressional delegation in November 2009 that Iran already had 300 missiles capable of hitting Israeli targets, according to a U.S. State Department cable released by WikiLeaks.

Those reports suggest that Iran now has roughly 450 missiles that can reach Israel, half of which are improved models with much greater precision. Even if only one-fifth of those missiles get through Israel’s missile defences, Israeli cities could be hit by at least 100, most of which are able to hit targets with relative accuracy.

The Netanyahu government has sought to minimise the threat of Iranian retaliation for an Israeli strike against Iran in part by likening war with Iran to those fought against Hezbollah and Palestinian rockets in recent years, which have resulted in relatively few Israeli civilian casualties.

That was the message that Israeli military officials conveyed to the Israeli news media after an escalation of violence between the IDF and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza earlier this month.

Columnist Zvi Barel of Haaretz speculated on Mar. 11 that the purpose of the escalation, provoked by the IDF assassination of Zuhair al- Qaisi, the secretary general of the Popular Resistance Committee in Gaza, was to show the Israeli public that Israeli missile defence system could protect the population against rockets that the IDF linked to Iran.

Barel went even further. “After Iron Dome demonstrated its 95 percent effectiveness,” he wrote, “there is no better proof to Israel’s citizens that they will not suffer serious damage following an assault on Iran.”

The success of the Iron Dome against short-range rockets from Gaza is irrelevant, however, to what could be expected from a relatively untested Arrow system against Iranian ballistic missiles aimed at Israeli targets.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

A former top state department official singled out diplomatic engagement as the best available option for ending decades of “mistrust and misunderstanding” between Washington and Tehran.

“Take the sanctions pressure and turn it into a useful diplomatic tool to begin serious diplomatic negotiations with Iran,” Thomas Pickering said at a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing in the Capitol on Wednesday.

“Such a new direction will require much care and management of the rhetoric to cause the diplomatic process (to) move forward,” said Pickering, a former U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs as well as ambassador to the United Nations, Russia, India, Israel and Jordan.

Pickering presented his remarks to the influential Senate committee on the same day that Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi reportedly announced that talks between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany) would resume on April 13.

In February, Iran indicated it was ready to resume negotiations after a hiatus of more than a year. The United States and European Union (EU) responded with cautious optimism, but experts warned that few substantial results should be expected from just one meeting, especially given recently heightened tensions.

Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister and a serious advocate for diplomacy with Iran, called the resumption of talks a welcome development. Still, he told Agence France-Presse last week, “Don’t expect there will be a quick resolution of issues, because the gulf of mistrust is so enormously deep.”

At a Capitol Hill briefing on February 22, Hans Blix, former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), stated that revived talks should focus first on defusing tensions over Tehran’s nuclear program to avert possible Israeli military strikes.

“We don’t expect too much now, but we need to defuse the most acute things and prepare the road for further talks,” he said.

Although he emphasised that the threat of force should be kept on the table, striking Iran militarily would do little to impede any alleged Iranian nuclear ambitions, said General James E. Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the Wednesday hearing, reflecting a general consensus among high-level military officials.

“My worry is that it’s not going to do much to change their mind,” he said.

The matter of Iran’s leadership

Others who testified before the Senate committee were extremely pessimistic about the possibility of successful diplomacy with Iran, or at least while Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei holds power.

“Herein lies our policy conundrum: No nuclear deal with Tehran can be made without Khamenei, but it appears almost equally unlikely that any deal can be made with him,” according to Karim Sadjadpour, a policy analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Sadjadpour argued that certain measures could slow Iran’s alleged nuclear activities until regime change takes place in Iran, although he does not advocate that the U.S. or other foreign powers aggressively pursue such an outcome.

“The goal of coercive diplomacy should be to significantly slow Iran’s nuclear progress, and contain their regional political influence, until the regime is eventually forced to change – or is changed – under the weight of its own internal contradictions and economic malaise,” said Sadjadpour.

According to Pickering, the idea that pursuing regime change in Iran can bring about positive results is “far fetched and highly unlikely”, because U.S. history with “changing regimes has been pretty parlous”.

Since the Iranian perception that the United States has a policy of regime change appears to hinder progress in dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme, “the U.S. will need to consider how and when that policy, or the Iranian perception of it, should come off the table,” he added.

Beyond sanctions

A House proposal to impose measures more extreme than mere “crippling” economic sanctions, such as making it illegal for any U.S. official to even speak to an Iranian official, as well as a non-binding resolution that rules out containing Iran, suggests that lawmakers are working to limit the president’s options with Iran.

This trend has compelled former defence officials to speak out against the possible dire consequences of the draconian proposals.

Richard L. Klass, a retired Air Force colonel, wrote today that the anti-containment resolution led by a bipartisan group of senators – Bob Casey (D-PA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) – “confuses the issue” and “could be taken to authorise the use of force if Iran gets a nuclear weapon”.

“The resolution blocks a containment strategy and endorses U.S. military action regardless of any other circumstances,” wrote the former defence official.

Some lawmakers have also made some limited attempts to ease tensions.

This month, Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) proposed lifting the ban on U.S.-Iranian contact and appointing a U.S. representative for Iran devoted to pursuing all diplomatic avenues to stave off Iranian nuclear weapon acquisition and war.

Today, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky blocked a bill that required unanimous consent and was designed to speed up the imposition of further sanctions on Iran. He objected after his own amendment, meant to ensure that nothing in the bill could be construed as authorisation for force against Iran or Syria, was refused, Reuters reported.

While Congress appears overwhelmingly in favour of further punitive measures against Iran as long as the country continues to make nuclear advances that the United States and Israel consider suspicious and unnecessary, some still view the resumption of talks in April as a window for positive possibilities.

Pickering ended his remarks today by quoting an Iranian “friend” involved in Tehran’s foreign policy. “The historical record shows that every time we have been ready, you have not been, and every time you have been ready, we have not been.”

“Maybe,” Pickering suggested, “we can emerge from that position of the past to begin with some small things – that we can find a way to pull the curves of mutual interest together, rather than have them continue to bend apart.”

By - - and Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Mar 27 2012 (IPS)

At the third annual conference of J Street, the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby group that is widely seen as a counterweight to the more right-wing American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Israel-Palestine conflict took the focus back from the ongoing tension with Iran.

There was much talk of Iran at the Washington conference, but J Street intended to shift attention back to the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has successfully focused international attention on Iran, pushing the Palestinian issue off the agenda.

Controversy swirled even before the conference began. Peter Beinart, whom J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami dubbed the “troubadour of our movement”, had published an op-ed calling for boycotting products from Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

J Street does not agree with this proposal, and Ben-Ami criticised Beinart’s proposal heavily. With Beinart using the J Street conference to launch his new book, this made for some awkward moments, and when the issue came up at one of the plenary sessions, the crowd was evenly split among supporters and opponents of Beinart’s idea.

J Street was also criticised in some circles, especially by Palestinian civil society groups, for having former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as its highest-profile speaker.

The leading U.S. Jewish periodical, The Forward, published an op-ed criticising J Street for bringing Olmert, whom many, including Israeli human rights organisations, have accused of war crimes in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2008-09, and who left office under the cloud of a corruption investigation.

The Israeli government faced criticism last year for refusing to participate in J Street’s conference. It decided this time to send the deputy head of mission from Israel’s U.S. embassy, Baruch Binah, to address the audience, and admonish them for putting pressure on Israel. This stood in sharp contrast to calls for open dialogue from virtually all other speakers.

After having sent his national security adviser to J Street’s first conference and his top Middle East negotiator to their last one, President Obama sent the Vice President’s top foreign policy adviser, Anthony Blinken, and his own key spokesperson, Valerie Jarrett, who has little involvement in Middle East matters, to this conference. These choices were widely seen as a sign that the administration was being very cautious about J Street.

Jarrett’s speech was largely devoted to campaigning for the president’s re-election in November, and hardly touched on foreign policy at all.

Blinken’s was mostly a reiteration of Obama’s talk at AIPAC, focusing on Obama’s strong support for Israeli security, the strengthening of U.S.-Israeli military coordination and cooperation that has been called “unprecedented”, and on Obama’s insistence that he will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon but intends to exhaust other options before turning to a military one.

“Later this year, (the United States and Israel) will conduct the largest joint exercise ever,” Blinken said. “Despite fiscal challenges, President Obama has requested 3.1 billion dollars (in military aid to Israel) for 2013, the most ever.”

On Iran, Blinken noted, “Iranian nuclear weapons pose a security threat to the United States as well. That’s why President Obama said we do not have a policy of containment but are committed to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

“This ‘loose talk of war’ … is incredibly counterproductive. It drives up oil prices, taking money from us and putting it in Iran’s pocket… We believe it is possible to be smart and tough at the same time.”

Neither Blinken nor Jarrett gave any indication of new or renewed initiatives designed to restart Israel-Palestinian peace talks. But former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt Daniel Kurtzer offered some ideas as to how to move forward.

“Why not suggest Obama Parametres that say this where you start because this is where you left off,” Kurtzer said.

This echoes the “Clinton Parameters”, which former President Bill Clinton laid down for the two parties in December 2000 at the end of his second term in office and in the wake of the failure of the Camp David II peace summit to produce results several months earlier.

Kurtzer suggested that Obama sum up all the results of prior negotiations, modify them for current realities and present them as a starting point for new talks.

“Within the context of negotiations, we should be pushing both sides to do what they said they would do in the Roadmap in 2002,” Kurtzer said, referring to the “Roadmap for Peace” developed by President George W. Bush.

“Freeze settlements; permit Palestinian mobility in order to build their economy; destroy the infrastructure of Palestinian terrorism, and build the infrastructure of a Palestinian state. These are requirements two sides accepted, and in the context of negotiations, we should demand they fulfill them.”

Kurtzer also criticised the United States’ approach to dealing with Hamas, which the U.S. designates as a terrorist group and which controls the Gaza Strip. “On one hand we demanded elections, but when Palestinians had them, we walked away because we didn’t like the results.”

Hamas won a majority of Parliamentary seats in the 2006 Palestinian elections. Since then, the United States and Israel have imposed conditions — acceptance of Israel’s right to exist, renunciation of violence and acceptance of all prior agreements entered into by the Palestinian Authority – for dealing with Hamas as a part of the Palestinian government.

“I think it’s fair to ask Hamas to comply with those conditions,” Kurtzer said. “The question is whether they are etched in stone or is Hamas given a path to follow. Hamas is charged with maintaining a ceasefire in Gaza. They may not do a good job, but they have the charge, so how do we encourage Hamas to continue, instead of just waiting at the finish line.”

The conference itself was saturated with calls to avoid despair, a reflection of the stalled peace process and diminishing hopes for the two-state solution that J Street is dedicated to.

“In 1967, David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s first prime minister) said we have to give back the West Bank and Gaza,” said Avishai Braverman, a member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, from the Labor Party. “It’s clear today that we must partition the holy land as soon as possible, because otherwise we will have either one, majority Arab state or Arabs will not have rights.”

Knesset member Zehava Golan, the head of the left-wing Meretz party, was more direct. “Today (the fight within Israeli society) is between those who protect Israeli democracy and those who would sacrifice democracy for a messianic vision. They are willing to keep the land and control of millions of Palestinians at the cost of Israel’s democratic character,” he said.

“Oppressing millions of people for so long is first of all abusive to the Palestinians but also erodes the democratic principles of Israel. Those who think we can do this and maintain democracy are delusional. ..Democracy and human rights cannot coexist with the occupation of another people.”

Excerpt:

By - - and Gareth Porter
VIENNA, Mar 20 2012 (IPS)

The first detailed account of negotiations between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran last month belies earlier statements by unnamed Western officials portraying Iran as refusing to cooperate with the IAEA in allaying concerns about alleged nuclear weaponisation work.

Iran's permanent representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, says that the February talks came close to a final agreement. Credit: IAEA Photostream/CC By 2.0

It also indicates that the IAEA demand to visit Parchin military base during that trip to Tehran reversed a previous agreement that the visit would come later in the process, and that IAEA Director General Yukia Amano ordered his negotiators to break off the talks and return to Vienna rather than accept Iran’s invitation to stay for a third day.

Soltanieh took the unprecedented step of revealing the details of the incomplete negotiations with the IAEA in an interview with IPS in Vienna last week and in a presentation to a closed session of the IAEA’s Board of Governors Mar. 8, which the Iranian mission has now made public.

The Iranian envoy went public with his account of the talks after a series of anonymous statements to the press by the IAEA Secretariat and member states had portrayed Iran as being uncooperative on Parchin as well as in the negotiations on an agreement on cooperation with the agency.

Those statements now appear to have been aimed at building a case for a resolution by the Board condemning Iran’s intransigence in order to increase diplomatic pressure on Iran in advance of talks between the P5+1 and Iran.

Soltanieh’s account suggests that Amano may have switched signals to the IAEA delegation after consultations with the United States and other powerful member states which wanted to be able to cite the Parchin access issue to condemn Iran for its alleged failure to cooperate with the IAEA.

Parchin had been cited in the November 2011 IAEA report as the location of an alleged explosive containment cylinder, said by one or more IAEA member states to have been used for hydrodynamic testing of nuclear weapons designs.

The detailed Iranian account shows that the IAEA delegation requested a visit to Parchin in the first round of the negotiations in Tehran Jan. 29-31 and that it asked again at the beginning of the three “intercessional” meetings in Vienna for such a visit to take place at a second negotiating round in Tehran Feb. 20-21.

Soltanieh recalled, however, that during three “intercessional” meetings in February with IAEA Deputy Director General for Safeguards Herman Nackaerts, and Assistant Director General for Political Affairs Rafael Grossi, the two sides had reached agreement that the IAEA request for access to Parchin would be postponed until after the Board of Governors meeting in March.

But when the IAEA delegation arrived Feb. 20, it renewed the demand to visit Parchin, according to Soltanieh’s account.

“At the beginning of the meeting the first day, they said the director general had instructed them to give a message to us that they wanted to go to Parchin today or tomorrow, despite what we had clearly agreed two weeks earlier,” Soltanieh told IPS.

Soltanieh told the Board of Governors that the negotiating text on which the two sides were working at the Feb. 20-21 meeting provided specifically for a visit to Parchin as well as other sites in conjunction with Iran’s actions to clear up the issue of “hydrodynamic experiments” – the allegation by an unnamed member government published in the November 2011 IAEA report.

In response to the renewed request for a visit to Parchin, Soltanieh offered to let the delegation visit the Marivan site, where the same November report said the agency had “credible” evidence Iranian engineers worked on high-explosives testing for a nuclear device.

“We offered Marivan because it was the next priority,” Soltanieh told IPS, referring to the list of priority issues on which Iran was expected to take actions to be specified by the IAEA under the provision of the negotiating text.

But the IAEA delegation rejected the offer, claiming that it had been given too little time.

Soltanieh’s account reveals that the IAEA also turned down a request to stay one additional day to complete the negotiations of the new action plan. “At lunch hour the second day, we wanted them to stay another day,” he told IPS, and the delegation told them it might be possible.

But after consulting with Amano, the IAEA delegation said it could not stay.

Amano’s change of signals on Parchin and refusal to stay for a third day of negotiations were followed by condemnation of Iran as uncooperative by a “senior Western official” shortly before the IAEA Board of Governors meeting.

The official was quoted by Reuters Mar. 2 as saying, “We think there needs to be a resolution that makes clear that Iran needs to do more, a lot more, to comply with the agency’s requests.” The official called Iran’s stance during the talks a “gigantic slap in the face of the IAEA”.

In the end, no resolution was passed by the Board. Instead the P5+1 – the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany – issued a joint statement urging Iran to allow access to Parchin but not blaming Iran for the failure to reach agreement.

The negotiating text as it stood at the end of the February round of talks, which Soltanieh showed IPS, had relatively few handwritten deletions and additions.

A key provision in the draft text, which IPS was allowed to quote, says, “Iran agrees to cooperate with the Agency to facilitate a conclusive technical assessment of all issues of concern to the Agency. This cooperation will include inspections by the Agency, additional meetings, including technical meetings and visits, and access to relevant information, documentation and sites, material and personnel.”

The primary issue standing in the way of final agreement, according to Soltanieh, was whether the IAEA could reopen issues once they had been resolved. The text shown to IPS includes a provision that IAEA “may adjust the order” in which issues were to be resolved and “return” to issues even after they had been resolved.

The Iranians accepted the right of the IAEA to adjust the order but did not agree that it could reopen issues once they were completed satisfactorily, Soltanieh recalled, because Iran feared that giving the IAEA that power would lead to “an endless process”.

The other major issue, according to Soltanieh, was Iran’s demand that the IAEA “deliver” all the intelligence documents alleging that it had carried covert weaponisation activities to Iran before asking it for definitive answers to the allegation. The IAEA delegation said they couldn’t produce all the documents at once, he told IPS.

Iran then agreed that the agency could provide only those documents relevant to each issue when it comes up, the Iranian diplomat recalled. It is not clear, however, whether the IAEA has agreed to that compromise.

The United States has refused in the past to agree to turn over the “alleged studies” documents to Iran – a policy that Amano’s predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei had argued made it impossible to demand that Iran be held accountable for explaining those documents.

After Soltanieh’s presentation to the Board of Governors, Amano told reporters that some of Soltanieh’s statements had been inaccurate but appeared to confirm the main points of his presentation. “In fact, the February talks initially took place in a constructive spirit,” he said. “Differences between Iran and the Agency appeared to have narrowed.”

On the second day, Amano said, Iran had “sought to re-impose restrictions on our work,” which he said “included obliging the Agency to present a definitive list of questions and denying us the right to revisit issues, or to deal with certain issues in parallel, to name just a few.”

Amano’s spokesperson Gill Tudor declined to comment on the accuracy of Soltanieh’s account for this story, saying “(W)e would prefer to let the director general’s words speak for themselves.”

In response to a request for comment on this story, the U.S. State Department deferred to Amano’s account on the talks but said, ” (D)espite the IAEA’s best efforts, Iran was unwilling to reach such an agreement” and had “failed an initial test of its good faith and willingness to cooperate by refusing an IAEA request to visit Parchin….”

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

Excerpt:

By - - and Yasaman Baji
TEHRAN, Mar 19 2012 (IPS)

Last week’s unexpected reappointment of Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as the chair of Expediency Council has provoked considerable speculation here about Iran’s future political trajectory as it faces unprecedented economic pressure and military threats from Israel and the United States.

Rafsanjani's relationship with Khamenei and his inner circle has deteriorated steadily since the 2009 election. Credit: Mesgary/CC BY 2.0

The appointment ends months of speculation and expectations by the country’s hardliners regarding Rafsanjani’s forcible retirement from public life, although it remains unclear whether his re-appointment is anything more than symbolic given the conservative sweep in the Mar. 2 parliamentary election.

Many hardliners identify Rafsanjani as the behind-the-scenes figure challenging the results of the 2009 election, as well as Khamenei’s leadership. And his coy remark after voting in this year’s election that “if the same votes are cast as announced, we will have a good Parliament,” only added to the fury of his hard-line detractors who called for his removal.

Rafsanjani has chaired the Expediency Council since its inception, first as the president of the republic and then through successive five-year appointments since he left office in 1997. But his relationship with Khamenei and his inner circle has deteriorated steadily since the 2009 election.

For example, Rafsanjani’s website, which publicised his views and recollections of the Islamic Republic’s history, was recently shut down by judicial authorities.

Moreover, his children have come under tremendous pressure. His son Mohsen was forced to resign as the manger of Iran’s Metro system; his activist daughter Faezeh was handed a six-month prison sentence last month for speaking out against the system; and his youngest son Mehdi has been living in self-exile for over a year out of the fear that he will be arrested for his activities in the 2009 election.

Rtafsanjani’s persistent criticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s performance, which in the past several years has led to the latter’s boycott – in defiance of the law – of Expediency Council meetings , has also alienated him from the president’s followers.

Earlier this year, one of Ahmadinejad’s close allies, Ali Akbar Javanfekr called for “a review of the composition of influential state bodies”, arguing that, “It is not right to expect the elected president to sit next to and speak with individuals who are confronting the regime and the supreme leader and who through their remarks and actions encourage the plots of the enemies of Islam, the country and the people.”

Until May 2011, Rafsanjani also served as chair of the Assembly of Experts, an elected body of 86 clerics charged, among other things, with electing and removing the Leader. But after much pressure, apparently including behind-the-scenes lobbying by Khamenei himself, he agreed not to seek re-election.

Rafsanjani’s re-appointment to head the Expediency Council is thus all the more remarkable, suggesting that he has maintained his standing within key constituencies of the Islamic Republic.

The Expediency Discernment Council of the System, as it is formally known, is an administrative assembly appointed by the Leader and was created in 1987 by the revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to resolve differences on legislation between the Parliament and the Guardian Council.

A constitutional revision in 1989 gave it legal standing as an advisory body to which the Leader could refer significant issues for resolution.

In 2006, Khamenei further extended the Council’s powers by delegating to it some of his own supervisory authority over all branches of the government. Since then, however, Khamenei has consistently prevented it from fulfilling that role.

As Rafsanjani pointed out in a recent controversial interview with Etemaad Daily, Khamenei has done this by simply not responding to the operational guidelines submitted to him by the Council three years ago and by demanding that it not insert itself into controversies regarding alleged violations of the law by the Ahmadinejad administration.

The Islamic Republic’s Constitution gives the Guardian Council the right to veto laws passed by parliament that it deems either un- Islamic or unconstitutional. But if the parliament chooses to challenge a Guardian Council’s veto, it can refer the issue to the Expediency Council.

This council, whose membership includes, among others, the six clerical members of the Guardian Council, as well as the heads of all branches of the government, can, in turn, overrule the decision by the Guardian Council in “the interest of the system.”

In the past, the council has played a key role in overcoming the Guardian Council’s resistance on issues as varied as removing barriers to foreign investment and increasing the minimum marriage age for women.

The continued harassment of Rafsanjani’s family had convinced many observers that Khamenei would finally remove the former president from his last public position. But this did not happen.

It is hard to imagine the move to be “out of the longstanding friendship between the two men”, said a political activist named Alireza who noted that Khamenei did not hesitate to remove from the Council Rafsanjani’s brother, Mohammad Hashemi, and former petroleum minister, Bijan Namdar Zangeneh, who had played an active role in the presidential campaign of Mir Hossein Mussavi in 2009.

Khamenei was “probably unable to convince prominent clerics of the need for Rafsanjani’s complete purge,” he told IPS. “The move would have completely breached Khamenei’s relationship with these influential clerics.”

Another analyst points out that without Rafsanjani as chair, influential clerics such as Ayatollah Abbas Vaez Tabasi, who heads Iran’s richest religious foundation, Astan-e Qods-e Razavi, would probably boycott future meetings, “making even more public Khamenei’s effective loss of support among the higher ranks of the clerical community.”

The Mar. 2 parliamentary election may have also contributed to the decision. Although the Interior Ministry announced that 64 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, scepticism about the official figures is widespread.

“The fact that the Leader did not issue a written statement of appreciation for popular participation, as is usually his custom, reveals his unhappiness regarding the election,” a Tehran University political science professor told IPS. “And under these circumstances his hands were constrained in the push to eliminate important individuals such as Rafsanjani.”

Regardless of Khamenei’s true reasons, the message received by the public of Rafsanjani’s re-appointment, wrote Sadeq Zibakalam, another political science professor at the University of Tehran, in the reformist Shargh newspaper, was one of support for moderation against extremism.

“As much as his re-instatement (undoubtedly pleased) the moderates and those who have a concern for the system and the country’s future, it was far from pleasing to those currents and personalities who are neither concerned about the future of the system nor the country in 10, 20, or 30 years,” Zibakalam wrote in his column.

On the other hand, the re-appointment could prove merely cosmetic unless Khamenei relents and approves the powers the Council proposed in its guidelines three years ago.

“What is the use of spending hours and months of expert testimony and work …if the executive branch shelves (these plans) and there are no instruments for making sure that these plans are properly put into effect,” asked Zibakalam.

That will likely be the true test of whether Rafsanjani’s reappointment signals a return to moderation, balance, and even reconciliation after several years in which the regime has taken an increasingly hard-line stance.

Excerpt:

According to a new publication released here Thursday by an influential national security think tank, engaging Iran on shared interests in Afghanistan can help improve U.S.-Iran relations and maximise the chances for stability in the country following the withdrawal of U.S.-led combat forces by 2014.

The Stimson Center’s “Engaging Iran on Afghanistan” report comes amidst a time of increased anxiety about prospects for a positive U.S. legacy in the country, especially after a spate of blowback- inspiring incidents by International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF), including the apparent murder of 16 Afghan civilians by a U.S. sergeant.

“The United States has interests in Iran that are much broader than just the nuclear question,” said Stimson President and CEO Ellen Laipson, a former state department official who has focused on Near East and Middle East affairs in policy planning throughout her career.

Over the last two years, Iran has been targeted with unprecedented sanctions, assassinations of its citizens, other covert illegal measures and the increased threat of a military attack.

For its part, the U.S. has charged Iran with conducting nuclear weapons-related activities, the plotting of a terrorist attack against a Saudi ambassador on U.S. soil by Iranian government-related actors, and endangering U.S. interests by threatening to close the vital oil supply-route, the Strait of Hormuz.

Despite enduring further international isolation and significant hits against its struggling economy, such as the severe devaluation of its currency and further decreased trade prospects, Iranian nuclear activities have shown no signs of slowing while the threat of a military strike by Israel has been described as more likely than ever.

At a University of Maryland Iran briefing here on Tuesday, political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that among the negative consequences of an Israeli strike would be Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces and interests in Afghanistan.

The former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter stated that the Iranians would act out against the U.S. because they would consider an Israeli attack as authorised by Washington, especially if Tel Aviv’s forces flew over U.S.-controlled Iraqi airspace.

But the Stimson Center’s research shows that Afghanistan is also an area where the U.S. and Iran can cooperate.

Afghanistan presents the “most obvious convergence of interests” and is the most “promising” issue for better relations, noted report author Laipson.

On Monday, retired top CIA analyst and South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution Bruce Riedel wrote in the Daily Beast that a successful political solution to the Afghan war will require a “regional strategy that includes not only Pakistan but also key stakeholders like Iran and India”.

But while there is a consensus now that all of Afghanistan’s neighbours have to be actively involved in the war-torn country’s future if security is to be established, and while converging U.S.- Iran interests were clear well before before 2001, moving forward on this front has been overshadowed by increased hostility between the U.S. and Iran over its nuclear programme.

While the U.S. and Iran both want to prevent a “draconian” Taliban- led or heavily Pakistan-controlled government from ruling Afghanistan, according to Laipson a “conceptual disagreement” between the U.S. and Iran impedes them from working together more effectively on that goal.

The U.S. believes the international community needs to be involved in a stable Afghan future, but Iran believes regional involvement should be the exclusive “successor” to ISAF withdrawal, which should leave behind no residual foreign forces, she said.

“For Iran the regional approach is an alternative to an international approach. For the United States the regional approach is a component of the international approach,” Laipson noted.

Stimson cofounder Barry Blechman and colleague R. Taj Moore argued in a second publication released at the briefing Thursday that the solution to the political impasse between Iran and the U.S. must involve increased engagement and diplomacy on a wide range issues that have plagued relations since the Islamic revolution.

“The conflict between the U.S. and Iran has continued for more than 30 years” and has “all the negative aspects of the Cold War” but the U.S. does not face anywhere near the same threats to its security, they argued.

Blechman and Moore conclude that the U.S. should “utilize all potential conduits of communications to open negotiations with Iran”, not only on the nuclear issue, but on other issues of “common ground” such as Afghanistan.

The “Iran in Perspective: Holding Iran to Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Technology” report acknowledges the impediments the U.S. faces after years of mutual aggression and ongoing tensions. But it stresses that policy should be “founded not only on our concerns about a nuclear- armed Iran, but also a realistic understanding of the risks of military conflict with Iran.”

A policy aimed at keeping Iran’s nuclear programme peaceful that is more focused on engagement and incentives beyond the mere lifting of sanctions offers increased prospects for positive results, the report authors argue.

Blechman said he hoped that if President Barack Obama was re-elected in November, he would “sort of send Kissinger’s equivalent to China to Iran or work through intermediaries and begin a much broader level of exchanges, not only on the nuclear issue but on the other issues that lie between us.”

Writing in Bloomberg on Tuesday Vali Nasr, a professor of international relations and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, also recommended that President Obama actively pursue diplomacy with Iran now while conditions are optimal.

There has to be “credible reciprocity to build trust and create momentum in the talks” and while the lifting of sanctions by the U.S. and Europe should definitely be on the table, Washington must also be “open to starting bilateral talks with Iran about regional security and the future of U.S.-Iran relations,” he said.

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 13 2012 (IPS)

Amidst persistent speculation over a possible Israeli military attack against Iranian nuclear facilities in the wake of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit here, a detailed new public opinion survey released Tuesday suggests that such a move would enjoy little support in the United States.

According to the survey by the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), only one in four U.S. respondents favours an Israeli strike, while nearly seven in 10 (69 percent), including a strong majority of Republicans (59 percent), said they prefer continuing negotiations with Tehran.

Only one in seven (14 percent) of the survey’s 727 respondents said they thought Washington should encourage an Israeli attack, while 80 percent said the U.S. should either discourage Israel from taking such a step (34 percent) or maintain a neutral position (46 percent).

And, consistent with their preference for diplomacy over military action, nearly three out of four respondents, including 69 percent of Republicans, said the U.S. should act primarily through the U.N. Security Council, rather than unilaterally, in dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme.

Meanwhile, a second public opinion poll released Tuesday by the New York Times and CBS News found a slight majority (51 percent) of 1,009 respondents who said they would support the U.S. taking military action in order to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

That poll, which did not offer an option for continued diplomacy or negotiations, found that 36 percent of respondents would oppose such a strike. The remaining 13 percent said they were unsure.

Asked what the U.S. should do if Israel conducted its own unilateral strike, a 47 percent plurality said Washington should support the Jewish state, 42 percent said it should “not get involved”, and only one percent said the U.S. should oppose it.

The two surveys were released just days after last week’s annual policy conference of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose 13,000 activist-attendees were addressed by Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, among other luminaries, before fanning out across Capitol Hill to lobby their elected representatives for a more-confrontational U.S. stance toward Iran and its nuclear programme.

Top Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu during his visit here, have been suggesting for several months they were prepared to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities some time this year unless Tehran agreed to abandon its nuclear programme.

The Obama administration, on the other hand, has made clear, especially over the past three months, that unprecedented economic sanctions, combined with renewed negotiations with Iran by the so- called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany) should be given more time to reach a diplomatic settlement. Britain and France have also come out publicly during the past week against an Israeli strike.

It is not yet clear what was the impact, if any, of the AIPAC conference on popular attitudes.

On the one hand, the results in the Times/CBS poll – which was conducted over four days (Mar. 7-11) immediately after the conference – about U.S. military action against Iran were essentially no different from those of polls conducted over the past three years that also asked respondents whether they would support or oppose a U.S. strike against Iran to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

On the question of how the U.S. should react to an Israeli attack on Iran, on the other hand, the latest poll suggested an increase in support for Israel when compared to a Pew Research Center poll just one month ago in which 51 percent of respondents said Washington should “stay neutral” under such circumstances.

At the same time, 42 percent of respondents supported Obama’s “handling of the situation in Iran”, while 39 percent opposed. But the PIPA poll, which was conducted during the conference (Mar. 3- 7), probed far more deeply into attitudes about an Israeli strike against Iran and related issues, noted Peter Ferenbach, an expert on foreign policy attitudes and co-founder of ReThink Media, an organisation works with non-profit groups.

“It’s a welcome exploration of what Americans really think about Iran’s nuclear programme, and, not surprisingly, people’s responses are more nuanced when the issue is explored in depth,” he told IPS, adding that the “policy debate has been ill-served by a long string of poorly designed polls on this critical issue.”

“The phrasing of the Times/CBS poll – ‘Do you favour using military action against Iran to prevent the country from acquiring nuclear weapons?’,” he went on, “has a built-in efficacy bias that presumes a military strike would end Iran’s nuclear programme – a view held by virtually no one at the Pentagon.”

Indeed, the PIPA poll found that most respondents were pessimistic about the effects of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear programme. Only one in five (18 percent) said they believed that an Israeli military strike will delay Iran’s alleged ambition to acquire nuclear weapons by more than five years.

A 51-percent majority said they thought a strike would either delay Iran’s ability to produce a weapon by only one to two years (20 percent), or would have no effect (nine percent), or would actually result in Iran accelerating its nuclear programme (22 percent).

Interestingly, those percentages were similar to the findings of a survey of Israeli public opinion on the same question conducted late last month by Shibley Telhami, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Sadat Chair at the University of Maryland which co-sponsored the PIPA poll.

In a widely noted interview on CBS’ popular ’60 Minutes’ public- affairs programme Sunday, former Israeli Mossad chief Meir Dagan also noted that an Israeli strike could at best delay Iran’s programme.

A 51-percent majority in the PIPA poll also said an Israeli attack would either strengthen the regime (30 percent) or would have no effect on its hold on power (21 percent), while 42 percent said the regime would be weakened.

Moreover, only one in five respondents said they believed armed conflict between Iran and Israel would last either days or weeks. Three of four respondents said they believed such a conflict would last months (26 percent) or years (48 percent).

“One of the reasons Americans are so cool toward the idea of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear programme is that most believe that it is not likely to produce much benefit,” said Steven Kull, PIPA’s director.

Nearly six in 10 respondents (58 percent) said they thought Iran has decided to build nuclear weapons and is actively working toward that aim, an assertion that is at odds with the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community which most recently concluded that, while Tehran “is developing some of the technical ability necessary to produce nuclear weapons, (it) has not decided whether to produce them.”

Thirty percent of respondents agreed with the latter position, while only six percent accepted Iran’s repeated assertions that it is producing enriched uranium for civilian purposes only.

Asked to assume that Iran actually developed nuclear weapons, 62 percent of respondents said they believed the regime would likely use them to attack Israel, as opposed to only 32 percent who thought it would be deterred from doing so for fear of being destroyed in a nuclear retaliatory strike.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

By - - and Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Mar 12 2012 (IPS)

News stories about satellite photographs suggesting efforts by Iran to “sanitise” a military site that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said may have been used to test nuclear weapons have added yet another layer to widely held suspicion that Iran must indeed be hiding a covert nuclear weapons programme.

But the story is suspect, in part because it is based on evidence that could only be ambiguous, at best. The claim does not reflect U.S. intelligence, and a prominent think tank that has published satellite photography related to past controversies surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme has not found any photographs supporting it.

The original Parchin clean-up story by Associated Press correspondent George Jahn, published Mar. 7, reported that two unnamed diplomats from an unidentified country or countries – it was not made clear how many were involved – told him that satellite photos “appear to show trucks and earth-moving vehicles” at the site.

The two diplomats said they suspected Iran “may be trying to erase evidence” of tests of a “neutron device used to set off a nuclear explosion” because “some of the vehicles at the scene appeared to be hauling trucks and other equipment suited to carting off potentially contaminated soil from the site.”

However, a third diplomat told Jahn he “could not confirm that”, and Jahn was shown no photographs to back up the description offered by his two anonymous sources. Three other diplomats with whom Jahn spoke were apparently unaware of such photographs.

The satellite photographs described to Jahn did not come from U.S. intelligence. Former CIA counterterrorism official Phil Giraldi told IPS that a U.S. intelligence official had confirmed to him that the officials in question were not talking about intelligence provided by U.S. intelligence.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland refused to answer specific questions at a Mar. 8 briefing about whether U.S. intelligence had such satellite photos or whether the U.S. believes that such intelligence exists. She referred to such intelligence only in the conditional tense.

“Any evidence that Iran is seeking to cover its tracks would raise only further concern about the true nature of the programme,” she said.

That means that the officials were either from Israel or one of its three European allies – the British, French and Germans – who have been working closely with Israel to undermine and finally force a revision of the U.S. intelligence community’s 2007 conclusion that Iran has not worked on developing a nuclear weapon since 2003.

Israel provided a series of documents to the IAEA after that intelligence estimate – as recounted by former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei in his 2011 memoir – aimed at proving that Iran had secretly tested a detonator for an implosion device and had worked on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007. The timing of the story – just after the possibility of an IAEA inspection visit to the site had been suggested by Iran – is also suspect. The allegation of a clean-up at the site would provide a convenient explanation for the failure of the IAEA to find evidence to support the suggestion in its November 2011 report that Iran constructed a large containment vessel for hydrodynamic tests of nuclear weapons at Parchin.

Reflecting the degree to which the alleged intelligence has been given credence by being amplified without any questioning by the rest of the news media, an AFP report Saturday suggested that, even if Iran now agrees to an IAEA visit to the Parchin site, “it will find itself accused of having cleaned up the site beforehand.”

Further casting doubt on the motive behind the story, the same allegation was made to the same AP reporter more than three and a half months earlier. On Nov. 22, Jahn reported that a single official of an unidentified state had “cited intelligence from his home country, saying it appears that Tehran is trying cover its tracks by sanitizing the site and removing any evidence of nuclear research and development.”

That assertion came in the wake of the IAEA Board of Governors meeting in November, as the IAEA Safeguards Department was planning to request a visit to the site at Parchin, where the agency had just reported nuclear weapons-related testing had been carried out in a large explosive containment chamber, according to unnamed “Member States”.

The claim of satellite intelligence showing Iranian efforts to clean up a site at Parchin has not been supported by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), the Washington, D.C. think tank that had defended allegations in last November’s IAEA report about foreign expertise having assisted in the alleged construction of a containment vessel at Parchin in 2000.

Paul Brannan, a specialist on interpretation of satellite photography for ISIS, told the New York Times that he had looked at many photos of Parchin but so far had not found any photographs of the “specific site” – meaning the site at which the unnamed officials had claimed there were equipment and vehicles indicating possible removal of evidence of past tests.

But Brannan went even further to say he could not find any photographs of sites at Parchin that suggested clean-up. He told the Times the presence of various kinds of equipment in the vicinity is not an indication of removal of evidence by Iran.

“There is no way to know whether or not the activity you see in a particular satellite image is cleansing or just regular work.” Brannan added, “There’s a lot of activity there – always.”

The new alarm over alleged satellite images recalls the accusation by the George W. Bush administration in close consultation with Israel in 2004 that Iran was using high explosives to test nuclear weapons at Parchin.

ISIS Executive Director David Albright told interviewer Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio in July 2009 that he had “gotten a tip” in September 2004 that high explosives testing at Parchin “could be used for nuclear weapons”.

ISIS then published a series of satellite photographs that the organisation said were “consistent” with facilities for such nuclear testing.

The satellite images were then cited by Undersecretary of State John Bolton as alarming evidence of covert Iranian nuclear weapons work. The United States and its Western allies put strong pressure on the IAEA to get Iran to agree to a visit to Parchin.

But Bolton and the IAEA had only vague suspicions rather than hard intelligence to go on. The IAEA asked to visit four entirely different areas of the 24-square-mile Parchin facility for places that Israeli intelligence believed were consistent with some kind of nuclear- related testing activity.

The Iranians insisted that the IAEA inspectors could only visit one area per visit, even though they were allowed to visit five different buildings of their own choosing each time. The result was embarrassing visits in January 2005 and again in November that found nothing to justify the suspicions.

Another IAEA mission to Parchin that concedes that the information it had been given by those unnamed member states was false would deal a serious blow to the efforts of Israel and its European allies to refute the 2007 U.S. intelligence estimate.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

Excerpt:

McCain's comments touched off a vigorous new debate on Syria that radiated from the Capitol to the Pentagon and the White House. Credit: Derek Bridges/CC By 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 8 2012 (IPS)

This week was supposed to be all about Iran – at least, that’s how Israel and its powerful U.S. lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had planned it – and why the U.S. should prepare to bomb it very, very soon if its leadership doesn’t cave into Western demands to abandon its nuclear programme.

By week’s end, however, the most urgent foreign policy issue with which U.S. policy-makers – and their media camp followers – were grappling was whether to bomb Syria first instead.

Remarkably, the sudden deviation was triggered by Tuesday’s dramatic call on the floor of the Senate by Republican Sen. John McCain for the U.S. to provide decisive support to rebels battling to oust the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“The only realistic way to do so is with foreign air power,” declared McCain, whose strategy was swiftly endorsed by his two hawkish fellow-travellers, Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham and independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

“The United States should lead an international effort to protect key population centres in Syria, especially in the north, through airstrikes on Assad’s forces,” he declared, touching off a vigorous new debate that radiated from the Capitol to the Pentagon and the White House about how deeply and how violently to become involved in yet another predominantly Muslim Middle Eastern country.

While Defence Secretary Leon Panetta rejected McCain’s proposal, the administration appears to be moving closer to providing some forms of “non-lethal” equipment to the opposition by week’s end.

What was most remarkable about the move by the “Three Amigos”, as they are sometimes called in part, was its timing.

It came just as some 13,000 activists, energised by three days of juicy anti-Iran red meat dished out by everyone from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the top three Republican presidential candidates, as well as the Republican and Democratic leadership of both houses of Congress, were being bussed from AIPAC’s annual extravaganza at the Washington Convention Centre to Capitol Hill.

The mission was to persuade their elected representatives that the spinning by the mullahs of even one centrifuge to enrich uranium on Iranian soil posed an “existential” threat to Israel, if not quite yet to the U.S. itself, and was hence “unacceptable”.

Indeed, every conference delegate received a folder filled with detailed talking points topped by a slick, four-page coloured pamphlet with grim photos of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Leader Ali Khamenei, and a missile, complete with launch pad, entitled “Iranian Nuclear Weapons Capability: UNACCEPTABLE.”

No talking points on Syria at all were included. In fact, out of the literally scores of breakout briefing sessions that ran continuously between plenary sessions during the AIPAC conference, only one dealt directly with Syria.

That’s why the abrupt change of subject by the Three Amigos, all staunch advocates of Israel and great admirers of Netanyahu (with whom McCain and Graham had just met the week before in Jerusalem after which they publicly they publicly deplored President Barack Obama’s failure to align U.S. policy toward Tehran with their host’s), was so perplexing.

“It was incredibly poor timing by McCain to call for bombing Syria,” observed Heather Hurlburt, the executive director of the National Security Network (NSN), a foreign policy think tank close to the Obama administration. “I don’t know what it looks like to call for bombing Syria the same week (that) you’re calling for bombing Iran.”

Of course, there is a connection, and neo-conservatives (whose views are most reliably represented in the Senate by the Three Amigos) have worked increasingly assiduously at establishing it in the public mind as Syria has slowly slid toward civil war over the past year.

The Assad regime, they never cease to point out, has been Tehran’s closest and sometimes only ally in the Arab world, and its ouster would constitute a serious setback not only to its regional reach and influence, but also to another of Israel’s most dangerous foes, Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

“The end of the Assad regime would sever Hezbollah’s lifeline to Iran, eliminate a longstanding threat to Israel, bolster Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence, and inflict a strategic defeat on the Iranian regime,” McCain argued. “It would be a geopolitical success of the first order.”

In that respect, he and the neo-conservatives have argued, U.S. military intervention in Syria would be “very different” from last year’s intervention in Libya, which the Three Amigos also strongly supported.

In addition to the moral and humanitarian concerns on which Washington, NATO, and allied powers justified their intervention against Gaddafi, military action against Assad would also serve U.S. “strategic and geopolitical interests”, McCain asserted.

McCain’s argument partly echoed a much-noted New York Times op-ed by a former director of Israel’s Mossad, Efrain Halevy, who, significantly, has been one of the main figures in that country’s national security establishment who has publicly questioned the wisdom of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Entitled ‘Iran’s Achilles Heel‘, the article argued that Iran’s eviction from Syria would “…visibly dent its domestic and international prestige, possibly forcing a haemorrhaging regime in Tehran to suspend its nuclear policies. This would be a safer and more rewarding option than the military one.”

Unlike McCain, however, Halevy did not recommend direct military intervention in Syria, suggesting instead that Assad would go the minute that Russia, Assad’s main arms supplier and diplomatic protector, was persuaded to drop its support, a strategy that the Obama administration appears to be pursuing.

Although individual members have occasionally spoken hopefully about Assad’s demise, Netanyahu’s government has mostly kept a discreet silence on Syria. This reflects, among other things, concerns that chaos and civil war in such a heavily armed state, the possible ascendance by the Muslim Brotherhood or more radical Islamist forces, or both could prove more threatening than continued rule by the Assad dynasty, which, despite its support for Hezbollah, has kept its common border with Israel quiet for almost 40 years.

It has been far more comfortable focusing international attention on Iran’s nuclear programme and the necessity for the U.S. to take military action to stop it or to at least give Israel the wherewithal to do the deed. That was supposed to be the message coming out of the AIPAC conference and amplified by friendly Republican presidential candidates this week.

But for U.S. neo-conservatives, who generally feel they know better than Israel’s government what is in its interests, the Assads have long been seen as Public Enemy Number One, and their present weakness represents the best opportunity in decades.

Indeed, the ultimate goal in the strategy laid out in the infamous 1996 “Clean Break” paper prepared by prominent neo-conservatives for Netanyahu on the eve of his first term as prime minister was Syria’s destabilisation. The overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein – for which the paper was best known – was simply one step toward that aim.

During the 2006 war with Hezbollah, neo-conservatives encouraged Israel to expand its military campaign into Syria, and, more than any other identifiable political faction, they have called consistently for Washington to provide material and military assistance – as former Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz did in a long column in the Wall Street Journal did this week – to the opposition for many months.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

To prepare his report, Ahmed Shaheed talked to more than 100 victims and witnesses inside and outside of Iran. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Omid Memarian
NEW YORK, Mar 8 2012 (IPS)

A United Nations envoy has called on the Iranian government to release all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, and to conduct an extensive, impartial and independent investigation into the violence that followed the 2009 presidential election.

In a 36- page report released at the Human Rights Council in Geneva Wednesday, Ahmed Shaheed, the U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, catalogues allegations that amount to a “striking pattern of violations of fundamental human rights guaranteed under international law”.

“Mr. Shaheed’s report has utmost importance to the people of Iran, as it proves how oppressed Iranian people are and that their human rights are violated,” Iranian human rights activist and 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi told IPS. “It is also important from an international point of view, because an impartial international authority has reviewed the people’s claims and has presented a report.”

Iranian authorities had refused Shaheed’s request for a country visit in September 2011. In October, he presented 58 cases of human rights violations in his interim report to the U.N. General Assembly, prompting a harsh response from Iranian officials who questioned the U.N envoy’s credentials and the credibility of the sources used in the report.

In January, Shaheed’s report was sent to Iran for review by government officials. But instead of addressing the issues raised in the report, they again accused Shaheed of bias and inaccuracies.

“The Special Rapporteur was engaged in propaganda by participating in forums and gatherings that were contaminated by Western espionage agencies, Zionist elements and terrorist groups,” according to Iran’s official response as stated in the report.

It also stated that sources of information, such as reports or complaints, lacked credibility, and that no positive reference had been made to meetings with officials and representatives of civil society.

Shaeed countered that he fulfilled his mandate to the best of his ability on the basis of voluminous information collected from a variety of independent and reliable sources.

“This rapportueur and the report are all lies,” charged the head of Iran’s judiciary, Sadeq Larijani, during a conference on human rights in Tehran in February.

Mohammad-Javad Larijani, the head of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, also accused Shaheed of promoting Western interests, particularly those of Washington, which has been steadily ramping up the pressure on Tehran over its nuclear programme.

“Just by listening five minutes to him, we understand Mr. Shaheed’s and the U.S. secretary of state’s remarks are the same,” Larijani said.

In order to fulfill his mandate, the U.N. envoy talked to more than 100 victims and witnesses inside and outside of the country.

One student interviewed for the report told IPS that he was contacted by Skype and was able to explain what happened to him during two months in detention.

“Even if Mr. Shaheed could travel to Iran, me and others could not meet with him for the severe consequences we might have faced afterward,” he told IPS on the condition of anonymity. “The Iranian judiciary will never let him enter Iran because they cannot open the doors to the prisons and let him talk to human rights victims.”

Morteza Kazemian, a prominent political activist and journalist who spent nine weeks in solitary confinement after the 2009 presidential election, told IPS that, “This report can create diplomatic and legal pressure on violators of human rights in Iran, limitations and pressure that can be effective and not harm the people of Iran, as a war would.

“Mr. Shaheed’s new report is published at a time when there are serious military threats against Iran,” Kazemian added. “Unfortunately, allegations of non-peaceful nuclear activities have affected the issue of human rights violations in Iran.”

Reza Moini, the head of Reporters Without Borders’ Iran and Afghanistan Division, told IPS, “You must bear in mind that the Islamic Republic authorities did not allow Mr. Shaheed to go to Iran, and basically deprived him of a chance to visit with a large group of witnesses, victims, or even government officials.”

Thirteen members of Moini’s family, including one of his brothers, have been executed since 1980.

Shaheed’s report notes a dramatic increase in the number of executions in Iran, from less than 100 cases in 2003 to at least 670 cases in 2011.

“This report is successful as a diary of the suppression of the past two years and the rapporteur has, fortunately, been able to meet with many victims outside Iran, and has recorded their stories,” Moini added.

“However, it does not establish a relationship between the suppressive mechanisms and (Iran’s) current laws. This is why most of the demands of the victims of official suppression are absent. The biggest group of victims in this area are journalists and bloggers, and that is not a small number.

“The other point is that though impunity from punishment is quite clear throughout the report both in practice and in the victims’ tales, there is no emphasis about finding a clear solution for this problem in the recommendations section,” he said.

Ebadi also lamented that the special rapporteur was barred from conducting an on-the-ground investigation in Iran, but said she believed the report was thorough and presented an accurate picture.

“The fact that the Iranian government did not allow Mr. Shaheed in the country and did not issue him a visa, though inappropriate in nature, did not have an impact on the accuracy of Mr. Shaheed’s report, as he is well-informed about Iranian affairs through contacts by witnesses from inside and outside Iran who have shared their own observations with him,” she said.

“An extension of Mr. Shaheed’s mission has utmost importance for the people of Iran,” she added.

Human Rights Council members will decide on whether or not to renew Shaheed’s mandate for another year on Mar. 22.

Excerpt:

By - - and Pierre Klochendler
JERUSALEM, Mar 8 2012 (IPS)

Intense consultations at the highest level between the U.S. and Israel on how to coordinate their respective strategies vis-à-vis Iran indicate that a strike on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites, if launched by Israel, the U.S., or in tandem, wouldn’t occur this spring, probably not even before November.

“This notion that somehow we have a choice to make in the next week or two weeks, or month or two months, is not borne out by the facts,” U.S. President Barack Obama said on Tuesday, one day after hosting Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

By “choice”, read a U.S. war as last resort – if Iran chooses not to abandon its uranium enrichment programme.

By “facts”, rely on the severest Israeli intelligence estimates that Iran has already enough 20 percent enriched uranium in its possession to produce higher-grade nuclear fuel for more than a bomb. Were Iran to decide to actually build such a bomb, it would probably take about one year, U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta recently assessed.

Still, what if Israel chose to pre-empt its enemy’s controversial nuclear quest militarily before all other options are exhausted, thus pre-empting its ally’s preferred strategy?

Obama’s insistence to give precedence to economic sanctions and diplomacy clearly came within the context of Iran’s acquiescence to resume the long-stalled talks with the five U.N. Security Council powers (Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.S.) and Germany (P5+1) over its nuclear programme. The date and venue for such talks have yet to be determined.

Netanyahu’s demand that future P5+1 discussions be contingent on a complete cessation by Iran of its enrichment programme, the dismantlement of its underground Fordow enrichment facility, and the transfer to a third country of its already-enriched uranium beyond 3.5 percent was a non-starter – even the Israeli leader knew that.

Iran has also said it will allow access of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to its Parchin military complex – though conditions for such inspection have yet to be agreed upon. In its November 2011 report, the U.N. nuclear watchdog alleged simulated nuclear warhead tests took place in Parchin.

U.S. red lines to a potential Israeli military strike on Iran were not discussed during the Oval Office meeting, assured Netanyahu’s National Security Council chief Yaakov Amidror. “Red lines should rather be discussed between the international community and Iran,” he noted while welcoming, albeit sceptically, the prospect of P5+1 negotiations.

Israel’s own red line vis-à-vis Iran is when its nuclear programme attains what defence minister Ehud Barak calls a “zone of immunity”.

The defence minister’s doctrine refers to when Iran enters a phase after which Israeli or U.S. aerial strikes on its nuclear sites would be possible but mostly ineffective to even the most advanced bunker-busting bombs. That’s a matter of months, warns Israel.

If Barak’s argument is valid, the point when Iran produces its first nuclear bomb then becomes irrelevant. When Iran can actually decide it wants to build a bomb is the red line, Israel argues. When Iran has actually built a bomb is the point of no return, the U.S. retorts.

Thus, it is argued, defining an authoritative timeline for Iran crossing a nuclear weapon threshold risks being ill-defined. And, there’s no guarantee that the making of a bomb by Iran would be detected in real time. Atomic tests by the former Soviet Union (1949), Pakistan (1998), and North Korea (2006) took U.S. intelligence by surprise.

On the other hand, Israel has in the past conducted pre-emptive strikes with neither prior U.S. consent nor notification, destroying the Iraqi nuclear reactor Osirak (1981) and a Syrian reactor near Deir e-Zor (2007). The U.S. condemned the former. There was neither a red line nor a green light from the U.S. on the latter.

Yet during the first Gulf War (1991), Israel, under heavy U.S. pressure, refrained from retaliation against Iraq’s missile attacks.

That Netanyahu has no faith in the validity of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure was on public display at the Oval Office. Before their one-on-one meeting, the Prime Minister made no mention of the diplomatic option and economic sanctions advocated by the U.S. President. Obama, for his part, didn’t reiterate the eventuality of a military option.

In his address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Netanyahu declared dismissively: “Israel has waited patiently for the international community to resolve this issue. We’ve waited for diplomacy to work. We’ve waited for sanctions to work. None of us can afford to wait much longer.”

But Netanyahu’s impatience is also a non-starter. He made it amply clear even before his White house meeting that he hasn’t yet decided on a strike against Iran. So, Obama could safely reiterate Israel’s right to defend itself.

All that considered, Netanyahu won’t be told what to do with the Iran nuclear programme. After all, that would be equivalent to the U.S. taking responsibility for what Israel does.

So, in effect, Israel is maintaining its own zone of immunity. “Neither a green light (endorsing an Israeli strike on Iran) nor a red light (vetoing such strike),” said Netanyahu spokesman Liran Dan. “We’re in the grey zone now.”

This carefully-calculated ambiguity was corroborated by reports in the Israeli media quoting top U.S. officials that Obama has instructed Panetta to work directly with Barak on the procurement by Israel of advanced bunker-piercing bombs and air re-fuelling tankers.

Defence analysts have long pointed out that for an Israeli assault to be effective its Air Force needs these missing items in its arsenal.

“Israel’s right to defend itself is a matter of consensus. But whether Israel is sovereign in its decision on when and how to use its U.S. weapons and entangle its most important friend – that’s another question,” cautioned the liberal daily Haaretz in an editorial on Wednesday.

Excerpt:

By - - and Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

More than 10,000 U.S. citizens descended on Capitol Hill Tuesday under the direction of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading voice of the powerful Israel lobby here, to urge their congressional representatives to take a more aggressive stance towards Iran.

Their swarming of Congressional offices marked the final act of their annual three-day conference, which this year featured speeches by President Barack Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, three of the four leading Republican contenders for the White House this fall, and the top leaders of both parties in Congress.

The dominant theme of the conference was Iran’s presumed effort to develop nuclear weapons and what to do about it. The tone was heavily tilted toward actual or an increased threat of military action. This stands in stark contrast to Tuesday’s announcement that the U.S., United Kingdom, France, China, Russia and Germany had agreed to resume talks with Iran in hopes of reaching a diplomatic resolution on the Iranian nuclear programme.

President Obama’s speech, at the conference’s opening plenary and ahead of his meeting with Netanyahu the following day, reaffirmed his administration’s policy of applying “crippling” economic sanctions on Iran and leaving the military option as a last resort.

For his part, Netanyahu, who has recently been increasingly vocal about the need for stronger action regarding Iran, tried to strike a balance between avoiding a confrontational tone with Obama similar to the one he took during his controversial trip to Washington for last year’s AIPAC conference, and holding fast to his position that sanctions and diplomacy are not succeeding in their aim to deter Iran from its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons.

One key area of disagreement between Netanyahu and Obama is where the critical “red line” would be drawn with Iran. Would it be at the point where Iran was about to actually acquire a nuclear weapon, or merely at it gaining the technical capability to do so, a point many analysts believe Iran has already reached.

While Obama reinforced his view that the critical threshold was Iran actually obtaining a weapon, Netanyahu, whose government has long opposed any outcome that would permit Iran to enrich uranium on its own territory, carefully avoided mention in his speech of where the line should be drawn.

“President Obama has … stated clearly that all options are on the table, and that American policy is not containment,” Netanyahu told the AIPAC audience in the cavernous Washington Convention Centre. “Well, Israel has exactly the same policy – we are determined to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons; we leave all options on the table; and containment is definitely not an option.”

From there, Netanyahu took a more militant stance.

“Israel has waited patiently for the international community to resolve this issue. We’ve waited for diplomacy to work. We’ve waited for sanctions to work. None of us can afford to wait much longer,” Netanyahu continued, signaling that, while he may have agreed to let the United States pursue diplomacy for the moment, he was not committed to refraining from his own military action in the future.

Netanyahu’s stance was bolstered by Obama’s potential Republican opponents in November’s election. Each accused the president of not taking a strong enough stance against Iran.

Speaking by satellite hook-up, Mitt Romney, the persistent favourite in the Republican presidential race, criticised Obama’s approach and promised a tougher stance, including a military buildup around Iran aimed at intimidating its leaders.

“I will make sure Iran knows of the very real peril that awaits if it becomes nuclear,” Romney said. “I will engage Iran’s neighbours. I will station multiple carriers and warships at Iran’s door.”

He also won thunderous applause by promising that “… as president, my first foreign trip will not be to Cairo or Riyadh or Ankara. It will be to Jerusalem.”

Obama, however, was not without support at the closing plenary.

Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, who warned that attacking Iran could well prove counterproductive, told the conferees the U.S. was prepared to take military action “when all else fails”.

“We will keep all options – including military action – on the table to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” He described that as “a last alternative when all else fails, but make no mistake, we will act if we have to.”

More dramatically, Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, went into some detail about how the United States is already acting to enhance Israeli security, not just in general terms, but in ways that will specifically be of use against an Iranian attack.

“When Iran faces the fateful nuclear decision before it, it will have to recognise that should it cross the red line which would bring about military action against its nuclear facilities, its ability to retaliate, or even credibly threaten to retaliate, against Israel will be severely degraded by Israel’s missile defenses,” many of them developed by U.S. technology and, in the case of one powerful radar system, manned by U.S. troops, Levin told the AIPAC audience.

The United States provides well over than three billion dollars a year in military aid to Israel, an amount that has increased steadily under Obama.

The range of discussion within the conference – normally confined with rather narrow ideological limits – was widened by protest activities outside the convention centre.

The groups “Occupy AIPAC” and CODEPINK demonstrated against the conference from the beginning, picketing and setting up mock checkpoints to remind attendees of one of the key features of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and its ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip.

But inside the conference, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands was hardly mentioned, as conference organisers made certain that attention remained focused squarely on Iran and the “existential” its nuclear programme posed to Israel.

With the White House press conference Tuesday afternoon, Obama and his call to give more time for diplomacy got the last word.

“…(B)ecause the sanctions (against Iran) are going to be even tougher in the coming months, because they’re now starting to affect their oil industry, their central bank, and because we’re now seeing noises about them returning to the negotiating table … it is deeply in everybody’s interests – the United States’, Israel’s, and the world’s – to see if this can be resolved in a peaceful fashion,” Obama said Tuesday.

“I think there’s no doubt that those who are suggesting or proposing or beating the drums of war should explain clearly to the American people what they think the costs and benefits would be,” he said in an apparent swipe at Republicans who have lined up behind Netanyahu.

“The Iranians just stated that they are willing to return to the negotiating table, and we’ve got the opportunity, even as we maintain that pressure, to see how it plays out.”

*Jim Lobe contributed to this story.

Excerpt:

By - - and Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, US, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

Iran’s Mar. 2 parliamentary elections were touted by many Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the most “critical” event since the establishment of the Islamic Republic 33 years ago.

Speaker Ali Larijani had to contend with many unhappy deputies who say fraud and "unethical destructive conduct" were responsible for their defeats. Credit: Parmida Rahimi/CC BY 2.0

And if official figures are to be taken at face value, the Iranian electorate responded to the call, showing “insight and unity”, in the words of Gholamreaza Haddad Adel, an incumbent lawmaker who is now considered the most likely candidate to replace current speaker Ali Larijani in the next session of parliament.

Other government officials are hailing the election as a watershed in the face of military threats from Israel and “crippling” economic sanctions by the West.

According to Larijani himself, the election constituted a rebuke to Iran’s enemies who had wagered on a lacklustre turnout in order “to place even more pressure on Iran”. Instead, “the nation” stepped in to “push back against adventurist rivals and show that, in regard to national objectives, it is of one voice with the regime, and its exemplar is not political groupings, but rather the Leader of the revolution”, whose “management of the setting was praiseworthy”.

Official figures showed a seven-percent increase in voter turnout compared to the last parliamentary election in 2008 – from 57 to 64 percent. In many large cities, according to the official tally, participation increased dramatically. The number of people voting in the northern city of Rasht, for example, increased by 165 percent, while the southern city of Ahwaz witnessed a more modest, but still remarkable 50-percent increase, according to the publicly released results.

These figures are unlikely to be accepted by people who believe that the announced results of the contested 2009 presidential election, won by President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, were fraudulent. Many of them stayed home to protest political conditions in the country, including the continued detention of reformist leaders and the ban on their political parties.

Indeed, the inability to independently verify the results will add to suspicions that elections in Iran are becoming increasingly like show elections, particularly since the official in charge, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, gave out different figures regarding the number of people who participated virtually every time he spoke publicly after the polls closed Friday night.

As to the results, the much touted competition between the two lists of conservative candidates – one presumably supporting Khamenei and the other indirectly supporting Ahmadinejad – did not really materialise. Instead, among the 225 out of 290 seats that were decided in the first round of voting, the majority of winning candidates either appeared on both lists or were rookie politicians who ran as independents. About 20 people identified with the reformist movement were also elected.

Only in Tehran is there likely to be a confrontation between the two lists in the second round of voting next month, since only five out of the slotted 30 seats allotted to the capital city were decided. Fifty candidates will have to compete for the remaining 25 seats, along with candidates for another 40 seats elsewhere in the country, because none of them received the minimum 25 percent of the total vote cast that is required to win in the first round.

There was no surprise in the large number of incumbents who lost their seats, since historically only about 30 percent of sitting lawmakers have been re-elected.

Nonetheless, Speaker Larijani had to contend Monday with many unhappy deputies who claimed publicly that fraud and “unethical destructive conduct” were responsible for their defeats. Larijani must now figure out how to motivate the losers to do urgent work on next year’s budget whose approval has already been delayed by months due to government inaction and the election itself.

The high number of new deputies and the lack of clarity surrounding both their political views and their campaign donors make predictions regarding the political trajectory of the new parliament difficult.

But if the words of Ahmad Tavakoli, a current MP and head of the Majles Research Center, are to be accepted, “all (political) currents hold the same views in foreign policy, and their resistance against foreign pressures is good, despite the tactical differences they have in approaching the West.” It is in the domestic arena that “significant differences” are likely to emerge.

“We still do not know which currents or groups will take shape (in the parliament) and which one will dominate,” he went on to say.

The election produced one major surprise, described as “shocking” by some disappointed members of the opposition movement: the announcement that former president Mohammad Khatami, the most prominent reformist leader who is not under some form of detention, had voted in a district outside Tehran.

The reaction to that report was fast and furious on social networks and websites inside and outside of Iran. Criticism ranged from charges that he was committing treason against the people of Iran and being a coward and a dupe, to having blood on his hands for accepting the tenets of the Islamic Republic.

Earlier in the year, Khatami had laid out the release of all political prisoners and lifting of curbs on political parties and the press as conditions for the participation of reformist candidates in the election. He had not called for a voter boycott, but many assumed that he would not vote.

In his response to the harsh criticism directed against him by those Iranians who since the 2009 presidential elections have believed the system incapable of reform, Khatami wrote on his website, “My action is rooted in my political view and conduct and what I believe. I acted from a reformist position and for the sake of keeping open the path of reformism which I consider to be the only way for reaching the authentic ideals of the revolution, securing people’s rights, and the nation’s interests.”

In an election in which participation was insisted upon as an expression of needed national unity in the face of foreign threats, Khatami was faced with the choice of working within or against the system. Hedging or working against the system from within was not an option.

Reformists already have two leaders, 2009 presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mussavi and Mehdi Karrubi, who are under house arrest and have been widely accused of working against the system. Khatami made clear that in the face of few alternatives he does not see any utility in either joining them or abandoning the hope for reform or national reconciliation, even if only for doubtful tactical reasons.

Meanwhile, the dominant conservative bloc, which since 2009 has repeatedly accused those who protested that election of sedition, also faces a choice.

Now that this “critical” election has delivered a “slap to the enemy” and proved the “insight and unity of the nation”, the leadership could begin acting in a less paranoid fashion, intent on seeing enemies and fifth columns in every corner, if indeed its professed desire for national unity in the face of the enemy is sincere.

Although it may yet be too early, no hints of such a path have yet emerged, however, as the leadership has so far failed to show any interest in using the election to reach out to reformists and their supporters and reverse the political polarisation that has afflicted Iran’s highly diverse society since the 2009 election.

In that respect, this “critical” election appears designed more for external consumption than for internal reconciliation.

Excerpt:

By - - and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

Is war against Iran, either by Israel, the U.S. or both, closer or farther off after this week’s meeting here between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

As more than 10,000 pro-Israel activists, energised by the annual policy conference of powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), fanned out across Capitol Hill to urge their elected representatives to authorise war if Iran fails to halt its nuclear programme very soon, the answer to that question appeared as elusive as ever.

On the one hand, Obama made clear, as he did in his speech to AIPAC Sunday and again in his press conference Tuesday when he accused his Republican foes “beating the drums of war”, that he was determined not to be rushed into taking military action but would rather take advantage of what he called a “window of opportunity” for diplomacy to work.

He appeared to be referring to Tuesday’s announcement that the so- called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany) has responded favourably to an Iranian letter last month and formally agreed to resume negotiations with Tehran on its nuclear programme after a hiatus of more than a year.

“It is my belief that we have a window of opportunity where this can still be resolved diplomatically,” he told reporters Tuesday. “That’s not just my view. That’s the view of our top intelligence officials; it’s the view of top Israeli intelligence officials.”

“The president is taking a much bolder and more aggressive posture against the reckless war discourse,” noted Trita Parsi, an expert on U.S.-Israeli-Iranian relations and president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

“There are several reasons for this – obviously, because the U.S. military opposes a war with Iran, but also because the war talk shoots up oil prices, which, as the president pointed out in his AIPAC speech, not only benefits the Iranian government, but also causes gas prices in the U.S. to soar and job creation to be undermined,” he said. “And if you’re a sitting president seeking re- election, that’s the last thing you want.”

The president also never retreated from his position that he would not consider taking military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities unless and until Tehran was clearly weaponising its nuclear programme.

Obama thus successfully resisted pressure from Netanyahu and his many Congressional supporters – both Democrats and Republicans – to set the “red line” for military strikes at a much lower, if vaguer, threshold; that is, when Iran gains the mere “capability” to build a weapon, a line which many experts believe Tehran has already crossed.

On the other hand, some of his statements to AIPAC Sunday suggested that Obama had in effect assumed a more hawkish position, one that could make it much more difficult for him to avoid taking military action or prevent Israel from doing so, if the pending round of negotiations should stall or fail.

Thus, going beyond his administration’s mantra of “all options are on the table,” Obama spoke explicitly of a “military effort” if diplomacy and sanctions fail. He also reiterated a campaign promise from four years ago “to use all elements of American power to … prevent (Iran) from acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

Similarly, he appeared to endorse a favourite argument of the hawks by explicitly rejecting a “containment policy” against a nuclear- armed Iran.

Finally, he asserted in his AIPAC speech, as he has before, that Israel has a “sovereign right to make its own decision about what is required to meet its security needs,” adding that “no Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction.”

These comments “indicate that the White House now accepts the Israeli premise that Israel cannot live with a nuclear-armed Iran, period,” noted Wayne White, a former senior Middle East intelligence analyst at the State Department.

“So if Iran moves in that direction (or simply reaches a point in its nuclear development at which Iran is on the verge of a level of capability that would allow weaponization if it so chose), Washington now apparently accepts that Israeli military action would be legitimate (based on rules set by Israel and the U.S., mind you).”

Indeed, to Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East analyst, Obama’s statement sounded “almost like an invitation to Netanyahu to launch a war”.

That naturally raised the question of how Washington would react if Israel should undertake a unilateral attack.

Obama did not address himself explicitly to that question, although one passage, which followed his recital of the times when his administration defended Israel at the U.N. and other international forums, was suggestive. “So there should not be a shred of doubt by now,” he said. “When the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.”

While in Friday’s press conference, he insisted that that line was not intended as “a military doctrine” – a caveat that, according to one neo-conservative hawk, showed that he wasn’t serious – it added to the impression that Obama would not take concrete steps to restrain Israel and would defend it if Iran retaliated.

According to Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, Obama’s assurances may actually reduce the risks of war, at least in the short to medium run.

“Obama gave the kind of assurances that the security wing of the Israeli policy-making community wanted to hear,” he told IPS.

In an important op-ed published by the New York Times before the AIPAC meeting, Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, had argued that Obama could prevent a unilateral Israeli attack if he offered “an ironclad American assurance that if Israel refrains from acting in its own window of opportunity – and all other options have failed to halt Tehran’s nuclear quest – Washington will act to prevent a nuclear Iran while it is still within its power to do so.”

“I think Obama ticked the box in terms of creating the ‘zone of trust’ that Yadlin was asking for. I think it will stiffen the spine (of the Israeli security establishment) in their internal conversations,” Levy said.

While Netanyahu and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, are said to be most eager to strike Iran, many retired senior Israeli military and intelligence officials have spoken out strongly against unilateral action and are believed to reflect the views of those who are still in active service.

“I think in his follow-up news conference today, Obama was telling Netanyahu that ‘I’ve given you the assurances that should be sufficient. Now, please stop beating the war drums so I can get into a serious negotiation’ and try to settle this peacefully,” Levy told IPS.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

Obama urged a diplomatic resolution of the tensions with Iran, which, he contends, there is still time to achieve. Credit: White House photo

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama Sunday made a clear statement against a rush to war – either by the U.S. or Israel – with Iran, while also emphasising that he would pursue that option if alternatives were unsuccessful in ensuring that Iran would not develop a nuclear weapon.

Speaking at the annual policy convention of the powerful American- Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama decried the “loose talk of war”, and contended that sanctions and international pressure are working.

“Now is not the time for bluster; now is the time to let our increased pressure sink in, and to sustain the broad international coalition that we have built,” he said, noting that the recent drumbeat for war “has only benefited the Iranian government, by driving up the price of oil…”

He was no doubt referring to recent reports that Israel was preparing to strike Iranian nuclear targets this year, as well as exhortations by its supporters here, including three of the four major Republican presidential candidates, to take a more aggressive and threatening stance against Iran or to support Israel if it undertakes an attack against Tehran’s nuclear facilities on its own.

Obama began pushing back on that pressure last week in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine in which he stated that “…our assessment, which is shared by the Israelis, is that Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon and is not yet in a position to obtain a nuclear weapon without us having a pretty long lead time in which we will know that they are making that attempt.”

Obama went on to urge a diplomatic resolution, which, he contends, there is still time to achieve. He reiterated that point at the AIPAC conference Sunday.

“Given their history, there are of course no guarantees that the Iranian regime will make the right choice. But both Israel and the United States have an interest in seeing this challenge resolved diplomatically. After all, the only way to truly solve this problem is for the Iranian government to make a decision to forsake nuclear weapons. That’s what history tells us.”

AIPAC has been backing a resolution in the U.S. Senate which would draw a “red line” at Iran’s acquisition of the “capability” of building a nuclear weapon, a lower, if substantially more vague threshold than actually possessing one.

The group, whose positions generally reflect those of the Israeli government, will be sending thousands of its members gathered here for the conference to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to lobby lawmakers to support that resolution. The conference will hear directly from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday night after what many regard as a critical meeting between the two leaders earlier in the day.

Many analysts, including the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies, believe that Iran is already technically capable of producing a nuclear weapon but has not yet made the decision to actually build one. So the Senate’s approval of the resolution, especially if it carries an overwhelming majority of the upper chamber, not only risks escalating tensions with Tehran, but would also challenge the administration’s policy, as enunciated Sunday by Obama himself.

Obama drew this distinction in his speech Sunday at the AIPAC conference by repeatedly warning about Iran “obtaining” a nuclear weapon, while not mentioning “capability”.

“I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table,” the president stated. “And I mean what I say.

“Iran’s leaders should know that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he told the 13,000 AIPAC delegates. “And as I’ve made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

In the last several weeks, it has become increasingly clear that the U.S. and Israel disagree not only on their definition of “red lines” that would provoke military action, but also on what an acceptable negotiated outcome with Iran might be.

Israel has long held to the same position as former President George W. Bush: that Iran should not be permitted to enrich uranium on its own territory, a result that is also favoured by the sponsors of the pending resolution. The Obama administration, on the other hand, has indicated it is willing to accept a settlement permitting enrichment in Iran, provided it is subject to enhanced international oversight.

On the eve of his visit here, Netanyahu said he saw no use in further negotiations, but most analysts believe a new round of talks between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany) will take place as early as the end of this month.

Obama’s presentation at AIPAC came in the context of a larger controversy over his role in U.S.-Israel relations.

Speaking Immediately before Obama, Israeli President Shimon Peres, who is believed to oppose a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, praised him for his support of Israel and his efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

“He has made it clear that the United States of America will never permit Iran to become nuclear. He made it clear that containment is not a viable policy,” Peres said. “And as the president stated, all options are on the table…Mr. President, I know your commitment to Israel is deep and profound. Under your leadership, security cooperation between the United States and Israel has reached its highest level. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a friend in the White House.”

Yet the applause for Peres when he was introduced was noticeably much greater than that for Obama.

And just before the two presidents spoke, Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney and an ascendant neo-conservative in her own right, drew considerable applause herself when she charged during a discussion with several other prominent analysts that Obama had undermined Israel more than any president before him.

Although that applause was exceeded when fellow panelist and former Congresswoman Jane Harman, now head of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, chastised those who would break the bipartisan consensus on support for Israel and turn the issue into a “political football”, it remained a strong indication of the sizeable contingent in the cavernous Washington Convention Centre hall used by AIPAC for its annual convention that was very hostile to Obama.

Aware of this, Obama preceded his statements on Iran by defending his record of support for Israel and echoing Harman’s criticism of those who would politicise the issue.

“If during this political season you hear some question my administration’s support for Israel, remember that it’s not backed up by the facts,” Obama said.

He pointed to the widely acknowledged fact that U.S.-Israel security cooperation is greater than ever, as well as his repeated – and often lonely – defences of Israel at the U.N. and other international forums, many of which have drawn criticism from some of Washington’s closest allies.

Obama thereby set the stage for his defence of his Iran policy, and where the role of military force fits into it.

“As president and commander-in-chief, I have a deeply-held preference for peace over war,” Obama said. “I have sent men and women into harm’s way. I have seen the consequences of those decisions in the eyes of those I meet who have come back gravely wounded, and the absence of those who don’t make it home. …I only use force when the time and circumstances demand it.”

Although most of his speech was devoted to Iran, Obama also spent several minutes warning against “cynicism” and “despair” regarding the Palestinian issue, which has virtually disappeared from the headlines over the past year, displaced by the so-called “Arab Spring” and the escalation in tensions over Iran. But he announced no new initiatives in that regard.

*Jim Lobe contributed to this story.

Excerpt:

By - - and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 2 2012 (IPS)

While Israeli leaders historically have enjoyed not insignificant influence with their U.S. counterparts, Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu will likely arrive at the White House next week with a little extra boost in his efforts to get President Barack Obama to toughen his already hard line against Iran.

President Barack Obama greets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009. Credit: White House photo by Pete Souza

Nor is it related only to the fact that three of the four Republican presidential candidates are repeatedly accusing Obama of being “soft” on Iran and insufficiently committed to Israel’s security, thus seeking to drive a wedge between the president and Jewish voters and donors.

The extra boost on this visit is provided by growing concerns over the convergence of steadily rising oil prices – and jitters in the oil market over mounting tensions between Israel and Iran – with the November elections here.

“The biggest hurdle to President Obama’s re-election is almost surely going to be the inevitable rise in gas prices over the summer,” wrote Daniel Dicker, an oil trader who writes a column for financial website, The Street, this week.

“And no matter how hard he – or anybody else – argues that higher pump prices are largely beyond his control, you and I know that the American public won’t much care for explanations.”

Although Israel itself is neither a major producer nor consumer of oil, Netanyahu – whether by design or not – now finds himself in a position to influence the price that U.S. motorists pay at the pump and thus affect Obama’s political fortunes this fall, as noted Thursday by Gal Luft, the Israeli-born director of the Washington- based Institute for Global Security, in an essay published this week by foreignpolicy.com.

“There is no gainsaying the corrosive political impact that high gasoline prices have on an incumbent president’s chances of getting re-elected,” he wrote. “With prices projected to hit a national average of 4.25 dollars a gallon (3.8 litres) by (the end of May), and with a new poll finding that seven in 10 Americans find the gas price issue ‘deeply important,’ the president should be concerned.”

After all, back in the summer of 2008, oil and petrol prices reached all-time highs, helping to propel Obama to victory over Republican Senator John McCain in the presidential election that fall.

“Today, it’s the (Republicans’) turn to smell blood,” according to Luft. “Obama knows this. The problem is that Netanyahu, one of the savviest foreign leaders when it comes to American politics, know this too.”

Indeed, oil experts cited by the New York Times estimate that recent Israeli-Iranian threats and counter-threats, combined with U.S. pressure on third countries to reduce Iranian oil imports, have increased world oil prices by as much as 20 percent.

The same experts estimate that an actual Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would by itself provoke a further spike in oil prices on the order of 15 to 25 percent, adding at least 50 cents to petrol costs at the pump, which are now averaging close to four dollars a gallon.

“If the price of oil goes up to five dollars a gallon or more, it would not be good for Obama’s re-election,” according to Charles Ebinger, an energy expert at the Brookings Institution.

But such an increase could be prolonged or multiplied if Tehran retaliated by following through on threats to close the Strait of Hormuz – even if only for a few days – or by striking, either directly or through proxies, critical oil- and gas-production or refining facilities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, or Iraq, where Iranian-backed militias are well-placed to cause havoc in the southern oil fields.

“The most dangerous scenario would be if the Iranians were to retaliate against some of the Gulf states either because one or more let (the Israelis) over-fly their territory or another reason,” Ebinger told IPS.

“If they were attacked – especially the major refineries in Saudi Arabia or the main LNG (liquefied natural gas) facilities in Qatar – oil and gas prices would go through the roof,” he said.

An Israeli attack “could be a stunning success, or it could just as easily unleash a chain of events that would bring the world to the brink of the Greater Depression,” agreed Luft.

He argued that success would be better assured if the U.S. carried out the attack because, unlike Israel, it has the military resources to destroy Tehran’s conventional retaliatory capabilities, as well as its nuclear facilities.

But even without an attack, the persistence of Israeli-Iranian tensions through the summer ensures that petrol prices will remain 10-20 percent higher than they otherwise would be. Moreover, those prices will likely increase as demand grows with the ongoing – albeit slow – economic recovery and as supplies, whether due to sanctions against Iran or declines in exports from other sources, such as Sudan or Nigeria, tighten.

Netanyahu is expected to demand that Obama toughen his rhetoric against Tehran, deploy more firepower in the region to increase the credibility of a U.S. military strike, and offer concrete assurances that Washington will indeed take military action if Iran’s nuclear programme crosses certain “red lines”.

If Obama acquiesces, Luft noted, the current 10-20 percent Iran- related premium on oil prices could go higher yet. But rejection of those demands could also send prices higher because Israel may be considered more likely to take unilateral action with or without U.S. approval.

There are ways for Obama to overcome his predicament, according to Luft, who is closely associated with a number of prominent neo- conservative hawks.

Netanyahu may be willing to hold off on striking Iran until after the November elections in exchange for such prizes as the release of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, a major new U.S. weapons deal, and an increase in missile-defence spending for Israel in the administration’s 2013 budget, according to Luft. Such an agreement would presumably be accompanied by a U.S. commitment to strike Iran if its nuclear programme crossed certain red lines.

But Luft’s preferred option is something else altogether. Obama, he wrote, could “take ownership of, and lead, the military option against Iran, and reinvent himself as a war president in the hope that American motorists will view their pain at the pump forgivingly as part of their patriotic duty.

“Such an option would also defuse Republican criticism about Obama being weak on Iran and transform national priorities in the months leading up to the elections.”

Luft’s essay, however, leaves out a number of other possible factors that could both reduce the Iran-related premium and enhance Obama’s chances of being re-elected.

It ignores, for example, Iran’s own potential influence – for good or ill – on the oil market, according to Michael Klare, an energy specialist at Hampshire College.

“Netanyahu can have a lot to say about the price of gasoline, only so long as the Iranians play along,” he said. “But if tomorrow the Iranians say, ‘We’re going to negotiate seriously to resolve this,’ then he won’t have any cards to play any more,” as tension – and the Iran-related premium – ratchets down.

Indeed, any progress in negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 – the U.S., France, Britain, Russia and China – which most analysts believe will resume after a year’s hiatus at the end of this month or in April – could have that effect.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

By - - and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

On the eve of a critical set of meetings here between top U.S. and Israeli officials, a new survey finds little backing among the Israeli public for a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities without Washington’s approval.

According to the poll, released at a briefing at the Brookings Institution here Wednesday, only about one in five Israelis (19 percent) favour a unilateral strike without U.S. support.

If, on the other hand, Washington gave a green light for an attack, another 42 percent of Israelis would favour it, according to the survey, which was conducted late last week by Israel’s Dahaf Institute and has a margin or error of four percent.

The poll, which was organised by Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow at Brookings who teaches Middle East politics at the University of Maryland, found that 34 percent of the 500 Israeli respondents questioned by the pollsters oppose a strike and that a similar percentage believes such a strike would either have no effect on Iran’s nuclear programme (19 percent) or actually accelerate it (11 percent).

The poll, which also found that more than two-thirds of respondents (68 percent) believe that such an attack will provoke retaliation by Lebanon’s Hezbollah, is likely to bolster those in the administration of President Barack Obama who hope to persuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the two men meet here next week to shelve any plans his security cabinet may have for carrying out such an attack this year.

Netanyahu will be here to speak before the annual convention of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has been the main domestic lobbying force pushing for a hawkish policy and Congressional passage of a series of ever-tougher sanctions against economic and financial sanctions against Iran.

Obama, as well as Israeli President Shimon Peres and a host of other political heavyweights from both countries and major U.S. parties, is also scheduled to speak to the convention before his meeting with Netanyahu.

The Obama-Netanyahu meeting will cap a flurry of bilateral meetings of senior officials in both countries’ capitals over the last month in what appears to be an effort to gauge each others’ intentions.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, widely considered the most hawkish member of Netanyahu’s eight-man security cabinet, is here this week, while Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, was in Israel last week. The head of Israel’s Mossad, its foreign intelligence agency, was here to meet with his counterparts here, shortly after the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, completed a two-day visit to Israel.

While officials on both sides publicly insist that that they are coordinating their policies, the frequency of these high-level meetings, as well as off-the-record comments by anonymous officials, suggest that key differences on tactics and strategy in dealing with Iran may in fact be widening.

Top administration officials, backed by a growing number of retired military and intelligence officials here, have made increasingly clear that they oppose an Israeli military strike.

Echoing both his predecessor, Adm. Michael Mullen, and his boss, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, Dempsey warned in an interview 10 days ago in the clearest expression of the administration’s position to date that such an attack would be, among other things, “destabilising”, “premature”, “not prudent”, and unlikely to achieve Israel’s “long-term objectives”.

U.S. military and intelligence officials have also stated repeatedly that they do not believe the Iranian leadership has yet decided to build a nuclear weapon.

Such remarks have infuriated Netanyahu who, according to Israeli reports, accused Dempsey of “serving Iranian interests” by reducing the credibility of the threat that Israel or the U.S. would resort to military action if Tehran did not abandon its nuclear programme. He also reportedly refused to promise Donilon that he would give Washington advance notice if he decided to mount an attack.

Netanyahu himself reportedly hopes to persuade Obama to take a tougher line against Iran, beyond the administration’s mantra that “all options are on the table,” a reference to possible military action.

In particular, he wants Washington to publicly establish a clear “red line” – specifically, the achievement by Iran of an ill-defined nuclear-weapons “capability” – which, if crossed by Tehran, would trigger a U.S. attack.

The administration, however, has so far declined to do so, insisting privately instead that its red line would be Iran’s actual “weaponisation”, a benchmark that most analysts believe would take at least three years for Iran to achieve if it indeed decided to produce a deliverable bomb.

And while its officials, including Dempsey, continue to emphatically insist that the military option remains on the table, many analysts here – and in Israel – believe that the administration prefers putting in place a “containment and deterrence” strategy toward a nuclear Iran over a war whose consequences cannot be predicted.

Thus, AIPAC, presumably with Netanyahu’s encouragement and support, is lobbying for a pending Senate resolution that would take the “containment” option from the table and declare that it is a “vital national interest” of the U.S. to prevent Iran from acquiring a “nuclear weapons capability”.

“We …want to say clearly and resolutely to Iran: You have only two choices – peacefully negotiate to end your nuclear weapons programme or expect a military strike to end that programme,” said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, one of the co-sponsors.

Two other co-sponsors, John McCain and Lindsay Graham, met with Netanyahu in Israel last week, while three of the four remaining Republican presidential candidates are expected to endorse it when they address AIPAC next week.

The resolution so far has 37 co-sponsors, roughly equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, in the 100-seat Senate, but AIPAC is expected to make an all-out push for passage when its 10,000 activists arrive in Washington this weekend.

In this context, the latest poll should strengthen Obama’s hand. In addition to the lack of support for a unilateral strike that isn’t approved by Washington, it also found that a large majority of Israelis – and especially Israeli Jews – believe that Hezbollah, which is believed to have tens of thousands of rockets targeted on Israel, would join Iran in retaliating against any attack on Tehran.

On the other hand, a 44-percent plurality of Israeli respondents said they believed that an Israeli attack could set back Iran’s nuclear programme by at least three years.

Asked what they expected the U.S. to do if Israel carried out an attack, 27 percent said they thought Washington would join the war on Israel’s behalf, while 39 percent said it would provide diplomatic support but not military assistance. Only 15 percent said Washington would punish Israel by reducing its assistance.

Respondents were equally split on whether an Israeli attack would weaken or strengthen the Iranian regime, and a slight majority said a military strike against Iran would trigger a military conflict lasting months or years, as opposed to days or weeks.

Israeli respondents were split on whether they preferred Obama to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in November’s presidential elections, but preferred Obama by large margins over the other Republican candidates, including former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and House Speaker Newt Gingrich who have been the strongest advocates of military action against Iran.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

By - - and Omid Memarian
NEW YORK, Feb 28 2012 (IPS)

Amid mounting tensions between Iran and the United States over Tehran’s nuclear programme, perhaps nothing less than an Oscar to the acclaimed feature film “A Separation” could have brought smiles to the faces of millions of Iranians who see most news as bad news these days.

From left: Merila Zarei (Actress), Asghar Farhadi ('A Separation' Director) and Tahmineh Milani (Director). Credit: CC BY 2.0

In 1997, Majid Majidi’s “Children of Heaven” was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to “Life Is Beautiful” from Italy.

“‘A Separation”s position has surpassed the Iranian independent cinema; it is now (emblematic of) national hope,” the prominent Iranian director Tahmineh Milani told IPS in a telephone interview from Tehran.

“A lot of people really need for this film to be more successful, like a public hope, because Iranian society, especially among the youth, is so depressed that this prize has created hope and public solidarity,” she added.

The film portrays a struggling middle-class couple whose moral values are put to the test when an incident reveals hidden layers of the characters’ personalities and dignity.

In January, when Asghar Farhadi won the Golden Globe Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category, in his short speech, he said only that his people are a “peace loving” people. Many criticised him for not using the podium to send a stronger message from such a unique venue when millions of people were watching.

But Farhadi, well-known for not getting involved in politics at home, had the most political speech of the 84th Academy Awards, a speech that not only pleased millions of Iranian viewers but also Iranian officials who have been hammered by the international community with a series of severe sanctions and threats of a military attack against Iran’s nuclear sites over the past months.

“At this time many Iranians all over the world are watching us, and I imagine them to be very happy,” said Farhadi, adding, “They are happy not just because of an important award or a film or filmmaker, but because at the time the talk of war, intimidation, and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through its glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the dust of politics.”

Farhadi, who is expected to go back to Iran shortly after his trip to the U.S., walked a fine line in keeping his speech neutral, not specifying Iran or the West as the source of ongoing tensions, and made his speech all about the Iranian people.

“I proudly offer this award to the people of my country, the people who respect all cultures and civilisations and despise hostility and resentment,” Farhadi added.

Merila Zarei, a veteran actress in Tehran who appears in “A Separation” told IPS, “The fact that the film was made by a group of Iranian cinema professionals and has been seen able to compete with films from other parts of their world, based on international standards, is an honour for Iran’s cinema and film industry, and it helps our country’s culture and film industry to be recognised in the world.”

“Perhaps this Oscar can be a good starting point for others to follow the Iranian cinema more seriously,” she said.

For Zarei, working with Asghar Farhadi was an extraordinary experience. “As an experienced actress, working with him was like learning in a classroom,” Zarei said. “He taught us so many nuances expertly, affecting the way our work flowed. I believe that was the result of his knowledge, awareness, and expertise.”

“A Separation” earned a first Oscar for Iran at a time when the country’s film industry, particularly since the 2009 presidential election, has been under unrelenting pressure from authorities.

Last month, the government shut down the independent “House of Cinema” (Khane Cinema), the Iranian Alliance of Motion Picture Guilds, which has more than 6,000 members.

In September 2011, Iranian authorities arrested five documentary filmmakers and accused them of working or cooperating with the BBC Persian Service. The five documentarians were never tried in court and were released weeks later.

Last year, Jafar Panahi, one of Iran’s most prominent directors, was sentenced to six years in prison and banned from filmmaking, interviewing and traveling for 20 years for making a movie on Iran’s 2009 electoral unrest and subsequent crackdown. Panahi’s co-director, Mohammad Rasoulof, was also sentenced to one year in prison.

“The atmosphere was so constricted last year, and the inappropriate implemented policies have now reached a negative stage in the government-sponsored cinema,” Tahmineh Milani told IPS when asked about the freedom filmmakers exercise inside Iran.

“When we bring up issues and report on the shortcomings and deficiencies, we prepare the background for cultural and social growth,” Milani said in a telephone interview from Tehran. “Artists are not obligated to prescribe remedies for the society. They can only report the pain. The one who (should) come along and find the solution is the person who is the country’s macro manager.”

“It is these types of criticism that solve the problem,” Milani said. “But now the authorities say, ‘We don’t have any problems at all for you to bring up. Whoever brings up the problems is my enemy.’

“But it isn’t like that at all. I am not considered a political person myself, but I cannot withhold my reaction to the shortcomings or to the deep social issues in our society, I cannot remain silent.”

Excerpt:

After weeks of rapidly escalating tensions, particularly between Israel and Iran, signs emerged this week both here and in Tehran that serious negotiations over Tehran’s controversial nuclear programme may soon get underway.

The most concrete step was a long-awaited positive RSVP from Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalali, to an invitation extended last October by European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton to meet with the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia, and Germany) for a new round of talks.

“We voice our readiness for dialogue on a spectrum of various issues, which can provide grounds for constructive and forward-looking co- operation,” Jalali wrote in his letter.

In response, both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Ashton herself emerged from a meeting here Friday expressing cautious optimism about prospects for a resumption of negotiations, which have been effectively suspended for more than a year.

“…(W)e think this is an important step and we welcome the letter,” Clinton told reporters, adding that Jalili’s letter “appeared to acknowledge and accept” a Western condition that Iran has previously resisted: that any talks “begin with a discussion of (Iran’s) nuclear programme”.

A formal response by the P5+1, whose members are still consulting with each other, may not, however, be forthcoming until after the scheduled visit next week by a high-level delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the second in the past month. If Tehran accedes to certain requests that it denied the delegation in its last visit, confidence will be enhanced, U.S. officials said.

The latest developments come after several months of escalating tensions, the most recent spiral of which began in late December with the adoption of “crippling” sanctions by Washington and the EU and threats by some Iranian officials to close the Strait of Hormuz.

Since then, officials in the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its allies here repeatedly urged Washington to build up its forces in and around the Gulf to make the threat of military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities more credible. They have also warned that Israel may attack Iran unilaterally as early as this spring without necessarily consulting the U.S. in advance.

Israel also accused Tehran of attempting to carry out a series of bombings this week against Israeli diplomatic personnel in India, Georgia and Thailand, presumably in retaliation for the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists over the past several years, the most recent one on Jan. 11.

Most experts believe Israel’s Mossad, possibly with the help of an Iraq-based terrorist group, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, was behind the scientists’ killings. For its part, Tehran strongly denied responsibility for this week’s bombings.

These developments come amid signs of major differences between Israel and the administration of President Barack Obama with respect both to possible military action against Iran and what each considers an acceptable negotiated solution to its nuclear programme.

The Israelis have argued that Iran, once it decided to build a nuclear bomb, could throw out IAEA inspectors from its new underground Fordow facility near of Qom and begin producing weapons- grade uranium at any time. The facility is buried so deep that it would be impervious to Israel’s biggest conventional bombs. In its view, Tehran could thus enter a “zone of immunity” within months.

The administration, however, has argued that the situation is not nearly as urgent, not only because Washington has munitions that could penetrate Fordow, but also because Iran faces many more challenges in building a missile-deliverable weapon, challenges that could be made more difficult to overcome by concerted international action, including ever-tighter sanctions.

The latest estimates suggest that a deliverable bomb would take at least two to three years to build from the time that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, authorised such an effort, a decision that both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies agree he has not yet taken.

In Washington’s view, there remains much more time to take military action against Iran’s nuclear programme as a last resort. Moreover, absent clear evidence that Iran is indeed building a weapon, any attack would be seen as by the international community as aggression and increase Tehran’s determination to build one as a deterrent against future attacks.

The two allies also appear to disagree over the terms of an acceptable negotiated settlement and what constitute “red lines” over which Iran should not be permitted to cross. While administration officials most often insist that it is “unacceptable” for Iran to obtain a nuclear “weapon” or “bomb”, the Israelis insist that a nuclear weapons “capability” – a much lower and vaguer threshold – is unacceptable.

Israel opposes any uranium enrichment by Iran, a position that was shared by the administration of President George W. Bush and, at least until very recently, by France, which has consistently demanded that Tehran comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that it suspend its enrichment activities.

Although the Obama administration has not said so in so many words – no doubt to preserve its negotiating position – it has been signalling since Congressional testimony by Clinton last March that it would be prepared to accept Iran’s enrichment of uranium to a limit of 3.5 percent, provided that Tehran accept a much more intrusive IAEA inspection regime and clear up all outstanding questions posed by the IAEA regarding evidence of weaponisation activities.

These were the conditions set out explicitly by Obama’s former top Iran adviser, Amb. Dennis Ross, in a New York Times op-ed this week. It also suggested that Washington was open to a step-by-step Russian proposal that called for international sanctions against Iran to be eased in response to confidence-building steps by Tehran, such as halting its 20-percent enrichment programme and shipping its accumulated stock out the country.

He noted that Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said recently P5+1 talks could be based on the Russian proposal.

Ross’s op-ed was regarded as especially significant for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that he continues to dispense advice to the White House from his perch at the Washington Institute for Near Policy (WINEP), a think tank founded by the most powerful organisation in what is known as the Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

For its part, however, AIPAC is lobbying heavily for Israel’s position. Half a dozen of its most loyal Senate allies this week introduced a resolution that asserts that the prevention of Iran’s acquisition of a “nuclear weapons capability” is “a vital national interest of the United States”.

The resolution, which was co-sponsored by some 30 Republicans and Democrats, also insists on a “full and sustained suspension” of all Iran’s uranium enrichment activities and “a verified end to (Iran’s) ballistic missile program” – demands that appear calculated to sabotage any possible prospects for a successful negotiation.

In a letter to Obama Thursday, the main sponsors, who include Republicans John McCain and Lindsay Graham, independent Democrat Joe Lieberman and New York’s two Democratic senators, said they will oppose “any proposal… in which Iran is permitted to continue enrichment on its territory in any form”.

AIPAC is expected to push for a Senate vote on the resolution, as well as a companion measure in the House of Representatives, before or during its annual Washington convention, to be attended by Netanyahu, most members of Congress, and thousands of staunchly pro- Israel activists, in early March, when the P5+1 talks may also get underway.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

By - - and Correspondents
DOHA, Qatar, Feb 15 2012 (IPS)

Two Iranians have been arrested and charged with plotting a bomb attack in Bangkok, according to Thailand’s foreign minister.

Thai officials said on Wednesday they believed the incident in the Thai capital could be linked to recent attacks on Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia.

A man carrying an Iranian passport lost his legs and injured four other people in a Bangkok neighbourhood on Tuesday when grenades he was carrying apparently exploded by accident, police said.

Referring to the Iranians arrested in connection with the incident, Surapong Tovichakchaikul, the Thai foreign minister, said: “They are charged with causing an illegal explosion in a public area and attempting to kill police officers and members of the public.

“We cannot say yet if it’s a terrorist act, but it’s similar to the assassination attempt against a diplomat in India.”

The injured suspect, identified as Saeid Moradi, was in stable condition in a Bangkok hospital, although he remained unconscious after 10 hours of surgery, Suparung Preechayuth, a hospital surgeon, said.

Police said he had been charged with illegal possesion of explosives, causing explosions, attempted murder and assaulting a police officer. Two other men shared the rented house with him.

One person was arrested at Bangkok’s international airport on Tuesday but he has not yet been charged.

Malaysian arrest

Another person was arrested on Wednesday afternoon at Kuala Lumpur airport in neighbouring Malaysia as he tried to board a flight to Tehran, Malaysian police said.

The suspect, in his thirties, had apparently evaded authorities at Bangkok airport and flown to Malaysia.

Police Inspector-General Ismail Omar said he was arrested on intelligence from Thai authorities and was being investigated for “terrorism activities” related to the Bangkok bombings.

Asked whether the explosives used in India and Thailand were the same, a senior Thai security official said they both had the same “magnetic sheets”.

“The individual was in possession of the same magnets and we are currently examining the source of the magnet,” Wichian Podphosri, the secretary of Thailand’s National Security Council, said.

In the Bangkok attack, one explosive device went off in the bomber’s home. Another was thrown at a taxi that would not take one of the men who left the house following the explosion.

The third blew off the man’s leg when he tried to throw it at police and it either went off before he could throw it or it hit something and ricocheted back at him.

Netanyahu’s remarks

Reacting to the latest developments, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, accused Iran of targeting diplomats, saying that if the world did not stop Iran’s “aggression”, the attacks would spread.

“It harms innocent diplomats in many countries and the nations of the world must condemn Iran’s terror actions and demarcate red lines against Iranian aggression,” he said.

“If such aggression is not stopped it will spread to many countries.”

Iran has denied any involvement in the blasts, saying Israel often made such accusations.

Iranian state TV quoted Ramin Mehmanparast, the country’s foreign ministry spokesman, as saying that Israel was behind the explosions.

“The main goal of the Zionist regime is to conceal its real essence in carrying out terrorist acts particularly assassinating Iran’s scientists,” the state news agency IRNA quoted Mehmanparast as saying.

“We are not accepting, we are denying this and I don’t know how they (the Israelis) can assume within a short time of one hour that to say who has done this,” Iran’s ambassador to India, Seyed Mehdi Nabizadeh, said, referring to the New Delhi attack.

“It has happened in India. If India’s security says something like that, then we have to verify.”

India ‘lacks evidence’

India said it did not have enough evidence to reach a firm conclusion.

“The Indian government does not have any evidence pointing to any individual, entity, organisation or country being involved in Monday’s blast, so far,” a foreign ministry spokesman said.

The attack on an Israeli diplomatic car in the Indian capital left a female diplomat and three other people injured.

Police in Georgia said they had thwarted on an Israeli diplomatic vehicle on the same day.

Russia has condemned the bomb attacks and called on both countries to investigate but did not accuse Iran or any other country of involvement.

Russia “decisively condemns these attacks by extremists”, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

“We are convinced there can be no justification for terrorism in all its forms.”

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

By Marsha B. Cohen and Jim Lobe
MIAMI/WASHINGTON, Feb 13 2012 (IPS)

While Israel and its allies here blamed Iran for Monday’s two nearly simultaneous car bomb incidents in the capitals of India and Georgia, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama echoed local authorities in both countries who said they were not sure who the perpetrators were.

“I don’t have an assessment to give you of what the Israeli government is saying,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters in Washington.

“We have no information yet to share with you about who was behind those attacks, but we’re obviously working and discussing with the Israelis and others to ascertain exactly that,” he added.

Independent analysts in Washington also professed uncertainty about responsibility for the bombings.

Some said Iran, which had vowed last month to retaliate for the assassination, reportedly by Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, was the most likely candidate.

Others suggested that Laskar-e Taiba (LeT), a Pakistani terrorist group which carried out the 2008 bombings in Mumbai, India, also had to be considered a major suspect for the attack in New Delhi, which sent the wife of the Israeli Embassy’s military attaché to the hospital. After surgery to remove bits of shrapnel from the bomb, she was released late Monday, according to news reports.

The Indian government has promised Israel a thorough investigation of the blast that injured the woman and several other people. According to reports, an explosive device was placed on her car by a motorcyclist while it was stopped at a red light close to the Israeli embassy.

At nearly the same time, in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, a similar device, described by some reports as a grenade, was found attached to a car owned by one of the Israeli embassy’s local drivers and dismantled before it could be detonated.

A spokesman for the Georgian Interior Ministry, Shota Khizanishvili told reporters that the incident may have been linked to the driver’s personal life, rather than his work at the embassy, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

Coming so soon after the Jan 11 killing – also by a bomb attached by a motorcyclist to a car – of the Iranian nuclear scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the two attacks appeared to many both here and in Israel that Tehran was trying to take the revenge it had promised.

Roshan was the fourth Iranian scientist to be killed in this way in the last two years. NBC News quoted senior U.S. officials last week as confirming that the assassination campaign has been organised by Israel’s Mossad working with the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, an Iraq-based Iranian group that the U.S. lists as a terrorist organisation.

“In recent months we have witnessed several attempts to attack Israeli citizens and Jews in several countries, including Azerbaijan, Thailand and others,” Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu charged Monday. “…Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, were behind all of these attempted attacks,” he said.

Tehran called Israel’s charges “sheer lies” and suggested that Israel itself may have been responsible as part of its “psychological warfare” against Iran.

Israeli officials noted that Sunday marked the fourth anniversary of the assassination, also reportedly by Mossad, of Imad Mughiniyeh, one of the founders of Hezbollah, which, with Iran’s help, began as a resistance movement against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon during the 1980s and 1990s. Mughniyah had been accused of planning and carrying out terrorist attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets at Iran’s behest throughout the Middle East and even in Argentina.

Indian officials, meanwhile, did not rule out involvement of the LeT, which has been linked to Al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s military intelligence. Among the 164 people killed in its Mumbai attack were six people at Nariman House, a Chabad religious centre that catered to Israelis and visiting Jews from Western countries. Investigators concluded that the centre was a specific target of the LeT attack.

Since the fall of 2009, Israel has issued travel warning to its citizens visiting India, a popular destination with Israelis: “The terror group that carried out the 2008 Mumbai attack can conduct a number of attacks across India, including on the concentration of Western tourists and Israelis and may also attack Chabad houses.”

Early reports on several Indian news sites said that “low grade explosive material, including sulphur and potassium chlorate with sulphuric acid,” had been used to detonate Monday’s explosion. These early reports also noted that Abdul Karim Tunda, said to be affiliated with the LeT, used this method in late 1990s and early 2000s to set off explosions in various parts of India.

As of Monday night, however, the explosives used in the attack had not been positively identified, according to Delhi Police Commissioner B. K. Gupta.

The Times of India reported early Tuesday morning that the bomb attached to the Israeli embassy vehicle by a magnet was the type that has been used in past terrorist operations in Iran, Israel, Georgia, Turkey and Armenia. The newspaper also reported that its manufacture was of a sophistication that had not been seen in India to date.

U.S. experts on Iran and South Asia Monday said they were uncertain about who was responsible.

“The Israelis have been very quick and categorical in blaming the Iranians; it’s not an unreasonable charge,” said Bruce Riedel, a former top CIA analyst on the Near East and South Asia, now at the Brookings Institution.

“Israel and Iran have been engaged in a Spy vs. Spy war for years. This war has been getting hotter and hotter, with Israel’s deep concern about Iran’s nuclear programme,” he told IPS. “What we’re seeing now is a very dangerous game, getting more and more dangerous all the time.”

“It’s not a cold war anymore,” Riedel, who has advised the Obama administration on South Asia policy, went on, noting the assassinations of the Iranian scientists, as well as other efforts to sabotage Tehran’s nuclear and missile programmes. “Iran and Hezbollah are fighting back, and want to show their ability to carry out simultaneous attacks.”

At the same time, he stressed, “There are a host of people who would like to see a war between Iran and Israel, particularly Al-Qaeda” with which LeT has been linked.

Stephen Tankel, an expert on LeT at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agreed that the perpetrators could be Iran, Hezbollah, or LeT.

“Does Lashkar have an interest in targeting Israelis? Yes. Do Hezbollah (and Iran) have an interest in targeting Israelis? Yes and arguably more so,” he told IPS. “Do both groups have transnational networks? Yes.

Neither Hezbollah nor Lashker-e-Taiba is previously known to have operated in Georgia. Tankel said, “I’ve not heard of Lashkar folks in Georgia, but that does not mean they’re not there.”

“Gun to my head, I’d be more inclined to believe it was Hezbollah, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out I picked the wrong horse,” says Tankel. “Remember, we’re talking about two state-sponsored organisations that are pretty good at covering their tracks.”

Monday’s incidents also coincided with the opening of the trial of Umar Patek in Jakarta, Indonesia. Patek, who is believed to be a member of another Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist group, Jemaah Islamiah, is accused of masterminding the explosions that killed 202 people, most of them foreigners, at a night club and bar in Bali on 2002.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

Despite renewed media speculation regarding possible Israeli attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities as early as this spring, scepticism that such a campaign could actually be successfully carried out remains relatively high, raising the question of whether there is more bark than bite to Israeli threats.

The Tehran Research Reactor where uranium enriched to 20 percent is used to produce medical isotopes. Credit: Jim Lobe/IPS

It cannot expect a repeat of 1981 when the Israeli air force destroyed the Osirak reactor at Al-Tuwaythah, just south of Baghdad.

The Iranians are aware of both Israeli capabilities and the U.S.-made precision-guided penetrating munitions in the Israeli inventory. The Iranian programme has been dispersed all over the country – estimates range between 12 and more than 20 locations – and the facilities have been built with U.S. and Israeli capabilities in mind and are protected by modern Russian air defence systems.

The single most critical element of the Iranian programme is thought to be the Natanz facility. The heart of the facility is the centrifuge area, located in an underground, hardened structure.

But even if Israel tries to limits the target set, it would still have to attack other facilities besides Natanz. For example, the newer Fordow fuel-enrichment plant near Qom, where Iran has already moved 3.5-percent enriched uranium from Natanz, is built into the side of a mountain and is heavily fortified. There is a uranium conversion plant at Isfahan, a heavy-water facility being constructed at Arak and centrifuge factories outside Tehran.

The straight-line distance between Israel and Natanz is almost 1,609 kilometers. Since the countries do not share a common border, Israeli aircraft or missiles must fly through foreign – and hostile – airspace to get to the target.

The least risky method of striking Natanz is with Israel’s medium- range ballistic missiles, the Jericho II or III. It is believed that the Israeli missiles can reach Natanz. However, to travel that far the missiles will have a limited warhead weight, and it is doubtful that these warheads will be able to penetrate far enough underground to achieve the desired level of destruction.

Thus, an attack by the Israeli air force’s U.S.-made fighter-bomber aircraft is the most likely option. The Israelis have 25 F-15I and about 100 F-16I jets.

The F-15I is capable of carrying four metric tons of fuel in its internal tanks, conformal fuel tanks (CFT), and detachable tanks. This enables it to fly about 4,450 kilometers. With midair refueling, the range can be extended further.

The F-15I can carry a very wide range of weapons such as various guided missiles and bombs, as well as iron bombs. All in all, the plane can carry about 10 metric tonnes of munitions.

The F-16I has an extended flight range that reportedly allows Israeli forces to attack targets well within Iran without having to refuel. Use of could CFT extends its effective mission range up to 50 percent. The baseline model has a combat radius of 1,370 kilometers with two 907-kilogramme bombs and two air-to-air missiles, with 3,936-litre external tanks.

Assuming an air attack, the question is how will the aircraft fly from their bases in Israel to a target located 322 kilometres miles inside Iran?

They could go either through Saudi Arabia or Iraq, possibly even using Jordanian airspace as well. Either route is a one-way trip of about 1,931 kilometers.

To overfly Saudi Arabia the strike aircraft depart southern Israel, enter Saudi airspace from the Gulf of Aqaba or Jordan, fly 1,287 kilometers miles of Saudi airspace to the Gulf and then 483 kilometers into Iran.

Since the Israeli air force does not operate stealth aircraft, there is a reasonable expectation that at some point the aircraft will be detected over Saudi Arabia. Whether Saudi defences could – or would – be able to stop the Israelis is uncertain. Given Saudi fears over Iran’s nuclear programme, perhaps they would turn a blind eye and claim ignorance.

If they chose to traverse Iranian airspace, the strike aircraft depart southern Israel, cross 483 to 644 kilometers of Saudi airspace or a combination of Jordanian and Saudi airspace, and enter Iraqi airspace as soon as possible, continue across 805 kilometers of Iraq to the Persian Gulf and then on to the target.

Entering Iran from Iraqi airspace would be politically delicate. Although U.S. troops are no longer there, traversing Iraqi airspace would not be possible without the knowledge, and most likely the permission, of the United States.

The key question is whether Israel’s fighter-bombers can conduct this mission without refuelling. Combat radius – the distance an aircraft can fly and return without refueling – is difficult to calculate, and depends on weapons payload, external fuel tanks, mission profile, etc.

The best “guesstimate” of the combat radius of the F-15I and F-16I, outfitted with conformal fuel tanks, two external wing tanks and a decent weapons load, is almost 1,609 kilometers. Either of the two possible flight routes above is about 322 kilometers further than that. To make up for the shortfall, the aircraft could be fitted with an additional external fuel tank, but this will require a reduction in the weapons load. Given the accuracy of the weapons in the Israeli inventory, that might not be problematic.

However, if the aircraft are detected and intercepted, the pilots will have to jettison the tanks in order to engage their attackers. Dropping the tanks will prevent the aircraft from reaching their target.

Air refuelling is a limitation for the Israelis. In recent years Israel has acquired five C-130 and four to seven Boeing 707 tanker aircraft. However, the tankers would have to refuel the fighters in hostile airspace. The 707 is a large unarmed aircraft and would be very vulnerable to air defences.

Theoretically, the Israelis could do this, but at great risk of failure. If they decide to attack Natanz, they will have to inflict sufficient damage the first time – they probably will not be able to mount follow-on strikes at other facilities.

The ultimate question, of course, is once Israeli planes have flown back, won’t Iran be able to repair the damage and accelerate the nuclear programme? Or does Israel assume that the U.S. will pick up where they left and start a long-term war with Iran?

*David Isenberg is an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute and a contributor to the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information.