Although the place and time of the next round of talks on Iran’s nuclear programme have not yet been announced, the manoeuvring by Iran and the United States to influence the outcome has already begun.
Iran sought support for a revised proposal to the talks during the United Nations General [...]]]>
Although the place and time of the next round of talks on Iran’s nuclear programme have not yet been announced, the manoeuvring by Iran and the United States to influence the outcome has already begun.
Iran sought support for a revised proposal to the talks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) last month, according to a New York Times report Oct. 4. Then, only a few days later, the Barack Obama administration launched a preemptive attack on the proposal through New York Times reporter David Sanger.
The officials suggested the Iranian proposal would give Iran an easier route to a “breakout” to weapons grade uranium enrichment. But that claim flies in the face of some obvious realities.
An Oct. 4 story by Sanger reported that Iran had begun describing a “9-step plan” to diplomats at the UNGA and quoted administration officials as charging that the proposal would not “guarantee that Iran cannot produce a weapon”. Instead, the officials argued, it would allow Iran to keep the option of resuming 20-percent enriched uranium, thus being able to enrich to weapons grade levels much more quickly.
Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili issued a denial that Iran had “delivered any new proposal other than what had been put forward in talks with the P5+1″. But that statement did not constitute a denial that Iran was discussing such a proposal, because the Times story had said the proposal had been initially made to European officials during the P5+1 meeting in Istanbul in July.
Obama administration officials complained that, under the Iranian plan, Iran would carry out a “suspension” of 20-percent enrichment only after oil sanctions have been lifted and oil revenues are flowing again.
That description of the proposal is consistent with an Iranian “five-step plan”, presented during the talks with P5+1, the text of which was published by Arms Control Today last summer. In that proposal, the P5+1 would have ended all sanctions against Iran in steps one and two, but Iran would have ended its 20-percent enrichment only in the fifth step.
In that same final step, however, Iran also would have closed down the Fordow enrichment plant and transferred its entire stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium to “a third country under IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) custody”.
Iran has made clear that it intends to use the 20-percent enrichment as bargaining leverage to achieve an end to the most damaging economic sanctions.
Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, the spokesperson for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team from 2003 to 2005 and now a visiting scholar at Princeton University, told IPS, “Iran is prepared to stop 20-percent enrichment and go below five percent. The question is what will the P5+1 provide in return. As long as the end state of a comprehensive agreement is not clear for Iran, it will not consider halting enrichment at 20 percent.”
But the administration’s portrayal of the Iranian proposal as offering a sanctions-free path to continued 20-percent enrichment is highly misleading, according to close observers of the Iran nuclear issue. It also ignores elements of the proposal that would minimise the risk of a “breakout” to enrichment of uranium to weapons grade levels.
The Obama administration criticism of the proposal, as reported by Sanger, was couched in such a way as to justify the U.S. refusal to discuss lifting the sanctions on Iranian oil exports during the four rounds of talks with Iran. A senior administration official was quoted as saying that Iran “could restart the program in a nanosecond,” whereas “it would take years” to re-impose the sanctions.
Paul Pillar, national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, noted in a commentary in The National Interest that it is “far easier to impose sanctions on Iran than to lift them” and that if Iran reneged on a nuclear agreement, “it would be easier still.”
Peter Jenkins, British permanent representative to the IAEA from 2001 to 2006, noted in an e-mail to IPS that it took the EU only two months to agree to impose oil sanctions, and that “political resistance among the 27 (EU member states) to imposing oil sanctions would probably be less if re-imposition were required by an Iranian breach of a deal with the P5+1.”
Jenkins pointed out that EU oil purchases from Iran now have experience in getting supplies from other countries which could make re-imposing sanctions even easier.
One U.S. official was quoted by Sanger as complaining that the Iranian proposal would allow Iran to “move the fuel around, and it stays in the country”. That description appeared to hint that the purpose is to give Tehran the option of a breakout to weapons grade enrichment.
But the biggest difference between the proposal now being discussed by Iranian diplomats and the one offered last summer is that the new proposal reflects the reality that Iran began last spring to convert 20-percent enriched uranium into U308 in powdered form for fuel plates for its Tehran Research Reactor.
The conversion of 20 percent enriched uranium to U308, which was documented but not highlighted in the Aug. 30 IAEA report, makes it more difficult to use that same uranium for enrichment to weapons grade levels.
The new Iranian proposal evidently envisions U308 uranium remaining in the country for use by the Tehran Research Reactor rather than the entire stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium being shipped to another country as in its previous proposal.
Former State Department official Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, who has argued in the past that the only purpose Iran could have in enriching to 20 percent is a nuclear weapon, told the Times that the conversion “tends to confirm that there is civilian purpose in enriching to this level”.
But Fitzpatrick told the Times that the Iranians know how to reconvert the U308 powder back to a gaseous form that can then be used for weapons grade enrichment. “It would not take long to set it up,” Fitzpatrick said.
In an interview with IPS, Dr. Harold A. Feiveson, a senior research scientist at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson’s school and a specialist on nuclear weapons, said “it would not be super hard” to carry out such a reconversion.
But Feiveson admitted that he is not aware of anyone ever having done it. The reconversion to 20 percent enrichment “would be pretty visible” and “would take some time,” said Feiveson. “You would have to kick the (IAEA) inspectors out.”
Even Israeli policymakers have acknowledged that Iran’s diversion of 20-percent enriched uranium represents a step away from a breakout capability, as Haaretz reported Oct. 9.
Defence ministry sources told the Israeli daily that the Iran’s reduction of its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium had added “eight months at least” to what the Israeli government has cited as its “deadline” on Iran. The same sources said it was the justification for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dropping the threat of attack on Iran in his U.N. speech.
The deep reduction in Iranian oil revenues from sanctions and the recent plunge in the value of Iran’s currency may well have made Iran more interested in compromise than when the talks with the P5+1 started in April.
Mousavian told IPS, “I am convinced that Iran is ready for a package deal based on recognition of two principles.” The first principle, he said, is that “Iran recognises the P5+1 concerns and will remove all such concerns”; the second is that the P5+1 “recognises the rights of Iran and gradually lifts sanctions”.
But Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has expressed serious doubts about whether the Obama administration is willing to end the sanctions on Iran under any circumstances. In an Oct. 10 speech, Khamenei said the Americans “lie” in suggesting sanctions would be lifted in return for Iran giving up its nuclear program.
U.S. officials “make decisions out of grudge and aversion (toward Iran)”, Khamenei said.
]]>David E. Sanger reports for the New York Times that Iran sought to use its UN venue last week to “drum up support” for a negotiating strategy of lifting sanctions in tandem with a “nine-step plan” for “gradually suspending” uranium enrichment:
The Iranian plan is based on a proposal made [...]]]>
David E. Sanger reports for the New York Times that Iran sought to use its UN venue last week to “drum up support” for a negotiating strategy of lifting sanctions in tandem with a “nine-step plan” for “gradually suspending” uranium enrichment:
The Iranian plan is based on a proposal made to European officials in July. It essentially calls for a step-by-step dismantling of the sanctions while the Iranians end work at one of two sites where they are enriching what is known as “20 percent uranium.” Only when the Iranians reach step No. 9 — after all the sanctions are gone and badly depressed oil revenues have begun to flow again — would there be a “suspension” of the medium-enriched uranium production at the deep underground site called Fordow.
US officials, though, are not having it, claiming that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is merely stalling for time and hoping to break apart international support for sanctions:
]]>…. Obama administration officials say the deal is intended to generate headlines, but would not guarantee that Iran cannot produce a weapon. “The way they have structured it, you can move the fuel around, and it stays inside the country,” a senior Obama administration official said. “They could restart the program in a nanosecond. They don’t have to answer any questions from the inspectors” about evidence that they conducted research on nuclear weapons technology, but nonetheless would insist on a statement from the agency that all issues have been resolved.
…. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made it clear that the United States had no intention of relaxing the sanctions — particularly now, just as they show the first sign of forcing Iran’s leaders to rethink the costs of their nuclear program.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report made public Thursday reveals that Iran has actually reduced the amount of 20-percent enriched uranium available for any possible “breakout” to weapons grade enrichment over the last three months rather than increasing it.
Contrary to the impression conveyed by most news media coverage, [...]]]>
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report made public Thursday reveals that Iran has actually reduced the amount of 20-percent enriched uranium available for any possible “breakout” to weapons grade enrichment over the last three months rather than increasing it.
Contrary to the impression conveyed by most news media coverage, the report provides new evidence that Iran’s enrichment strategy is aimed at enhancing its bargaining position in negotiations with the United States rather than amassing such a breakout capability.
The reduction in the amount of 20-percent enriched uranium in the Iranian stockpile that could be used to enrich to weapons grade is the result of a major acceleration in the fabrication of fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor, which needs 20-percent enriched uranium to produce medical isotopes.
That higher level enriched uranium has been the main focus of U.S. diplomatic demands on Iran ever since 2009, on the ground that it represents the greatest threat of an Iranian move to obtain a nuclear weapon capability.
When 20-percent uranium is used to make fuel plates, however, it is very difficult to convert it back to a form that can enriched to weapons grade levels.
When data in the Aug. 30 IAEA report on the “inventory” of 20-percent enriched uranium is collated with comparable data in the May 25 IAEA report, it shows that Iran is further from having a breakout capability than it was three months earlier.
The data in the two reports indicate that Iran increased the total production of 20-percent enriched uranium from 143 kg in May 2012 to 189.4 kg in mid-August. But the total stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium that could be more easily enriched to weapons grade – and which has been the focus of U.S. diplomatic demands on Iran ever since 2009 – fell from 101 kg to 91.4 kg during the quarter.
The reduction in the stockpile available for weapons grade enrichment was the result of the conversion of 53.3 kg of 20-percent enriched uranium into fuel plates – compared with only 43 kg in the previous five months.
Iran was thus creating fuel plates for its medical reactor faster than it was enriching uranium to a 20-percent level.
But although that reduction of the stockpile of enriched uranium of greatest concern to the United States was the real significance of the new report, it was not conveyed by the headlines and leads in news media coverage. Those stories focused instead on the fact that production of 20-percent enriched uranium had increased, and that the number of centrifuges at the underground facility at Fordow had doubled.
“Nobody has put out the story that their stockpile is shrinking,” said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a leading independent specialist on nuclear weapons policy, in an interview with IPS.
David Sanger and William Broad of the New York Times asserted in an Aug. 30 story that Iran had “doubled the number of centrifuges installed” at Fordow and had “cleansed” the site where the IAEA believed there had been nuclear weapons development work. The story made no reference to fuel plates or the effective stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium.
A second story by Sanger and Jodi Rudoren on the same day, datelined Jerusalem, was even more alarmist and inaccurate. It declared that the nuclear programme was “speeding up” and that Iran was “close to crossing what Israel has said is its red line: the capacity to produce nuclear weapons in a location invulnerable to Israeli attack.”
Reuters and AP stories also focused on the doubling of centrifuges as the main message in the IAEA report, and Reuters also said Iran “seems to be struggling to develop more efficient nuclear technology that would shorten the time it would need for any atom bomb bid”.
The Washington Post headline said that Iran was “speeding up” uranium enrichment, and the lead said Iran had “substantially increased the production of a more enriched form of uranium in recent months”. But in the second paragraph, it added, somewhat cryptically, that Iran “appeared to take steps that would make it harder to use its uranium stockpile to make nuclear bombs”.
Only a few paragraphs later was it made clear that the lead was misleading, because the IAEA had found that Iran had “converted much of the new material to metal form for use in a nuclear research reactor.” It even quoted an unnamed Barack Obama administration officials said it could not be “further enriched to weapons-grade material….”
In fact the IAEA data showed that it had converted all of the uranium enriched to 20 percent during the quarter to fuel plates, and had converted some of the production from previous quarters as well.
The media reports of a doubling of the number of centrifuges at the underground facility at Fordow were also misleading. When the information is examined more carefully, it actually provides further evidence that Iran is not striving to amass the higher level uranium needed for a breakout capability but is maneuvering to prepare for a later negotiated settlement.
Although the IAEA report shows that the number of centrifuges in place in Fordow has increased from 696 to 2,140 over the past six months, it also makes it clear that the number of centrifuges actually operating has not changed during that period.
The reason for that striking anomaly in the deployment at Fordow does not appear to be technical problems with the centrifuges. The 1,444 centrifuges that are not operating were never even connected by pipes, as the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) observed in its Aug. 30 commentary on the report.
The noncommittal character of the deployment of centrifuges at Fordow suggests that Iran has not decided whether those 1,444 centrifuges are to be committed to 3.5-percent enrichment or to 20-percent enrichment.
The Obama administration appears to understand that this uncertainty about the purpose of the centrifuges is aimed at strengthening Iran’s diplomatic hand in future negotiations. “They have been very strategic about it,” a senior U.S. official told the New York Times just before the report was made public. “They are creating tremendous capacity, but they are not using it.”
The official added, “That gives them leverage, but they think it also stops short of creating the pretext for an attack.”
Cirincione agrees with that senior official’s analysis. “The Iranians are excellent chess players. They are moving their pieces very carefully,” he said. “They are continuing to enhance the value of their bargaining chips.”
The implication of the IAEA report, Cirincione believes, is that Iran is still maneuvering to position itself for a more advantageous agreement in future negotiations. “If you were the Iranians, why would you negotiate right now?” asked Cirincione. “You would want to wait for a better deal.”
In previous rounds of negotiations with Iran in 2012, the United States demanded an end to all 20-percent enrichment and even the closure of the Fordow facility but offered no alleviation of the harsh financial sanctions now being imposed on Iran.
*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
]]>“If it’s Sunday,” Columbia University scholar Gary [...]]]>
“If it’s Sunday,” Columbia University scholar Gary Sick wrote in an email to Gulf 2000, a listserv he moderates, “it must be time for major U.S. government ‘leaks’ (really planted stories) about Iran. Positioning and spinning is particularly important with negotiations possibly ready to start.”
He continued,
]]>The official feed to The New York Times is in the article by David E. Sanger and Steven Erlanger outlining U.S. demands in the opening round. They look very much like the proposed demands outlined by Israeli officials and Dennis Ross last week, viz. closing (and eventually dismantling) Fordow, and halting all production of and removing all 20 percent enriched uranium. The official going-in position seems to be a halt to all enrichment, but there is an ambiguous suggestion that a compromise outcome would be some level of enrichment with stringent monitoring and inspections.The leak to the Washington Post had a different theme. It suggests that U.S. intelligence — primarily drones and intercepts — is now so good that we can have considerable confidence that Iran is not now building a nuclear weapon and that we would know if and when Iran changed course and decided to race for a bomb. This complements the Times article by indicating that the United States is going into negotiations with a much better understanding of internal Iranian policy than we ever had on Iraq. “Trust us,” seems to to be the underlying message.What is missing from both stories is any indication of what Iran might expect to receive for its cooperation. The threat of crippling sanctions is mentioned in the event that Iran fails to toe the line, but there is no consideration of how sanctions might change if there was actual movement toward an agreement. The strategy is all threat and no concession. That is entirely consistent with U.S. strategy since at least the days of Bill Clinton.
Part of the negative tone in The New York Times may be the result of its good-cop-bad-cop approach to Iran reporting. Will we have a report from the alternative team on Monday giving a more nuanced and balanced interpretation of the same evidence? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Incidentally, neither The Times nor The Post, despite their varying degrees of focus on the intelligence picture, even hinted at assassinations or cyber warfare in Iran, let alone the Sy Hersh report about secret U.S. training of Iranian Mojahedin Khalgh operatives for operations inside Iran. Some things, it seems, are better off not said.
Because I got hung up in New York Wednesday morning, I hit rush hour traffic on the Beltway coming into DC, and arrived late for the opening session of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘s Washington Forum on “Countering the Iranian Threat.”
Nothing out of the ordinary during last night’s cocktail outing at the Ritz-Carlton, where in an adjacent conference area, two Barhraini gentlemen stood in white robes and head-dresses greeting people for an event sponsored by that government. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) event is your run-of-the-mill blue chip neoconservative conference at the high-endest of high-end Washington hotels.
As I looked closely at the final schedule, I was rather struck by the speakers’ list.
The New York Times‘s David Sanger — who just co-wrote a controversial story about Iran – will moderate a panel. Jeffry Goldberg, another mainstream journalist and no stranger to controversial stories on Iran, will be on a panel with perhaps the most strident advocate of immediate attacks on Iran, Reuel Marc Gerecht.
From officialdom, U.S. WMD czar and the former vice president of United Against a Nuclear Iran, Gary Samore, will address the crowd on Friday morning.
Naturally, the right wing of the foreign policy establishment is represented as well. Iran Policy Committee head Raymond Tanter, a tireless advocate of the Mojehedeen-e Khalq (MEK), was at the cocktail. And the Hudson Institute‘s I. Lewis Scooter Libby — formerly then-Vice President Dick Cheney‘s chief of staff who was convicted of lying to investigators in the PlameGate scandal — was in attendance for Thursday morning’s panels, as was Patrick Clawson of the AIPAC-formed Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Of course there is the FDD roster itself: Gerecht (who was seen chatting in the lobby on Thursday morning with neoconservative Washington Times journalist Eli Lake), Cliff May, Michael Ledeen, and all the others.
But what really piqued my interest was an FDD fundraiser scheduled for Thursday night at the home of an unnamed ambassador to the United States.
Here’s what the schedule has to say:
7:00 pm
Dinner at the residence of one
of Washington’s noteworthy Ambassadors
(Closed to Media)
(Minimum $5,000 gift required. Contribute here, or for more information on becoming a donor, please contact XXXXXXX)
FDD’s communications director, Judy Mayka, told me on Wednesday night that just which ambassador is hosting the $5,000 a plate fund-raiser is such a closely guarded secret that even she didn’t know. I’ll update as I find out more.
However, Thursday morning’s session featured Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), who made the case for more robust U.S. assistance to Israel on missile defense. He received spontaneous mid-presentation applause — a rarity at these Washington panels.
Given the focus on Israel for FDD and many of its scholars — and the neoconservative movement from which they emerge — it’s not a stretch to put the early odds that Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren will play host to tonight’s big money FDD donors.
Otherwise, what I caught of the opening panel was rather unremarkable. Former Regean administration national security advisor Bud McFarlane spoke about impending threats and FDD’s unique ability to confront them:
We’re going, in the next two years, to face a threat from Iran, North Korea… We’re probably going to face a disruption of the oil supply…
Nobody else in Washington has the reach and the depth and the solutions that will get us out of this.
Mark Dubowitz, FDD’s executive director, ran down the group’s roster and sang their praises. He joked, as anti-anti-Semitism activist Irwin Cotler did on Thursday morning, about being a Canadian. Threats against Iran were not totally absent, but Dubowitz delivered them with a metaphor:
There’s no silver bullet for solving this problem, but there might be silver shrapnel.
Knowing some of the views of FDD staff and experts, some of the panel titles read like rhetorical questions:
- Sanctions: What’s Next?
Is enforcement enough?- Increasing Threats, Diminishing Options: Should the Military Option be Employed against Iran?
When does this become the only option?
Dubowitz confirmed the militarist bent of FDD when he closed out Wednesday night’s opening cocktail reception: “We’re not just a think tank. We like to think of ourselves as a ‘battle tank’.”
]]>“The cables [...]]]>
“The cables reveal how Iran’s ascent has unified Israel and many longtime Arab adversaries -notably the Saudis – in a common cause,” the NYT asserted.
But Gareth Porter and Jim Lobe took a closer look at cables describing conversations with Arab leaders and found that “the Times account seriously distorted the content – and in the case of the Saudis, ignored the context – of the cables released by Wikileaks.”
In fact, the cables show that most Gulf Arab regimes – including Saudi Arabia itself – have been seriously concerned about the consequences of a strike against Iran for their own security, in sharp contrast to Israel’s open advocacy of such a strike. They also show the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait expressing that concern with greater urgency in the past two years than previously.
Porter and Lobe take apart the NYT’s assertion that “a largely silent front of Arab states whose position on sanctions and force looked much like the Israelis,” finding that Arab leaders have expressed serious concern about the consequences of U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
They also find that Saudi language on Iran as reported in diplomatic cables—some of the harshest Arab statements regarding Iran’s nuclear program, according to the NYT—mirror the official position of the Bush administration at the time.
Former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, told IPS that such a statement would “fit a pattern of communication with the United States of ingratiating themselves with their protector.”
Porter and Lobe write:
Thomas Lippman, former Washington Post Middle East bureau chief and an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, who has written a book on Saudi-U.S. relations, also said that the Abdullah quote would have been in line with the usual Saudi pattern of “telling the Americans what they wanted to hear”.
Cables highlighted in the article also include reports on discussions with senior UAE diplomats, the most recent of which summarizes a discussion between UAE’s foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nayan and a visiting congressional delegation.
Most recently, a Feb. 22, 2010 cable has the UAE’s foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nayan, warning a visiting delegation headed by Rep. Nita Lowey, a strong supporter of Israel in Congress, that any “crisis or confrontation in the region [over Iran's nuclear programme] would create oil supply problems world wide.”
According to the cable, the minister ended the meeting with a “soliloquy on the importance of a successful peace process between Israel and its neighbors as perhaps the best way of reducing Iran’s regional influence.”
They look at a number of cables describing discussions with Gulf Arab leaders and conclude:
]]>While confirming growing Arab fears about Iran’s regional clout and nuclear ambitions, the cables suggest that other Gulf Arab leaders – with the possible exception of Bahrain’s King Hamad, the only regional leader with a majority Shi’a population – have little or no appetite for military action against Iran.
The only problem, as IPS’s Gareth Porter pointed out on Tuesday, was that the Times story omitted crucial context that made the picture far murkier. This context included Russian denials that the missiles in question even existed.
Today, the Times issued a new story walking back their original analysis. The story notes that “a review of a dozen other State Department cables made available by WikiLeaks and interviews with American government officials offer a murkier picture of Iran’s missile capabilities.” It’s perhaps notable that David Sanger, whose Times reporting on Iran has tended toward an alarmist view of Iranian weapons capabilities, had a byline on the first story but not the second.
The Times should be commended for showing some skepticism about the BM-25 story. Given the paper’s sorry record in the run-up to the Iraq war, let’s hope that this skepticism proves to be the rule and not the exception.
]]>The New York Times looks back at Stuxnet, the worm that targeted computers in Iran, specifically, those linked to Iran’s centrifuge work [...]]]>
The New York Times looks back at Stuxnet, the worm that targeted computers in Iran, specifically, those linked to Iran’s centrifuge work on uranium enrichment. The lede of the Times piece, by William Broad and David Sanger, says the virus “was precisely calibrated in a way that could send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control.”
Then they have this:
The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but in recent weeks officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was. American officials have suggested it originated abroad.
Later, Broad and Sanger go into some of the other hints that Israel may be behind the attack, which we covered (briefly in our Daily Talking Points) way back when (Oct. 1) via a piece by Laura Rozen.
]]>David Sanger, who I’m told views himself as something of [...]]]>
David Sanger, who I’m told views himself as something of a player, has the scoop:
A senior American official said Wednesday that the United States and its partners were “very close to having an agreement” on a common position to present to Iran. [...]
The new offer would require Iran to send more than 4,400 pounds of low-enriched uranium out of the country, an increase of more than two-thirds from the amount required under a tentative deal struck in Vienna a year ago. The increase reflects the fact that Iran has steadily produced more uranium over the past year, and the American goal is to make sure that Iran has less than one bomb’s worth of uranium on hand.
Iran would also have to halt all production of nuclear fuel that it is currently enriching to 20 percent — an important step on the way to bomb-grade levels. It would also have to make good on its agreement to negotiate on the future of its nuclear program.
While it was Iran that rejected the Vienna deal, it was Washington that dismissed a later, watered-down fuel swap deal known as the Tehran Declaration.
As Eli previously reported, the P5+1 has supported the Vienna Group fuel swap deal, over the Turkish and Brazilian mediated Tehran Declaration deal. Iran favors the latter deal, which even some eminent U.S. foreign policy figures have called a good “first step.”
Those positions hold. But bridging them — which depends heavily on both sides’ red lines — does not seem an impossible task.
Nonetheless, Sanger quotes an unnamed U.S. official who says that Iran’s response to the deal will indicate to the Obama administration “whether the Iranians still think they can tough it out or are ready to negotiate.”
]]>Foreign Policy: Marc Lynch blogs that while the White House is considering “talk[ing] more openly about military options [against Iran],” according to The New York Times’ David Sanger, such rhetoric would be counterproductive and dangerous. Lynch warns that if the Iranians return [...]]]>
Foreign Policy: Marc Lynch blogs that while the White House is considering “talk[ing] more openly about military options [against Iran],” according to The New York Times’ David Sanger, such rhetoric would be counterproductive and dangerous. Lynch warns that if the Iranians return to the P5+1 nuclear talks, “Iran will quite reasonably refuse to bargain under the threat of military force, and will view American offers under such conditions as manifestly insincere,” and won’t find a military threat credible. More importantly, such threats would destroy any confidence building measures and widen existing divisions. “The greatest danger of introducing open war talk by the administration is that it would represent the next step in the ‘ratcheting’ of which I’ve been warning for months and pave the way either to the 1990s Iraq scenario or to an actual war,” says Lynch.
The Jerusalem Post: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (FDD) Benjamin Weinthal writes that new EU sanctions will have an impact on EU-Iranian gas deals but unlike the U.S. sanctions the new EU sanctions will not place sanctions on individual Iranian officials because of human rights violations. Weinthal interviews FDD’s Mark Dubowitz who tells him, “A fragile political consensus exists in favor of sanctions in Europe. If the Obama administration doesn’t provide determined leadership by either sanctioning foreign companies which are violating US law, or persuading these companies to terminate their Iranian ties, European governments will not enforce their own sanctions.” Weinthal repeats his Dubowitz’s calls for Swiss energy company Elektrizitätsgesellschaft Laufenburg (EGL) to cancel its €18 billion-€20 billion gas deal with Iran.
Tehran Bureau: Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the hawkish Washington Institute for Near east Policy (WINEP) writes that while the Treasury Department’s decision to sanction 37 German, Maltese and Cypriot companies for being controlled by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) but “the latest U.S. actions are not likely to put sufficient pressure on Tehran to change the regime’s calculus.” The Iranian shipping line is alleged to participate in arms smuggling and, according to Levitt is “one of the central players in Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons capabilities.”
]]>