The suspect graph of a nuclear explosion reportedly provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as evidence of Iranian computer modeling of nuclear weapons yields appears to have been adapted from a very similar graph in a scholarly journal article published in January 2009 and available on the internet.
[...]]]>The suspect graph of a nuclear explosion reportedly provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as evidence of Iranian computer modeling of nuclear weapons yields appears to have been adapted from a very similar graph in a scholarly journal article published in January 2009 and available on the internet.
Graph published by the scholarly journal Nuclear Engineering and Design, Volume 239, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 80–86.
The graph, published in a Nov. 27 Associated Press story but immediately found to have a mathematical error of four orders of magnitude, closely resembles a graph accompanying a scholarly article modeling a nuclear explosion. It provides a plausible explanation for the origins of the graph leaked to AP, according to two nuclear physicists following the issue closely.
The graph in the scholarly journal article was well known to the IAEA at the time of its publication, according to a knowledgeable source.
That means that the IAEA should have been able to make the connection between the set of graphs alleged to have been used by Iran to calculate yields from nuclear explosions that the agency obtained in 2011 and the very similar graph available on the internet.
The IAEA did not identify the member countries that provided the intelligence about the alleged Iran studies. However, Israel provided most of the intelligence cited by the IAEA in its 2011 report, and Israeli intelligence has been the source of a number of leaks to the AP reporter in Vienna, George Jahn.
Graph published by the Associated Press on Nov. 27, 2012, reportedly as evidence of Iranian computer modeling of nuclear weapons yields.
The graph accompanying an article in the January 2009 issue of the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design by retired Swiss nuclear engineer Walter Seifritz displayed a curve representing power in a nuclear explosion over fractions of a second that is very close to the one shown in the graph published by AP and attributed by the officials leaking it to an Iranian scientist.
Both graphs depict a nuclear explosion as an asymmetrical bell curve in which the right side of the curve is more elongated than the left side. Although both graphs are too crudely drawn to allow precise measurement, it appears that the difference between the two sides of the curve on the two graphs is very close to the same in both graphs.
The AP graph appears to show a total energy production of 50 kilotonnes taking place over about 0.3 microseconds, whereas the Seifritz graph shows a total of roughly 18 kilotonnes produced over about 0.1 microseconds.
The resemblance is so dramatic that two nuclear specialists who compared the graphs at the request of IPS consider it very plausible that the graph leaked to AP as part of an Iranian secret nuclear weapons research programme may well have been derived from the one in the journal article.
Scott Kemp, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told IPS he suspects the graph leaked to AP was “adapted from the open literature”. He said he believes the authors of that graph “were told they ought to look into the literature and found that paper, copied (the graph) and made their own plot from it.”
Yousaf Butt, a nuclear scientist at the Monterey Institute, who had spotted the enormous error in the graph published by AP, along with his colleague Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, said in an interview with IPS that a relationship between the two graphs is quite plausible, particularly given the fact they both have similar asymmetries in the power curve.
“Someone may just have taken the Seifritz graph and crudely adapted it to a 50-kilotonne yield instead of the 18 kilotonnes in the paper,” Butt said.
He added that “it’s not even necessary that an actual computer model was even run in the production of the AP graph.”
Apparently anticipating that the Seifriz graph would soon be discovered, the source of the graph given to AP is quoted in a Dec. 1 story as acknowledging that “similar graphs can be found in textbooks, the internet and other public sources.”
Butt said that he doesn’t know whether the AP graph is genuine or not, but that it could well be a forgery.
“If one wanted to plant a forgery,” he wrote, “it would make sense to manufacture something that looked like the output from the many unclassified ‘toy-models’ available on-line or in academic journals, rather than leak something from an actual high-fidelity classified study.”
The Seifritz graph came to the attention of the IAEA secretariat soon after it was published and was referred to the staff specialist on nuclear weapons research, according to a source familiar with the IAEA’s handling of such issues.
The source, who refused to be identified, told IPS the reaction of the official was that the graph represented fairly crude work on basic theory and was therefore not of concern to the agency.
The agency was given the alleged Iranian graph in 2011, and a “senior diplomat” from a different country from the source of the graph said IAEA investigators realised the diagramme was flawed shortly after they received it, according to the Dec. 1 AP story.
The IAEA’s familiarity with the Seifritz graph, two years before it was given graphs that bore a close resemblance to it and which the agency knew contained a huge mathematical error, raise new questions about how the IAEA could have regarded the Israeli intelligence as credible evidence of Iranian work on nuclear weapons.
Yukiya Amano, the director-general of the IAEA, refused to confirm or deny in an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington Dec. 6 that the graph published by AP was part of the evidence of Iranian “activities” related to nuclear weapons cited by the agency in its November 2011 report. .
Amano responded to a question on the graph, “I can’t discuss this specific information.”
In its November 2011 report, the IAEA said it had “information” from two member states that Iran had conducted “modeling studies” aimed at determining the “nuclear explosive yield” associated with components of nuclear weapon. It said the “information” had identified “models said to have been used in those studies and the results of these calculations, which the Agency has seen”.
The “senior diplomat” quoted by AP said the IAEA also had a spreadsheet containing the data needed to produce the same yield as shown on the graph – 50 kilotonnes – suggesting that the spreadsheet is closely related to the graph.
Butt observed, however, that the existence of the spreadsheet with data showing the yield related to a 50 kilotonne explosion does not make the graph any more credible, because the spreadsheet could have been created by simply plugging the data used to produce the graph.
Kemp of MIT agreed with Butt’s assessment. “If it’s simply data points plotted in the graph, it means nothing,” he told IPS.
After Butt and Dalnoki-Veress identified the fundamental error in the graph AP had published as evidence of Iranian work on a 50-kilotonne bomb, the Israeli source of the graph and an unidentified “senior diplomat” argued that the error must have been intentionally made by the Iranian scientist who they alleged had produced the graph.
A “senior diplomat” told AP the IAEA believed the scientist had changed the units of energy used by orders of magnitude, because “Nobody would have understood the original….”
That explanation was embraced by David Albright, who has served as unofficial IAEA spokesman in Washington on several occasions. But neither Albright nor the unidentified officials quoted by Jahn offered any explanation as to why an accurate graph would have been more difficult for Iranian officials to understand than one with such a huge mathematical error.
Further undermining the credibility of the explanation, Jahn’s sources suggested that the Iranian scientist whom they suspected of having devised the graph was Dr. Majid Shahriari, the nuclear scientist assassinated by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad in 2010.
No evidence has been produced to indicate that Shahriari, who had a long record of publications relating to nuclear power plants and basic nuclear physics, had anything to do with nuclear weapons research.
*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.
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NEW YORK, Nov 26 2012 (IPS) - I have never read a book quite like this. “Becoming Enemies” is the latest product of the indispensable National Security Archive, the Washington non-profit that has given new meaning to the Freedom of Information Act.
They not only use their [...]]]>
via IPS News
NEW YORK, Nov 26 2012 (IPS) - I have never read a book quite like this. “Becoming Enemies” is the latest product of the indispensable National Security Archive, the Washington non-profit that has given new meaning to the Freedom of Information Act.
They not only use their skills to get major U.S. policy documents declassified, but they take those documents and find innovative ways to illuminate important historical episodes. This book is a living example.
It covers the period of the Iran-Iraq war, during which U.S.-Iran relations hardened into the seemingly permanent enmity that has characterised their relations ever since. NSA assembled a group of individuals who were deeply involved in the making of U.S. policy during that time, backed up by a small group of scholars who had studied the period.
They provided them with a briefing book of major documents from the period, mostly declassified memos, to refresh their memories, and then launched into several days of intense and structured conversation. The transcript of those sessions, which the organisers refer to as “critical oral history”, is the core of this book.
No one can emerge from this book without a sense of revelation. No matter how much you may know about these tumultuous years, even if you were personally involved or have delved into the existing academic literature, you will discover new facts, new interpretations, and new dimensions on virtually every page.
I say this as someone who was part of the U.S. decision-making apparatus for part of this time and who has since studied it, written about it, and taught it to a generation of graduate students. I found little to suggest that my own interpretations were false, but I found a great deal that expanded what I knew and illuminated areas that previously had puzzled me. I intend to use it in my classes from now on.
Iranians tend to forget or to underestimate the impact of the hostage crisis on how they are perceived in the world. Many Iranians are prepared to acknowledge that it was an extreme action and one that they would not choose to repeat, but their inclination is to shove it to the back of their minds and move on.
This book makes it blindingly clear that the decision by the Iranian government to endorse the attack on the U.S. embassy in November 1979 and the subsequent captivity of U.S. diplomats for 444 days was an “original sin” in the words of this book for which they have paid – and continue to pay – a devastating price.
Similarly, U.S. citizens tend to forget their casual response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, our tacit acquiescence to massive use of chemical weapons by Iraq, and the shootdown of an Iranian passenger plane by a U.S. warship, among other things.
The authors of “Becoming Enemies” remind us that, just as Americans have not forgotten the hostage crisis, Iranians have neither forgotten or forgiven America’s own behaviour – often timid, clumsy, incompetent, or unthinking; but always deadly from Iran’s perspective.
It is impossible in a brief review to catalogue the many new insights that appear in this book for the first time. However, one of the most impressive sections deals with the so-called Iran-contra affair – the attempt by the Reagan administration to secretly sell arms to Iran in the midst of a war when we were supporting their Iraqi foes.
This, of course, exploded into a major scandal that revealed criminal actions by many of the administration’s top aides and officials and nearly resulted in the impeachment of the president. The official position of the administration in defending its actions was that this represented a “strategic opening” to Iran.
Participants in this discussion, some of whom had never before publicly described their own roles, dismissed that rationale as self-serving political spin. President Reagan, they agreed, was “obsessed” (the word came up repeatedly) with the U.S. hostages in Lebanon and was willing to do whatever was required to get them out, even if it cost him his job.
Moreover, the illegal diversion of profits from Iran arms to support the contra rebels in Central America was, it seems, only one of many such operations. The public focus on Iran permitted the other cases to go unexamined.
Another striking contribution is the decisive role played by the U.N. secretary-general and his assistant secretary, Gianni Picco (a participant), in bringing an end to the Iran-Iraq war. This is a gripping episode in which the U.N. mobilised Saddam’s Arab financiers to persuade him to stop the war, while ignoring the unhelpful interventions of the United States. They deserved the Nobel Peace Prize they received for their efforts.
There are, however, some lapses in this otherwise exceptional piece of research. One of the “original sins” of U.S. policy that are discussed is the U.S. failure to denounce the Iraqi invasion of Iran on Sep. 22, 1980, thereby confirming in Iranian eyes U.S. complicity in what they call the “imposed war”. I am particularly sensitive to the fact that the discussion of the actions of the Carter administration in 1980 is conducted in the absence of anyone who was actually involved.
Those of us in the White House at the time would never have failed to recall that direct talks with the Iranians about the release of the hostages had begun only days earlier. So there was for the first time in nearly a year a high-level authentic negotiating channel with Iran.
My own contribution to the missed opportunities that are enumerated at the end of the book would, in retrospect, have been our lack of courage or imagination to use our influence with the United Nations Security Council to bargain with Iran for immediate action on the hostages. If we had taken a principled position calling for an immediate cease-fire and Iraqi withdrawal, the entire nature of the war could have been transformed.
To my surprise, Zbigniew Brzezkinski, my boss at the time, sent a personal memo to President Carter (which I had never seen until now) that argued for “Iran’s survival” and held out the possibility of secret negotiations with Tehran. This was a total revelation to me, and it was so contrary to the unfortunate conventional wisdom that Brzezkinski promoted the Iraqi invasion that even the authors of this book seemed at a loss to know what to make of it.
The other huge disappointment with this initiative, which is not the fault of the organisers, was the absence of any Iranian policymakers. Iranian leaders and scholars should read this book. Perhaps one day their domestic politics will permit them to enter into such a dialogue. That day is long overdue.
*Gary Sick is a former captain in the U.S. Navy, who served as an Iran specialist on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He currently teaches at Columbia University. He blogs at http://garysick.tumblr.com.
]]>The world economy would bear substantial costs if the United States took steps to significantly escalate the conflict with Iran over its controversial nuclear programme, according to the findings of a Federation of American Scientists’ (FAS) special report released here Friday.
Based on consulations with a group of nine bipartisan [...]]]>
The world economy would bear substantial costs if the United States took steps to significantly escalate the conflict with Iran over its controversial nuclear programme, according to the findings of a Federation of American Scientists’ (FAS) special report released here Friday.
Based on consulations with a group of nine bipartisan economic and national security experts, the findings showed the effects of U.S. escalatory action against Iran could range from 64 billion to 1.7 trillion dollars in losses for the world economy over the initial three-month term.
The least likely scenario of de-escalation, which would require U.S. unilateral steps showing it was willing to make concessions to resolve the standoff, would result in an estimated global economic benefit of 60 billion dollars.
“The study’s findings suggest that there are potential costs to any number of U.S.-led actions and, in general, the more severe the action, the greater the possible costs,” Mark Jansson, FAS’s special projects director, told IPS.
“That being said, even among experts, there is tremendous uncertainty about what might happen at the higher end of the escalation ladder,” added Jansson, the second author of the report after Charles P. Blair, an FAS senior fellow on state and non-state threats.
The six plausible scenarios of U.S.-led actions against Iran included isolation and a Gulf blockade, which would include U.S. moves to “curtail any exports of refined oil products, natural gas, energy equipment and services”, the banning of the Iranian energy sector worldwide (incurring an estimated global economic cost of 325 billion dollars), and a comprehensive bombing campaign that would also target Iran’s ability to retaliate (incurring an estimated global economic cost of 1.082 trillion dollars).
The report is explicit in not endorsing any particular policy recommendation, although others are not so reticent.
United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) are leading hardline Washington-based advocacy groups arguing for sweeping economic measures against Iran.
“The White House must build on this momentum, intensifying economic warfare in an effort to shake the Islamic Republic to its core,” wrote FDD executive director Mark Dubowitz in June.
Paul Sullivan, an economics professor specialising in Middle East security at Georgetown University, told IPS that, “The fact that the hardest core of the neoconservative ‘strategists’ have not thought through the costs of escalating conflict with Iran is proof of their group intellectual inadequacy.
“The main effects to the U.S. if there is escalation is through the price of oil and increased military and other national security costs,” said Sullivan, who evaluated the scenarios as an expert but could not comment on the specific figures due to Chatham House Rules.
“If there is an attack on Iran, with the expected counterattacks the price of oil could quite easily go to 250 dollars or higher. This could push the U.S. right back into a recession,” he said.
As tensions rise over the decades-long dispute over Iran’s controversial nuclear programme, analysts are increasingly examining a range of costs associated with escalating the so-far cold conflict between the U.S. and Iran.
The Iran Project Report released in September showed that the cost of Iranian retaliation would be “felt over the longer term” by the U.S. and could result in a regional war.
“In addition to the financial costs of conducting military attacks against Iran, which would be significant…there would likely be near-term costs associated with Iranian retaliation, through both direct and surrogate asymmetrical attacks,” according to the report, which was endorsed by a long list of high-level, bipartisan national security advisers.
The Iran Project report’s findings support the notion that greater escalatory action will result in greater costs – shown in financial terms by the FAS findings: “A dynamic of escalation, action, and counteraction could produce serious unintended consequences that would significantly increase all of these costs and lead, potentially, to all-out regional war,” notes the report.
An Oct. 19 event on the economic and military considerations of war with Iran at the Center for the National Interest (CNI) offered similar assessments.
“You could lose eight million barrels a day of production, and it would not come back quickly,” said J. Robinson West, who has also held senior positions in the White House, the Energy Department, and the Pentagon under various Republican administrations. “We believe the price of oil will go above 200 dollars a barrel.”
On Oct. 20, the New York Times reported that the U.S. and Iran had “agreed in principle for the first time” to direct negotiations.
But Tehran and Washington did have “limited bilateral talks” in 2009 “when the Iranian leadership saw a potential in the newly elected Obama administration to address some of Iran’s bottom lines regarding the country’s right to enrichment,” Farideh Farhi, an independent scholar and affiliate graduate faculty at the University of Hawai’i, told IPS.
On Wednesday, President Obama denied the Times report but did not dismiss the notion of one-on-one talks. In fact, he strongly suggested that the U.S. would seriously engage if the Iranians proved their sincerity.
“If Iran is serious about wanting to resolve this, they’ll be in a position to resolve it,” he said during his first press conference following his successful presidential re-election campaign.
“The situation is different now insofar as the Iranian leadership is much more sceptical of Obama’s words regarding his desire to resolve the nuclear issue instead of going for the Islamic regime’s jugular after a show of desire for talks,” said Farhi.
“To be sure, there will always be hardline naysayers in Tehran no matter what. A similar situation exists in the U.S.. But if the past is any guide, Tehran will come around and abandon its current resistance to bilateral talks if it sees a potential for breakthrough,” she said.
]]>Israel tops the list of the world’s most militarised nations, according to the latest Global Militarisation Index released Tuesday by the Bonn International Centre for Conversion (BICC).
At number 34, Israel’s main regional rival, Iran, is far behind. Indeed, every other Near Eastern country, with the exceptions of Yemen (37) [...]]]>
Israel tops the list of the world’s most militarised nations, according to the latest Global Militarisation Index released Tuesday by the Bonn International Centre for Conversion (BICC).
At number 34, Israel’s main regional rival, Iran, is far behind. Indeed, every other Near Eastern country, with the exceptions of Yemen (37) and Qatar (43), is more heavily militarised than the Islamic Republic, according to the Index, whose research is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Singapore ranks second, followed by Syria, Russia, Jordan, and Cyprus, according to the Index, which is based on a number of weighted variables, such as the comparison of a country’s military budget with its gross domestic product (GDP), and the percentage of the GDP it spends on health care.
Six of the top 10 states, including Israel (1), Syria (4), Jordan (5), Kuwait (7), Bahrain (9), and Saudi Arabia (10) are located in the Middle East, while yet another of Iran’s neighbours, Azerbaijan, made its first entry into the militarised elite at number 8.
The former Soviet Caucasian state has used its vast oil wealth, which has placed it among the fastest growing economies in the world, to buy expensive weapons systems in recent years, apparently as leverage to press Armenia (23) into returning the disputed Nagorno-Kharabovsk enclave which Baku lost in a brief but bloody war after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Bahrain’s placement in the top 10 was also a first for the Sunni-dominated kingdom which has been backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in an increasingly violent effort to suppress demands by the Shi’ite majority for democratic reform.
While the Middle East is far more militarised than any other region – all of its countries rank within the top 40 – Southeast Asia, led by Singapore, appears ascendant, according to Jan Grebe, the Index’s head researcher who directs BICC’s work in the field of arms export control.
In addition to Singapore, China (82) and India (71) are increasing their defence budgets at a relatively rapid rate, while the recent flaring of territorial conflicts between Beijing and its neighbours across the South and East China Seas will likely amplify voices within those countries for defence build-ups.
“It remains to be seen how this development will affect the degree of militarisation of individual states and the entire region,” Grebe said.
In contrast, both sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are relatively low on the Index, which covers statistics for 2011 and ranked 135 countries altogether.
At number 30, Angola was a notable African exception, while Chile (31), Ecuador (36), and Colombia (38) topped the Latin American list. By contrast, Brazil, which has by far the largest defence budget in the region, ranked 76.
Among those excluded from the Index was North Korea, whose defence budget has proved impervious to independent analysts and which is widely thought to be one of the world’s most militarised states, if not the most. Eritrea, another state that has made it into the top 10 in the past, also was not included this year.
Created in 1996, the GMI, which has been updated each year, tries to assess the balance between militarisation and human development, particularly related to health.
In addition to BICC’s own research, data published by the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the Institute for Strategic Studies are used to compile the Index, whose rankings go back to 1990 at the end of the Cold War.
In addition to the comparison of military budgets, GDP, and health expenditures, the Index uses several other variables, including the total personnel in the paramilitary and military forces – albeit not the police – and total number of physicians vis-à-vis the overall population, and the ratio of the number of heavy weapons to the total population.
Each variable is given a certain score which is then “weighted” according to a set formula to determine a total quantitative score. The more militarised a country, the higher the score. South Korea which, for many years, ranked in the top 10, fell to 18 this year.
Eritrea, which fought a bitter war with Ethiopia and repeatedly cracked down hard against internal dissent, gained a “perfect” 1,000 score in 2004, the first of a three-year reign atop the list.
But Israel, which has carried out a 45-year occupation of Palestinian lands and Syrian territory, has topped the list for almost all of the last 20 years. On the latest Index, its score came to 877, 70 points ahead of Singapore, which has been number two for every year this century, except for the three in which Eritrea was number one.
Significantly, Greece ranked 14 on the list, the highest of any NATO country, far ahead of its regional rival, Turkey, which took the 24th slot, and Bulgaria (25).
The two countries with the world’s largest defence budgets, the United States and China, ranked 29 (591) and 82 (414), respectively.
In addition to the six Middle Eastern states in the top, Oman (11), the UAE (13), Lebanon (17), Iraq (26), and Egypt (28) were all found to be more militarised than Iran, which is currently subject to unprecedented economic sanctions imposed primarily by the West which accuses it of pursuing a nuclear programme that may have military applications.
The concentration of so many Middle Eastern states at the top underscores the degree to which the region has become a powder keg.
If the Middle East dominates the top ranks, sub-Saharan African states, with just a few exceptions, lie at the low end of scale. The region’s biggest economy, South Africa, ranks 98, while its most populous nation, Nigeria, stands at 117.
Too little militarisation carries its own risks, according to
Grebe, because states may not be able to guarantee order or even territorial integrity.
“This situation points to the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon that some state security apparatuses are incapable of preventing violence and conflict simply because the country concerned shows a degree of militarisation which is too low,” he said.
]]>With President Barack Obama winning re-election, foreign policy analysts here are pondering whether his victory will translate into major changes from the rather cautious approach he followed overseas in his first term.
For now, speculation is focused primarily on the Middle East, the region that has dominated the international agenda [...]]]>
With President Barack Obama winning re-election, foreign policy analysts here are pondering whether his victory will translate into major changes from the rather cautious approach he followed overseas in his first term.
For now, speculation is focused primarily on the Middle East, the region that has dominated the international agenda since 9/11, much to the frustration of those in the Obama administration who are hoping to accelerate Washington’s “pivot” to the Asia/Pacific, especially in light of growing tensions between China and Japan and the ongoing political transition in Beijing.
Others are hoping that Obama will be willing to invest a fair amount of whatever additional political capital he gained from his victory on reviving international efforts to curb global warming, a challenge that thrust itself back into public consciousness here with hurricane-force winds as “Super-Storm Sandy” tore up much of the northeastern coast, including lower Manhattan.
Indeed, long-frustrated environmental groups seized on Obama’s allusion to the “destructive power of a warming planet” in his Chicago victory speech early Wednesday’s morning as a hopeful sign that the president, who hardly mentioned the problem during the campaign for fear of key coal-producing swing states, notably Ohio, may make climate change one of his “legacy” issues.
“President Obama’s legacy will be shaped by his ability to take on big challenges, including climate change, clean energy, environmental protection, and sustainability,” said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute (WRI).
As with climate change and other issues with major domestic implications, however, Obama will be constrained by certain political realities, most notably the fact Republicans will still hold a solid majority in the House of Representatives and 45 seats in the Senate, enabling them to effectively block any legislation to which they are strongly opposed.
“You’ve had an election that more or less preserves the status quo in the House,” noted Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “At a time when Obama’s top priority is getting the economy going, I’m not sure we’ll see a major initiative on climate change.”
And, while Obama won a sturdy majority of the electoral vote, his margin in the national vote is unlikely to exceed three percent when all the votes are counted. As a result, the institutional and partisan balance of power remains much the same as before the election.
Moreover, the fact that foreign policy did not play much of a role in a campaign dominated by the economy – only five percent of voters told pollsters as they left the voting booth that foreign affairs was the most important issue facing the country – suggests that Obama cannot claim a clear mandate for major policy changes.
Still, the fact that his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, dropped his earlier hawkish, neo-conservative rhetoric as the election approached and essentially embraced Obama’s general policy approach, including even in the Middle East, in the closing weeks of the campaign was taken by some as a green light, if not a mandate, to pursue the president’s instincts.
“The election campaign, and not only the outcome, should be seen as the rout of the neo-conservatism of the disastrous 2001-2006 period of the Bush administration and the consolidation of a broad, bipartisan foreign policy consensus,” wrote Middle East analyst and occasional White House adviser Marc Lynch on his foreignpolicy.com blog Wednesday.
He predicted that what he called Obama’s “caution and pragmatism” in the region, particularly with respect to generally supporting democratic transitions, seeking ways to convene Israelis and Palestinians, engaging moderate Islamists, and pursuing Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, is unlikely to change, although he suggested that bolder approaches in some areas were called for.
In particular, the administration should begin “serious efforts at real talks with Iran” on its nuclear programme and “be prepared to take yes for an answer,” he wrote, echoing a consensus among realists in the foreign policy establishment that Obama will have greater flexibility to strike a deal with Tehran now than at any time in the last two years.
Reports of back-channel talks between the U.S. and Iran in preparation for a new round of negotiations between Tehran and the so-called P5+1 powers after the election have been circulating for two weeks.
Lynch also called for Washington to get behind a major push to unify the two main Palestinian factions and “encourage the renewal of a peace camp in the upcoming Israeli election” in hopes reviving serious efforts to achieve a two-state solution – a recommendation that also been urged by many analysts disappointed by Obama’s failure over the last two years to apply real pressure on Israel to halt the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Since 2010, Obama and his fellow Democrats have avoided confronting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who made little secret of his support for Romney – on either issue in major part because they felt their re-election chances depended heavily on the neutrality, if not the goodwill of the powerful Israel lobby.
Remarkably, however, those fears appear to have proved largely unfounded. Despite the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars in swing states on ads by the hard-line neo-conservative Republican Jewish Coalition and the Emergency Committee for Israel, as well as repeated charges by Romney that Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus,” 70 percent of Jewish voters opted for the president – a result that suggested that at least those hard-line neo-conservative elements of the lobby most closely tied to Netanyahu and the settler movement were not nearly as powerful as generally believed.
If so, Obama may have more room for manoeuvre on both Israel-Palestine and Iran, if he chooses to exercise it, than he himself previously thought.
Indeed, the election results were greeted with some considerable anxiety by Netanyahu’s supporters both here and in Israel.
“(R)emember that Obama is deeply committed to three things: global nuclear disarmament, rapprochement with the Islamic world, and Palestinian statehood,” wrote David Weinberg Wednesday in Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper funded by U.S. casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a major Netanyahu backer who also funded the election ads against Obama.
“I believe that he will forcefully act to progress on all three fronts, and this could bring him into conflict with Israel,” he added. “So start filling your sandbags. We’re in for a rough ride.”
Moreover, surveys of Jewish voters nationwide and in the swing states of Ohio and Florida commissioned by J Street, a “pro-peace” Zionist group, found that Obama’s tally among Jewish voters was only four percent less than in 2008 – roughly the same proportionate loss he suffered among virtually all demographic groups, except Latinos, who increased their support for the president significantly compared to four years ago.
The surveys also found overwhelming (79 percent) support for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, 76 percent support for an active U.S. role in negotiating a settlement, as well as a significant plurality for continuing diplomacy with Iran.
Still Kupchan believes Obama is unlikely to aggressively challenge Netanyahu, especially on the Israel-Palestinian issue.
“I think the chances of a major push on the peace process are slim,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That would happen only if there is an opening of sorts in the region or if it comes primarily from within Israel and a shift in the electoral landscape there that gives it Netanyahu an incentive to do something bold.”
But he, too, predicted that Obama will try harder to reach some agreement with Iran in the coming months while continuing to resist intervention – especially military intervention – amid the continuing turmoil in the Arab world.
“The one place you’ll see a growing footprint and presence and growing activism,” he said, will be in Asia, especially if “things heat up more over territorial disputes between China and its neighbours. And the new Chinese leadership may pursue a more confrontational stance which could in turn invite an American response in kind.”
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Amid growing and increasingly harsh criticism of his handling of the economy, talk of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s removal has regained momentum in Iran in recent weeks.
But, according to most observers, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is unlikely to back any move to shorten Ahmadinejad’s term, [...]]]>
via IPS News
Amid growing and increasingly harsh criticism of his handling of the economy, talk of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s removal has regained momentum in Iran in recent weeks.
But, according to most observers, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is unlikely to back any move to shorten Ahmadinejad’s term, which runs out in mid-2013, for fear that impeaching him will only wreak greater havoc on a political environment that is already highly polarised and contentious.
Over 100 members of the parliament, or Majlis, have signed on to a demand that the president be summoned to answer questions about the recent drastic devaluation of the currency. Runaway inflation, combined with rising unemployment, has rattled many MPs concerned with the devaluation’s impact both on the price of key imports and the cost of operating factories and agricultural enterprises.
If the president either refuses to appear or fails to explain his policies to parliament’s satisfaction, the issue may eventually be referred to the judiciary, which, would, in turn, clear the way to his removal before the presidential election scheduled to take place next June.
But even the MPs who have called for Ahmadinejad to testify are not optimistic that such a scenario is realistic. “Neither MPs have hope that such questioning will lead anywhere, nor the representatives of the government are trying to stop the process,” according to Etemaad Daily.
Calls for Ahamdinejad’s removal are not new. In mid-summer there were reports that two former members of Ahmadinejad’s cabinet – former foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki and former interior minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi – had written a letter to Khamenei calling for the president’s removal.
Khamenei, however, has proved reluctant to criticise the president or acknowledge the severe economic woes the country faces. In the two weeks of intense volatility in the currency market, he even denied during a provincial visit the existence of an economic crisis.
He acknowledged that problems such as unemployment and inflation exist “like everywhere else”, but insisted that these problems can be overcome. “Nothing exists that the nation and officials cannot solve,” he said.
Khamenei’s positive take on the state of the Iranian economy is received with quite a lot of scepticism among the population. Many people see Khamenei as oblivious to the crushing burden of economic difficulties that increasingly dominate conversations at dinner tables, in cafes, and in the street.
Khamenei’s continued support for Ahmadinejad is also much discussed. Some prominent politicians, such as Deputy Speaker Mohammadreza Bahaonar, have publicly said that the Leader wants the government to finish its legal terms. “The cost of removing the president is more than us doing nothing for another year,” he said recently.
This is not a view shared by Ahmad Tavakoli, another prominent MP from Tehran. “Ahmadinejad’s period is over, and the continuation of his presidency is not positive,” he said this week, suggesting that he disagrees with Khamenei’s decision to tolerate Ahmadinejad until the end of his term.
There are other theories why Khamenei will continue to support Ahmadinejad. According to Ali, a journalist who asked only that his first name be used, Khamenei cannot back down from the support because he is unable to explain the costs his support of Ahmadinejad in the disputed 2009 election have imposed on the people and the country. “Khamenei prefers the current situation to acknowledging that he made a mistake,” Ali insists.
Reza, a 58-year-old political activist, sees fear as the explanation for Khamenei’s support for Ahmadinejad. He believes that Ahmadineajd’s penchant for creating “corruption dossiers” on key political actors “will eventually be directed at Khamenei’s family whose financial record is not without blemish.”
According to Reza, if pushed, “Ahmadinejad will reveal the information he has and this scares the Ayatollah. Through his support Khamenei is in effect paying for Ahamdinejad’s silence.”
In reality, Khamenei faces a complex situation. On the one hand, he must deal with the more public and harsher criticism of Ahmadinejad’s economic policies, and, on the other, the potentially destabilising impact of the president’s removal.
So far, Khamenei’s approach in balancing these two concerns seeks a third path, which, according to one political commentator, is “to take effective control of executive affairs and transform Ahmadinejad into a show president whose time is spent traveling abroad.”
The result can be seen in Khamenei’s conduct in the past few years. Until recently, Khamenei was always considered to be a “sitting Leader” whose annual trips to a designated province or public appearances were mostly limited to official events, such as the anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s founder.
Since the end of the post- 2009 election protests, however, Khamenei has taken many more short trips. Earlier this year, for example, he comforted the family of an assassinated nuclear scientist at their home. He also took a quick trip to East Azerbaijan after the August earthquake while the president was in Saudi Arabia.
More significantly, he has been meeting with economic actors and their representatives in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, eliciting their views and promising redress. One recently elected MP who did not want to be identified told IPS, “I send requests regarding my district’s needs directly to the Leader and not the president.”
A University of Tehran professor says that the roots of Khamenei’s increased activism can be found in Ahmadinejad’s extensive use of executive privilege and extra-legal powers to circumvent and marginalise other branches of the government, particularly the parliament.
According to the professor, however, Khamenei may also be engaged in unconstitutional conduct by interfering in the affairs of the executive branch. “Khamenei is as blameworthy as Ahmadinejad in weakening the rule of law and preventing other institutions from performing their supervisory task in relation to the executive branch,” he says.
Khamenei rejects these criticisms and said in April 2011, after he prevented Ahmadinejad from firing the intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, that “the office of the Leader has no intention of interfering in the decisions and activities of the government, unless it feels that an interest of the state has been ignored.”
These days, however, his words are received with scepticism. Maryam, a retired teacher, sees in Khamenei’s performance a desire to centralise power in his office. “He wants a weak president so that he can be in control and be in charge, and now he is in charge of everything. Why should he change the situation?”
]]>With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney virtually tied with Election Day less than two weeks away, Muslim voters could play an unexpected critical role in deciding the outcome Nov. 6.
A poll of 500 registered Muslim voters released here Wednesday found that more than two-thirds (68 percent) currently plan to vote [...]]]>
With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney virtually tied with Election Day less than two weeks away, Muslim voters could play an unexpected critical role in deciding the outcome Nov. 6.
A poll of 500 registered Muslim voters released here Wednesday found that more than two-thirds (68 percent) currently plan to vote for Obama and only seven percent for Romney. But a surprisingly large 25 percent said they were still undecided between the two main party candidates.
And tens of thousands of those undecided voters are disproportionately concentrated in three “swing” states – Ohio, Virginia and Florida – where the candidates are focusing their campaigns in the last two weeks.
“The Muslim vote could be decisive in several battleground states,” said Naeem Baig, chairman of the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections (AMT), which co-sponsored the survey and whose political arm is expected to formally endorse candidates before the election.
The poll, which was conducted during the first two weeks of October, also found large majorities of respondents who said that the U.S. should support rebels in Syria (68 percent) and that Washington was right to intervene with NATO in last year’s revolt against the Qadhafi regime in Libya (76 percent).
Respondents were roughly evenly divided on whether the U.S. has provided sufficient support to the uprisings in the Middle East, known as the Arab Spring.
Precisely how many Muslim citizens there are in the United States – and hence how many Muslim voters – has been a matter of considerable debate. The U.S. Census is forbidden to ask residents their religious affiliation.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), another co-sponsor of the survey and an 18-year-old grassroots organisation that has become one of the country’s most active national Muslim groups, estimates a total U.S. Muslim population at between six and seven million, or about the same as the total number of U.S. Jews.
The Pew Research Center, on the other hand, last year estimated the total number of Muslim Americans at 2.75 million, of whom about one million were children and hence ineligible to vote. It found that more than 60 percent of U.S. Muslims are immigrants, and, of those, more than 70 percent are citizens.
Most native-born Muslims are African Americans, who, together with Arabs, Iranians, and South Asian comprise roughly 80 percent of the total U.S. Muslim population.
CAIR estimates the total number of registered Muslim voters at at least one million. Ohio, according to CAIR’s estimates has around 50,000 registered Muslim voters; Virginia, around 60,000; and Florida, between 70,000 and 80,000.
Historically, Muslim Americans have been split in their voting behaviour, but in the 2000 election 72 percent voted for George W. Bush primarily because his campaign met at length with Muslim organisations and, during a key debate with then-Vice President Al Gore, the former president spoke out against the use of secret evidence in deportation hearings and racial profiling. Four national Muslim organisations eventually endorsed his candidacy.
But, disillusioned with his administration’s harsh response to 9/11, including the detention of hundreds of Muslim men, the passage of the so-called Patriot Act, as well as the war in Iraq, U.S. Muslims abandoned Bush.
In the 2004 election, 93 percent of Muslims voted for the Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry; another five percent for third-party candidate Ralph Nader, and only one percent for Bush, according to surveys conducted at the time.
The Democratic shift continued in 2008 when nearly 90 percent of Muslim voters cast their ballots for Obama and only two percent for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain.
Whether that level of support will be retained for Obama, however, is unclear, according to CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, who said Muslims were in some respects disappointed by Obama’s inability or failure to fully follow through on some of his campaign pledges to amend or rescind the more onerous provisions of the Patriot Act and close the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba.
Like the general public, he noted, Muslims have also been disappointed by the president’s performance on the economy and reducing unemployment.
In addition, noted Oussama Jammal, who chairs a public affairs committee of the the Muslim American Society (MAS), noted that Obama’s greater use of drones to strike suspected Al-Qaeda and other Islamist militants in Pakistan “is not selling well in the (Muslim) South Asian community”.
Revelations regarding “unprecedented surveillance” of mosques and the use of agents provocateurs by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have also hurt Muslim confidence in Obama, according to Baig.
The 500-person sample on which the poll was based was drawn from a data base of nearly 500,000 Muslim American voters that was, in turn, developed by matching state voter-registration records with a list of some 45,000 traditionally Muslim first and last names prevalent in a variety of the world’s Muslim-majority ethnic groups.
Respondents included 314 men and 186 women across the country. Twenty-six percent of respondents were born in the U.S.; while 71 percent were not. (Three percent declined to answer the question.) Ninety-three percent said they had lived in the U.S. 10 years or more.
Of the total sample, 43 percent said they were of South or Southeast Asian ancestry; 21 percent, Arab; eight percent, European; and six percent from Iran and Africa each, an indication that African American Muslims, who are estimated to comprise about 30 of all Muslim Americans, may have been under-represented.
Half of respondents said they attend a mosque at least once a month.
The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus five percent.
In addition to its findings about presidential preferences, the poll found that a whopping 91 percent of respondents intend to vote in this year’s election. In the last presidential election in 2008, only about 57 percent of eligible voters cast ballots.
It also found that the percentage of those who considered themselves closer to the Democratic Party grew from 42 percent in 2006 to 66 percent today, while affiliation with the Republican Party remained roughly the same at between eight and nine percent since 2008. Fifty-one percent of respondents said they considered the Republican Party, several of whose presidential candidates during the primary campaign made blatant Islamophobic remarks, hostile to Muslims.
Asked how important they considered 16 current foreign and domestic issues education, jobs and the economy, health policy, and civil rights were called “very important” by four out of five respondents. Seventy-one percent said they considered “terrorism and national security” in the same category, while two-thirds of respondents named the “possibility of war with Iran”.
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It was exactly 50 years ago when then-President John F. Kennedy took to the airwaves to inform the world that the Soviet Union was introducing nuclear-armed missiles into Cuba and that he had ordered a blockade of the island – and would consider stronger action – to force their removal.
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It was exactly 50 years ago when then-President John F. Kennedy took to the airwaves to inform the world that the Soviet Union was introducing nuclear-armed missiles into Cuba and that he had ordered a blockade of the island – and would consider stronger action – to force their removal.
“It was the most chilling speech in the history of the U.S. presidency,” according to Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, who has spent several decades working to declassify key documents and other material that would shed light on the 13-day crisis that most historians believe brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any other moment.
Indeed, Kennedy’s military advisers were urging a pre-emptive strike against the missile installations on the island, unaware that some of them were already armed.
Several days later, the crisis was resolved when Soviet President Nikita Krushchev appeared to capitulate by agreeing to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba.
“We’ve been eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked,” exulted Secretary of State Dean Rusk in what became the accepted interpretation of the crisis’ resolution.
“Kennedy’s victory in the messy and inconclusive Cold War naturally came to dominate the politics of U.S. foreign policy,” write Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations in a recent foreignpolicy.com article entitled “The Myth That Screwed Up 50 Years of U.S. Foreign Policy.”
“It deified military power and willpower and denigrated the give-and-take of diplomacy,” he wrote. “It set a standard for toughness and risky dueling with bad guys that could not be matched – because it never happened in the first place.”
What the U.S. public didn’t know was that Krushchev’s concession was matched by another on Washington’s part as a result of secret diplomacy, conducted mainly by Kennedy’s brother, Robert, and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.
Indeed, in exchange for removing the missiles from Cuba, Moscow obtained an additional concession by Washington: to remove its own force of nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles from Turkey within six months – a concession that Washington insisted should remain secret.
“The myth (of the Cuban missile crisis), not the reality, became the measure for how to bargain with adversaries,” according to Gelb, who interviewed many of the principals.
Writing in a New York Times op-ed last week, Michael Dobbs, a former Washington Post reporter and Cold War historian, noted that the “eyeball to eyeball” image “has contributed to some of our most disastrous foreign policy decisions, from the escalation of the Vietnam War under (Lyndon) Johnson to the invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush.”
Dobbs also says Bush made a “fateful error, in a 2002 speech in Cincinnati when he depicted Kennedy as the father of his pre-emptive war doctrine. In fact, Kennedy went out of his way to avoid such a war.”
To Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, whose research into those fateful “13 days in October” has brought much of the back-and-forth to light, “the lessons of the crisis for current policy have never been greater.”
In a Foreign Affairs article published last summer, he described the current confrontation between the U.S. and Iran as “a Cuban missile crisis in slow motion”.
Kennedy, he wrote, was given two options by his advisers: “attack or accept Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.” But the president rejected both and instead was determined to forge a mutually acceptable compromise backed up by a threat to attack Cuba within 24 hours unless Krushchev accepted the deal.
Today, President Barack Obama is being faced with a similar binary choice, according to Allison: to acquiesce in Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear bomb or carry out a preventive air strike that, at best, could delay Iran’s nuclear programme by some years.
A “Kennedyesque third option,” he wrote, would be an agreement that verifiably constrains Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for a pledge not to attack Iran so long as it complied with those constraints.
“I would hope that immediately after the election, the U.S. government will also turn intensely to the search for something that’s not very good – because it won’t be very good – but that is significantly better than attacking on the one hand or acquiescing on the other,” Allison told the Voice of America last week.
This very much appears to be what the Obama administration prefers, particularly in light of as-yet unconfirmed reports over the weekend that both Washington and Tehran have agreed in principle to direct bilateral talks, possibly within the framework of the P5+1 negotiations that also involve Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany, after the Nov. 6 election.
Allison also noted a parallel between the Cuban crisis and today’s stand-off between the U.S. and Iran – the existence of possible third-party spoilers.
Fifty years ago, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro had favoured facing down the U.S. threat and even launching the missiles in the event of a U.S. attack.
But because the Cubans lacked direct control over the missiles, which were under Soviet command, they could be ignored. Moreover, Kennedy warned the Kremlin that it “would be held accountable for any attack against the United States emanating from Cuba, however it started,” according to Allison.
The fact that Israel, which has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear sites unilaterally, actually has the assets to act on those threats makes the situation today more complicated than that faced by Kennedy.
“Due to the secrecy surrounding the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, the lesson that became ingrained in U.S. foreign policy-making was the importance of a show of force to make your opponent back down,” Kornbluh told IPS.
“But the real lesson is one of commitment to diplomacy, negotiation and compromise, and that was made possible by Kennedy’s determination to avoid a pre-emptive strike, which he knew would open a Pandora’s box in a nuclear age.”
]]>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.
]]>Jim Lobe and I wrote a report yesterday for IPS News about the expected US decision to delist the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (aka MEK, PMOI and NCRI) from its foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list. Most analysts we interviewed predicted that the removal would only worsen already abysmal relations with Iran and possibly make [...]]]>
Jim Lobe and I wrote a report yesterday for IPS News about the expected US decision to delist the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (aka MEK, PMOI and NCRI) from its foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list. Most analysts we interviewed predicted that the removal would only worsen already abysmal relations with Iran and possibly make any effort to defuse the gathering crisis over its nuclear programme yet more difficult. Here’s a round-up of what they had to say beginning with statements that came in following the article’s publication:
John Limbert, a retired career foreign service officer and former embassy hostage in Tehran who served as the first-ever Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iran from 2009 to 2010 when he returned to teach at the US Naval Academy:
There may be reasons, but it’s a strange and disappointing decision.
I know the group claims it has abandon its violent and anti-American past. I wish I could believe them. They have a very dubious history and a similarly dubious present.
Farideh Farhi, Iran expert at the University of Hawaii:
As to the MEK delisting, especially after high-level leaks by members of the US intelligence community that the MEK was involved in terror operations inside Iran, the decision will no doubt make the Iranian leadership even more distrustful of US intentions regarding the future of Iran, particularly given the congressional support for the MEK to spearhead regime change. Less trust will make compromise less likely, presumably a preferred outcome for the high profile supporters of the MEK in Congress and elsewhere.
Note that the Obama Administration’s humanitarian argument for delisting says very little about the future operation of this group in the US and how their well-funded operation and agitation for regime change will be promoted or managed in the US. This ambiguity by itself will be a source of tension and will be used by hardliners inside Iran to further delegitimize all efforts to agitate for political reform from inside and outside of the country.
The issue is not about whether something needed to be done to help the poor souls caught in Iraq, abused by everyone including their own cult-like organization. The issue has to do with the wisdom of linking the highly political and politicized process of de-listing to a humanitarian effort.
Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005:
“Delisting will be seen not only by the Iranian regime, but also by most Iranian citizens, as a hostile act by the United States.”
“The MEK has almost no popular support within Iran, where it is despised as a group of traitors, especially given its history of joining forces with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War,” Pillar, who now teaches at George Washington University, added.
“Any effect of the delisting on nuclear negotiations will be negative; Tehran will read it as one more indication that the United States is interested only in hostility and pressure toward the Islamic Republic, rather than coming to terms with it.”
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former senior Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator currently at Princeton University:
“The Iranian security establishment’s assessment has long believed that foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA, Israeli Mossad, and the UK’s MI6 utilise the MEK for terror attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, nuclear sabotage and intelligence gathering,”…
“Therefore, the delisting of MEK will be seen in Tehran as a reward for the group’s terrorist actions in the country,” he wrote in an email exchange with IPS. “Furthermore, Iran has firmly concluded that the Western demands for broader inspections (of Iran’s nuclear programme), including its military sites, are a smokescreen for mounting increased cyber attacks, sabotage and terror of nuclear scientists.
“Delisting MEK would be considered in Tehran as a U.S.-led effort to increase sabotage and covert actions through MEK leading inevitably to less cooperation by Iran with the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency).”
He added that government in Tehran will use this as a way of “demonstrating to the public that the U.S. is seeking …to bring a MEK-style group to power” which, in turn, “would strengthen the Iranian nation’s support for the current system as the perceived alternative advanced by Washington would be catastrophic.”
Karim Sadjadpour, analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:
…said the move was unlikely to be “game-changer” in that “the MEK will continue to be perceived inside Iran as an antiquated cult which sided with Saddam Hussein during the (Iran-Iraq) war, and U.S. Iran relations will remain hostile.”
“It doesn’t help (Washington’s) image within Iran, certainly, and some Iranian democracy activists may misperceive this as a U.S. show of support for the MEK, which could have negative ramifications,” he noted.
Mila Johns, a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland:
“The entire atmosphere around the MEK’s campaign to be removed from the FTO list – the fact that (former) American government officials were allowed to actively and openly receive financial incentives to speak in support of an organisation that was legally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, without consequence – created the impression that the list is essentially a meaningless political tool,” she told IPS.
“It is hard to imagine that the FTO designation holds much legitimacy within the international community when it is barely respected by our own government,” she said.
No other group, she noted, has been de-listed in this way, “though now that the precedent has been set, I would expect that other groups will explore this as an option.”
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