February 20, 2006
EU Says Iran Must Change Atomic Stance
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:25 p.m. ET

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian and Iranian officials agreed Monday to hold more talks on Moscow's offer to enrich uranium for Tehran, a compromise proposal considered a final opportunity for the Islamic regime to avoid the threat of international sanctions over its nuclear program.

The office of presidential Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov, who hosted the Iranian delegation, issued a terse statement that the Russian and Iranian negotiators had agreed to continue talks, several news agencies reported. The statement did not elaborate.

The ITAR-Tass news agency said the Iranian delegation was expected to leave Moscow on Tuesday. Calls to the Iranian Embassy in Moscow went unanswered Monday evening.

In Brussels, Belgium, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said talks with Iran's foreign minister failed to make progress in resolving the West's standoff with the Islamic republic over its nuclear program.

Solana said Iran's ''substantive position has not changed.'' Speaking after a 90-minute meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Solana said, ''They have to be much more constructive.''

The Russian offer, backed by the United States and Europe, was widely seen as the last chance for Iran to address the West's concerns before a March 6 meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which could start a process leading to punishment before the U.N. Security Council.

The council has the power to impose economic and political sanctions.

But Iran has adamantly defended its right to maintain a domestic enrichment program, seen by the United States and other Western nations as a cover-up for a suspected weapons program.

Before the Moscow talks, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sought to lower expectations.

''Honestly speaking, we have modest expectations, but we will make every effort to avoid an escalation of the situation and the use of force,'' Lavrov told a government meeting chaired by President Vladimir Putin in televised comments.

The top Iranian negotiator, Ali Hosseinitash, deputy secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, said he believed an agreement was possible. He cautioned, however, against linking the Russian plan to demands for Iran to restore a freeze on uranium enrichment, Russian news agencies reported.

''The negotiations with Russia do not foresee any preconditions,'' Hosseinitash said, according to ITAR-Tass. He added that there was no link ''between the moratorium on uranium enrichment and talks on the Russian plan.''

Mottaki said in Brussels that Tehran was looking for a ''peaceful solution'' to the impasse and was ready to listen to ''new ideas.''

''We express our readiness for negotiations based on justice and a comprehensive compromise. We want to peacefully solve the problem,'' he said after talks with Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht.

''We believe that the time of threats is over. The (U.N.) Security Council should not be considered as a tool of some countries ... We are here to hear any new plans, any new proposal, any new ideas.''

The Iranians have blown hot and cold over Moscow's initiative, under which Iran's enrichment activities would take place on Russian soil to ensure no uranium is diverted for nuclear weapons. Enrichment is a process that can produce either fuel for a nuclear reactor or material for a warhead.

The Russian foreign minister said Iran could conduct all nuclear activities on its own soil once the IAEA had resolved its concerns about the Iranian nuclear program.

Lavrov said last week the Russian proposal is conditional on Iran giving up all enrichment activity, including small-scale efforts it started last week. The EU and the United States also insist that Tehran reimpose a freeze on all enrichment.

Analysts said a concrete result likely would emerge from further talks later in the week, when the head of Russia's atomic energy agency, Sergei Kiriyenko, visits Iran.

Experts have said Iran would like its scientists to have access to the Russian enrichment facility and hope to retain the right to conduct part of the enrichment process at home. But former Russian Atomic Energy Minister Viktor Mikhailov told the Vremya Novostei daily in Monday's editions that the entire facility would be off-limits to the Iranians.

IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei recently suggested that the international community might have no choice but to accept small-scale enrichment on Iranian soil as a condition for Tehran to agree to move its full program abroad, a diplomat familiar with ElBaradei's position said Sunday on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Iranian presidential spokesman Gholamhossein Elham, speaking in a news conference Monday, welcomed the IAEA proposal on small-scale enrichment inside Iran as a ''positive step'' toward resolving the dispute but said any restrictions on Tehran's right to access nuclear energy were unacceptable.



Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

http://theaustralian.news.com.au/common/st...55E1702,00.html

US accuses Iran of arming militia
From correspondents in Baghdad
20feb06

IRAN is providing weapons and training to militias and extremist groups in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Iraq, said today.

"Iran has a mixed policy towards Iraq," he told a news conference.
On the one hand it had good state-to-state relations with the Shiite-dominated government, but it has "another policy as well which is to work with some militias, to work with some extremist groups, to provide training and to provide weapons, directly or indirectly," Mr Khalilzad said.

"Iraqis are increasingly concerned about the role Iran is playing."

US authorities are particularly worried about the growing influence of Shiite militias which are alleged to have infiltrated Iraq's interior ministry.

Khalilzad also slammed a call made last week by Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki for British forces, belonging to the US-led coalition, to leave southern Iraq, saying this was "uncalled for interference" in Iraq's internal affairs.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari also said yesterday that Mr Mottaki's calls were "unacceptable", adding that "only the Iraqi Government is allowed to decide the fate of these troops".

Iran's attempt to stir trouble could be linked to attempts to distract public opinion away from the nuclear question, the ambassador said, referring to international fears Tehran is seeking to built an atomic weapon.

© The Australian

U.S. Ambassador Criticizes Iran's Role in Iraq

By Nelson Hernandez

BAGHDAD, Feb. 20 -- Iran is playing "a negative role" in Iraq by providing weapons, training and other support to militias and insurgent groups that interfere in Iraqi politics, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq said at a news conference on Monday.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=8580

February 21, 2006
March Madness

by Gordon Prather
Gholamali Haddad-Adel, "speaker" of Iran's parliament – in Cuba, last week – dismissed the possibility of a U.S. preemptive attack against Iran, finding it "impossible" to believe that the U.S. would want "to repeat the experience of Iraq."

"We hope the United States is not so stupid," he said.

Presumably, Haddad-Adel meant to say, "We hope that President Bush, his vice president, his secretary of state, and his ambassador to the United Nations are not so stupid."

Now, some or all of the above may be stupid. But their stupidity is not what Haddad-Adel and the rest of the world need to concern themselves with.

It's their sanity.

As well as the sanity of a majority of congresspersons.

Up until the eve of Bush's preemptive invasion of oil-rich Iran's Islamic neighbor – oil-rich Iraq – Bush et al. repeatedly stressed that "we" wanted to settle – through "diplomatic means, if at all possible" – the international crisis triggered by revelations by "Slam Dunk" Tenet that Iraq had reconstructed its nuclear weapons program.

But by March 2003, on-the-ground inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency knew – and so reported to the UN Security Council – that there was no indication whatsoever of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.

Moreover, polls show that the majority of Americans now know what Tony Blair knew four years ago: Bush was determined to depose Saddam Hussein no matter what the IAEA inspectors found or didn't find.

Why?

Well, most Americans are still puzzled about why.

But most Americans now realize that Bush lied to them – that he didn't preemptively attack Iraq because he believed Saddam had nukes he planned to give to terrorists.

Of course, congressional leaders knew that all along.

And most congresspersons should have at least suspected when they voted overwhelmingly for the authorization to use military force against Iraq that the presumption was false that

"Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations…"

So how to explain the adoption this week – by a vote of 404-4 – of House Concurrent Resolution 341 "condemning the government of Iran for violating its international nuclear nonproliferation obligations and expressing support for efforts to report Iran to the United Nations Security Council."

In particular, what "violations" are they talking about?

"Whereas Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated, '[i]t is obvious that if Iran cannot be brought to live up to its international obligations, in fact, the IAEA Statute would indicate that Iran would have to be referred to the UN Security Council'…."

Okay, what "international obligations" is Condi talking about?

Well, it's not clear. But, Condi does refer to the IAEA Statute. So the House assumes she must be referring to the Safeguards Agreement that Iran concluded with the IAEA way back in 1973.

"Whereas on February 4, 2006, the IAEA Board of Governors reported Iran's noncompliance with its IAEA safeguards obligations to the Security Council…."

But the House is mistaken. The IAEA Board didn't report any such thing. In fact, the Board didn't report anything.

Rather, the IAEA Board requested [.pdf] that Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei report to the Security Council the absolutely outrageous and discriminatory demands that the Board had made on several occasions, calling on Iran to – among other things – implement "transparency measures,"

"which extend beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol, and include such access to individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual-use equipment, certain military-owned workshops, and research and development as the Agency may request in support of its ongoing investigations."

As of this writing, ElBaradei has made no such report and is unlikely to do so before late March. By then, of course, Bush will probably have already launched a preemptive attack against Iran.

What will be his authority?

"[Congress] calls on all members of the United Nations Security Council … to expeditiously consider and take action in response to any report of Iran's noncompliance in fulfillment of the mandate of the Security Council to respond to and deal with situations bearing on the maintenance of international peace and security…."

What Security Council mandate is Congress talking about?

Apparently the same one Bush didn't have when he "took action" against Iraq.

March madness.

http://www.albawaba.com/en/news/194842

Report: US plans to attack Iran's nuke facilities
A US military action against Iran's nuclear facilities has entered a practical stage, according to a Saudi newspaper. The report, published Sunday by al Watan daily, claims the American intelligence identified 23 nuclear facilities in Iran while intelligence bodies of other countries added to the list eight facilities. All of these are expected to targeted by US warplanes if diplomatic efforts to stop Iran's nuclear facilities fail.

According to the report, the US army will need five days to one week to complete the strike. However, US military experts claim the attack should be carried out no later than January 2007, because on that time Iran's nuclear development enters the "red phase", i.e. the nuclear facilities would be dangerous to strike due to fear of radiation.

The report adds the US has decided that Israel will not be directly involved in the strike. However, the Bush administration will allow Israel to retaliate if attacked by long range Iranian missiles. Based on US intelligence reports, Iran has at least 20 mobile launchers for this kind of missiles.


© 2006 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publi...icle_3371.shtml

Is Iran Next?
by William Norman Grigg
March 6, 2006

The Bush administration's crusade to "democratize" the Middle East is zeroing in on Iran's nuclear ambitions. The result could be devastating — but the worst need not happen.
As the current crisis with Iran unfolds, discussion of a possible war is tinted with a sense of déjà vu and burdened with a feeling of inevitability. Once again, the Bush administration issues grim warnings about the prospect of "weapons of mass murder" falling into the hands of a deranged ruler heading a terrorist-sponsoring regime. Once again, the administration lobbies the UN Security Council, rather than Congress, for "authority" to wage a war it insists is necessary to preempt a dire global threat. And the Iranian regime's defiant militancy apparently leaves little reason to hope that the anticipated war — which even hawkish observers believe would be devastating — can be avoided.

However, there are sound reasons to believe that war can and will be avoided. First of all, the Bush administration confronts a severe shortage of military assets to deal with Iran. It is also in a strategic straitjacket as a result of the removal of Saddam Hussein; the resulting power vacuum has been filled by Iraqi allies of Tehran, an "axis of evil" regime.

Bad as the present situation is on the ground in the Persian Gulf, the Iranian regime, according to the Bush administration's own intelligence estimates, is years away from acquiring the means to build even a single nuclear weapon. And that assumes that Tehran is involved in a secretive effort to develop nukes. The chief "evidence" in support of that proposition has been provided by an Islamo-Marxist terrorist group that seeks to supplant the existing Iranian regime — and that, once in power, could actually be even worse.

While the Bush administration and those who echo its party line would have us believe that war with Iran is both imperative and impending, a realistic appraisal of the situation yields a different conclusion. War is avoidable and would be counterproductive.

Order of Battle

The ongoing war in Iraq has tied up nearly all of our available manpower and resources. Iran is a mountainous nation four times larger than Iraq (roughly the size of Alaska) with a population of roughly 70 million — nearly two-thirds of which is younger than 30. Unlike Iraq, Iran has a viable air force and a relatively homogenous population that does not necessarily support its government, but would unite against a foreign aggressor. The nation absorbed an estimated one million casualties in its war with Iraq during the 1980s, a conflict in which the aggressor, Saddam's Iraq, received material and military aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union.

The removal of Saddam's regime resulted in a new government aligned with Tehran. The new Iraqi parliament is dominated by the United Iraqi Alliance, created with the blessing of the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani (a near physical twin of the late, unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini). The alliance includes the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is headquartered in Iran. SCIRI is led by Abdel Aziz-Hakim, who spent 20 years in Iranian exile as a guest of the Tehran regime. SCIRI's Iranian-funded military arm, the Badr Brigades, includes many veterans of the Iran-Iraq war (on the Iranian side).

The alliance also includes the Dawa Party, led by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr; Dawa's military affiliate is the Mahdi Army, which was formed in 2003. The Mahdi Army survived a three-week assault conducted by U.S. Marines in Najaf in November 2004. Sadr paid a high-profile visit to Iran in late January as a gesture of support in Tehran's escalating confrontation with the United States. "If any Islamic state, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran, is attacked," warned Sadr's spokesman during the visit, "the Mahdi Army would fight inside and outside Iran." Mahdi Army loyalists have insinuated themselves in key positions throughout the new Iraqi military and police. Sadr has also opened diplomatic channels with Syria's Bashar Assad, who rules another nation targeted by Washington for "regime change."

British journalist Andrew Cockburn, who has covered the Persian Gulf for over a decade, believes that the occupation of Iraq has left the United States strategically checkmated in any potential military conflict with Iran. "Jimmy Carter presented Iran with 52 hostages," writes Cockburn. "George Bush has done a lot better, sending 130,000 Americans across the ocean as guarantees of his administration's good behavior toward the Islamic Republic."

Military analyst William Lind concurs that Tehran has the strategic initiative. "It can shut down its own oil exports and, with mining and naval action, those of Kuwait and the Gulf States as well," writes Lind. "It can ramp up the guerilla wars both in Iraq and in Afghanistan. It could also do something that would come as a total surprise to Washington and cross the Iran-Iraq border with four to six divisions, simply rolling up the American army of occupation in Iraq. Syria might well join in, knowing that it is only a question of time before it is attacked anyway. We have no field army in Iraq at this point; our troops are dispersed fighting insurgents. A couple dozen Scuds on the Green Zone [the Coalition's headquarters in Baghdad] would decapitate our leadership."

Is War Inevitable?

Grim and forbidding as such scenarios may be, hawkish analysts and commentators insist that the alternative — "the world's most destructive weapons in the hands of clerical radicals who might use them," in the Wall Street Journal's words — is immeasurably worse.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the 1970s-era radical student movement that helped overthrow the Shah and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, subscribes to an apocalyptic strain of Islam: "We must prepare ourselves to rule the world and the only way to do that is to put forth views on the basis of the return" of the Shi'ite Muslim Messiah, the "Mahdi" or "Hidden Imam."

Ahmadinejad has stated that Israel should be "wiped off the map," has questioned the historic authenticity of the Jewish Holocaust, and has claimed that a divine "aura" emanated from him during his speech before the UN General Assembly last fall. He seems almost perfectly cast in the role of the Mad Megalomaniac from the Middle East. In fact, neo-conservative war hawk Michael Ledeen, an "Iran-Contra" figure notorious for his tight connections to shadowy individuals in the intelligence community, has whimsically suggested that "the CIA managed to recruit this guy from central casting [to be] the perfect person to get the West to take the Iranian threat seriously."

With Iranian public opinion catalyzing behind a figure seen as a modern Persian incarnation of Adolf Hitler, the atmosphere is being tuned for a potentially devastating war.

"The unavoidable reality is that we now need urgently to steel ourselves to the ugly probability that diplomacy will not now suffice: one way or another, unconscionable acts of war may now be unavoidable," lamented prominent British commentator Gerard Baker in the Times of London. "Those who say war is unthinkable are right. Military strikes, even limited, targeted and accurate ones, will have devastating consequences for the region and for the world. They will, quite probably, entrench and harden the Iranian regime. Even the young, hopeful democrats who despise their theocratic rulers and crave the freedoms of the West will pause at the sight of their country burnt and humiliated by the infidels. A war, even a limited one, will almost certainly raise oil prices to recession-inducing levels" — with $150 a barrel oil a realistic possibility. Yet allowing Iran to go nuclear, Baker continues, would be "a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik Revolution and the coming of Hitler."

Niall Ferguson, a British historian teaching at Harvard University, offered an even bleaker prediction in a January 15 essay for the London Telegraph. Written from the vantage point of a hypothetical "future historian," Ferguson's essay posits Iran's acquisition of nuclear capability in the very near future, a 2007 nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel, a humiliating retreat from Iraq by U.S. forces overwhelmed by Iranian-backed militias, and a four-year war between a U.S.-led coalition and Iranian-backed Shi'ite forces.

These disheartening assessments, it should be understood, are offered by two commentators who support the idea of a military strike against Iran — and who apparently overlook the fact that Israel's strength provides a major deterrence in the region.

The Worst "Best-case Scenario"

If these projections could be taken as worst-case scenarios, what would a best-case scenario look like? The Iran Policy Committee (IPC), a high-octane beltway think-tank composed of prominent military and diplomatic figures, offers what it considers to be a suitable alternative to either "appeasement" of Iran or preemptive warfare against it.

"For too long, Washington has been divided between those who favor engagement with and those who support military strikes against the Iranian regime," stated the IPC in US Policy Options for Iran, a report published roughly a year ago that has gained an audience in Washington during the present crisis. "The Committee stresses the potential for a third alternative: Keep open diplomatic and military options, while providing a central role for the Iranian opposition to facilitate regime change."

While the IPC advocates regime change rather than a military assault, they justify their plans in much the same way as the neo-cons do. Reiterating a key theme recited by the Bush administration in the build-up to war with Iraq, the IPC insists that "time is on Iran's side. The world cannot wait for proof 'beyond a reasonable doubt' of an Iranian bomb. The risks of delay are too high. The international community should be prepared to act on the recent discoveries of evidence of weapons-related nuclear activities. Discoveries over the past two years, along with the revelations by Iranian opposition groups that Iran is developing a nuclear trigger, constitute 'clear and present evidence' of illicit activities that, unless halted, may lead to bomb-making."

What Revelations?

"In December 2004," continues the group's report, "Iran's main opposition coalition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), uncovered a new missile program secretly pursued by Iran, as well as a program to develop a nuclear warhead. The new secret missile, produced at the Hemmat Missile Industries Complex in northeast Teheran, is named Ghadar, NCRI reported. North Korean experts are believed to be assisting the Iranian program at this complex."

The activist arm of the NCRI is a guerrilla group called the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), or "People's Mujahideen." The Iran Policy Council claims that the MEK has "an impressive network in Iran, where it has been gathering intelligence on Iran's nuclear weapons program as well as its activities in Iraq." In fact, according to the Bush administration, the NCRI/MEK alone is responsible for uncovering vital evidence of Iran's secret nuclear weapons program — evidence that was somehow concealed from inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) during its inspection of Iranian nuclear facilities.

"Iran has concealed its … nuclear program," stated President Bush during a July 16, 2005, White House press conference. "That became discovered, not because of their compliance with the IAEA or [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty], but because a dissident group pointed it out to the world, and [that] raised suspicions about the intentions of the program.

On January 20, the Jerusalem Post reported another discovery by the NCRI — a "hot press" and a "hot iso-static press" supposedly kept at a secret site 25 miles west of Tehran. "These machines are able to simultaneously use pressure and heat to produce uranium spheres for production of nuclear bombs," stated NCRI spokesman Dowlat Nowrouzi in London. "Both of these machines are banned items."

Iran insists that it has been in compliance with its treaty obligations and that it seeks to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The key evidence contradicting that claim has been produced by the MEK and its Paris-based political front, the NCRI. Several members of Congress, including Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), want to provide material assistance and support for the MEK as a presumptive government-in-exile for a liberated Iran.

The Iran Policy Council insists that the MEK should play a "central role" in regime change in Iran. In fact, once regime change is accomplished, the nuclear threat will become moot, asserts the IPC, since "the nature of the regime in Teheran is of greater import than its nuclear weapons capability: An Iran with representative institutions with a nuclear weapons capability would not be as destabilizing as nuclear weapons in the hands of the unelected, expansionist theocracy."

The problem with all of this is that the MEK — which the Bush administration regards as its key source on Iran's clandestine nuclear ambitions, and which stands to benefit from "regime change" in Iran — has been officially listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department since 1997. Before the Iraq War, the Bush administration pointed to MEK camps in Iraq as evidence of Saddam's support of terrorism.

Profile of an "Ally"

The MEK was created in 1965 as part of a Soviet-sponsored international terrorist network that waged wars of "national liberation" throughout the developing world. Human Rights Watch, which describes the MEK as an "urban guerrilla group," points out that the group's ideology is a Muslim variation on "liberation theology." In Latin America, liberation theology was Marxism-Leninism wrapped in Christian symbolism and language. MEK's version makes similar cynical use of Islam. As noted by Human Rights Watch:

The organization's founding trio focused their initial thrust on creating a revolutionary ideology based on their interpretation of Islam that could fuel an armed struggle by persuading masses of people to rise up against the government. This ideology relied heavily on an interpretation of Islam as a revolutionary message compatible with modern revolutionary ideologies, particularly Marxism.... In addition to religious texts, the group also studied Marxist theory at length.

In 1970, 13 members of the MEK received training (most likely under Soviet supervision) at PLO camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Upon their return, the PLO-trained MEK cadres shared their newly acquired skills with their comrades, and the group embarked on a wave of attacks and bombings intended to bring down the Shah. During one rampage, MEK terrorists killed several U.S. military personnel and contractors who were working in Iran. The group suffered some attrition from gun battles, arrests, and executions. It survived long enough to lend its support to the Khomeini revolution, including the seizure of American hostages in October 1979. But it was purged from Khomeini's coalition in 1981 and much of its leadership was driven into exile.

Beginning that year, the MEK began a hit-and-run guerrilla war against the Iranian regime in the hope of triggering a popular uprising. When that proved unsuccessful, the group set up the NCRI in Paris. In 1985, notes Human Rights Watch, the MEK's "leadership was transformed when Masoud Rajavi announced his marriage to Maryam Uzdanlu.... The husband and wife team became co-leaders" of the MEK and announced an "ideological revolution."

All of the group's members were required to undertake an individual "ideological revolution" by engaging in Maoist-style "self-criticism" sessions. Adherents were expected to listen raptly "to radio messages and explanations provided by [their] commanders" in order to "gain a deep insight into the greatness of our new leadership, meaning the leadership of Masoud and Maryam.... To believe in them as well as to show ideological and revolutionary obedience to them." By 1987, the MEK had acquired "all the main attributes of a cult," writes Iranian scholar Ervand Abrahamian, with Masoud Rajavi claiming the titles Rahbar (leader) and Imam-i hal (the Present Imam), and the forerunner to the impending second advent of the Mahdi.

Expelled from France in 1986, Masoud Rajavi was welcomed in Baghdad, where he and his followers built a "National Liberation Army" that joined the Iran-Iraq war on Saddam's side. The MEK's plan to "liberate" Iran reads a great deal like the U.S. neo-conservative fantasy of a "cakewalk" in Iraq. As quoted by Human Rights Watch:

We will not be fighting alone; we will have the people on our side. They are tired of this regime, and … they have every incentive to get rid of it forever. We will only have to act as their shields, protecting them from being easy targets for the [revolutionary] guards. Wherever we go there will be masses of citizens joining us, and the prisoners we liberate from jails will help us lead them towards victory. It will be like an avalanche, growing as it progresses.

When the war ended in 1988 without victory for Iraq or the "National Liberation Army," the MEK leadership imposed yet another "ideological revolution" on its followers, this one involving forced mass divorces and torture of those suspected of espionage or ideological deviation. Following the first Gulf War, the MEK collaborated in Saddam's crackdown on Shi'ites and Kurds.

In 2003, U.S. forces disarmed MEK fighters who operated several camps within 60 miles of the Iranian border. Rather than treating them as terrorists, the Bush administration designated the MEK fighters as "protected" persons under the Geneva Convention. Amazingly, the Bush administration rebuffed an offer from Iran to exchange MEK leaders for al-Qaeda suspects being held in Tehran.

The Way Out

The MEK "has tried to establish itself as the Iranian equivalent of Ahmad Chalabi's 'government in exile,' the Iraqi National Congress [INC]," writes Iranian expatriate Reza Aslan, author of No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. "Like the INC before the [Iraq] war, the MEK has advocates in the highest levels of government. And like the INC, the MEK has been inundating the US intelligence community with uncorroborated and, according to some intelligence officials, highly suspect information meant to encourage the White House to carry out the same policy of regime change in Iran that it did in Iraq."

At this point, there simply are no good alternatives in dealing with Iran. An unsuccessful military attack, or even a successful one, could have catastrophic consequences. Swapping out the current Iranian regime for one run by a Marxist cult would not result in a net improvement. And the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is — not to put too fine a point on the matter — unnerving. Perhaps the good news in all of this is found in the fact that our chief "evidence" of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program comes from the MEK.

Military disengagement from the Middle East, coupled with a serious effort to achieve energy independence, would be the best alternative. Advocates of war with Iran focus on Ahmadinejad's hostile intentions toward Israel. But Israel is a regional superpower, boasting a nuclear arsenal and the most formidable conventional military in the Middle East; it is quite capable of protecting its own interests, as we should protect ours.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2.../8/154740.shtml


The Apocalyptic Vision of Iranian President Ahmadinejad
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Thursday, Feb. 9, 2006
The man in charge of hoodwinking the Western powers about Iran's now
18-year-old secret nuclear program believes the apocalypse will happen in
his own lifetime. He'll be 50 in October.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Shi'ite creed has convinced him lesser
mortals can not only influence but also hasten the awaited return of the
12th Imam, known as the Mahdi. Iran's dominant "Twelver" sect holds that
this will be Muhammad ibn Hasan, the righteous descendant of the Prophet
Muhammad. He is said to have gone into "occlusion" in the 9th century, at
age 5. His return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war, bloodshed and
pestilence. After this cataclysmic confrontation between the forces of good
and evil, the Mahdi will lead the world to an era of universal peace.

"The ultimate promise of all Divine religions," says Ahmadinejad, "will be
fulfilled with the emergence of a perfect human being [the 12th Imam], who
is heir to all prophets. He will lead the world to justice and absolute
peace. Oh mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last
repository, the promised one." He reckons that the return of the Imam, AWOL
for 11 centuries, is only two years away.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is close to the messianic Hojjatieh Society, which is
governed by the conviction that the 12th Imam's return will be hastened by
"the creation of chaos on Earth." He has fired Iran's most experienced
diplomats and scores of other officials, presumably those who don't share
his belief in apocalyptic conflagration.


The Iranian leader's finger on a nuclear trigger would be disquieting under
any circumstances. Positively alarming would be a nuclear weapon in the
hands of a man who badgers Israel, the U.S. and the European Union in belief
that a pre-emptive aerial attack on Iran's nuclear facilities will hasten
the return of the missing Mahdi. Such an attack presumably would trigger
anti-Western mayhem throughout the Middle East.

When he became Iran's sixth president since the 1979 revolution last summer,
Mr. Ahmadinejad decided to donate $20 million to the Jamkaran mosque, a
popular pilgrimage site where the faithful can drop their missives to the
"Hidden Imam" in a holy well. Tehran's working-class faithful are convinced
the new president and his Cabinet signed a "compact" pledging themselves to
precipitate the return of the Mahdi - and dropped it down Jamkaran's well
with the Mahdi's zip code.

In Mr. Ahmadinejad's eyes, Iran is strong, with oil inching up to $70 a
barrel and America, dependent on foreign oil, is weak. He has said publicly
America and Europe have far more to lose than Iran if the U.N. Security
Council votes for tough economic sanctions. He also figures if Israeli
and/or U.S. warplanes strike Iran, all he has to do is give the U.S. a hard
time in Iraq as American forces prepare to withdraw.

Moving two or three Iranian divisions into Iraq and activating Shi'ite
suicide bombers and hit squads throughout the region would not be too hard
for a country that fought an 8-year war against Iraq (1980-88) and had no
compunction about giving thousands of youngsters a key to paradise and 72
virgins before sending them across Iraqi minefields.

A top Ahmadinejad officer, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Kossari, who heads the
political watchdog, or Security Bureau, of Iran's armed forces, recently
taunted the U.S. when he bragged "we have identified all the weak points of
our enemies" and have sufficient cannon fodder -- i.e., suicide operation
volunteers -- "ready to strike at these sensitive locations." Iranian
television recently broadcast an animated film for Iranian children
glorifying suicide bombers.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&...d=21&m=2&y=2006
Tuesday, 21, February, 2006 (22, Muharram, 1427)


Iran, Oil and Euros: The War Scenario
Gwynne Dyer, Arab News

Here’s the scenario. On March 20 Iran opens a new “bourse” (exchange) on which countries all over the world can buy and sell oil and gas not only for dollars but also for euros. It also establishes a new oil “marker” (oil pricing standard) based on Iranian crude and denominated in euros, in open rivalry to the existing West Texas Intermediate, Norway Brent and UAE Dubai markers, all of which are calculated in US dollars.

The Iranian bourse is an instant success with countries and companies that are unhappy about having to hold huge amounts of overvalued US dollars to finance their oil transactions, all of which must presently be conducted in that currency. Very large sums start to shift from the dollar to the euro, although exactly how much is unknown because the US Federal Reserve System (by pure coincidence, of course) has chosen late March as the time to stop publishing the data that would make it easy to know how fast the hemorrhage was.

But the US government knows, and is deeply alarmed by the danger that the dollar may be losing its status as the world’s only reserve currency. Given the huge deficits that plague the US economy, the US dollar’s value would collapse if other countries began to see it as just another currency, so the euro must be prevented from emerging as an alternative reserve currency. In practice, that means the Iranian experiment with a euro-denominated oil bourse must be stopped — and the only way to do that is to attack Iran.

Some of the scenario-mongers would change the sequence of events and have the US launch a “preventive” attack against Iran before it even opens the bourse. An alternative scenario has Washington persuading Israel to do the dirty work of actually launching air strikes against Iran. But a lot of people are genuinely worried that the whole crisis over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program is being whipped up to give Washington cover for a strike against Iran that is really meant to halt the bourse.

In support of this thesis, they argue that a similar initiative by Saddam Hussein, who began insisting that Iraq’s oil exports be paid for in euros in 2000, led directly to the US invasion of 2003. The Iranians are going much further, and they will be punished too. How seriously should we take this argument?

Although final details on the way the Iranian oil bourse will operate are still lacking, it’s clear that a euro-denominated oil exchange could catch on, and would indeed challenge the US dollar’s unique advantages as the world’s sole reserve currency. However, it is less clear that the Bush administration actually knows or cares about this.

There is no real evidence linking Saddam Hussein’s demand to be paid in euros for Iraq’s oil with the subsequent US invasion of Iraq. Those two events occurred almost three years apart, and in any case Saddam merely asked to have the checks made out in euros, so to speak. Iraq’s actual oil sales continued to go through the New York or London exchanges and to be conducted in dollars.

Besides, those were the early years of the Bush administration, and US dollar was much less vulnerable because the twin US deficits on the federal budget and the foreign trade account had not yet had time to swell to their present massive size. The euros-for-oil story is just one of many motives that people have proposed to explain the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq, given that Saddam had neither terrorist ties nor weapons of mass destruction, but it fails to convince.

The rapidly deteriorating financial position of the United States probably does explain the Federal Reserve’s announcement that on March 24 it will stop publishing data on the M3 money supply, which tracks how many US dollars are held by foreigners. If you are worried about a panic flight from the dollar, then you want to keep any downward trend in overseas holdings of US dollars out of public sight. But the Fed might well be doing this around now even if no Iranian oil bourse were on the horizon, and no dramatic conclusions need to be drawn from it.

In order to believe that the US government is planning an attack on Iran to head off the challenge to the dollar that a euro-based Iranian oil bourse would represent, you must first believe that the Bush administration actually worries about such things, and there is little proof that it does. It certainly should, but if it truly did, would it have pushed through the biggest tax cuts in American history? The Bush administration is reckless enough to contemplate an attack on Iran, but it is too ignorant about fiscal and monetary matters to worry about such esoteric matters as the potential connections between a shift to euros in the oil market, foreign investor confidence in the US dollar, and the sustainability of the massive US budget and trade deficits. As Vice President Dick Cheney said to former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill when the latter protested over the huge Bush tax cuts (an issue on which he later resigned): “Ronald Reagan proved that budget deficits don’t matter.”

If the US does attack Iran, it will be for other motives.

http://www.energybulletin.net/12125.html
Published on 18 Jan 2006 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 18 Jan 2006.

The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse
by Krassimir Petrov


How to deceive friends and influence people: Oil crisis lies...

I. Economics of Empires

A nation-state taxes its own citizens, while an empire taxes other nation-states. The history of empires, from Greek and Roman, to Ottoman and British, teaches that the economic foundation of every single empire is the taxation of other nations. The imperial ability to tax has always rested on a better and stronger economy, and as a consequence, a better and stronger military. One part of the subject taxes went to improve the living standards of the empire; the other part went to strengthen the military dominance necessary to enforce the collection of those taxes.

Historically, taxing the subject state has been in various forms—usually gold and silver, where those were considered money, but also slaves, soldiers, crops, cattle, or other agricultural and natural resources, whatever economic goods the empire demanded and the subject-state could deliver. Historically, imperial taxation has always been direct: the subject state handed over the economic goods directly to the empire.

For the first time in history, in the twentieth century, America was able to tax the world indirectly, through inflation. It did not enforce the direct payment of taxes like all of its predecessor empires did, but distributed instead its own fiat currency, the U.S. Dollar, to other nations in exchange for goods with the intended consequence of inflating and devaluing those dollars and paying back later each dollar with less economic goods—the difference capturing the U.S. imperial tax. Here is how this happened.

Early in the 20th century, the U.S. economy began to dominate the world economy. The U.S. dollar was tied to gold, so that the value of the dollar neither increased, nor decreased, but remained the same amount of gold. The Great Depression, with its preceding inflation from 1921 to 1929 and its subsequent ballooning government deficits, had substantially increased the amount of currency in circulation, and thus rendered the backing of U.S. dollars by gold impossible. This led Roosevelt to decouple the dollar from gold in 1932. Up to this point, the U.S. may have well dominated the world economy, but from an economic point of view, it was not an empire. The fixed value of the dollar did not allow the Americans to extract economic benefits from other countries by supplying them with dollars convertible to gold.

Economically, the American Empire was born with Bretton Woods in 1945. The U.S. dollar was not fully convertible to gold, but was made convertible to gold only to foreign governments. This established the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. It was possible, because during WWII, the United States had supplied its allies with provisions, demanding gold as payment, thus accumulating significant portion of the world’s gold. An Empire would not have been possible if, following the Bretton Woods arrangement, the dollar supply was kept limited and within the availability of gold, so as to fully exchange back dollars for gold. However, the guns-and-butter policy of the 1960’s was an imperial one: the dollar supply was relentlessly increased to finance Vietnam and LBJ’s Great Society. Most of those dollars were handed over to foreigners in exchange for economic goods, without the prospect of buying them back at the same value. The increase in dollar holdings of foreigners via persistent U.S. trade deficits was tantamount to a tax—the classical inflation tax that a country imposes on its own citizens, this time around an inflation tax that U.S. imposed on rest of the world.

When in 1970-1971 foreigners demanded payment for their dollars in gold, The U.S. Government defaulted on its payment on August 15, 1971. While the popular spin told the story of “severing the link between the dollar and gold”, in reality the denial to pay back in gold was an act of bankruptcy by the U.S. Government. Essentially, the U.S. declared itself an Empire. It had extracted an enormous amount of economic goods from the rest of the world, with no intention or ability to return those goods, and the world was powerless to respond— the world was taxed and it could not do anything about it.

From that point on, to sustain the American Empire and to continue to tax the rest of the world, the United States had to force the world to continue to accept ever-depreciating dollars in exchange for economic goods and to have the world hold more and more of those depreciating dollars. It had to give the world an economic reason to hold them, and that reason was oil.

In 1971, as it became clearer and clearer that the U.S Government would not be able to buy back its dollars in gold, it made in 1972-73 an iron-clad arrangement with Saudi Arabia to support the power of the House of Saud in exchange for accepting only U.S. dollars for its oil. The rest of OPEC was to follow suit and also accept only dollars. Because the world had to buy oil from the Arab oil countries, it had the reason to hold dollars as payment for oil. Because the world needed ever increasing quantities of oil at ever increasing oil prices, the world’s demand for dollars could only increase. Even though dollars could no longer be exchanged for gold, they were now exchangeable for oil.

The economic essence of this arrangement was that the dollar was now backed by oil. As long as that was the case, the world had to accumulate increasing amounts of dollars, because they needed those dollars to buy oil. As long as the dollar was the only acceptable payment for oil, its dominance in the world was assured, and the American Empire could continue to tax the rest of the world. If, for any reason, the dollar lost its oil backing, the American Empire would cease to exist. Thus, Imperial survival dictated that oil be sold only for dollars. It also dictated that oil reserves were spread around various sovereign states that weren’t strong enough, politically or militarily, to demand payment for oil in something else. If someone demanded a different payment, he had to be convinced, either by political pressure or military means, to change his mind.

The man that actually did demand Euro for his oil was Saddam Hussein in 2000. At first, his demand was met with ridicule, later with neglect, but as it became clearer that he meant business, political pressure was exerted to change his mind. When other countries, like Iran, wanted payment in other currencies, most notably Euro and Yen, the danger to the dollar was clear and present, and a punitive action was in order. Bush’s Shock-and-Awe in Iraq was not about Saddam’s nuclear capabilities, about defending human rights, about spreading democracy, or even about seizing oil fields; it was about defending the dollar, ergo the American Empire. It was about setting an example that anyone who demanded payment in currencies other than U.S. Dollars would be likewise punished.

Many have criticized Bush for staging the war in Iraq in order to seize Iraqi oil fields. However, those critics can’t explain why Bush would want to seize those fields—he could simply print dollars for nothing and use them to get all the oil in the world that he needs. He must have had some other reason to invade Iraq.

History teaches that an empire should go to war for one of two reasons: (1) to defend itself or (2) benefit from war; if not, as Paul Kennedy illustrates in his magisterial The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a military overstretch will drain its economic resources and precipitate its collapse. Economically speaking, in order for an empire to initiate and conduct a war, its benefits must outweigh its military and social costs. Benefits from Iraqi oil fields are hardly worth the long-term, multi-year military cost. Instead, Bush must have went into Iraq to defend his Empire. Indeed, this is the case: two months after the United States invaded Iraq, the Oil for Food Program was terminated, the Iraqi Euro accounts were switched back to dollars, and oil was sold once again only for U.S. dollars. No longer could the world buy oil from Iraq with Euro. Global dollar supremacy was once again restored. Bush descended victoriously from a fighter jet and declared the mission accomplished—he had successfully defended the U.S. dollar, and thus the American Empire.


II. Iranian Oil Bourse

The Iranian government has finally developed the ultimate “nuclear” weapon that can swiftly destroy the financial system underpinning the American Empire. That weapon is the Iranian Oil Bourse slated to open in March 2006. It will be based on a euro-oil-trading mechanism that naturally implies payment for oil in Euro. In economic terms, this represents a much greater threat to the hegemony of the dollar than Saddam’s, because it will allow anyone willing either to buy or to sell oil for Euro to transact on the exchange, thus circumventing the U.S. dollar altogether. If so, then it is likely that almost everyone will eagerly adopt this euro oil system:

· The Europeans will not have to buy and hold dollars in order to secure their payment for oil, but would instead pay with their own currencies. The adoption of the euro for oil transactions will provide the European currency with a reserve status that will benefit the European at the expense of the Americans.

· The Chinese and the Japanese will be especially eager to adopt the new exchange, because it will allow them to drastically lower their enormous dollar reserves and diversify with Euros, thus protecting themselves against the depreciation of the dollar. One portion of their dollars they will still want to hold onto; a second portion of their dollar holdings they may decide to dump outright; a third portion of their dollars they will decide to use up for future payments without replenishing those dollar holdings, but building up instead their euro reserves.

· The Russians have inherent economic interest in adopting the Euro – the bulk of their trade is with European countries, with oil-exporting countries, with China, and with Japan. Adoption of the Euro will immediately take care of the first two blocs, and will over time facilitate trade with China and Japan. Also, the Russians seemingly detest holding depreciating dollars, for they have recently found a new religion with gold. Russians have also revived their nationalism, and if embracing the Euro will stab the Americans, they will gladly do it and smugly watch the Americans bleed.

· The Arab oil-exporting countries will eagerly adopt the Euro as a means of diversifying against rising mountains of depreciating dollars. Just like the Russians, their trade is mostly with European countries, and therefore will prefer the European currency both for its stability and for avoiding currency risk, not to mention their jihad against the Infidel Enemy.

Only the British will find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They have had a strategic partnership with the U.S. forever, but have also had their natural pull from Europe. So far, they have had many reasons to stick with the winner. However, when they see their century-old partner falling, will they firmly stand behind him or will they deliver the coup de grace? Still, we should not forget that currently the two leading oil exchanges are the New York’s NYMEX and the London’s International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), even though both of them are effectively owned by the Americans. It seems more likely that the British will have to go down with the sinking ship, for otherwise they will be shooting themselves in the foot by hurting their own London IPE interests. It is here noteworthy that for all the rhetoric about the reasons for the surviving British Pound, the British most likely did not adopt the Euro namely because the Americans must have pressured them not to: otherwise the London IPE would have had to switch to Euros, thus mortally wounding the dollar and their strategic partner.

At any rate, no matter what the British decide, should the Iranian Oil Bourse accelerate, the interests that matter—those of Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, and Arabs—will eagerly adopt the Euro, thus sealing the fate of the dollar. Americans cannot allow this to happen, and if necessary, will use a vast array of strategies to halt or hobble the operation’s exchange:

· Sabotaging the Exchange—this could be a computer virus, network, communications, or server attack, various server security breaches, or a 9-11-type attack on main and backup facilities.

· Coup d’état—this is by far the best long-term strategy available to the Americans.

· Negotiating Acceptable Terms & Limitations—this is another excellent solution to the Americans. Of course, a government coup is clearly the preferred strategy, for it will ensure that the exchange does not operate at all and does not threaten American interests. However, if an attempted sabotage or coup d’etat fails, then negotiation is clearly the second-best available option.

· Joint U.N. War Resolution—this will be, no doubt, hard to secure given the interests of all other member-states of the Security Council. Feverish rhetoric about Iranians developing nuclear weapons undoubtedly serves to prepare this course of action.

· Unilateral Nuclear Strike—this is a terrible strategic choice for all the reasons associated with the next strategy, the Unilateral Total War. The Americans will likely use Israel to do their dirty nuclear job.

· Unilateral Total War—this is obviously the worst strategic choice. First, the U.S. military resources have been already depleted with two wars. Secondly, the Americans will further alienate other powerful nations. Third, major dollar-holding countries may decide to quietly retaliate by dumping their own mountains of dollars, thus preventing the U.S. from further financing its militant ambitions. Finally, Iran has strategic alliances with other powerful nations that may trigger their involvement in war; Iran reputedly has such alliance with China, India, and Russia, known as the Shanghai Cooperative Group, a.k.a. Shanghai Coop and a separate pact with Syria.

Whatever the strategic choice, from a purely economic point of view, should the Iranian Oil Bourse gain momentum, it will be eagerly embraced by major economic powers and will precipitate the demise of the dollar. The collapsing dollar will dramatically accelerate U.S. inflation and will pressure upward U.S. long-term interest rates. At this point, the Fed will find itself between Scylla and Charybdis—between deflation and hyperinflation—it will be forced fast either to take its “classical medicine” by deflating, whereby it raises interest rates, thus inducing a major economic depression, a collapse in real estate, and an implosion in bond, stock, and derivative markets, with a total financial collapse, or alternatively, to take the Weimar way out by inflating, whereby it pegs the long-bond yield, raises the Helicopters and drowns the financial system in liquidity, bailing out numerous LTCMs and hyperinflating the economy.

The Austrian theory of money, credit, and business cycles teaches us that there is no in-between Scylla and Charybdis. Sooner or later, the monetary system must swing one way or the other, forcing the Fed to make its choice. No doubt, Commander-in-Chief Ben Bernanke, a renowned scholar of the Great Depression and an adept Black Hawk pilot, will choose inflation. Helicopter Ben, oblivious to Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression, has nonetheless mastered the lessons of the Great Depression and the annihilating power of deflations. The Maestro has taught him the panacea of every single financial problem—to inflate, come hell or high water. He has even taught the Japanese his own ingenious unconventional ways to battle the deflationary liquidity trap. Like his mentor, he has dreamed of battling a Kondratieff Winter. To avoid deflation, he will resort to the printing presses; he will recall all helicopters from the 800 overseas U.S. military bases; and, if necessary, he will monetize everything in sight. His ultimate accomplishment will be the hyperinflationary destruction of the American currency and from its ashes will rise the next reserve currency of the world—that barbarous relic called gold.


--


Recommended Reading
William Clark “The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War in Iraq”
William Clark “The Real Reasons Why Iran is the Next Target”

About the Author
Krassimir Petrov (Krassimir_Petrov@hotmail.com) has received his Ph. D. in economics from the Ohio State University and currently teaches Macroeconomics, International Finance, and Econometrics at the American University in Bulgaria. He is looking for a career in Dubai or the U. A. E.

Also by this author
“China’s Great Depression”
“Masters of Austrian Investment Analysis”
“Austrian Analysis of U.S. Inflation”
“Oil Performance in a Worldwide Depression”
See: www.financialsense.com/editorials/petrov/main.html

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/for.../02/07/8250445/

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB28Ak03.html
Iran's fate still in US hands
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

This week, the highly anticipated status report on Iran by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will be released, ahead of a crucial IAEA meeting set for March 6, and all parties to the Iran nuclear crisis are involved in ferocious last-minute diplomacy.

The whirlwind global diplomacy includes the visit to Tehran by China's vice minister of foreign affairs, Lu Guozheng, and the Middle East trip of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to whip up Arab support for the US stance against Iran.

This coincides with the dangerous escalation of Sunni-Shi'ite conflict bordering on civil war in Iraq, bound to benefit Rice's agenda of heightening the perception by Sunni Arabs of the Iran threat, given that none of the Arab states that are currently members of the IAEA's board of governors sided with Iran at the last meeting that saw Tehran's nuclear dossier referred to the United Nations Security Council.

It is noteworthy that the statement of Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued last Thursday forcefully condemned attacks on Sunni mosques in Iraq in retaliation for an attack on a Shi'ite shrine. "I see it necessary to strongly request from the grieving Shi'ites in Iran, Iraq and elsewhere in the world to refrain from any hostile action toward their Muslim brethren. Surely there are hands at work seeking to provoke the Shi'ites against the mosques and other revered places of the people of Sunni faith. Any such action is aiding the enemies of Islam and is forbidden by sharia [Islamic law]."

Nevertheless, there is now a double-edged sword in Iraq's connection to the Iranian nuclear crisis: just as Iran has been using its influence in Iraq as a lever with the West, the United States can now turn the tables and use the growing Sunni tide against Shi'ites to its advantage in the nuclear crisis.

There is some good news from Tehran, though. Iranian officials announced on Sunday an "agreement in principle" with Russia on the idea of a joint nuclear-fuel venture on Russian soil. Establishing the facility in Russia would give that country some control over the the uranium.

The head of Russia's atomic-energy agency, Sergei Kiriyenko, was, however, more circumspect than his Iranian counterpart at a press conference. He limited himself to mentioning continuing talks in Moscow this week and a guarantee of a Russian supply of fuel for the nuclear power plant in Bushehr, Iran, that Russia is building.

He did say later, though, that "the majority of technical and financial issues pertaining to the joint enrichment project in Russia have been solved".

This, in turn, raises an important question: What about the moratorium on Iranian enrichment activities, which a mere 10 days ago was set as a precondition for the Russian proposal by Russia's officials? There are growing indications of a possible breakthrough on this thorny question, in light of a recent report by the Brussels-based organization International Crisis Group endorsing the notion of "delayed limited enrichment" by Iran. [1]

Conceptually, then, the gap between the parties in this crisis appears to be narrowing, and barring unforeseen circumstances, such as "incriminating" news about Iran's nuclear activities in light of another IAEA visit to Iran to inquire about the so-called "Green Salt" project, we can be guardedly optimistic about a breakthrough. [2]

Still, the bottle remains half-empty, and as of this writing many important details still need to be ironed out. The devil of the Russian proposal is, after all, in the details. Even Kiriyenko admitted in his press conference that the Russian proposal entailed a time-consuming chain of activities involving a whole network backed by a "study".

The scope of Iran's managerial involvement and technical participation are two related issues of tremendous concern to the US, which supports only financial participation by Iran, and it remains to be seen whether the White House will endorse any potential deal between Tehran and Moscow in the near future.

In some respects, then, the ball is at present in the US court: an inflexible US attitude could torpedo the Russian deal and force the issue at the UN Security Council, probably with less Russian backing, as Moscow for the moment favors the resolution of the issue within the IAEA framework. But that may be diplomatic maneuvering not sustainable after a collapse of Iran-Russia talks.

A flexible US response, on the other hand, could put a cap on this unpredictable crisis and allow the United States to have a proactive role, even with respect to future Iranian nuclear programs. Concerning the latter, Iran has recently referred favorably to the US-backed idea of an international fuel bank, and Iran's chief negotiator, Ali Larijani, has explicitly mentioned some recent ideas put forward by US scientists (see Asia Times Online, Closing the doors to nuclear diplomacy, February 22).

Larijani, in a recent interview with Al-Arabiya, stated that Iran was still studying certain recent proposals made by US scientists, such as the use of "automatic centrifuges" for low-enriched uranium.

Indeed, in an ideal scenario, the US could offer support to Iran in such important areas as nuclear-waste management. Compared with Russia, which has a less than desirable record on nuclear-waste management, particularly during the Cold War, the US has advanced technology and experience that it could conceivably share with Iran and thus help the cause of Iran's nuclear environmentalism.

A US role in low-level waste in Iran?
At present, the US has a couple of low-level nuclear-waste facilities - the Savannah River site in South Carolina and the Hanford site in Richland, Washington - and it passed a low-level-waste act in 1980 that could be instructional for Iranian lawmakers.

The US has shut down several sites, including one in Idaho, because of such problems as ground contamination and poor safety standards, again, all of which could be instructional for Iran. As of now, after decades of a nuclear program in Iran, there is no legislation on nuclear waste and, sadly, no nuclear environmentalism either. This is despite the presence of many environmentalist organizations in Iran focusing on pollution and other related issues.

Hypothetically, if Iran and the US were to allow a sudden U-turn in their present hostile relations and seriously to contemplate a gradual normalization, then the idea of some token US participation in the Iranian nuclear program should not be ignored.

This could begin in the area of nuclear-waste management, particularly since an Iran-Russia agreement on the return of spent fuel from the Bushehr plant to Russia covers only intermediate and high-level nuclear waste, and hence there is room for some US involvement deemed politically safe in the current environment.

At a minimum, the US could assist with facilitating a consulting role by US scientists and nuclear-waste experts with Iran's atomic-energy agency; the latter would certainly benefit from US experience, such as in the interim storage of nuclear waste.

David Lochbaum, in his book Nuclear Waste Disposal Crisis (PennWellBooks, 1996), has noted that post-Chernobyl studies have shown that Russian safety analysis "tends to place greater emphasis on prevention and early mitigation of selected design-basis accidents than it does on the consequences and mitigation of severe accidents beyond the design basis of the plant".

Another author, Raymond Murray, in his book Understanding Radioactive Waste (Battelle Press, 1994), has stated that only by means of a sophisticated computer program "can the performance of a disposal facility be predicted accurately". This, in turn, raises the question: Why shouldn't the US consider assisting Iran as it has such know-how?

Toward nuclear environmentalism in Iran
As Iran persists in its ambitious plan to expand its nuclear program through the purchase of several new reactors, among other things, the issues of license requirements and contingency plans for crisis prevention, environmental protection and the like will gain greater prominence. And again, these are areas where US nuclear experience and knowledge could be used.

The bottom line of the United States' concern about Iran's nuclear program should not just be about militarization, but about nuclear safety as well.

What is needed in Iran today, in addition to a nuclear-waste act, is a nuclear-waste fund, to underwrite fully the costs of disposal programs not covered by the agreement with Russia on the return of spent fuel, including the training of a whole new cadre of nuclear environmentalists.

But that is future thinking and, for now, the political crisis over Iran's nuclear program has first to be resolved.

Notes
1. According to the International Crisis Group, the delayed limited enrichment plan would work as follows: "The wider international community, and the West in particular, would explicitly accept that Iran cannot only produce peaceful nuclear energy but has the right to enrich domestically; in return, Iran would agree to a several-year delay in the commencement of its enrichment program, major limitations on its initial size and scope, and a highly intrusive inspections regime."

2. "Green Salt" is a term given to uranium tetrafluoride (UF4), which is a mid-point state in the process of converting uranium ore into the UF6 uranium fuel used in nuclear plants or, alternatively, further enriched for weapons-grade uranium. In essence, it is a section of the fuel cycle that Iran had not divulged. Word of the "Green Salt" project first emerged in a summary of investigations by a deputy to IAEA head ElBaradei given to a February 2-4 IAEA board meeting that resulted in a vote to report Iran's case to the UN Security Council. Western intelligence has linked this uranium-processing project to missile warhead design and tests with high explosives, although the basis for these charges remains highly debatable.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He is also author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction (forthcoming).

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

U.S. senator: Iranian nuclear threat is biggest since Cold War:

“The Iranian threat to the world is the biggest since the Cold War,” Senator John Mccain told ABC television on Sunday.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3221299,00.html

===
'The vilification of Iran' :

In the current campaign against Iran, another parallel strikes me: We asked Saddam Hussein to "prove a negative" when we insisted he prove that he did not have weapons of mass destruction. Now we are asking Iran to prove another negative: that it is not developing nukes.
http://tinyurl.com/r4eyz

===
Europe scorns Iran’s nuclear ‘deal’ with Russia :

France, Germany and Britain on Monday sought to increase international pressure on Iran, dismissing Tehran’s announcement that it had reached a “basic agreement” with Russia over its controversial nuclear programme.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/14f9a2e8-a7ba-11d...00779e2340.html

===
IAEA: Iran appears determined to expand uranium enrichment program :

In a confidential report made available to The Associated Press, also suggested that unless Iran drastically increased its cooperation with an agency probe, the agency would not be able to establish whether past clandestine activities were focused on making nuclear arms.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/2...gency-iran.html

===
Charley Reese: It's Usually About Money:

Conflicts are often about money. One factor that might account for the Bush administration's hostility toward Iran is Iran's plan to open a bourse – an oil exchange – in March in which Iranian oil will be sold for euros, not dollars.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12097.htm

February 28, 2006
U.N. Agency Says It Got Few Answers From Iran on Nuclear Activity and Weapons
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
VIENNA, Feb. 27 — Iran has accelerated its nuclear fuel enrichment activities and rejected demands of international inspectors to explain evidence that had raised suspicions of a nuclear weapons program, according to a report by a United Nations agency. That could make it easier for the United States and its European partners to seek punitive action in the Security Council.

But the assessment, contained in an 11-page report released Monday by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, made no definitive judgment about whether the program was peaceful, or intended to create the capacity to produce weapons. That surprised some governments and even some agency officials who had predicted that the report would be harsher.

The report laid out a long list of fresh examples in which Iran has stonewalled the agency, responding with incomplete and ambiguous answers and refusing repeated requests to turn over documents and information.

It called it "regrettable and a matter of concern" that Iran has not been more forthcoming after three years of intensive agency verification.

In an indication that Iran is prepared to take a tougher line against the agency and even against the United States, Iran told inspectors on Sunday that documents obtained by American intelligence suggesting links between Iran's nuclear activities and its missile program were forgeries, the report said.

The documents make reference to a secretive entity in Iran called the Green Salt Project, and seem to suggest that the project established "administrative interconnections" between Iran's uranium processing, high explosives and missile warhead design. If accurate, the documents would be the first to tie what Iran says is its purely civilian nuclear program to military activities.

But those allegations "are based on false and fabricated documents," Iranian authorities were quoted as telling an agency inspection team on Sunday, an assertion that came after months of pledges by Iran to provide information on the matter. They also declared that no such project had ever existed.

The report, released to the 35 countries that sit on the agency's decision-making board, also left unclear whether the Iranians had taken possession of copies of the disputed Green Salt documents, which would seem to be a necessary step if Tehran were to subject them to serious forensic examination and pass judgment on their authenticity.

But the shift in the Iranian position seemed intended to call into question the reliability of American intelligence reports on Iran, and to remind the international community of the far-reaching American intelligence failure in overstating Iraq's nuclear program in the months before the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A senior administration official in Washington, who declined to speak on the record because of the delicate nature of the intelligence, said that Iran had been shown only a limited number of documents from the laptop computer that American intelligence agencies had obtained from an Iranian source.

"We knew they would question the credibility of the intelligence," the official said, "but the other countries that have seen it can judge for themselves."

In another development, Iran informed the agency that it was planning at the end of this year to set up 3,000 centrifuges that enrich uranium as it moves toward industrial-scale enrichment, ignoring international demands that it return to a freeze on its uranium enrichment activities at its vast facility at Natanz, the report said. That would be enough to make a weapon if all technical problems were resolved.

The site is eventually to hold 50,000 of the machines, which would give Iran the technical ability to purify large amounts of uranium for either nuclear reactors or atomic bombs.

The report also documents a number of contradictions between claims by Iranian authorities and the inspectors' evidence.

An example of the serious discrepancies found by the atomic agency center on Iranian research on plutonium, one of the main fuels of nuclear arms. The report said the agency took a number of Iranian plutonium disks to Vienna for analysis of their makeup.

The investigators found a major disagreement between the disks and what was said to be the solution from which they were made. The analysis revealed that eight of the disks had "significantly lower" amounts of plutonium 240. That finding is important because plutonium 240 is considered a pollutant in the making of nuclear arms, and nuclear engineers work hard to limit its presence.

The report made no link between the plutonium 240 finding and its potential usefulness for making nuclear arms. Rather, in the agency's usual understated style, it simply noted the discrepancy.

"The story is not as straight as it has been presented to us," said a senior official with knowledge of the agency's investigation.

As for its enrichment activities, the report added that Iran forged ahead with the program by feeding uranium gas in mid-February into a research cascade of 10 centrifuges that process it into enriched uranium. On Feb. 22, it said, Iran tested a 20-machine cascade that is now ready to receive the uranium gas.

Under a November 2004 agreement with Britain, France and Germany, Iran agreed voluntarily to freeze all of its uranium conversion, enrichment and reprocessing activities.

But when promised economic and political rewards in exchange for the freeze were not forthcoming, Iran broke the agreement, first by restarting uranium conversion last August and then by beginning tests of enriching uranium on Feb. 11, feeding the toxic, gaseous form of the element into a single centrifuge and then expanding the program.

Despite the wealth of new information about Iran's nuclear activities, the report concluded that the agency "has not seen any diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices." It reiterated, however, the analysis of past reports that it "is not at this point in time in a position to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran."

The United States, Britain, France and a number of other governments have been strongly critical of Dr. ElBaradei for not taking a tougher stance against Iran.

But he is said to be determined to have the agency continue to play a leading role in negotiations with Iran and have as much access on the ground in Iran as possible, and is reluctant to turn Iran against him or the agency he heads, said a number of Vienna-based officials who speak with him regularly.

In recent weeks, he has even told member states that the world might have to accept the fact that Iran will not capitulate to agency demands that it renew a freeze of its enrichment activities, a stance that has enraged the United States in particular, the officials said.

But Dr. ElBaradei's report is certain to be used by the United States and the Europeans to push for a resolution critical of Iran when the agency board meets next week. On Feb. 4, the board voted to report Iran's nuclear case to the Security Council, a move that reflects increasing suspicion around the world that Iran is determined to develop nuclear weapons.

William J. Broad contributed reporting from New York for this article, and David E. Sanger from Washington.



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http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=8610

February 28, 2006
A Way Out for Iran?
China may have it
by Gordon Prather
The Bush-Cheney Pentagon is reportedly putting finishing touches on a plan to preemptively nuke Iran for insisting on its inalienable right – guaranteed by (a) the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, ( the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and © their Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA – to enjoy the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

Meanwhile, the Bush-Cheney Department of Energy just announced plans to form a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, through which the U.S. "will work with other nations possessing advanced nuclear technologies to develop new proliferation-resistant recycling technologies in order to produce more energy, reduce waste, and minimize proliferation concerns."

"Additionally, these partner nations will develop a fuel services program to provide nuclear fuel to developing nations, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of abundant sources of clean, safe nuclear energy in a cost-effective manner in exchange for their commitment to forgo enrichment and reprocessing activities, also alleviating proliferation concerns."

Meanwhile, Bush-Cheney have managed to get the IAEA Board to "request" [.pdf] that Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei report to the UN Security Council that the Board has "required" Iran to – among other outrageous things – "reestablish full and sustained suspension of all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development."

So far, ElBaradei has resisted making such a report, apparently because he feels this egregious overreaching of authority by the Board could result in serious damage to the IAEA as an institution and to the NPT itself.

Now, you might suppose that if Iran quickly signed up for the Bush-Cheney GNEP – as a developing nation, forgoing enrichment and reprocessing activities – Bush-Cheney would be foiled, compelled to postpone nuking Iran indefinitely.

Wrong!

You see, as with Iraq, Bush-Cheney and the neo-crazies are determined to effect regime-change in Iran. For them, any excuse will do. But they know you soccer moms will have to be convinced that the mullahs are developing nukes to give to Islamic terrorists to ship to a U.S. port (run by the United Arab Emirates) for detonation.

Bush-Cheney know perfectly well – because ElBaradei has repeatedly told them – there is no indication that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The CIA has told Bush-Cheney that it will take the Iranians at least five years to get an industrial-scale uranium-enrichment facility operational, and another five years to make enough weapons-grade uranium to make a nuke or two.

Is there nothing Iran can do to forestall the Bush-Cheney preemptive attack?

Well, perhaps.

You see, largely because of former President Jimmy Carter and other eco-wackos, the U.S. has ceased to be a supplier of nuclear power plants, first-rate or otherwise. Hence, one of the principle goals of the GNEP is to team with existing suppliers of first-rate nuclear power plants.

Bush-Cheney "would like to develop, in partnership with other nations, advanced reactors that are passively safe, that could have a lifetime of the reactor cores, that are possibly meltdown-proof, that can be built on a modular basis, can perhaps even be factory built, shipped to a country and deployed."

You bet they would.

But is such an advanced reactor possible?

You bet!

China will actually begin construction of such a revolutionary nuclear reactor this year near Weihai, in eastern China's Shandong province. The 190-megawatt prototype "pebble-bed" nuclear reactor is expected to be generating electricity in 2010.

A pebble-bed reactor is like a giant, radiation-shielded, self-contained gumball machine, containing hundreds of thousands of billiard-ball-sized fuel elements, together with hundreds of thousands of billiard-ball-sized carbon moderators.

In operation, hundreds of the balls are continually removed (robotically) from the bottom of the gumball machine, checked (robotically) for remaining fissile-material content, logged, and reintroduced (robotically) into the top of the machine.

Once the gumball machine begins operation, it never again needs external refueling throughout its 50-plus-year continuous operating life.

The coolant, helium gas, which is chemically and physically inert, is forced down through the pebble-bed from top to bottom. Exiting through a closed loop, the hot helium gas drives electric generators before being cooled and reintroduced to the top of the machine.

The proliferation-proof, meltdown-proof pebble-bed technology development began in Germany more than 30 years ago and was continued in South Africa, but has apparently now been perfected in China.

If, as planned, similar units are produced modularly in factories in China, by 2020 China will be the world's only supplier of first-rate nuclear power plants.

So how can Iran forestall an imminent Bush-Cheney attack?

Sign up, before the next IAEA Board meeting, to be China's first customer.

Bush: We shall not let Iran have the means, the knowledge to make nuclear weapon. This would destabilize the world

March 1, 2006, 1:19 PM (GMT+02:00)

US President George W. Bush spoke on this issue with unprecedented clarity when he made an unannounced first visit to Afghanistan Wed. March 1.

Tight security surrounded his five-hour visit to Kabul and the US base at Bagram, and his talks with President Hamid Karzai. Bush was also due to open the new US Embassy before flying off to India and Pakistan.

Tuesday, US Lt.-Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the US Senate in Washington that insurgents represent a greater threat to Afghan government authority across the country today than at any point since the Taliban government's overthrow in Oct. 2001. He predicted an upsurge of Taliban operations in the spring after a fourfold increase of suicide attacks in 2005 compared with 2004.

Copyright 2000-2006 DEBKAfile. All Rights Reserved.

Tehran, Moscow agree in principle on a joint uranium enrichment venture on Russian soil – as DEBKAfile predicted Feb. 24. Russia rescues Tehran from UN Security Council penalties

February 27, 2006, 12:45 PM (GMT+02:00)

The accord was announced Sunday, Feb. 26, by Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, after two days of talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Kiriyenko at the Bushehr nuclear reactor.

DEBKAfile reports: The Russians, by going along with Iran’s demands, have rescued the Islamic Republic from the threat of a US-European-Israel complaint to the UN Security Council. Referral of Iran’s nuclear breaches of the NPT was to have taken place after the critical IAEA board session in Vienna March 6.

Now, the Russian delegate will be able to ask for time to work on the details of the Moscow-Tehran accord. The Iranians will thus buy several precious months to continue to process uranium – their main objective in engaging in diplomacy in the first place. The hands of Washington, the EU and the UN are meanwhile tied over referral to the Security Council by the shadow of Russian veto hanging over any resolution penalizing Iran.

Moscow has thus delivered a sharp setback to the US-Israeli drive to put spokes in the wheels of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

DEBKAfile adds: Kirienko leads a Kremlin faction that advocates breaking ranks with Washington and Europe and striking out for a bilateral Moscow-Tehran deal that under certain conditions releases the brakes on the Islamic republic’s nuclear program,. President Vladimir Putin would have preferred to go along with the West. He was overruled by the Kirienko faction.

Our military sources report that by pulling off this accord in principle with Iran, Kirienko frees Iran to enrich uranium up to weapons grade. Israel is thus confronted with a potential strategic threat as grave - or graver - than the Hamas rise to power in Palestinian government.

In the space of a month, the two developments have tightened the Iranian noose around the Jewish state.

DEBKAfile reported earlier that the Russian go-it-alone initiative had aroused deep concern in Washington, Jerusalem and Vienna. They feared to that to succeed, Kirienko would bow to a deal that permitted hands-on Iranian involvement in the manufacturing process and decisions on quantities of the joint uranium enrichment venture in Russia. This would remove the safeguards demanded by the US and Europe against the Russian-Iranian enterprise turning out weapons-grade uranium.

According to information reaching Washington and Jerusalem, Kirienko also favors letting Iran continue enrichment at home simultaneously with the Russian-hosted enterprise.

American and Israeli suspicions were first aroused, according to our intelligence sources, by the odd behavior of Gholam Reza Aghazadeh’s delegation upon its arrival in Moscow Monday, Feb. 20, to discuss the joint plant in Russia. Its maneuvers had the appearance of a decoy operation to mystify and draw attention away from the real action elsewhere. A bulletin at the end of the day reported no progress, followed by a continuation Tuesday, which the Iranians abruptly left without explanation. Then, too, an Iranian official demanded that resumed diplomacy with the European Union take place separately with each government instead of with a joint UK-French-German delegation.

Washington took this as a declaration of divorce between the Tehran-Moscow track and Iran’s dealings with Europe and the UN nuclear watchdog in Vienna and a full stop to the international drive for diplomatic action to arrest Iran’s progress toward a bomb.

Copyright 2000-2006 DEBKAfile. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/...em/itemID/11070

Angus Reid Global Scan : Polls & Research
Use Diplomacy on Iran Case, Say Americans
March 3, 2006

Iran: Sanctions or war?
The country’s nuclear program has spawned an international debate.
(Angus Reid Global Scan) – Many adults in the United States think military action against Iran is unwarranted at this point, according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News. 55 per cent of respondents believe Iran is a threat that can be contained with diplomacy now, and 19 per cent say the country is not a menace to the U.S.

After being branded as part of an "axis of evil" by U.S. president George W. Bush in January 2002, Iran has contended that its nuclear program aims to produce energy, not weapons. Only 20 per cent of respondents believe Iran is a threat to the U.S. that requires military action now.

In November 2004, the Iranian government announced a voluntary suspension of its uranium enrichment program following international pressure. In August 2005, Iran resumed uranium conversion activities at the Isfahan facility. In January, Iran removed the international seals from the Natanz site.

In his Jan. 31 State of the Union address, Bush said Iran "is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions, and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons. America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats."

On Mar. 1, Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki said a report prepared by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could not prove that Iran is attempting to produce nuclear weapons, adding, "Iran (...) is exercising its right to possess nuclear technology with peaceful intentions. We are opposed to nuclear weapons."

The IAEA has said that the "lack of cooperation on the part of Iranian authorities" does not allow the body to effectively conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear activities taking place inside the country.

Polling Data

Which comes closer to your opinion—Iran is a threat to the United States that requires military action now, Iran is a threat that can be contained with diplomacy now, or Iran is not a threat to the United States at this time?

Threat requiring action now
20%

Threat that can be contained
55%

Not a threat at this time
19%

Not sure
6%



Source: The New York Times / CBS News
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 1,018 American adults, conducted from Feb. 22 to Feb. 26, 2006. Margin of error is 3 per cent.

Premature Capitulation
Don’t Endorse Pilot-Scale Enrichment in Iran


By George Perkovich

As Iran pushes the international community to the brink of crisis over its nuclear program, eminent organizations and individuals will propose “compromises” as if the burden is not on Iran to rectify its serious nuclear transgressions. Compromise will be appealing compared to war, which is the alternative that many observers and UN Security Council members believe Washington would pursue. But there are many alternatives short of war, and the wrong “compromise” today will only lead us all back to the brink tomorrow.

The leading compromise proposal is for the international community to endorse Iran’s operation of a small research and development facility for enriching uranium. Iran would run an agreed number of centrifuges – less than 500 under the International Crisis Group plan released this week – while suspending fuller-scale applications of this technology until the International Atomic Energy Agency can resolve the serious doubts that Iran’s nuclear activities have been and will be exclusively for peaceful purposes.

This is a bad idea, albeit the menu to choose from does not include any good options. (Endorsing enrichment in a country with Iran’s still unresolved nuclear record and threatening international behavior would be unwise even if enrichment made economic sense; the fact that Iran has no need for homemade nuclear fuel makes the proposal even more suspect.)

Allowing Iran to operate a pilot-scale enrichment plant would give Iranian engineers all the opportunity they need to master this technology. Once this is done, Iran has jumped the major hurdle on the route to acquiring nuclear weapons.

Proponents of pilot-scale enrichment as the least-bad option assume that Iran does not or will not have secret facilities to conduct enrichment beyond the declared pilot facility that would be heavily monitored. Iran’s failure after three years to give the IAEA an adequate explanation of what happened with the advanced centrifuge designs that Iran purchased on the black market indicates that, at least in the past, undeclared actors and facilities operated in the nuclear program. Still, proponents of the pilot-scale option argue plausibly that there is no proof that Iran now has secret facilities. Because Iran seems willing to create a major crisis and limit the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors if pilot-scale enrichment is not allowed, the hope is that giving Iran what it wants will motivate Tehran to allow intrusive inspections that will in turn deter any effort to use secret facilities to apply the knowledge gained in the pilot-scale plant.

Unfortunately, an internationally endorsed pilot-scale plant reduces the odds of detecting secret activities in several ways. If inspectors or spies detect suspicious procurement of parts or communications or other evidence related to enrichment, Iran can argue that the legitimate plant explains it. When no enrichment is allowed, any evidence is decisive; when some enrichment is allowed, all evidence may be ambiguous.

Iran’s potential to break out of the nonproliferation treaty and move fullspeed to building nuclear weapons would grow greatly once it has mastered enrichment technology. Again, proponents of the pilot-scale fallback recognize this; they just think there is no better alternative.

But the pilot-scale alternative only postpones for a little while the hard dilemmas and dangers posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran has behaved according to a very clear logic since its major nonproliferation violations were detected in 2002. Indeed, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 through 2005, Hasan Rowhani, has explained that Iran’s strategy has been to suspend only those activities that it was not ready to undertake. Once the technologists have been prepared to take a new step in acquiring the capability to produce fissile materials, they have taken it and essentially dared the international community to stop them. This happened in 2004, in August 2005 with the re-starting of the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan, and in January 2006 with the end of suspension of uranium enrichment. In the Isfahan case, Iran crossed a redline established by the EU-3 and seems to have managed to erase it from the consciousness of many observers.

Iran’s behavior and articulated strategy warn clearly that once it has mastered pilot-scale enrichment it will seek to do more, and will break any agreement to the contrary. A crisis, no less dire than the current one will emerge, only then Iran will be much closer to having the capability to make bomb fuel than it is today. There is no evidence that Iranian leaders are prepared to make a strategic decision not to acquire the capability to make nuclear weapons. The pilot-scale option enables Tehran to avoid this decision and proceed as it wishes.

Perhaps there is nothing the U.S. or others in the international community can do to persuade Iranian leaders to eschew their quest for dual-use facilities. But how would we know? The U.S. has not joined directly into the negotiating process with France, Germany and the United Kingdom, so Iran has not been able to factor its interests viz a vis the U.S. None of Iran’s interlocutors, including the IAEA and its director general, has posed costs or benefits of sufficient magnitude and certainty to move Iranian decision-makers away from the path they are on.

Given the inadequacy of threats and inducements mustered thus far, many observers leap to the assumption that military attacks must be the alternative to acquiescence. Memories of the Bush Administration’s run up to the Iraq war still loom large. When President Bush says banally (and unnecessarily) “we’re not taking any option off the table,” listeners leap to the conclusion that war is on. But discussions with a wide range of U.S. officials betray keen awareness that military attacks on Iran would probably result in a worse situation than we face today, and would not solve the strategic problem posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions and support of terrorist organizations.

Fixating on the shadow of military strikes is an excuse for avoiding the hard problem of mustering international unity to confront and persuade Iran to build a nuclear energy program that inherently reassures the international community that Iran will be a constructive, not a threatening, power on the world stage. This means unity in offering more positive incentives than Washington has contemplated, and more determined political and economic pressure than Russia, China, India and others have been willing to endorse. The volume of public warnings over the obvious dangers of military attack is so high compared to discussions of political-economic strategies that one detects an avoidance of responsibility for international stewardship.

To sharpen the point, imagine if President Bush unequivocally said that there is no military solution to the strategic challenge posed by Iran, and the U.S. will conduct no military operations against Iran unless Iran or its agents attack U.S. or friendly forces. Many would not believe such a declaration, which means there is nothing the U.S. can do in this regard, but if war is set aside does it make any sense now to open the door to uranium enrichment in Iran? Again, why is war being posed as the alternative to be avoided now? Why should Iranian decision-makers and public be spared from facing a higher set of costs in maintaining the current nuclear-weapon-option strategy? Why not hold the line at the critical point of uranium enrichment and offer Iran a higher set of benefits for switching to a nuclear energy policy that the world can live with?

Even leading organizations and individuals that incline toward the pilot-scale-enrichment “compromise” recognize that it is undesirable. What is the imperative to fall back now? Doesn’t it make more sense to seriously try the diplomacy of inducements and pressure by bringing the U.S. off the sidelines and directly into the multilateral negotiations with Iran?


George Perkovich is the Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. For the latest proliferation news and resources, visit the Carnegie Proliferation News website, www.ProliferationNews.org.




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March 4, 2006
Iran Softens Tone, but Talks With Europeans on Nuclear Program End in Bitterness
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
VIENNA, March 3 — If diplomacy were a courtship, the rendezvous between Iran and Europe in a Viennese mansion on Friday could be called a failed seduction.

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, had asked for urgent talks with his former European negotiating partners, promising new ideas aimed at both restarting the negotiations and keeping Iran's nuclear case out of the United Nations Security Council.

But in nearly two hours of early morning talks, the Iranians rejected the Europeans' key demand for resuming the relationship: a return to an indefinite freeze on making enriched uranium, which can be used either to produce electricity or to make bombs.

The Europeans made their disappointment clear. "We were unable to reach agreement," Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany announced tersely to reporters. Mr. Steinmeier, the host of the meeting at his ambassador's residence, offered Iran a stark ultimatum: either stop enriching uranium and "return to the table of negotiations," or face judgment before the Security Council.

Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, who had canceled a trip to Kiev, Ukraine, to attend, was just as blunt, calling the failure to reach agreement "unfortunate."

So were the other two European officials, the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, and John Sawers, the political director of the British foreign office, who had taken the place of the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who was ill.

The Iranians, according to participants in the talks, were visibly rattled. Mr. Larijani had come in with a new conciliatory tone. Gone was the combative talk about Iran's sovereign right to enrich uranium as a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Rather, Mr. Larijani expressed sympathy for the European approach and support for the need to build confidence on all sides, so talks could continue under a November 2004 agreement with France, Germany and Britain. That agreement froze Iran's enrichment-related activities in exchange for potential political and economic rewards.

To that end, he said that Iran would be willing to implement a two-year moratorium on industrial-scale uranium enrichment and recommit itself to a more thorough inspection of its facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

However, continuation of the small-scale uranium enrichment operation that Iran restarted last month at its vast Natanz facility, and which Iran says is for research purposes, was nonnegotiable.

The Europeans, who spoke on condition of anonymity under diplomatic rules, said they were not surprised. But they responded with a quiet ferocity that has been unusual in their dealings with Iran.

Mr. Steinmeier rejected Mr. Larijani's request that the two sides announce publicly that "progress" had been made. He also brushed off Mr. Larijani's objection to public statements by the Europeans that no agreement had been reached.

The German foreign minister even said that since there was no progress to report, it made no sense for Mr. Larijani to join in the brief encounter with the news media on the steps of the ambassador's residence.

In an apparent protest, the Iranian delegation, which had pitched its flag next to those of Britain, France, Germany and the European Union, carried it away before the Europeans made their statements.

The dispute moves next to the session of the 35-country board of the International Atomic Energy Agency that will open in Vienna on Monday. In early February, the board overwhelmingly voted to report Iran's case to the Security Council, a move that reflected increasing suspicion that Iran was determined to develop nuclear weapons. The resolution allows Security Council action against Iran after a delay of at least a month.

It is not yet certain whether the board will try to pass another resolution next week, or whether one would be needed before the Security Council acts.

While the Europeans, together with the United States and a number of other countries, seem to be eager to have the Security Council take up the Iran issue, Russia is extremely reluctant.

Like the Europeans, the Russians had demanded that Iran stop uranium enrichment at Natanz. When Mr. Larijani was in Russia on Thursday, the Russians rejected the same offer he later presented to the Europeans, participants in Friday's meeting said.

But Russia does not support sending the matter to the Security Council, for fear that it would set off an irrevocable march toward punitive measures.

Russia's foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said Friday there was still time before the nuclear agency's board meeting to reach an agreement, one that would keep the agency at the center of efforts to resolve the confrontation.

"If the issues are sent to the Security Council, we are concerned that this would lead to escalation of the situation," Mr. Lavrov said, speaking in English, in an interview with American news organizations in Moscow. "I know how the Security Council works: you start with a soft reminder, then you call upon, then you require, then you demand, then you threaten. It will become a self-propelling function."

The Russians are negotiating with Iran on a possible face-saving joint venture, in which Russia would enrich Iran's uranium on Russian soil, under Russian control.

That procedure would allow Iran to continue to operate its Isfahan plant, which converts raw uranium into a form that is ready to be enriched, but not to master enrichment technology.

Contradicting Mr. Steinmeier, who said in Vienna that "time is running out," Mr. Lavrov said there was still time to resolve the crisis. But he acknowledged that he had no clear idea of how to proceed if Iran insisted on defying the agency's demands.

"I am very frank with you," he said. "I don't have an answer. I don't think anybody else has an answer."

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Moscow for this article.



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March 5, 2006
As Crisis Brews, Iran Hits Bumps in Atomic Path
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
When Iran defiantly cut the locks and seals on its nuclear enrichment plants in January and restarted its effort to manufacture atomic fuel, it forced the world to confront a momentous question: How long will it be before Tehran has the ability to produce a bomb that would alter the balance of power in the Middle East?

Iran's claims that it is racing forward with enrichment have created an air of crisis as the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency prepares to meet tomorrow in Vienna before the United Nations Security Council takes up the Iran file for possible penalties.

Yet behind the sense of immediate alarm lies a more complex picture of Iran's nuclear potential. Interviews with many of the world's leading nuclear analysts and a review of technical assessments show that Iran continues to wrestle with serious problems that have slowed its nuclear ambitions for more than two decades.

Obstacles, the experts say, remain at virtually every step on the atomic road. The most significant, they add, involve the two most technically challenging aspects of the process — converting uranium ore to a toxic gas and, especially, spinning that gas into enriched atomic fuel.

According to the analysts, the Iranians need to do repairs and build new machines at a prototype plant before they can begin enriching even modest quantities of uranium. And then, for a decade, they would have to mass produce 100 centrifuges a week to fill the cavernous industrial enrichment halls at Natanz. What is more, the gas meant to feed those machines is plagued by impurities.

The perception gap was underscored in February when Tehran issued a stark warning. By late this year, Iranian officials said, they would begin installing nearly 3,000 centrifuges at the giant Natanz plant, buried deep underground to withstand attack. That many centrifuges, international inspectors knew, could make fuel for up to 10 nuclear warheads every year.

In Washington and Europe, the announcement was dismissed as an empty boast. "Maybe they can move that fast," said a senior American official who tracks Iran's program but who declined to be named because it is an intelligence matter. "But they would need lots of help, luck and prayer."

Tehran maintains that it has every right to master the atomic basics in pursuit of a peaceful program of nuclear power. But more and more countries have come to view that as a cover story.

Estimates of just when Iran might acquire a nuclear weapon range from alarmist views of only a few months to roughly 15 years. American intelligence agencies say it will take 5 to 10 years for Iran to manufacture the fuel for its first atomic bomb. Most forecasters acknowledge that secret Iranian advances or black market purchases could produce a technological surprise.

Conservative forecasts often take into account not only the technical difficulties but also a political judgment: that Tehran will run for the finish line — making its first bomb — only when it can rapidly produce a large arsenal.

A further uncertainty is defining the exact point at which Iran's nuclear program would become an unstoppable threat. While most analysts identify the greatest danger as when Iran can produce nuclear fuel — the hardest part of the bomb venture, far more difficult than designing a warhead — others, particularly the Israelis, say the tipping point may come earlier, when Tehran has accumulated a critical mass of atomic knowledge.

For all the bluster and anxiety of the moment, Iran's atomic history is a conundrum of delay: given its wealth of atomic scientists and oil revenues, why was Tehran unable to succeed years ago?

After all, it took only three years for the United States to build the world's first atom bomb. It took Pakistan and North Korea, poor by Western standards, roughly a decade to get enough material for their first nuclear devices. Iran, by most estimates, has been moving toward the same objective for at least two decades.

Some of Iran's nuclear troubles can be traced to wavering political commitment by mullahs more interested in creating a theocracy than unlocking the secrets of the atom. And many top scientists fled after the Islamic revolution of 1979.

But the United States created other obstacles. In the 1990's, it pressured Russia, China and other nations to end deals that would have given the Iranian program a jump-start. Some of those maneuvers were covert; some played out in the press.

"In retrospect, we impeded a lot more of their progress than we knew," said Robert J. Einhorn, a central player in nuclear diplomacy in the Clinton administration and the early days of the Bush administration.

In Washington and around the world, assessments of Iran's technological maturity have driven deliberations over what to do. American and Israeli planners have quietly debated the possibility and the risks of military strikes, including whether they would be more effective soon or only after Iran has built a much larger infrastructure.

At least publicly, though, the Bush administration has followed a different strategy than it did with Iraq. After the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction there, President Bush has never argued that Iran poses an imminent threat, and his aides have called for diplomacy.

"There are still certain techniques and pieces of know-how that we do not believe that they have," Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said in February.

Most experts focus on uranium and ignore Iran's work on plutonium, another bomb fuel, judging it as even further from fruition. Still, nuclear analysts warn against complacency.

"They do have serious problems," said Mohammad Sahimi, a chemical engineer at the University of Southern California who left Iran in 1978. "But we've made mistakes in underestimating the strength of science in Iran and the ingenuity they show in working with whatever crude design they get their hands on."

Centrifuges and Uranium

By all accounts, the oldest and most daunting problem involves centrifuges — temperamental machines whose rotors can spin extraordinarily fast to enrich uranium. After two decades of effort, Iran seems barely out of the starting gate.

All uranium is not equal. One form, uranium 235, easily splits in two, or fissions, in bursts of atomic energy that power nuclear reactors and bombs. Its slightly heavier cousin, uranium 238, does not.

But since uranium 235 accounts for less than 1 percent of all uranium, engineers use centrifuges to separate the two and concentrate the rare form. Uranium enriched to about 4 percent uranium 235 can fuel most reactors; to 90 percent, atom bombs.

In 1987, the Iranians secretly began buying drawings and parts for centrifuges from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear expert who operated the world's biggest nuclear black market. International inspectors say the deals eventually included parts for about 500 primitive used centrifuges.

Tehran, apparently unhappy with their quality, turned to Moscow. In early 1995, it made a secret deal to buy an entire plant of centrifuges — typically tens of thousands of the spinning machines linked together to slowly increase the level of enrichment.

But after the Clinton administration persuaded Moscow to back out, Iran accelerated its secret drive to copy Dr. Khan's centrifuges. It also started building the huge enrichment plant near Natanz, in central Iran. The pilot factory there was to house 1,000 centrifuges; the main plant would shelter 50,000 machines underground.

In August 2002, Iranian dissidents revealed the existence of the Natanz site, beginning the current confrontation with the West. The next year, Iran agreed to suspend work while negotiating with Europe over the program's fate.

But when operators shut down an experimental cascade of 164 centrifuges at Natanz, about 50 of them broke or crashed, according to a January report by David Albright and Corey Hinderstein of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington.

Now, the report said, Iran must replace and repair the broken machines and prepare the cascade for operation. Then comes the really hard part: if all goes well, the Iranians must mass-produce thousands of centrifuges and learn to run them in concert, like a large orchestra.

Iran is also struggling to turn concentrated uranium ore, or yellowcake, into uranium hexafluoride, the toxic gas fed into the centrifuges for enrichment. Such conversion is done at a site on the outskirts of Isfahan.

Iran began the conversion effort in the early 1990's, asking China to help build the complex. But in 1997, the Clinton administration persuaded Beijing to stop the deal. The Iranians got blueprints but little else. So they started building on their own.

"From what I saw, everything looked like local manufacturing except for some gauges," said Gary S. Samore, who ran the National Security Council's nonproliferation office during the Clinton administration and who traveled to Isfahan in 2005.

Iran, which tried to hide most of its nuclear sites, voluntarily revealed Isfahan to international inspectors in 2000. But the plant encountered problems during its first runs in early 2004, its output laced with impurities, in particular molybdenum, a silvery element often found in uranium ore.

The contamination, experts say, can ruin delicate centrifuges, reducing their efficiency and cutting short their lifetimes.

The Iranians are working hard to solve the problem. Mark Hibbs of Nuclear Fuel, an industry publication, who broke the molybdenum story, said most experts believed that the Iranians would ultimately succeed. British intelligence, he said, put the time needed at a year and a half, Israeli analysts at two or three months.

Houston G. Wood III, a centrifuge expert at the University of Virginia, said the Iranians might simply learn to cope. "If you're smart enough," he said, "you could probably get by, maybe with decreased efficiency."

Western officials worry that the conversion has a secret side run by a military group seeking to integrate the nuclear program with the design of missiles that could deliver a weapon. In a Jan. 31 report, the I.A.E.A. revealed that it had documentary evidence of a shadowy operation, the Green Salt Project. Tehran dismissed the charge of a hidden military effort as baseless and later called the documents forgeries.

Estimating a Bomb's Birth

Atomic forecasts are driven largely by assessments of technological maturity, sometimes colored by judgments of the risks of guessing wrong.

That may explain the gulf between Israel's claim that the world has as little as six months before the "point of no return" and estimates that an Iranian warhead is many years away.

"We live within Iranian missile range," said a senior Israeli official who has worked on the country's estimates. "Our survival depends on understanding the worst-case scenario." Thus, in the Israeli view, it would be a huge mistake to let the Iranians figure out how to clean up and enrich their uranium.

Israel cites studies like one published in October by the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College, "Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran." Its timeline is short, one to four years. Iran, it asserted, "lacks for nothing technologically or materially to produce it, and seems dead set on securing an option to do so."

Henry Sokolski, an editor of the report, said neither he nor anyone else could actually produce a truly accurate forecast. "A lot of people are fraudulent, making it sound like a science," he said. "It's not."

He nonetheless defended the report's estimate as reasonable, pointing to Iran's long nuclear history.

Analysts like Mr. Albright and Ms. Hinderstein of the Institute for Science and International Security put the earliest date Iran might produce a weapon at 2009.

To date, the most comprehensive public estimate is by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an arms analysis group in London. "If Iran threw caution to the wind," John Chipman, the institute's director, said, it might be able to make fuel for a single nuclear weapon by 2010.

Dr. Samore, who edited that report and is now at the MacArthur Foundation, said the Iranians might see political advantage in a more deliberate approach, doing nothing provocative until after 2015 or even 2020.

In his view, he said, Iran would complete the main Natanz plant, installing 50,000 centrifuges and learning to operate them. If successful, it could then enrich uranium to the low levels needed for a nuclear reactor and so comply with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Then it could rush ahead and produce enough highly enriched fuel for a nuclear arsenal in weeks or months. At full tilt, the report concluded, Natanz could annually churn out material for up to 180 warheads.

Such a "breakout" chain of events worries experts because it leaves the world little or no time to react.

Seeking a Global Strategy

The Bush administration has concluded that even if Iran stops short of assembling a weapon, its ability to produce one on short order would change the politics of the Middle East. So it has been trying, with mixed success, to devise a broader atomic blockade that would turn the unilateral, often clandestine efforts of the past into a far more global effort involving not only Europe but India, China and Russia. In theory, the meeting this week in Vienna is a step in that direction.

But administration officials are also trying to make headway on their own. They have persuaded several of Iran's neighbors — they will not say which ones — to block Iranian cargo flights that appear headed toward North Korea or other potential nuclear suppliers. Last year, that strategy appeared to succeed in at least one case, when China intervened.

In a little-noted speech in February, Robert Joseph, an under secretary of state and one of the administration's leading hawks on Iran, described the tools of denial he was employing, from cracking down on Tehran's finances to depriving Iran of crucial technologies.

But administration officials readily acknowledge that it is next to impossible to build a leak-proof wall. In his speech, Mr. Joseph warned of the "wild card" that Iran could obtain nuclear fuel for a bomb from an outside supplier.

As much as anything, officials worry about the unknown. They note that the United States missed signs that a country was about to go nuclear with the Soviets in the 1940's, the Chinese in the 1960's, India in the 1970's and Pakistan in the 1990's.

"People always surprise us," said a senior nuclear intelligence official who was not authorized to speak publicly. "They're always a little more cunning and capable than we give them credit for."



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March 5, 2006
Iran's Best Friend
At the rate that President Bush is going, Iran will be a global superpower before too long. For all of the axis-of-evil rhetoric that has come out of the White House, the reality is that the Bush administration has done more to empower Iran than its most ambitious ayatollah could have dared to imagine. Tehran will be able to look back at the Bush years as a golden era full of boosts from America, its unlikely ally.

During the period before the Iraq invasion, the president gave lip service to the idea that Iran and Iraq were both threats to American security. But his advisers, intent on carrying out their long-deferred dream of toppling Saddam Hussein, gave scant thought to what might happen if their plans did not lead to the unified, peaceful, pro-Western democracy of their imaginings. The answer, though, is now rather apparent: a squabbling, divided country in which the Shiite majority in the oil-rich south finds much more in common with its fellow Shiites in Iran than with the Sunni Muslims with whom it needs to form an Iraqi government.

Washington has now become dangerously dependent on the good will and constructive behavior of Shiite fundamentalist parties that Iran sheltered, aided and armed during the years that Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. In recent weeks, neither good will nor constructive behavior has been particularly evident, and if Iran chooses to stir up further trouble to deflect diplomatic pressures on its nuclear program, it could easily do so.

There is now a real risk that Iraq, instead of being turned into an outpost of secular democracy challenging the fanatical rulers of the Islamic republic to its east, could become an Iranian-aligned fundamentalist theocracy, challenging the secular Arab regimes to its west.

Fast-forward to Thursday's nuclear deal with India, in which President Bush agreed to share civilian nuclear technology with India despite its nuclear weapons programs and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

This would be a bad idea at any time, rewarding India for flouting the basic international understanding that has successfully discouraged other countries from South Korea to Saudi Arabia from embarking on their own efforts to build nuclear weapons. But it also undermines attempts to rein in Iran, whose nuclear program is progressing fast and unnerving both its neighbors and the West.

The India deal is exactly the wrong message to send right now, just days before Washington and its European allies will be asking the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran's case to the United Nations Security Council for further action. Iran's hopes of preventing this depend on convincing the rest of the world that the West is guilty of a double standard on nuclear issues. Mr. Bush might as well have tied a pretty red bow around his India nuclear deal and mailed it as a gift to Tehran.



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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2070419,00.html

The Sunday Times March 05, 2006
Cheney daughter leads ‘cold war’ on mullahs
Sarah Baxter



THE war in Iraq is her father’s business but Elizabeth Cheney, the American vice-president’s daughter, has been given responsibility for bringing about a different type of regime change in Iran.
Cheney, a 39-year-old mother of four, is a senior official in the State Department, which has often been regarded as hostile territory by Dick Cheney’s White House team. Nonetheless father and daughter agree it would be better for the mullahs’ regime to collapse from within than to be ousted by force.

The question is whether democratic reform can be achieved before Iran becomes a nuclear power. That is the younger Cheney’s job. In the State Department she is referred to as the “freedom agenda co-ordinator” and the “democracy czar” for the broader Middle East. “She’s fantastic and dynamic,” said a colleague.

Her official title is deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and she is in charge of spending the $85m (£48m) — up from $10m last year — recently allocated to promote democracy in Iran. Much of it will be spent on broadcasting the views of exiles, dissidents and reformers inside Iran.

Cheney is better known to Iranian listeners of Voice of America’s Persian service than she is to Americans, although she publicly backed her sister Mary’s right to privacy when Democrats made an issue of her lesbianism in the 2004 election.

She rarely gives interviews but set out her agenda in a speech to the Foreign Policy Association’s annual dinner last June. Cheney said there was a “direct parallel” between reform movements in the Arab world and Poland’s Solidarity in the 1980s, which lit the “spark of freedom” in the Soviet bloc.

A strike by Tehran bus drivers that led to the jailing and torture of Mansour Osanloo, a union leader, and protests by textile workers in the northern province of Gilan have raised hopes that Iranians are fed up with the clerics’ repressive rule.

“President (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad was elected on the basis of a ‘chicken in every pot’ and there’s no sign that he is living up to that,” said a senior State Department official. “The patience of people who supported him is going to run out.”

Iranian exiles are using the showdown with Tehran over nuclear weapons to build unity among notoriously fractured opposition groups. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran, said in Washington last week that democratic regime change was a “race against time”.

“Forget about endlessly negotiating with the mullahs,” he said. “They will only buy the regime more time and a military strike would be a gift to the clerics. Everybody knows you cannot come away from the precipice without democracy.”

Mohsen Sazegara, a former Revolutionary Guard turned reformer who was recently jailed in Iran, said United Nations anti-nuclear sanctions should be linked to improvements in human rights. “Iranians will see that the international community is standing up for the rights of the people of Iran,” he said.

Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said Cheney was well qualified for the post. “She has a lot of experience dealing with non-governmental organisations and knows what she is talking about. She is a different person from her father.”

Another Washington-based expert on Iran suggested her relationship to Dick Cheney sometimes hampered her work. “Her last name can make things difficult for her because people assume everything you tell her is going to go straight to the vice-president.”

Father and daughter will be on the same side if Ahmadinejad’s regime sees off its internal opposition and acquires nuclear weapons. “There’s no credibility gap over our willingness to use force,” a State Department official said, “but hopefully it won’t come to that.”

China urges renewed talks on Iran nuclear crisis

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing urged Iran on Sunday to resume talks with Russia and the European Union on its nuclear programme as soon as possible, a day ahead of a key meeting of the U.N. atomic watchdog.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

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U.S.-India pact may undermine effort to rein in Iran
By David R. Sands
The Washington Times
Published March 4, 2006


WASHINGTON -- The new U.S.-India nuclear cooperation pact is complicating the Bush administration's efforts to rally international pressure against Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons programs.

Critics of the India deal in Congress and among arms-control activists say the concessions President Bush granted to India in the nuclear deal signed Thursday in New Delhi make it harder to preserve a united front against Tehran's efforts to build atomic bombs.


Some lawmakers in Congress, which must approve parts of the India deal, say the bad precedent it sets for Iran and other rogue states seeking nuclear weapons is enough to kill the accord.

The India deal "empowers the hawks in every rogue nation to put their nuclear plans on steroids now that they can no longer be isolated," said Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat and co-chairman of the congressional task force on nonproliferation.

The 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), an informal collection of the top suppliers of nuclear technology, will also consider the India accord at an upcoming meeting, a German Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday.

The NSG would have to lift its own embargo on India to allow member countries to sell sensitive technology and equipment to New Delhi.

Negotiators from Iran and the European Union, meeting briefly yesterday in Vienna, Austria, announced they had once again failed to reach a deal on halting Iran's program to enrich uranium, a key step in the bomb-making process.

The impasse sets the stage for a Monday meeting of the board of the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nation's nuclear watchdog, a meeting that could clear the way for U.N. Security Council action to sanction Tehran.

But Reuters news agency reported that Russia still is pushing a compromise that would allow Iran to pursue a more limited enrichment-research program over time.

The State Department confirmed yesterday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will be in Washington early next week, with the Iran question a key topic on the agenda.

According to an unidentified diplomat at the Vienna talks yesterday, Mr. Lavrov will present to U.S. officials a compromise plan between the Europeans and Iran that would allow Tehran to run a scaled-down uranium-enrichment program.

For years, Europe and the United States have opposed allowing Iran any kind of enrichment capability.

Such a compromise could leave Washington facing near-isolation diplomatically after months of building a consensus that led the IAEA's 35-nation board to put the U.N. Security Council on alert about Iran's nuclear program.

In New Delhi on Wednesday, Mr. Bush agreed to end a long ban on U.S. nuclear cooperation with India, which never signed the international treaty on nonproliferation, in exchange for an Indian pledge to put its civilian nuclear facilities under international monitoring.

Mr. Bush hailed the potential of closer U.S.-India ties to transform the region and world in a speech at the end of his three-day visit yesterday.

The United States and India, which had cool relations throughout the Cold War years, "are closer than ever before, and the partnership between our free nations has the power to transform the world," the president said.

Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, who hammered out the final details of the nuclear accord just hours before Mr. Bush arrived in India, said in an interview with the International Herald Tribune that comparisons with the Iranian nuclear program were "ludicrous."

Michael Green, who helped prepare much of the India agenda before leaving the National Security Council in December, said the New Delhi deal "gives Iran a good talking point."

But he added the spinoff effects of closer U.S.-India ties will be "profound," and will bring India firmly into the camp of nations seeking to contain the spread of nuclear weapons.

Iran's negotiators are already citing the India deal in a bid to divert the U.S.-led pressure campaign.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, said Iranians resented the fact that India and Israel have not been punished for their military nuclear programs, while Iran cannot pursue what he said were peaceful civilian nuclear efforts.

The India deal faces an uncertain future in Congress, with many lawmakers saying they still must see the fine print on what safeguards Mr. Bush was able to obtain over India's extensive nuclear facilities.

Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican, said he would like to support the agreement as a path to a better U.S.-India relationship

March 6, 2006
Iran Maintains Defiant Stance as Atomic Agency Takes Case
By NAZILA FATHI
TEHRAN, March 5 — Iran on Sunday reiterated its warning that it would begin making nuclear fuel on an industrial scale if the United Nations nuclear agency decided to send its case to the Security Council in its meeting on Monday.

The warning came a day before the start of a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which will decide whether to send Iran's case to the Security Council for possible punitive actions.

The agency had demanded last month that Iran suspend its research and development program before the agency's meeting this week. But Iran brushed off the demand. The current Iranian program produces enriched uranium on a small scale. Enriched uranium can be used to make nuclear fuel; highly enriched uranium can be used to make nuclear weapons.

"If Iran's nuclear dossier is referred to the U.N. Security Council, uranium enrichment will be resumed," Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said at a news conference, referring to large-scale enrichment. "Nuclear research and development are part of Iran's national interests and sovereignty and we will not give them up."

"We will not accept the suspension of our research program," he said, "but we are willing to hold off on large-scale enrichment for a short period of time to remove concerns."

"This is our last proposal to end this standoff," he added.

European negotiators rejected the same proposal on Friday when Mr. Larijani offered it at a meeting in Vienna. "Europe will not accept such an offer because even a research program can give Iran the capability to develop nuclear weapons," said a Western diplomat in Tehran, speaking on condition of anonymity under diplomatic rules.

Justin Higgins, a State Department spokesman, said on Sunday, "This is only the latest in a long series of unhelpful statements and gestures that Iran has made with regard to its nuclear program."

Iran has so far rejected all international proposals for it to abandon its nuclear research program, including one made by Russia last week for uranium to be enriched by Russia on Russian soil and the fuel shipped back to Iran. The Russian proposal was backed by the United States and China.

Iran has warned that any sanctions against it could affect oil prices. But Mr. Larijani said Iran, which is OPEC's second-largest oil producer, would not use "oil as a weapon" because it respected the psychological security of the international community.

"But naturally if they change the situation that will automatically be affected, too," he warned, saying sanctions themselves, without any action by Iran, would affect prices.

He added that "sanctions will not affect us much, and some solutions have been thought about for those which would affect us."

The conservative daily Keyhan reported Sunday that a spy who had passed information to Americans about Iran's nuclear program for the past 10 years had been arrested. It said the man, who was not identified, had been arrested once before on the same charges but was released after he expressed regret.

The newspaper reported that another person accused of spying, an employee of the state telecommunication company, had been arrested and charged with selling fiber-optic telecommunications plans to the United States.

Tough Talk From Bolton on Iran

WASHINGTON, March 5 (Reuters) — John R. Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said Sunday that Iran faced "painful consequences" if it continued secret nuclear activities, and he said the matter would become more difficult to resolve if the international community did not confront it.

Mr. Bolton also reaffirmed that the United States would use "all tools at our disposal" to thwart Iran's nuclear program and was already "beefing up defensive measures."

"The Iran regime must be made aware that if it continues down the path of international isolation, there will be tangible and painful consequences," he told 4,500 delegates to the convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the leading pro-Israel lobbying group.



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http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8663

March 6, 2006
Another War for Israel
The amen corner howls for war with Iran
by Justin Raimondo
A prominent public official finally said what we've been saying all along in these pages:

"The U.S. presence in Iraq is hurting the worldwide war on terrorism and benefits only Iran and al-Qaeda, U.S. Rep. John Murtha said on Sunday. 'The only people who want us in Iraq are Iran and al-Qaeda,' Murtha said on CBS's Face the Nation political talk show. 'And I talked to a top-level commander the other day and he said China wants us there also. Why? Because we're depleting our resources … our troop resources and our fiscal resources.'"

Not to worry: Iran, it seems, is next on our hit list, and this is largely at the behest of the one beneficiary of the Iraq war Murtha fails to mention: Israel. The Israelis have been loudly howling for months about the prospect of a nuclear Iran: their amen corner in the U.S. has gone into overdrive, pushing for sanctions and drawing a dire picture of nuke-wielding "mad mullahs." The world was shocked when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened to wipe Israel off the map, yet it has to be said that even the maddest mullahs don't imagine nuking Washington, D.C. Iran's nukes, if it ever acquires any – in 10 years' time, like the experts say – will more than likely target Tel Aviv, not Toledo.

Yet in one important sense, at least, the former is just as American as the latter – at least it is in the eyes of American decision-makers, who conduct U.S. foreign policy as if Israel were the 51st state. An outstanding example of this unique symbiosis is the news that the Israelis have penetrated Iran via U.S.-occupied Iraq, with the full complicity and assistance of the Americans:

"Israel's special forces are said to be operating inside Iran in an urgent attempt to locate the country's secret uranium enrichment sites. 'We found several suspected sites last year but there must be more,' an Israeli intelligence source said. They are operating from a base in northern Iraq, guarded by Israeli soldiers with the approval of the Americans, according to Israeli sources."

This sort of scuttlebutt has been knocking around ever since Seymour Hersh first broke the story of Israel's penetration of Kurdistan. The point is that the extension of American power in the Middle East has allowed Tel Aviv's tentacles to slither all the way to the Euphrates and beyond – to Tehran.

The Times of London also reveals that NATO is keen to get in on the act: "multilateralism," i.e., gang-banging, is back in style. This ought to delight the Democrats, who are in some ways ahead of the Republicans (and certainly ahead of the Bush administration) on the Iran issue. Hillary Clinton has done everything but call for declaring war on the mullahs, and House Democratic mis-Leader Nancy Pelosi supported the movement to impose draconian economic sanctions on Iran. The supposedly "antiwar" Democrats are getting way out ahead of the Bush administration when it comes to Part II of the Great Middle Eastern War. With Hillary's finger on the trigger, the first shots of World War IV are almost certain to be sounded.

The dramatic narrative of the Iranian nuke crisis is going according to a familiar script, one we became well-acquainted with in the run-up to war with Iraq. All the same ingredients of the Iraqi potboiler are being thrown into the mix: a Middle Eastern country ruled by an unattractive tyrant, Israel's partisans furiously beating the drums for war, and "weapons of mass destruction" described by dubious exile groups. Playing the part of Chalabi, we have the Marxoid-feminist cult of Maryam Rajavi and her army of Amazonian fighters. Ostensibly corralled within the walls of Camp Ashraf in Iraq, these Iranian "freedom fighters" – half of them women – are on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Yet I have it on good authority that American visas are being handed out to these burly gals at a fast clip: all they have to do is show up at a U.S. embassy somewhere in the Middle East – say, Istanbul – and they are granted "asylum" in the U.S. They constitute a reserve army ready to spring into action when the time comes to put an Iranian face on an American invasion.

The UN Security Council is slated to discuss the Iranian nuke issue shortly, and the sequence of events – Western demands that Iran cease and desist, followed by angry Iranian refusals – is perfectly suited to war propaganda. As the pace of the narrative picks up and the tension builds, the war drama unfolds according to a by-now-timeworn pattern. It's not the kind of screenplay that usually wins an Academy Award: this is strictly formulaic stuff, designed to give consumers of war propaganda what they need in order to rationalize mass murder. It may be crude – as in the case of Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al-Qaeda, or tales of WMD hidden beneath Saddam's Babylonian palaces – but it does the job.

Remember how important the nuclear issue was for getting us into the Iraqi quagmire: this time around, the same crew is pushing the same button. A recent poll shows that a clear majority of Americans are willing to risk war in order to stop the Iranians from going nuclear. Invoking the specter of nuclear annihilation is the best way to scare the living daylights out of otherwise thinking people. If the War Party can convince the Americans that the "mad mullahs" are on the brink of having the ability to nuke New York, they will have accomplished their mission.

Some, like Gore Vidal, believe we live in "the United States of Amnesia," and that Americans can't remember what happens from week to week, never mind the lies they told last year and the year before. I respectfully disagree: the people clearly realize they were lied into war, and they aren't happy about it. As to whether they'll let the War Party get away with pulling another fast one, that remains to be seen. The Republicans, if they are smart, will bet on "no" and back away from the abyss, while the Democrats blithely step off the ledge and invite the rest of the country to come with them. The Bushies are already under fire for going soft on those Ay-rabs with the Dubai port-management brouhaha, and the Democrats show every sign of taking up with alacrity Marshall Wittmann's advice and outflanking the GOP on "national security" issues, i.e., out-warmongering the Republicans.

As the next presidential campaign season looms, the prospect of John McCain and Hillary Clinton going at it mano a mano, in a contest to see who can bluster with a more convincing bellicosity – well, all I can say is that the presidential debates will redefine gender roles for the next hundred years, and it isn't going to be pretty.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC04Ak03.html
The march across Iran's 'red line'
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

On the eve of the International Atomic Energy Agency's meeting on Monday, crunch-time diplomacy has gone into full gear. This includes a high-level meeting between the Iranians and the Europeans that many consider to be the final opportunity to abort the IAEA's imminent decision to complain against Iran to the United Nations Security Council.

Yet all indications are that unless the principal parties agree to
cross their self-described "red lines", there will be no breakthrough and battle will be resumed in the Security Council.

Iran's nuclear fuel cycle is, of course, the eye of the storm, causing the seemingly unbridgeable divide between Iran and the West, with the former insisting on it as a matter of right and the latter insisting against it as a matter of global security.

The "red line" for Washington is Iran's capability to enrich uranium, which if it were permitted could be misused for military objectives.

But, then again, there appear to be two red lines here, one the Iranian possession of nuclear weapons, which US President George W Bush has repeatedly said he will not "tolerate", and a subsidiary red line pertaining to Iran's possession of dual-use technology that can portend a nuclear-armed Iran. With regard to the latter, various US officials, including John Bolton, the country's ambassador to the UN, have said on record it is unacceptable. The two are interrelated, but one can detect subtle "yellowing" of the second red line.

This yellowing is visible in non-official or semi-official pronouncements, such as by former US national security adviser Gary Sick, who has testified in Congress in favor of the "contained, monitored enrichment" option, a position recently endorsed more fully by the International Crisis Group.

And then there is the position of Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, who last month used his proxies to spread the word that "Natanz [Tehran's pilot enrichment plant] is Iran's bottom line, a sovereignty issue, a reality we may have to deal with".

In a sense, the IAEA has crossed its own "red line" by shyly accommodating itself to a limited enrichment program in Iran, and its brave though half-aborted initiative must set an example to the other players in this crisis to transgress their own self-described "red lines".

Unfortunately, Washington is clearly against any such concessions to Iran, which in turn explains the lack of genuine interest on the White House's part for any major breakthrough prior to the IAEA meeting. This is particularly so since talks between Moscow and Tehran have not yielded any results and, instead, prompted some Russian experts to call for more compromises on Russia's part.

In the aftermath of the Moscow talks on Wednesday, the director of Russia's Contemporary Iran Studies Center, Rajab Safarov, told Interfax, "Iran cannot unilaterally make substantial concessions on key and important issues. Therefore, some concessions on Russia's part are necessary. These concessions concern both essential and organizational phases of the uranium-enrichment process."

This week, Iran and Russia agreed in principle on the establishment of a uranium-enriching facility on Russian soil, but this idea appears to be foundering on Moscow's insistence that Iran give up all enrichment activities in Iran, something Tehran is reluctant to do.

And the US is completely opposed to the idea of participation by Iranian scientists in the proposed joint venture in Russia, as requested by Iran, as well as to Iran's related request that the enrichment process occur partly inside Iran.

From Iran's vantage point, there is already a fuel-fabrication plant in Isfahan and there is no need not to put such facilities to good use as part and parcel of a satisfactory formula.

Nevertheless, as for Iran's "red line" of retaining the right to enrich uranium, all signs indicate that despite hardline rhetoric there is a considerable mellowing, or to put it consistently, "yellowing", reflected in Iran's (a) recent pitch to the European Union for a two-year moratorium on enrichment and ( self-limitation to limited "industrial enrichment" along the lines suggested by ElBaradei.

Iran's softening position is born by the imperative to secure foreign nuclear fuel for current and future nuclear projects in light of both Iran's limited natural uranium and the technical problems with the conversion of "yellowcake" to uranium hexafluoride (UF6).

Nevertheless, on Iran's part, overcoming the "red line" verbiage requires a theoretical house-cleaning touching on the entire nuclear strategy of the country. Concerning the latter, an Iranian official involved with negotiations, Hosseini Tash, recently stated that the nuclear issue was a "strategic issue".

Perhaps it would be more apt to say "geo-economic" rather than "strategic" since Iran's official position is that the principal purpose of the nuclear industry is to produce energy. The appellation "strategic" is a misnomer, then, so long as Iran denies the West's allegations that it is engaged in nuclear-weapons production. Also, labeling a purely economic industry as strategic is tantamount to making excess commitment to all its facets as critical components of the country's national-security interests, whereas under the present circumstances this would be stretching it.

Various Israeli and Western intelligence reports indicate that Iran will be able to resolve most if not all of its technical difficulties in the near future, although the estimates vary from several months to a few years. Yet there is no disagreement that in light of Iran's ambitious plans for a rapid expansion of its nuclear program, self-sufficiency is not an option and Iran must actively court partners in its quest to find secure and reliable sources of nuclear fuel.

As a result, Iran has begun to refer approvingly of an international fuel bank and the various proposals for an IAEA-proof multinational arrangement for fuel production inside or outside Iran. The No 1 priority of Iran today is to get the Bushehr power plant up and running, but it faces yet another delay as a result of Russian foot-dragging that has postponed it to either some time this year or early next year. The Russians are committed to building a US$1.2 billion plant at Bushehr.

But with Russia boxing itself in on the US side with respect to the IAEA demand for the resumption of enrichment suspensions in Iran, no one in Iran can feel secure about the current Russian promises of insulating the Bushehr deal from the nuclear crisis, given the various calls from within the US Congress and the US media for a Russian ultimatum to cut off all nuclear cooperation with Iran if it fails to comply with the IAEA's demands. From Iran's vantage point, that is Russia's "red line" that it should never cross.

Of course, breakthrough diplomacy requires a great deal of concessions on both sides - one only needs to look at Camp David for inspiration - and Iran would be ill-advised to sink its head in the sand and to disregard the coming confrontation if it sticks to its "red line".

One option would be to reject the demands to give up the enrichment pilot plant and, instead, to put the facility on "cold standby", as is the case with some similar US facilities, to make sure about a potential fuel supply and to weigh properly the pros and cons of the Russian offer.

Another option is to convert Natanz into an internationally run facility kept by a multinational holding company using state-of-the-art centrifuges kept in "black boxes" with respect to Iranian scientists. The latter option would gradually phase out the Iranian centrifuges and both ease international anxiety about Iran's diversion and satisfy the Iranian quest for a steady supply of nuclear fuel.

But the United States at the moment seems only minimally interested in the various feasible scenarios for "objective guarantees" of a peaceful Iranian nuclear program, setting its eagle eyes on punitive measures against a country that has tormented its "unipolar moment" for nearly three decades.

This is not a risk-free option, however. That is why giving the IAEA more time to exhaust the options short of the Security Council, which is sure to over-politicize the issue and to reduce the room for concessions on Iran's part, is a wise idea that should not be ignored.

The US-EU rush to the Security Council most likely will extinguish the Iranian yellowing of its red line, hardly the desirable outcome for all concerned.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", the Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He is also author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction (forthcoming).

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

March 6, 2006
Chief of Atomic Agency Sounds Optimistic Note on Iran
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog for the United Nations, said today that he hoped an agreement could be reached with Iran on its nuclear program.

Mohamed ElBaradei spoke before a meeting of the nuclear agency's board of governors in Vienna. The board, which is reviewing Dr. ElBaradei's latest report on Iran this week, voted in February to refer Iran's nuclear case to the United Nations Security Council amid growing suspicions that Iran is determined to develop nuclear weapons.

The United States and the Europeans are certain to use Dr. ElBaradei's most recent report to push for a resolution critical of Iran during the agency's board meeting.

In the past three years, Dr. ElBaradei noted today, the agency has been conducting intensive investigations of Iran's nuclear program to provide assurances about its peaceful nature.

"During these investigations, the agency has not seen indications of diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices," he said. "Regrettably, however, after three years of intensive verification, there remain uncertainties with regard to both the scope and the nature of Iran's nuclear program."

He said there were still questions about "the past and current direction" of the program.

"I am still very much hopeful that in the next week or so, an agreement could be reached," Dr. ElBaradei said in televised remarks to reporters.

Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in November 2004 to voluntarily freeze all of its uranium conversion, enrichment and reprocessing activities. But when promised economic and political rewards were not forthcoming, Iran broke the agreement. It restarted uranium conversion last August and then began tests of enriching uranium on Feb. 11.

Last week, Dr. ElBaradei released an 11-page report that said Iran has accelerated its nuclear fuel enrichment activities and rejected demands of international inspectors to explain evidence that had raised suspicions of a nuclear weapons program. That assessment could make it easier for the United States and its European partners to seek punitive action in the Security Council.

The report made no definitive judgment about whether the nuclear program was peaceful, or intended to create the capacity to produce weapons.

Dr. ElBaradei today also mentioned a surge of diplomacy in which Iran has offered not to pursue industrial-scale uranium enrichment for up to two years. The Reuters news agency quoted an unnamed diplomat close to the talks between Iran and the European Union as saying that Iran may agree to extend that moratorium if it is permitted to run a small-scale enrichment research program.

Iran says that it has the right to develop a program for power.

The deputy secretary of Iran's national security council, Javad Vaeedi, told Reuters in Vienna that enrichment "research and development" in Iran was irreversible.



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http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1724473,00.html

US envoy hints at strike to stop Iran

· Bolton says nuclear plant can be 'taken out'
· UN agency meets to send report to security council

Julian Borger Washington
Monday March 6, 2006
The Guardian


The US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has told British MPs that military action could bring Iran's nuclear programme to a halt if all diplomatic efforts fail. The warning came ahead of a meeting today of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which will forward a report on Iran's nuclear activities to the UN security council.
The council will have to decide whether to impose sanctions, an issue that could split the international community as policy towards Iraq did before the invasion.


Article continues

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yesterday the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said: "Nobody has said that we have to rush immediately to sanctions of some kind."
However the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, visiting Washington last week, encountered sharply different views within the Bush administration. The most hawkish came from Mr Bolton. According to Eric Illsley, a Labour committee member, the envoy told the MPs: "They must know everything is on the table and they must understand what that means. We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down."

It is unusual for an administration official to go into detail about possible military action against Iran. To produce significant amounts of enriched uranium, Iran would have to set up a self-sustaining cycle of processes. Mr Bolton appeared to be suggesting that cycle could be hit at its most vulnerable point.

The CIA appears to be the most sceptical about a military solution and shares the state department's position, say British MPs, in suggesting gradually stepping up pressure on the Iranians.

The Pentagon position was described, by the committee chairman, Mike Gapes, as throwing a demand for a militarily enforced embargo into the security council "like a hand grenade - and see what happens".

Yesterday Mr Bolton reiterated his hardline stance. In a speech to the annual convention of the American-Israel public affairs committee, the leading pro-Israel US lobbyists, he said: "The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve ... we must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat that the Iranian regime poses."

The IAEA referred Iran to the security council on February 4, but a month's grace was left for diplomatic initiatives. By yesterday, those appeared exhausted. A meeting of European and Iranian negotiators broke down on Friday over Tehran's insistence that even if Russia was allowed to enrich Iran's uranium, Iran would enrich small amounts for research. Iran says that it needs enrichment for electricity.

According to Time magazine, the US plans to present the security council with evidence that Iran is designing a crude nuclear bomb, like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. The evidence will be in the form of blueprints that the US said were found on a laptop belonging to an Iranian nuclear engineer, and obtained by the CIA in 2004. However, any such presentation will bring back memories of a similar briefing in February 2003 in which Colin Powell, then US secretary of state, laid out evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which proved not to exist.

While the US and Britain keep a united front over Iraq in the UN security council, there are clear differences over Iran. Britain has ruled out a military option if diplomatic pressure fails. The US has not. There is no serious consideration of large-scale use of ground forces, but there are disagreements in the administration over whether air strikes and small-scale special forces operations could be effective in halting or slowing down Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme.

Some believe Iran has secret facilities that are buried so deep underground as to be impenetrable. They argue that the US could never be certain whether or not it had destroyed Iran's "capability".

http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?A...L&IssueID=28350

Electronic warfare warning by Tehran

TEHRAN: Iran owns advanced technology in electronic warfare and can combat any such attacks on its military equipment, the head of defence ministry electronics industries said yesterday.

"If our main enemy wants to carry out electronic warfare and jamming operations, our standards are at the Nato level," Ebrahim Mahmou-dzadeh said.

He was also quoted as saying that Iran's radars, passive and active electronic protection "can combat anything that wants to harm us".

In recent months Israel has been dangling the threat of pre-emptive action to stop Iran's disputed nuclear programme - seen by the West as a mask for weapons development.

Meanwhile, analysts say that the Gulf states appear reluctant to get drawn into a US confrontation with Iran given that the region is still licking its wounds from successive wars.

"The region cannot take a new (military) intervention after the Iraq tragedy," said Jassem Al Saadun, head of Kuwait's Al Shall Economic Consultants.

The Gulf states "want to catch their breath, having been drained by years of wars and conflicts," echoed London-based newspaper editor Abdul Bari Atwan.

He was alluding to the devastating 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Gulf war, and the US-led invasion of Iraq of March 2003.

At a meeting in Riyadh on Wednesday, foreign ministers of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) distanced themselves from Washington's tough line on Iran's nuclear programme.

US envoy hints at strike to stop Iran :

Bolton says nuclear plant can be 'taken out'
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12215.htm

===
Bolton warns Iran of ‘painful consequences’:

Speaking at a convention of Jewish-Americans, said it is too soon for the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran but other countries are talking about doing so and Washington is “beefing up defensive measures to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11684031/

===
The USS Ronald Reagan deployed in the Persian Gulf :

The U.S. Fifth Fleet said the USS Ronald Reagan has been deployed for maritime security operations in the Gulf region. The nuclear-powered surface vessel headed a carrier group that contains a guided missile cruiser, two destroyers and support ships.
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/0....107638889.html

===
Jon Snow interviews Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, live in Tehran
http://www.channel4.com/player/playerwindo...=3575&vert=news

===
Can a deal be done?:

A deal over Iran's nuclear programme is possible, according to the UN's chief nuclear watchdog.
http://www.channel4.com/player/playerwindo...=3554&vert=news

===
Washington splits over best policy to halt Iran's nuclear plan:

Visiting MPs were astonished by a lack of consensus on the eve of the crucial nuclear meeting
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2071918,00.html

March 7, 2006
Russia and West Split on Iran Nuclear Issue
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
VIENNA, March 6 — A serious rift emerged Monday when Russia split with the United States and Europe over Iran's nuclear program after the Russians floated a last-minute proposal to allow Iran to make small quantities of nuclear fuel, according to European officials.

The reports of the proposal prompted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to call Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and according to an administration official who was briefed on the conversation, "she said the United States cannot support this."

Ms. Rice's call came after Dr. ElBaradei suggested to reporters that the standoff with Iran could be resolved in a week or so, apparently an allusion to the Russian proposal. Washington's strategy is to get past the meeting of the I.A.E.A. that opened Monday and, under a resolution passed by the agency's board in February, have the issue turned over to the United Nations Security Council immediately. But officials clearly fear that the Russian proposal is intended to slow that process.

American officials said they had been assured by the Russians that there was no formal proposal on the table. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, had dinner in Washington on Monday evening with Ms. Rice and the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, and he is scheduled to meet President Bush in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

Under the Russian proposal, Iran would temporarily suspend all uranium enrichment activities at its facility at Natanz but then be allowed to do what Russia describes as "limited research activities" in Iran's uranium enrichment program, said the European officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules.

Iran would have to agree to a moratorium on production of enriched uranium on an industrial scale for between seven to nine years, ratify additional measures that let the nuclear agency conduct intrusive inspections of its nuclear facilities and create a joint venture with Russia on the production of enriched uranium on Russian soil, the officials said. The proposal, which has not been made public, spurred Dr. ElBaradei to give an upbeat assessment about a possible swift resolution of the impasse over Iran's program, an official familiar with his thinking said.

In a tonal shift, Dr. ElBaradei said Iran had made concessions on some issues. Calling Iran's activities at its uranium enrichment plant at Natanz "the sticking point," he added, "That issue is still being discussed this week, and I still hope that in the next week or so that agreement could still be reached."

In an interview on Monday evening, R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said the administration would reject any proposal that did not require the Iranians to stop domestic nuclear enrichment and reprocessing activities. "The United States will not support any halfway measures," he said. "That means full suspension of all nuclear activities, and a return to negotiations on that basis."

Ms. Rice told Dr. ElBaradei that Washington wanted to see Iran's case before the Security Council as soon as this week's agency board meeting was over; that the United States would seek a presidential statement, which does not carry the weight of a resolution, noting Iran's past failures to comply with its international commitments; and that Iran's case would then be sent back to the nuclear agency for further review, according to an official with knowledge of the conversation.

The Russian proposal is a reversal of its previous stance and seemed motivated by its determination to protect Iran from judgment by the Security Council.

Russia — and even China — had joined the United States and the Europeans in demanding that Iran resume a freeze of uranium enrichment activities at Natanz, reflecting mounting global suspicion that Iran's nuclear program is intended to produce weapons.

The Russian proposal surfaced late last week, when Sergei Kisliak, Russia's chief nuclear negotiator, presented it to officials of Britain, France and Germany.

He said Iran would have to resume full suspension of all enrichment-related activities, including what it calls its small-scale "research and development" while the agreement on the package was negotiated. Once there was an agreement, however, Iran would be allowed to conduct limited uranium enrichment research activities under a pilot program as agreed with the I.A.E.A.

As soon as Iran and the agency agreed on the small-scale enrichment, Iran's Parliament would ratify the "Additional Protocol" to Iran's nuclear agreement. That protocol gives the nuclear agency's inspectors the right to ask for exceptional access to Iran's nuclear facilities. When one of the Europeans asked Mr. Kisliak for his definition of a pilot program, he said there was no real definition, one official said.

A moratorium on industrial-scale enrichment and reprocessing activities would last two to three years while the nuclear agency carried out an investigation of Iran's past nuclear activities and five to six years more until trust with Iran could be rebuilt.

Mr. Kisliak conceded that a major risk of such a package was that Iran would inch closer to mastering the technology for a small cascade of centrifuges that turn uranium gas into enriched uranium that can be used to produce electricity or to make bombs. He added that it would shorten the period needed for Iran to "manufacture a weapon" by a number of months, one official familiar with the briefing said.

Iran has always contended its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, although Russia, like the United States and the Europeans, is convinced it intends to make nuclear weapons.

Mr. Kisliak speculated that Iran was unlikely to accept the proposal, in part because of the long-term constraints on its industrial-scale enrichment program. The proposal threatened to derail a carefully formulated, but fragile strategy to send Iran's case to the Security Council. Last month's resolution by the nuclear agency board demanded that no action be taken in the Council until after the current board meeting, a way to give Iran one last chance to comply with agency demands.

Even though there is no specific timetable to seek economic sanctions on Iran, both Russia and China are opposed to sanctions. There is no need for another resolution to be passed by the agency board this time for the Security Council to act. Certainly, Dr. ElBaradei is looking for a negotiated solution to the Iran impasse even if it means giving Iran a significant concession on making nuclear fuel.

In a conversation with the German and French foreign ministers, a senior British Foreign Office envoy and the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, in Vienna last Friday, Dr. ElBaradei expressed the view that Iran needed to continue some uranium enrichment work as a face-saving measure, a European official said. The Europeans, who met earlier with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, replied that it was not a question of saving face but of maintaining both the credibility of the nuclear agency and a firm position toward Iran.

The crucial issue for Iran is mastering the fuel cycle by enriching uranium. Indeed, in Tehran on Sunday, Mr. Larijani reiterated Iran's position that it would not freeze small-scale production of nuclear fuel even if its case came before the Security Council.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington for this article.



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March 7, 2006
U.S. Firm Against Iran Nuclear Enrichment
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:40 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration told Iran on Tuesday that enrichment of nuclear fuel on Iranian territory was unacceptable as Russia appeared to close ranks with the United States over Tehran's nuclear program.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered the tough message -- but shied away from warning of immediate U.N. sanctions -- after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

At a joint State Department news conference, Lavrov said there was no compromise in sight with Iran. Russia has been negotiating with Iran and has proposed enriching fuel on Russian soil for Iran's energy need.

''We will see what is necessary to do in the Security Council,'' Rice said. She said there was still time for Iran to change its ways.

From the State Department, Rice and Lavrov were headed to the White House for a meeting with President Bush. Earlier in the day, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the U.S. expects the U.N. Security Council to move forward to rebuke Tehran for its disputed nuclear program.

''The international community has spelled out what Iran must do -- that means suspend all enrichment activity,'' McClellan said.

Meanwhile, a diplomat in Vienna, Austria, where the International Atomic Energy Agency is meeting, told The Associated Press that Iran is offering to suspend full-scale uranium enrichment for up to two years. The offer reflected Tehran's attempts to escape Security Council action over the activity, which can be used to make nuclear arms.

The diplomat, who demanded anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the issue, said Tehran's offer was made Friday by chief Iranian negotiator Ali Larijani in Moscow in the context of contacts between Iran and Russia on moving Tehran's enrichment program to Russia. But Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said Tuesday his country was not prepared to freeze small-scale enrichment.

Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech Tuesday to a pro-Israel lobbying group that Iran will not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon and warned that the issue may soon go before the Security Council.

''The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose meaningful consequences,'' Cheney said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

''We join other nations in sending that regime a clear message: we will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,'' Cheney said.

He said the U.S. ''is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime.'' In the past the U.S. has said it has no intention of using military force for now, but has declined to completely rule it out.

The Bush administration is getting closer to a U.N. Security Council rebuke of Iran, but the latest round of diplomacy shows the United States needs the help of Cold War foe Russia to close the deal.

Lavrov's meeting with Bush in the Oval Office is a rarity. U.S. presidents customarily receive foreign heads of state in the presidential office, but seldom invite a lower-ranking official such as a foreign minister for a meeting there.

''This is an issue of confidence with the international community,'' McClellan said. ''The regime has shown it cannot be trusted. It hid its nuclear activities for two decades from the international community. It has refused to comply with its international obligations. This is about the regime and its behavior. That's what this is about and that's what our focus is.''

Russia, which has veto power as one of the permanent members of the Security Council, is perhaps Tehran's most important ally and business partner. Russia also has crafted a potential compromise to head off sanctions or other punishment of Iran.

China, which also has veto power on the Security Council, is appealing for further negotiation. ''Iran should cooperate closely with the IAEA to settle the nuclear dispute,'' Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said Tuesday in Beijing at a news conference. ''There is still room for settlement of the issue in the IAEA.''

The United States won a diplomatic coup in February when Russia went along with the U.S.-backed effort to report Iran to the council, but had to agree to a delay of at least a month before the council could take any action. That window is closing without the progress Russia hoped to claim on its proposed nuclear compromise.

It is not clear, however, that Moscow will support a U.S. move for penalties against Iran.

------

Associated Press Writer George Jahn contributed to this report from Vienna.

^------

On the Net:

State Department: http://www.state.gov



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http://csmonitor.com/2006/0307/dailyUpdate.html?s=mesdu
World > Terrorism & Security
posted March 7, 2006 at 11:00 a.m.

IAEA: Deal on Iran's nuclear program close

ElBaradei says a deal is possible, but US is skeptical of new negotiations.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, says a deal with Iran on its nuclear program is possible, and may be concluded within several days.
The Washington Post reports the new proposal would see Russia giving Iran enough slightly enriched uranium to run its nuclear generators for civilian purposes, but not enough to build a nuclear weapon. But the Russian proposal would also allow Iran to conduct small-scale uranium enrichment under strict perimeters set by the UN and the IAEA.

In return, the diplomats said, Iran would be asked to recommit to in-depth IAEA probes of its program on short notice. Iran canceled such investigations last month after the IAEA's 35-nation board put the UN Security Council on alert by passing on Iran's nuclear dossier.
EUobserver, an independent European Union news site, reports that the Russian proposal had "divided" supporters of UN sanctions against Iran for its program. Germany was cautiously in favor of Russia's idea, while Britain and France were against, and continued to support the US position.



03/06/06

Iraq's different Paces

03/03/06

Hamas in Russia for talks with senior officials

03/02/06

Report: A democratic China could be 'great risk' to Asia





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Germany is the one that "could most live with a pilot enrichment plant in Iran," a European diplomat told Reuters, adding however that Berlin would never allow Tehran to break EU unity in the standoff.
A US state department spokesman rebuffed the idea of small-scale enrichment on Iranian soil, saying "You can't be just a little pregnant."

The New York Times reports that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called ElBaradei on Monday to tell him the US could not support the proposal, which still has not been made public. US officials also said that Russian diplomats told them that no formal proposal was on the table. The US wants to get past the IAEA meeting and on to the UN Security Council, but officials worry that the Russian proposal is meant to slow down that process.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that John Bolton, US ambassador to the United Nations, told some British MPs that the US will use strategic airstrikes or a special forces raid against some Iranian targets if the country doesn't stop its program.

In Washington, the MPs spoke to the sometimes-controversial US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. And they quoted him saying: "We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down."
In response, one of Iran's senior commanders said his country would become a killing field for any enemy aggressor.

Time magazine reports, however, that observers should not be misled by all the rhetoric - there's not likely to be any kind of serious confrontation yet.
There's unlikely to be any kind of showdown any time soon for one overarching reason — there is simply little appetite among the key players in the dispute to escalate matters. The IAEA had already in principle decided, at its previous board meeting in January, to refer Iran to the Security Council, yet Monday's meeting — expected to last up to three days — is still expected to offer Tehran another 30 days in which to cut a deal. Veto-wielding Security Council members Russia and China remain resolutely opposed to sanctions, which conflict with their own national economic interests, and it's not immediately clear exactly what outcome the US — which currently holds the rotating Security Council chair — would seek from a Council discussion on the Iran issue.
The Associated Press reports that while the US talks tough, the reality is that it will still need the help of Russia in order to convince the UN Security Council to pursue sanctions against Iran. Russia is Iran's most important business partner, and political ally.
On both Iran and Hamas, the United States needs Russian acquiescence, if not outright support. That may make it more difficult for the administration to press Lavrov very hard over what Rice recently called a disturbing erosion of democratic guarantees in post-Soviet Russia. US officials insist they will not give Russia a pass.
"There are areas where ... we differ, and we think we can have a frank and candid exchange of views with them on those subjects," State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Monday. "We're certainly going to continue to make clear our concerns about those areas where we do have problems."

The Los Angeles Times reports that in Iran itself, the issue is seen as one of "nationalism mixed with a feeling that Iran too often has been treated as an exception to the rules of international relations." Even those opposed to the hard-line fundamentalist regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad support Iran's drive to produce nuclear power.
Linda Heard, writing in the Arab News, says that the feeling in much of the Middle East is that the US is using a double standard toward Iran's nuclear policy.

While the US and its European allies are demanding Iran’s compliance, the American president has himself flouted the terms of the NPT by offering nuclear technology to nuclear-armed India, which is not a signatory.
On the other hand, Iran has abided by the treaty’s chapter and verse and there is as yet no smoking gun to indicate it is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. George Bush makes no apology for this glaring double standard other than to point out that India is a democracy, which presumably means it should be trusted ... However, America’s hallowed democracy standard does not apply to Hamas, which was fairly elected to govern the Palestinian people. If the US has its way, Hamas is to be starved out of office.

Also on Monday, two other countries called for more time for a negotiations. Agence-France Presse reports that China called on Iran to cooperate with the IAEA immediately, but also called for restraint on all sides. The Hindustan Times reports that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Parliament that India "did not favour a confrontation" or "coercive" methods to settle the problem.

Cheney Says U.S. Won't Let Iran Get Nukes


Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday that Iran will not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon and warned "the United States is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime."

Cheney said the Iranian government "continues to defy the world with its nuclear ambitions" and that the issue may soon go before the U.N. Security Council.

"The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose meaningful consequences," Cheney said in a speech to the to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential pro-Israel lobbying group.

Cheney spoke as diplomats at an International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, were considering whether to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions. The United States believes Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons; Iran says its nuclear program is for generating electricity.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was in Washington Tuesday to discuss Iran with President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Cheney said the United States joins "other nations in sending that regime a clear message: we will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

He denounced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for calling for Israel's destruction and denying that the Nazi Holocaust of Jews took place.

He said he supports the "the democratic aspirations of the people of Iran" and said "Iranians have endured a generation of repression at the hands of a fanatical regime. That regime is one of the world's primary state sponsor of terror."




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http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/03/07/iran.nuclear.1246/

March 7, 2006
White House Issues Warning on Iran's Nuclear Ambitions
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
Bush administration officials reiterated their firm opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions today, with Vice President Dick Cheney lashing out at Iran as the Russian foreign minister started talks in Washington that included his country's proposal to enrich uranium for Iran's energy needs.

During a speech in Washington at the annual gathering of the nation's top pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Mr. Cheney volunteered his assessment of Iran as continuing to defy the world with its nuclear ambitions and said that the United States was keeping "all options on the table."

"The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose meaningful consequences," Mr. Cheney said.

At the White House, President Bush's chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the Iran leadership "continues to move in the wrong direction. We have made it very clear, as well as the international community, that Iran needs to suspend all its enrichment-related activities."

Mr. Cheney's remarks coincided with a visit to Washington today by Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov after reports Monday that Russia had split with the United States and Europe by floating a last-minute proposal to allow Iran to make small quantities of nuclear fuel. Reports from European officials of that proposal prompted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to call Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and according to an administration official who was briefed on the conversation, "She said the United States cannot support this."

Today, Ms. Rice and Mr. Lavrov appeared to be trying to back away from the impression that there was a rift in their positions. In a briefing with reporters, Ms. Rice said that Mr. Lavrov did not inform the United States of any new idea.

"We have been supportive of the Russian proposal, which would be a joint venture with enrichment and reprocessing on Russian soil and in which there would be an effort or we believe minimal proliferation risk," Ms. Rice said, "because the enrichment and reprocessing would be on Russian soil, with fuel provision to Iran and then a fuel takeback provision."

Mr. Lavrov said today during the briefing with Ms. Rice that there is no compromise, new Russian proposal.

"All our contacts with Iran, with the European troika, with the United States, with China and with others, including the director general of I.A.E.A., were about finding a way to implement the February decision by the board of governors of I.A.E.A.," he said.

Perhaps trying to deflate any suggestion of a breach between Washington and Moscow, Mr. Lavrov added, "It is only in that context that our well-known suggestion to have a joint venture to enrich uranium on Russian territory to provide for the fuel needs of Iran was made, and we repeatedly stated that it's only in this context that this joint venture initiative is available."

At the White House, Mr. McClellan said that despite Mr. Cheney's veiled threat that the United States was keeping "all options on the table," the Bush adminstration was still pursuing a diplomatic solution on Iran. "Our concerns are broader than just the nuclear issue," he said. "We are concerned about the regime's behavior when it comes to its sponsorship of terrorism. We're concerned about its behavior when it comes to the repression of its people."

The atomic energy agency's board of governors is meeting in Vienna this week to discuss Dr. ElBaradei's latest report on Iran.

Mr. Lavrov's schedule includes a meeting with President Bush. He had dinner with Ms. Rice on Monday evening and with the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley.

Ms. Rice's call to Dr. ElBaradei on Monday came after he suggested to reporters that the standoff with Iran could be resolved in a week or so, apparently an allusion to the Russian proposal. Washington's strategy is to get past the meeting of the I.A.E.A. that opened Monday and, under a resolution passed by the agency's board in February, have the issue turned over to the United Nations Security Council immediately.

But officials clearly feared that the Russian proposal is intended to slow that process.

American officials have previously said they had been assured by the Russians that there was no formal new proposal on the table.

But the European officials who discussed the issue on Monday said that Russia was proposing that Iran temporarily suspend all uranium enrichment activities at its facility at Natanz but then be allowed to do what Russia describes as "limited research activities" in Iran's uranium enrichment program. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules.

The European officials said Monday that Iran would have to agree to a moratorium on production of enriched uranium on an industrial scale for between seven to nine years, ratify additional measures that let the nuclear agency conduct intrusive inspections of its nuclear facilities and create a joint venture with Russia on the production of enriched uranium on Russian soil.

In an interview on Monday evening, R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said the administration would reject any proposal that did not require the Iranians to stop domestic nuclear enrichment and reprocessing activities. "The United States will not support any halfway measures," he said. "That means full suspension of all nuclear activities, and a return to negotiations on that basis."

Ms. Rice told Dr. ElBaradei on Monday that Washington wanted to see Iran's case before the Security Council as soon as this week's agency board meeting was over; that the United States would seek a presidential statement, which does not carry the weight of a resolution, noting Iran's past failures to comply with its international commitments; and that Iran's case would then be sent back to the nuclear agency for further review, according to an official with knowledge of the conversation.

The new Russian proposal would be a reversal of its previous stance and seemed motivated by its determination to protect Iran from judgment by the Security Council.

Russia — and even China — had joined the United States and the Europeans in demanding that Iran resume a freeze of uranium enrichment activities at Natanz, reflecting mounting global suspicion that Iran's nuclear program is intended to produce weapons.

Iran has always contended its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, although Russia, like the United States and the Europeans, is convinced it intends to make nuclear weapons.

Elaine Sciolino contributed reporting from Vienna for this article and David Stout from Washington.



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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC08Ak02.html
THE ROVING EYE
The old lovers' nuclear tango
Commentary by Pepe Escobar

The already frail nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was bombed to oblivion last week by US President George W Bush - immolated On the altar of a strategic relationship with India to counteract the emergence of China. Meanwhile, the US threatens to punish Iran because the Islamic Republic is a full member of the NPT. This is the (surrealist) way geopolitics works.

Bush in India imperiously buried all international norms - enshrined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the NPT and the United Nations. He proclaimed himself as the nuclear emperor - the only one who decides who has the right to nuclear power and who doesn't.

Defending the Indian deal, Bush said that nuclear power was a renewable energy source (which it's not) and that the deal would help to alleviate global demand for crude oil. The Iranian leadership also argues it needs nuclear power to alleviate its own dependence on crude oil. This is the way geopolitical enemies coincide.

It takes a world-weary aristocrat to put things in perspective. In the remarkable Blood & Oil (Random House), exiled Prince Manucher Farmanfarmaian of the Qajar royal family (which ruled Persia for 140 years before the Pahlavi dynasty) writes that the long, lurid drama between the United States and Iran "is a tango between two old lovers who now only know how to face each other with knives in their teeth". The knives are out and may soon reach the UN Security Council.

Farmanfarmaian knows the tango by heart. Just after World War I, his second cousin - the last of the Qajar line - was the first shah to fall under the faded British Empire (the British wanted a dictator). The British then chose Reza Shah - whom our aristocrat wickedly describes as "a soldier who had worked for my father". Then the American empire via the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) toppled nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (a cousin of Farmanfarmaian's father), which led to great friend of America Shah Reza Pahlavi's reign and his toppling by ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who dubbed the former American friend "the Great Satan". No wonder that since 1979 the former lovers have been at each other's throats.

The Natanz unfinished melody
The nuclear tango is worthy of a soundtrack by Astor Piazzolla. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, the lead singer, is now certain that the imbroglio cannot be solved until next week. Not so fast, said spurned lover Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state. Washington's strategy is more military marching band than tango. It regards the IAEA board meeting convened this Monday in Vienna as a mere formality; the only thing that matters is immediately to turn the matter to the UN Security Council.

Not so fast, say the Russians, experienced former players in the Great Game in Central Asia alongside the British Empire, now interfering with the tango with a loud Russian techno beat. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is on Mission Impossible in Washington, meeting with Rice and Bush and trying to convince them that a last-minute Russian proposal is the only peaceful way out.

A Belgian diplomat close to the EU-3 (France, Germany and Britain) negotiations in Brussels has confirmed to Asia Times Online that the Europeans knew about the Russian proposal since last Friday. The proposal was discussed by the Russians and Iranians in Tehran.

"The Russians offered something we [in Europe] were not able to agree on. What the Russians describe as 'limited research activities' by Iran means that the Iranians don't do industrial research and don't produce enriched uranium at their plant in Natanz for at least seven years, maybe nine or 10."

Instead, Russia and Iran, in a joint venture, would produce enriched uranium in Russia, monitored by the IAEA, to generate electricity. The Iranian press is reporting that Iran would agree to negotiate the suspension of industrial-scale enrichment for two years, not nine or 10, and as long as it can go on with its own nuclear research. ElBaradei himself recognized that the uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz is "the sticking point". But for the Bush administration, the Russian proposal is still anathema.

Washington wants by all means a "presidential statement" (a degree lower than a resolution) exclusively focused on the negative (my former lover has been cheating, now it must behave). But the whole point is that the IAEA inspectors have not found any proof that Iran is violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty. So Washington's obsession on Iran being officially reprimanded on the world stage does reek of tango betrayal. European diplomats know there's no support for a UN resolution. Russia and China have already made it clear. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) has released a statement saying the involvement of other UN organizations (that would mean the Security Council) is not welcomed. NAM is in favor of diplomacy within the confines of the IAEA.

Iranians see the most important points of the IAEA report as Paragraph 53 ("All the declared nuclear material has been accounted for") and Paragraph 44 ("The enrichment process at Natanz is covered by agency safeguards containment and surveillance measures"). Thus the Iranian view that ElBaradei's concerns are political, not technical; there is no legal or technical basis for the dossier to be referred to the Security Council. The Iranians also point out that the IAEA spent 27 years clearing up the nuclear "ambiguities" of Japan. Compared with that, three years investigating Iran is not much.

The "presidential statement" sought by Washington would mean in practice that Iran has to give up - with nothing in return - all of its rights under the terms of the NPT. Once again, the IAEA report - after three years of investigation - told the agency's 35 board members it has not found "any diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices".

The overall perception in Iran is that the nation will never accept being humiliated as a pariah - especially when there is no evidence that it is deceiving the IAEA. Americans and some Europeans would do well to study some history. This is a proud nation, according to Farmanfarmaian, "that rebuffed the Romans in the 3rd century and took the Emperor Valerian prisoner, a country that redefined the Arabs' Islam and made it its own".

Killer instincts
The US$250 billion question (the cost of the occupation of Iraq so far, and counting) is how Iran's possible humiliation on the world stage can be engineered by the Bush administration as the first step toward another "shock and awe" attack.

Bush himself has warned on the record that a military strike "is not off the table". Both the CIA and the State Department are in favor of applying a lot of pressure all of the time - but no air strikes or Special Forces on the ground, at least not in the immediate future. The Pentagon wants a military-enforced embargo.

Significantly, the most hawkish of hawks had to be the US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. In a speech, not by accident, at the annual convention of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel US lobby, he said Iran's nuclear program could be "taken out".

So a classic old-lovers-with-knifes-in-their-teeth tango keeps rambling on. Now it has expanded to a tango for two couples: the US plus the EU-3 on one side of the dance floor, and Russia and ElBaradei on the other.

There's some possibility of intermingling as Germany, part of the EU-3, has show signs of agreeing with experimental enrichment in Iran. Nobody - the IAEA, the UN, NAM, the EU-3, the Muslim world, the world at large - wants to see blood on the dance floor. If only the former lovers would get rid of those knives.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Mag_Iran_bom...re_21_0307.html

Mag: Iran bombing odds are 2:1 by 2007
RAW STORY
Published: March 7, 2006

The odds of an American or Israeli airstrike on Iran by March 31, 2007 are 2:1, according to April editions of the Atlantic Magazine. The magazine relies on online betting at tradesports.com, and provides a few details of the circumstances in which each strike might take place.

The Atlantic is known for its predictions of future events, and has held widely respected debates on military strikes on North Korea and Iran. Neither scenarios resulted in a favorable position for the United States. Excerpts follow.

#
4:1: Overt Air Strike by the United States or Israel by June 30, 2006.

By this date, the United Nations Security Council may have only recently enacted sanctions, such as travel bans or freezing the assets of Iranians associated with the nuclear program. More important, neither the United States nor Israel is likely to risk a strike in the midst of an election year. Israel will have only recently voted in a new parliament, and the United States will be mere months away from mid- term elections. Advertisement

3:1: Overt Air Strike by the United States or Israel by December 31, 2006.

The November elections will be over in the United States, and a new government will be firmly in place in Israel. But the two powers may continue to defer to the international community, and wait to assess whether sanctions and diplomacy curb Iran’s ambitions.

2:1: Overt Air Strike by the United States or Israel by March 31, 2007.

If Iran continues to make progress toward nuclear weapons capability, despite heavy international pressure, a surgical military strike against one of its key facilities—such as the uranium-enrichment plant in Natanz or the uranium-conversion facility in Isfahan—would become more politically feasible. Analysts at the Eurasia Group, an international consulting firm, predict that surgical strikes are likely “by the [United States] or Israel during the first quarter of 2007.”

Current betting figures can be obtained at http://www.intrade.com.

War pimp alert:

Report: Israelis in Iran Hunting Nukes :

The soldiers are on a mission to prevent the Iranians from succeeding in their bid to develop a nuclear weapon. They are involved in locating uranium enrichment facilities in Iran, according to the British Sunday Times, and are currently based in neighboring northern Iraq. The United States is supporting the move, says the paper.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=99700

===
Sounds familiar:

Iranian bombshell? :

Bush Administration officials are readying a new intelligence briefing for council members on Tehran's weapons programs. It will rely mainly on circumstantial evidence, much of it from documents found on a laptop purportedly purloined from an Iranian nuclear engineer and obtained by the CIA in 2004. U.S. officials insist the material is strong but concede they have no smoking gun.
http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/arti...hp?storyid=6074

===
Drumbeat sounds familiar :

US fears about Iranian nukes, discussed in Vienna yesterday, are hardly the whole story. Washington is compiling a dossier of grievances against Tehran similar in scope and seriousness to the pre-war charge-sheet against Iraq.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12237.htm

Iran threatens new 'killing fields' in nuclear row:

John Bolton, the hawkish US Ambassador to the United Nations, warned that the republic faced "painful consquences" if it refused to comply. In response, the deputy head of Iran's armed forces retorted: "Iran’s armed forces, through their experience of war, will turn this land into a killing field for any enemy aggressors."
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12229.htm

===
Iran deploys home-made submarine in Gulf waters :

“The submarine is fully adapted to the Persian Gulf,” he said, adding that the Iranian navy was pursuing a policy of deterrence in the strategic waters — home to the world’s largest oil reserves. No further details on the submarine were given.
http://tinyurl.com/ezs2a

===
Serious technical challenges slow Iran's nuclear efforts :

Interviews with many of the world's leading nuclear analysts and a review of technical assessments show that Iran continues to wrestle with serious problems that have slowed its nuclear ambitions for more than two decades.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/05/news/iran.php

===
Iran and US: Diplomacy or war?:

The IAEA recently stated it "has not seen any [Iranian] diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons", a charge made by the Bush administration.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/460...C4CC9F29627.htm

===
In case you missed it?

U.S. endorsed Iranian plans to build massive nuclear energy industry:

In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford signed a directive that granted Iran the opportunity to purchase U.S. built reprocessing equipment and facilities designed to extract plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel.
http://teamliberty.net/id229.html

http://teamliberty.net/id229.html
U.S. endorsed Iranian plans to build massive nuclear energy industry

March 5, 2006 – In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford signed a directive that granted Iran the opportunity to purchase U.S. built reprocessing equipment and facilities designed to extract plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel.

When Gerald Ford assumed the Presidency in August 1974, the current Vice President of the United States, Richard B Cheney served on the transition team and later as Deputy Assistant to the President. In November 1975, he was named Assistant to the President and White House Chief of Staff, a position he held throughout the remainder of the Ford Administration.[1]

In August 1974, the current Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld served as Chairman of the transition to the Presidency of Gerald R. Ford. He then became Chief of Staff of the White House and a member of the President's Cabinet (1974-1975)[2] and was the Ford Administration’s Secretary of Defense from 1975–1977.

The current President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz served in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Gerald Ford.[3] Wolfowitz is considered as a prominent architect of the Bush Doctrine, which has come to be identified with a policy that permits pre-emptive war against potential aggressors before they are capable of mounting attacks against the United States.

According to Washington Post Staff Writer Dafna Linzer, “Ford’s team endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium – the two pathways to a nuclear bomb. Either can be shaped into the core of a nuclear warhead, and obtaining one or the other is generally considered the most significant obstacle to would-be weopons builders.”[4]

What the current Bush Administration is asserting, particularly through its news agency Fox News, or as I like to call it, the Fascist Opinion X-change, is that it needs to prevent Iran from achieving the exact same nuclear capabilities that President Ford and his key appointees, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were encouraging Iran to accomplish 30 years ago. Iran, a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, is guaranteed the right to develop peaceful nuclear power programs – regardless of whether the United States approves or disapproves the politics or political leadership of that country; a point that Iran has repeated over and over again. For 30 years, Iran has proclaimed that it needs nuclear power since its oil and gas supplies are limited, just like the United States, and therefore has the legal right to produce and operate nuclear power plants. Thirty years ago, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld agreed. Today, Cheney and Rumsfeld appear to be crawling out of their skins with uncontrollable militarized lust for control of Iranian oil fields via a U.S. occupied, Iran. The NEO-CON war drumbeaters have already devised their plans for the liberation of the people again, this time Iranian people, and making things all better, just like they have done in Iraq. Scary stuff, but it is true. In preparation, the Bush Administration has primed the mainstream media so effectively that 8 out of 10 Americans believe Iran poises an immediate nuclear threat to the United States. The President’s recent and risky travel to regional nuclear powers, Pakistan and India, no doubt also served as a strategic warning to those countries to prepare for the certain public backlash to be expected once the U.S. or Israel begins to drop bombs on Iran.

It is also worth noting that in 2000, the World Bank resumed making loans to Iran. As of June 30, 2004, the World Bank as made 51 loans valued at $2.6 billion to Iran. The World Bank gets its funds from the International Monetary Fund, which in turn, gets its money from member nation dues / contributions. The United States is required to contribute $37.2 billion per year into the IMF. The atrocious Federal Reserve Banking Cartel orchestrated this money scheme so that it can continue to print and loan astronomical numbers of debt notes. If the American people understood that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Congress have been funding many activities of the Islamic Republic of Iran, most would be skeptical of the federal government’s current claim that Iran’s 30 year old, U.S. sanctioned, nuclear program is somehow now an immediate threat to the security of the United States. The IMF and the World Bank create just enough degrees of separation to shield the government from the people recognizing that the federal government has fed the dog well that it now claims will bite if we do not ‘put it down’ with a pre-emptive strike.



With Wolfowitz at the helm of the World Bank, one has to wonder if once again the Federal Reserve has positioned itself to fund both sides of a warring conflict. One thing is certain; loaning money to fund both sides of a war is a perfected craft of the member banks of the Federal Reserve, which is interested only in loan collateral and interest payments. Patriotism is not part of the equation. What is most disturbing about the relationship between the Fed, IMF, and World Bank is that the $37.2 billion the U.S. is obligated to pay to the IMF annually, is actually secured by the American taxpayer. We the People, and the ability of the U.S. Congress to confiscate our wealth through that unconstitutional apparatus referred to as a federal income tax, makes loaning money to the Islamic Republic of Iran easy because if Iran defaults on its World Bank loans, the U.S. portions of the loans work their way back to the lender of last resort, which is the U.S. Congress. When the U.S. Congress responds to failed loans and failed banking institutions, they assume responsibility for the loan amount, and pass the burden of repayment onto the American people.



Finally, but very much part of the U.S. government’s charade aimed at deceiving the American people into believing that the U.S. has played no part in the development of Iran or its nuclear power programs, is the absolute economic threat that Iran poses to the global value of the U.S. dollar. Unless the U.S. intervenes, on March 20, 2006 the world will have the option of purchasing oil with euros instead of dollars through the opening of the Iranian Oil Bourse. The Iran Oil Bourse will be the third exchange in which global oil transactions will be executed. While financial analysts debate whether such an exchange operating solely in euros will have the potential to collapse the U.S. economy, the complete silence of the mainstream media regarding this most important untold story can be interpreted as a sign that this suggested economic threat is real. As the Bush Administration has proven itself to be the most dishonest, secretive presidency in the history of the United States, it has repeatedly demonstrated that the truth about its motives and agendas can only be found in what is not being reported to the American people. And if the Iran nuclear threat rhetoric is the firewall that the U.S. government is hiding the U.S. dollar global supremacy behind, than any military action in Iran will be solely on behalf of the member banks of the Federal Reserve – at the expense of American sons and daughters serving in the U.S. military and at the burden of the U.S. taxpayer who is already indebted to the federal government to the tune of $28 thousand, which is each and every American’s current share of the Federal Reserve / U.S. Congress banking cartel produced national debt - $28,000 and growing faster than ever!



Here’s a patriotic challenge and very American gut check for your consideration: Next time you hold your children and / or grandchildren, look them in the eye and explain to them how they are, right at this very moment, indebted to the federal government of the United States of America, to the tune of $28,000, and then ask yourself how you allowed it to happen. Sobering fact that feels better to ignore, does it not? But hell, we’re spreading democracy, right? I don’t think so, and hopefully soon, neither will you.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


[1] The White House, Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/, [Accessed March 4, 2006]

[2] United States Department of Defense, Biography – Donald H. Rumsfeld, http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/rumsfeld.html, [Accessed March 4, 2006]

[3] Washington Post, Realism, Rewarded, George F. Will, May 12, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...5051101815.html, [Accessed March 4, 2006]

[4] Washington Post, Past Arguments Don’t Square with Current Iran Policy, Dafna Linzer, March 27, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2005Mar26.html, [Accessed March 4, 2006]



Freelance writer / author, Ed Haas, is the editor and columnist for the Muckraker Report. Get smart. Read the Muckraker Report. [http://teamliberty.net] To learn more about Ed’s current and previous work, visit Crafting Prose. [http://craftingprose.com]


Copyright © 2002-2006 by MUCKRAKER REPORT.
All rights reserved. For re-print permission, contact Ed Haas: (843) 327-7598.

March 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Letting India in the Club?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
India is a country that had me at hello. Call me biased, but I have a soft spot for countries of one billion people, speaking a hundred different languages and practicing a variety of religions, whose people hold regular free and fair elections and, despite massive poverty, still produce generations of doctors and engineers who help to make the world a more productive and peaceful place. Sure, as today's bombings in India illustrate, it has its problems — but it is not Iraq. It is a beacon of tolerance and stability.

So I applaud President Bush's desire to form a deeper partnership with India. There is only one thing I would not do for that cause: endorse — in its current form — the nuclear arms deal that the Bush team just cut with New Delhi. I am all for finding a creative way to bring India into the world's nuclear family. India deserves to be treated differently than Iran. But we can't do it in a way that could melt down the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and foster a nuclear arms race in South Asia.

What's the problem? India has never signed the N.P.T., which is the international legal framework that limited the world's nuclear club to the U.S., China, Russia, Britain and France. For decades, U.S. policy has been very consistent: we do not sell civilian nuclear technology to any country that has not signed the N.P.T. And since that included India, India could never buy reactors, even for its civilian power needs, from America.

But with India eager to buy U.S. nuclear technology, and the U.S. eager to build India into an economic and geostrategic counterweight to China, the Bush team wanted — rightly — to find a way to get India out of the corner it put itself in when it first set off a nuclear blast in 1974. Under the Bush-India deal, India would designate 14 of its 22 nuclear power reactors as "civilian," to be put under international safeguards, leaving the other 8 free from inspections and able to produce as much bomb-grade plutonium as India wanted. In return, U.S. companies would be able to sell India civilian-use nuclear reactors and technology.

This is a troubling deal for two reasons. First, it could only undermine the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Yes, I know, the Bush team doesn't believe in treaties and says the treaty isn't restraining the rogues anyway. But this treaty is the legal basis by which we have been able to build coalitions against the nuclear rogues to restrain them from spreading W.M.D. One of the key legal bases for isolating Saddam Hussein was that he'd violated the N.P.T., which Iraq had signed. The legal basis by which we are building a coalition against Iran's going nuclear is the N.P.T. Under the N.P.T., we board ships suspected of carrying W.M.D. Japan, Brazil and Argentina all chose to forgo nuclear weapons to gain access to foreign nuclear technology by abiding by the N.P.T. What are they going to think if India gets a free pass?

What should we have done? Bob Einhorn, who has worked on nonproliferation for every administration since Nixon's, has the right idea: Tell India that it can have this deal — provided it does something hard that would clearly reinforce the global nonproliferation regime. And that would be halting all production of weapons-grade material, thereby capping India's stockpile of nuclear bomb ingredients where it is. That could be a lever to get Pakistan to do the same. The fewer bomb-making materials around, the less likely it is for any to fall into the hands of terrorists.

"The Bush administration proposed such a production cutoff in negotiations, but dropped the idea when India balked," Mr. Einhorn said. "India says it is willing to adopt the same responsibilities and practices as the other nuclear powers. It so happens that the five original nuclear powers — U.S., U.K., France, Russia and China — have all stopped producing fissile material for weapons. If we are going to bring India into the club, it should do so as well."

India says it needs to keep producing nuclear material to have a more credible deterrent. I can't judge that. All I know is that we should not go ahead with this deal until India is ready to halt its production of weapons-grade material.

"The problem the Bush administration faces in selling the nuclear deal is not, as the president has said, that 'some people just don't want to change' or that they are focused on outdated concerns," Mr. Einhorn argued. "People are willing to change. They want to support the president's India initiative, even modify longstanding policies. But they want to do it in a way that also serves an objective that is hardly outdated: preventing nuclear proliferation."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtm...07/ixworld.html

Russia 'to break ranks' in Iran nuclear row
By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor
(Filed: 07/03/2006)

Western countries were alarmed last night by signs that Russia was ready to break ranks and agree to Iran's demand to continue nuclear "research and development", fearing that this would make it easier for Teheran to develop nuclear weapons.

Briefed about the latest Russian proposals, Mohammed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), expressed the hope that a compromise could be reached "in the next week or so".


Mohammed ElBaradei: diplomacy
But Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, was expected to deliver a firm rejection of the Kremlin's blueprint at a meeting in Washington with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov last night.

"He is going to get a strong response from the Americans," said one western source. "The Russians are testing the waters and are desperate for a deal. But any kind of research or development will allow the Iranians to take significant steps towards mastering the technology."

The row threatens to undermine the fragile international unity reached last month, when America, Russia, China and European countries agreed that Iran should be reported to the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme.



Diplomats said that the UN might start discussing the issue next week. But the apparent change of heart by Moscow, which is a vital trading partner of Iran and a veto-wielding member of the Security Council, greatly complicates the strategy.

Speaking at the start of a meeting of the IAEA's board of governors in Vienna, Mr ElBaradei appeared to be playing for more time for a diplomatic solution.

"Everybody understands that escalation is not going to help a situation that is highly, highly volatile right now in the Middle East," he said.

Iran says that it is seeking to develop nuclear power for "peaceful purposes" but western countries suspect that it is trying to make nuclear weapons.

Last year Teheran ended its "voluntary" suspension of uranium enrichment, a process involving technology that could be used to produce nuclear fuel for power stations as well as fissile material for bombs.

As retaliation for an IAEA resolution that it should report Iran to the Security Council, Teheran also scaled back its co-operation with nuclear inspectors.

Western countries have supported a Russian initiative to resolve the crisis by moving the enrichment facilities from Iran to Russia, where the work would be overseen by Russian engineers to ensure that it produces only low-enriched uranium, for up to 10 years.

They had trusted Moscow to respect the "red line" that Iran should not be allowed independently to carry out any enrichment, including "research and development".

But diplomats say that Mr Lavrov is now proposing that Iran should be allowed to carry out small-scale research on a "cascade" system of up to 164 inter-connected uranium enrichment centrifuges.

This would make it difficult for Iran to produce useable quantities of enriched uranium, which usually requires thousands of machines to operate.

But western experts say that any work on enrichment will bring Iran closer to the ability to make weapons, perhaps at secret locations.

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/middlee...ter_1135599.php
Middle East News
IAEA chief calls for calm as report goes to Security Council
By Michael Logan
Mar 8, 2006, 19:00 GMT


Vienna - The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Wednesday called for a \'cool-headed\' approach as he prepared to send his report on Iran\'s nuclear programme to the UN Security Council.

\'Everybody from countries on the Security Council said that this was simply a new level of diplomacy,\' he said after the IAEA\'s 35-member board of governors finished considering his report.

\'We now need a cool-headed approach and less rhetoric,\' he continued. \'This situation won\'t be resolved tomorrow and we need a comprehensive political solution.\'

The IAEA referred Iran the Security Council at the last meeting, after the Islamic nation failed to dispel doubts that its nuclear programme was entirely peaceful and then restarted uranium enrichment after a period of voluntary suspension.

Enriched uranium can be used for civilian or military purposes.

Iran in response immediately stopped all voluntary cooperation with the agency under the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The UN Security Council agreed to defer action until after ElBaradei\'s report, and gave Iran a list of action points to improve upon during the interim period. ElBaradei\'s report said no real progress had been made.

While highlighting some differences amongst the governors in the interpretation of the report, ElBaradei said everybody was united in requesting Iran to show more transparency.

Iran, however, took the lack of a further resolution as showing divisions amongst nations.

\'There was no resolution and no decision,\' Javad Vaidi, Deputy Head of Iran\'s Supreme National Security Council (NSC), said after the meeting. \'This means there was no consensus against Iran.\'

ElBaradei, who on Monday seemed almost positive that a compromise deal could be struck this week, said he was still optimistic that things could move forward.

\'I had hoped that we would see something this week, but we are not working on a strict timeline,\' he said. \'Sooner or later all parties will realize an agreement is necessary.\'

The Director-General\'s optimism seemed to have based on the extension of a Russian plan to allow Iran to conduct some limited research and development on uranium enrichment while Russia provided the fuel for its civil needs.

However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday denied that a new proposal had been put forward.

France, Germany and the UK said that they hoped Iran would take up the Russian proposal in its original form, which did not include allowing Iran to research enrichment technology.

However, this looks unlikely to happen, as Vaidi echoed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad\'s statement that Iran would continue enrichment research \'according to its rights.\'

Iran\'s Ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, also emphasized this point, saying \'our research and development programme is irreversible.\'

However, both Vaidi and Soltanieh emphasized that Iran was committed to diplomacy, and would be open to any offers that could help resolve the impasse.

\'We will now review our strategy in face of the latest developments,\' Vaidi said.

Nonetheless, Vaidi found time to be truculent, throwing the words of US Vice President Dick Cheney, who said Iran could face \'harm and pain,\' back at him.

\'The US may be able to cause \'harm and pain\' but it is also susceptible to this,\' he said. \'If this is the path the US chooses, then let the ball roll.\'

ElBaradei said he would forward the report either Wednesday or Thursday, adding that the next steps were up to the UN Security Council.

Several countries called for the council to \'throw its weight behind the IAEA,\' but sanctions are not on the table.

As a first step, the Security Council should demand that Iran cooperate with the IAEA and fulfil the nuclear watchdog\'s demands for more transparency, US Ambassador to the IAEA Gregory Schulte said.

The US ambassador also said the IAEA should implement exceptional powers that would allow for special controls in Iran.

France, Germany and the UK in a joint statement said they believed that the time had come for the council to reinforce the IAEA\'s authority by calling on Iran to show more cooperation.

They added that Iran\'s progress simply was not good enough, and that that there could be a hidden threat in the Islamic nation. <!--page-->

\'The Board still cannot judge whether what it knows represents the full picture or is simply the tip of the iceberg,\' the nations said. \'We need hardly remind members that it was the part of the iceberg out of view that did for the Titanic.\'

ElBaradei said there may now be a \'division of labour,\' with the IAEA continuing its inspections and the council working on a political solution.

The next meeting of the IAEA will be in June.


© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

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March 9, 2006
Threats Rattle at Nuclear Meeting on Iran
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
VIENNA, March 8 — Negotiating over Iran's nuclear program has come to resemble an endless session of global poker. In the latest round, played Wednesday in the boardroom of the international nuclear agency here, distrust beat diplomacy.

The Iranian side upped the ante by blaming the United States for Iran's predicament — consideration of its nuclear activities in the United Nations Security Council next week — and threatened retaliation.

"The United States may have the power to cause harm and pain," Javad Vaeedi, a senior Iranian nuclear negotiator, told reporters at the end of the meeting. "But it is also susceptible to harm and pain. So if the United States wants to pursue that path, let the ball roll."

The threat did not seem to be an off-hand remark. The threat was contained, in almost the same wording and with the same mixed metaphor, in Iran's speech to the 35-nation board of the International Atomic Energy Agency and in a separate formal statement. In Iran meanwhile, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed that those who wanted to "violate the rights of the Iranian nation will quickly regret their actions."

But underscoring the fluid nature of Iran's policy making, even Iran's envoy in Vienna dodged when asked what letting the ball roll meant — perhaps using oil as a weapon or destabilizing the region, for example. Ali Asghar Soltainyeh, Iran's ambassador to the agency, said the matter would be "carefully" studied back home.

Wednesday's meeting was Iran's last chance to promise to curb its nuclear activities and avoid judgment by the Security Council.

Last month, the agency voted by an overwhelming majority to report Iran's case for judgment to the Security Council, but gave Iran a grace period of one final month to take remedial steps before the Security Council would take action.

Instead of giving in, Iran held firm to its position that it had the sovereign right to continue to make small amounts of nuclear fuel for research purposes at its vast uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.

Consideration of the Iran case by the agency on Wednesday was a diplomatic ritual. It came toward the end of the regularly scheduled quarterly session of the board, in which several nuclear issues were discussed. A number of board members, as well as Iran, delivered speeches on Iran's nuclear crisis, but no formal resolution was introduced.

Iran's oil minister, Kazem Vaziri-Hamaneh, delivered a very different message in Tehran. He assured an edgy oil market that Iran would continue to export crude even if economic sanctions were imposed. His remarks underscored the fluid nature of Iran's policy making.

Noting that sanctions "could affect" the oil market and raise prices, "it will not affect our decision to continue our supply," he told reporters on the fringes of a meeting of OPEC oil ministers. "Oil flow is continuing. The exports will not be stopped."

But the Bush administration was quick to focus on Iran's threats. "Provocative statements and actions only further isolate Iran from the rest of the world," the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said in New Orleans.

Iran's threats came a day after Vice President Dick Cheney declared, without any specifics, that the Security Council would "impose meaningful consequences" on Iran if it proceeded with uranium enrichment activities. He did not indicate how he was able to predict the outcome of Security Council deliberations before the body even met.

The Bush administration's envoy to the nuclear agency, Gregory L. Schulte, kept up the fierce tone on Wednesday, telling reporters, "The leadership in Tehran has thus far chosen a course of flagrant threats and phone negotiation."

Uncertainty about Iran's intentions, coupled with persistent threats from Washington about punitive measures against Iran, prompted pleas for caution and a return to negotiations.

"Everybody is looking forward to a political settlement," Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency's director and the most recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, told reporters Wednesday in Vienna at the end of the meeting on Iran. He added: "What we need at this stage is cool-headed approaches. We need for people to lower the rhetoric."

Dr. ElBaradei called on Iran to resolve outstanding issues of concern and restore the world's confidence "to get out of the hole that we're in today."

He underscored that in the long term, the United States held the key to building Iran's trust with the world. Stressing that it was a personal view, he said that once security issues began to be discussed with Iran, "the U.S. should be engaged into a dialogue."

In Washington, R. Nicholas Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, said action against Iran in the Security Council would start early next week.

The first step will be a "strong statement" about Iran, which means a statement by the Council president that lacks the force of a formal resolution. But Mr. Burns said that if the Iranian government did not "accede to the wishes of the international community, then of course we would have to look at possible targeted sanctions, which a number of countries are already beginning to explore."

The sanctions "will be specifically targeted to pressure the regime and Iran's nuclear and missile programs, rather than hurting the great majority of innocent Iranians," he said.

The outcome of Wednesday's meeting was a setback for Russia, which is opposed to using the Security Council as a vehicle to punish Iran. In recent days, Russia floated — then withdrew under American pressure — a face-saving proposal to restart negotiations that would have allowed Iran to conduct some small-scale uranium enrichment eventually.

In his speech to the board on Wednesday, Russia's ambassador, Grigory V. Berdennikov, called on Iran to "fully cooperate" with the nuclear agency "without delay" so that its case could be dealt with in a "normal, routine" way inside the I.A.E.A.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said Wednesday after meeting with the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, that "I don't think sanctions as a means to solve a crisis has ever achieved a goal in the recent history."



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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC10Ak04.html
Iran's turn for a 'coalition of the willing'
By Ehsan Ahrari

The Bush administration has conducted a calculated three-tiered campaign either to force Iran to lower its "threat potential" with regard to its nuclear program or, failing that, to bring about a regime change in Tehran. And within these tiers, other layers are unfolding that confirm Washington's unwavering determination to
resolve the matter, one way or the other, one plodding step at a time.

This is illustrated by the latest wrinkle in the crisis.

On Wednesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) wrapped up a two-day meeting by deciding to forward a report on Iran by its head, Mohamed ElBaradei, to the United Nations Security Council. The report found that after nearly three years of inspections, the IAEA remained unable to rule out the possibility that Iran still had secret nuclear activities, which could include work related to uranium enrichment and efforts to adapt weapons to carry a nuclear bomb.

Referral to the UN has always been the United States' goal in the years of international wrangling over Iran's nuclear program, which the US is convinced is aimed at producing nuclear weapons, something Tehran vigorously denies.

But now that moment has come, the US has to tread carefully. Russia and China, two of the permanent Security Council members with veto powers, along with the US, France and Britain, cannot be counted on to go along with any moves to impose direct UN sanctions on Iran.

Instead, as US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns told a congressional committee, the United States wanted a non-binding presidential statement to "condemn" Iran when the Security Council meets next week as Iran "directly threatens vital American interests". After that, he said, the US would move to a binding Chapter 7 resolution designed to "isolate" Tehran and "hopefully influence its behavior".

This, much like "the coalition of the willing" that invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, would involve the United States' allies "to show that they are willing to act [by imposing sanctions against Iran], should the words and resolutions of the United Nations not suffice", as Burns put it.

So the saga continues, all in line with the United States' orchestrated plan to see the matter through in terms of its three-tier strategy.

Tier 1: The European connection
This approach allowed the European Three (Britain, France and Germany - EU-3) to conduct the diplomatic campaign to persuade Iran to forgo its uranium-enrichment program, something that Tehran says it is entitled to under its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty rights.

The US never had any doubts that Iran would not listen to the Europeans. What was important was that this diplomatic campaign served a purpose, which was to create a semblance that, unlike in the case of Iraq in 2003, the administration of President George W Bush was not obsessed with carrying out a military operation to stop Iran in the potential development of nuclear weapons.

However, such an option was never far from the thinking of the US or its Israeli allies.

Tier 2: War of words
This involves gradually ratcheting up threatening and accusatory rhetoric toward Iran regarding its nuclear program and about its "real" intentions in Iraq.

US Vice President Dick Cheney continued his share of this campaign when he spoke to the pro-Israeli American-Israel Public Affairs Committee on Monday: "The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course [of enriching uranium], the international community is prepared to impose meaningful consequences."

Cheney continued, "For our part, the United States is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime. And we join other nations in sending that regime a clear message: we will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

The phrase "keeping all options on the table" has become a euphemism to threaten Iran with military action, either from the US or from Israel. Bush has used the phrase on a number of occasions.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld added his bit on Tuesday by accusing Iran of dispatching the Al-Quds Division of its Revolutionary Guard to "stir trouble inside Iraq". This division is understood to conduct military-style operations aimed at destabilizing a government - much like the US Special Forces - outside Iran. Even though Iran is suspected of influencing the outcome of Iraqi elections, that was the first time that any American official had accused it of using the Al-Quds Division.

The question is, why the ratcheting up of this rhetoric against Iran now? The most likely answer is that Iran and Syria have remained the most obvious targets of US criticism for all the insurgency-related trouble it is encountering in Iraq.

There is little doubt that such criticism has basis. At the same time, one has to remain highly conscious of the insatiable desire of US officials to find a scapegoat for their country's inability to tackle effectively the Iraqi insurgency.

A second reason might be that, by accusing Iran of using its own version of "special forces" in Iraq, the US might also be getting ready to indulge itself in "tit-for-tat" activities. American journalist Seymour Hersh accused the Bush administration several months ago of using Special Forces to monitor nuclear sites inside Iran. There have also been reports that Israel's Mossad is involved in similar activities by using Iraqi territory to launch espionage operations in Iran.

Iran has always been an influential actor in Iraq. The commonality of Shi'ite religion is its chief basis. From the perspectives of realpolitik, Iraq tried to influence the politics of Iran - or at least its Sunni minority population - while Iran regularly and unsuccessfully tried to influence Iraqi Shi'ites during the rule of Saddam.

Now that Shi'ites have emerged as the dominant group in Iraq, the influence of Iran is likely to be a permanent feature of Iraqi politics. That is a reality with which the Bush administration is having quite a bit of a problem, especially at a time when sectarian warfare is intensifying.

Tier 3: The bear and the panda
The third tier of the US campaign against Iran is to deal with, and neutralize, the positions of Russia and China.

Russia: Moscow belatedly decided to side with the US in terms of having Iran's dossier referred to the UN. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was in Washington on Tuesday, assuring Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that his country had decided to drop its proposal of allowing Iran to undertake small-scale nuclear enrichment on Iranian soil.

It seems President Vladimir Putin is no mood to irritate Bush further, so soon after making another highly controversial decision of inviting Hamas leaders to Moscow for consultations.

However, Russia has made it clear that it does not favor sanctions against Iran. "I don't think sanctions as a means to solve a crisis have ever achieved a goal in recent history," Lavrov was reported in the media as saying.

And interestingly, Lavrov said the discussions of how to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions reminded him of the run-up to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. "It looks so deja vu, you know," he said. "I don't believe we should engage in something which might become self-fulfilling prophecy."

China: Beijing remains a wild card in this episode. Thus far, it has made no objections about referring Iran to the UN Security Council. How it will behave now that this has happened is unclear. However, as in the case of Russia, it is hard to say whether China will stay quiet once the US decides to turn up the heat on Iran.

Given Russia's attitude, and the uncertainty of which way China might jump, the US has been forced to go the "alliance-building" route in terms of having sanctions imposed on Iran.

Tier 1 in this drama has played itself out, with the European initiative having served its purpose of appearing to give diplomacy a chance. The rhetoric of Tier 2 will continue unabated ("no options are off the table", "meaningful consequences"). With the US seeking action beyond the UN, Tier 3 now sees China and Russia to some extent sidelined.

So we move on to Tier 4: the building of another "alliance of the willing", with Lavrov's warnings of deja vu ringing in the ears.

Ehsan Ahrari is the CEO of Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, Virginia-based defense consultancy. He can be reached at eahrari@cox.net or stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His columns appear regularly in Asia Times Online. His website: www.ehsanahrari.com.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

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Why Iran's oil bourse can't break the buck
By F William Engdahl

A number of writings have recently appeared with the thesis that the announced plans of the Iranian government to institute a Tehran oil bourse, perhaps as early as this month, is the real hidden reason behind the evident march to war on Iran by the Anglo-American powers. The thesis is simply wrong for many reasons, not least that war on Iran has been in planning since the 1990s as an integral part of the United States' Greater Middle East strategy.

More significant, the oil-bourse argument is a red herring that diverts attention from the real geopolitical grounds behind the march toward war that have been detailed on this website, including in my piece, A high-risk game of nuclear chicken, which appeared in Asia Times Online on January 31.

In 1996, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, two neo-conservatives later to play an important role in formulation of Bush administration's Pentagon policy in the Middle East, authored a paper for then newly elected Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That advisory paper, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm", called on Netanyahu to make a "clean break from the peace process". Perle and Feith also called on Netanyahu to strengthen Israel's defenses against Syria and Iraq, and to go after Iran as the prop of Syria.

More than a year before President George W Bush declared his "shock and awe" operation against Iraq, he made his now-infamous January 2002 State of the Union address to Congress in which he labeled Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as a member of the "axis of evil" trio. This was well before anyone in Tehran was even considering establishing an oil bourse to trade oil in various currencies.

The argument by those who believe the Tehran oil bourse would be the casus belli, the trigger pushing Washington down the road to potential thermonuclear annihilation of Iran, seems to rest on the claim that by openly trading oil to other nations or buyers in euros, Tehran would set into motion a chain of events in which nation after nation, buyer after buyer, would line up to buy oil no longer in US dollars but in euros. That, in turn, goes the argument, would lead to a panic selling of dollars on world foreign-exchange markets and a collapse of the role of the dollar as reserve currency, one of the "pillars of Empire". Basta! There goes the American Century down the tubes with the onset of the Tehran oil bourse.

Some background considerations
That argument fails to convince for a number of reasons. First, in the case of at least one of the oil-bourse theorists, the argument is based on a misunderstanding of the process I described in my book, A Century of War, regarding the creation in 1974 of "petrodollar recycling", a process with which then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger was deeply involved, in the wake of the 400% oil-price hike orchestrated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

The US dollar then did not become a "petrodollar", although Kissinger spoke about the process of "recycling petrodollars". What he was referring to was the initiation of a new phase of US global hegemony in which the petrodollar export earnings of OPEC oil lands would be recycled into the hands of the major New York and London banks and re-lent in the form of US dollar loans to oil-deficit countries such as Brazil and Argentina, creating what soon came to be known as the Latin American debt crisis.

The dollar at that time had been a fiat currency since August 1971 when president Richard Nixon first abrogated the Bretton Woods Treaty and refused to redeem US dollars held by foreign central banks for gold bullion. The dollar floated against other major currencies, falling more or less until it was revived by the 1973-74 oil-price shock.

What the oil shock achieved for the sagging dollar was a sudden injection of global demand from nations confronted with 400% higher oil-import bills. At that time, by postwar convention and convenience, as the dollar was the only reserve currency held around the world other than gold, oil was priced by all OPEC members in dollars as a practical exigency.

With the 400% price rise, nations such as France, Germany and Japan suddenly found reason to try to buy their oil directly in their own currencies - French francs, Deutschmarks or Japanese yen - to lessen the pressure on their rapidly declining reserves of trade dollars. The US Treasury and the Pentagon made certain that did not happen, partly with some secret diplomacy by Kissinger, bullying threats, and a whopping-big US military agreement with the key OPEC producer, Saudi Arabia. At that time it helped that the shah of Iran was seen in Washington to be a vassal of Kissinger.

The point was not that the US dollar became a "petro" currency. The point was that the reserve status of the dollar, now a paper currency, was bolstered by the 400% increase in world demand for dollars to buy oil. But that was only a part of the dollar story. In 1979, after the accession to power of the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, oil prices shot through the roof for the second time in six years. Yet, paradoxically, later that year the dollar began a precipitous free-fall, not a rise. It was no "petrodollar".

Foreign dollar-holders began dumping their dollars as a protest against the foreign policies of the administration of US president Jimmy Carter. It was to deal with that dollar crisis that Carter was forced to bring in Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve in 1979. In October 1979 Volcker gave the dollar another turbocharge by allowing interest rates in the US to rise some 300% in weeks, to well over 20%. That in turn forced global interest rates through the roof, triggered a global recession, mass unemployment and misery. It also "saved" the dollar as sole reserve currency. The dollar was not a "petrodollar". It was the currency of issue of the greatest superpower, a superpower determined to do what it needed to keep it that way.

The F-16 dollar backing
Since 1979 the US power establishment, from Wall Street to Washington, has maintained the status of the dollar as unchallenged global reserve currency. That role, however, is not a purely economic one. Reserve-currency status is an adjunct of global power, of the US determination to dominate other nations and the global economic process. The United States didn't get reserve-currency status by a democratic vote of world central banks, nor did the British Empire in the 19th century. They fought wars for it.

For that reason, the status of the dollar as reserve currency depends on the status of the United States as the world's unchallenged military superpower. In a sense, since August 1971 the dollar is no longer backed by gold. Instead, it is backed by F-16s and Abrams battle tanks, operating in some 130 US bases around the world, defending liberty and the dollar.

A euro challenge?
For the euro to begin to challenge the reserve role of the US dollar, a virtual revolution in policy would have to take place in Euroland. First the European Central Bank (ECB), the institutionalized, undemocratic institution created by the Maastricht Treaty to maintain the power of creditor banks in collecting their debts, would have to surrender power to elected legislators. It would then have to turn on the printing presses and print euros like there was no tomorrow. That is because the size of the publicly traded Euroland government-bond market is still tiny in comparison with the huge US Treasury market.

As Michael Hudson explains in his brilliant and too-little-studied work Super Imperialism, the perverse genius of the US global dollar hegemony was the realization, in the months after August 1971, that US power under a fiat dollar system was directly tied to the creation of dollar debt. The US debt and the trade deficit were not the "problem", they realized. They were the "solution".

The US could print endless quantities of dollars to pay for foreign imports of Toyotas, Hondas, BMWs or other goods in a system in which the trading partners of the United States, holding paper dollars for their exports, feared a dollar collapse enough to continue to support the dollar by buying US Treasury bonds and bills. In fact in the 30 years since abandoning gold exchange for paper dollars, the US dollars in reserve have risen by a whopping 2,500%, and the amount grows at double-digit rates today.

This system continued into the 1980s and 1990s unchallenged. US policy was one of crisis management coupled with skillful and coordinated projection of US military power. Japan in the 1980s, fearful of antagonizing its US nuclear-umbrella provider, bought endless volumes of US Treasury debt even though it lost a king's ransom in the process. It was a political, not an investment, decision.

The only potential challenge to the reserve role of the dollar came in the late 1990s with the European Union decision to create a single currency, the euro, to be administered by single central bank, the ECB. Europe appeared to be emerging as a unified, independent policy voice of what French President Jacques Chirac then called a multipolar world. Those multipolar illusions vanished with the unpublicized decision of the ECB and national central banks not to pool their gold reserves as backing for the new euro. That decision not to use gold as backing came amid a heated controversy over Nazi gold and alleged wartime abuses by Germany, Switzerland, France and other European countries.

Since the shocks of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing declaration of a US "global war on terror", including a unilateral decision to ignore the United Nations and the community of nations and go to war against a defenseless Iraq, few countries have even dared to challenge dollar hegemony. The combined defense spending of all nations of the EU today pales by comparison with the total of current US budgeted and unbudgeted military spending. US defense outlays will reach an official, staggering level of US$663 billion in the 2007 fiscal year. The combined annual EU spending amounts to a mere $75 billion, and is tending to decline, in part because of ECB Maastricht deficit pressures on its governments.

So today, at least for the present, there are no signs of Japanese, EU or other dollar holders engaging in dollar-asset liquidation. Even China, unhappy as it is with Washington's bully politics, seems reluctant to rouse the American dragon to fury.

The origins of the oil bourse
The idea of creating a new trading platform in Iran to trade oil and to create a new crude-oil benchmark apparently originated with the former director of the London International Petroleum Exchange, Chris Cook. In a January 21 article in Asia Times Online (What the Iran 'nuclear issue' is really about), Cook explained the background. Describing a letter he had written in 2001 to the governor of the Iranian Central Bank, Dr Mohsen Nourbakhsh, Cook explained what he advised then:
In this letter I pointed out that the structure of global oil markets massively favors intermediary traders and particularly investment banks, and that both consumers and producers such as Iran are adversely affected by this. I recommended that Iran consider as a matter of urgency the creation of a Middle Eastern energy exchange, and particularly a new Persian Gulf benchmark oil price.

It is therefore with wry amusement that I have seen a myth being widely propagated on the Internet that the genesis of this "Iran bourse" project is a wish to subvert the US dollar by denominating oil pricing in euros.

As anyone familiar with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will know, the denomination of oil sales in currencies other than the dollar is not a new subject, and as anyone familiar with economics will tell you, the denomination of oil sales is merely a transactional issue: what matters is in what assets (or, in the case of the United States, liabilities ) these proceeds are then invested.
A full challenge to the domination of the US dollar as the world central-bank reserve currency entails a de facto declaration of war on the "full-spectrum dominance" of the United States today. The mighty members of the European Central Bank Council well know this. The heads of state of every EU country know this. The Chinese leadership as well as the Japanese and Indians know this. So does Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Until some combination of those Eurasian powers congeal in a cohesive challenge to the unbridled domination of the United States as sole superpower, there will be no euro or yen or even Chinese yuan challenging the role of the dollar. The issue is of enormous importance, as it is vital to understand the true dynamics bringing the world to the brink of possible nuclear catastrophe today.

As a small ending note, a good friend in Oslo recently forwarded me an article from the Norwegian press. At the end of December, Sven Arild Andersen, director of the Oslo bourse, announced he was fed up with depending on the London oil bourse trading oil in dollars. Norway, a major oil producer, selling most of its oil into euro countries in the EU, he said, should set up its own oil bourse and trade its oil in euros. Will Norway - a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - become the next target for the wrath of the Pentagon?

F William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). He can be reached through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

March 10, 2006
Bush Says Diplomacy Way to Tackle Iran
By REUTERS
Filed at 2:01 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday called Iran a ``grave national security concern,'' but said he sought a diplomatic way to cap its nuclear goals.

A hardline Iranian cleric told a Friday prayers congregation in Tehran earlier that Bush was using the nuclear issue to further his goal of overthrowing the Islamic Republic.

The U.N. Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions, will tackle Iran's case early next week after the U.N. nuclear watchdog sent it a report this week saying it could not verify that Iran's atomic activities were purely peaceful.

Bush said U.S. concerns were the result of Iran's stated desire to destroy Israel and Washington's belief that Tehran wants to build nuclear bombs -- something the Iranians deny.

``You begin to see an issue of grave national security concern,'' Bush told a newspaper group.

``Therefore it's very important for the United States to continue to work with others to solve these issues diplomatically, deal with these threats today,'' he said.

The Security Council will not rush into sanctions. It is likely first to urge Iran to accept International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demands that it halt all uranium enrichment work.

Iran, which has fought to avoid being taken to the council, suspects Bush is only using the nuclear issue as a pretext.

``Bush talks of regime change or change of its behavior, which is the same. It means no Islamic regime,'' said senior cleric Ahmad Khatami in a sermon in which he also denounced the European Union as a ``puppet of U.S. policies.''

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana spoke for the first time publicly of possible sanctions against Iran.

``I do not rule out sanctions, but it depends on what kind of sanctions they are,'' Austria's Der Standard daily quoted him as saying. ``We certainly do not want to hurt the Iranian people.''

However, asked if EU foreign ministers meeting in Salzburg would discuss the issue, he told reporters: ``No. We are talking about a gradual approach to give some room still for diplomacy.''

TARGETED SANCTIONS

British Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed to pursue Iran's case through the Security Council, saying a failure by Tehran to meet its global obligations would lead to ``a serious situation.''

European diplomats say that if Iran is impervious to U.N. demands, council measures might start with foreign travel bans and asset freezes aimed at Iranian leaders and their families.

The United States, which has its own sweeping sanctions in place against Iran, has pressed for tougher international action to isolate the Islamic Republic. Iran has threatened to retaliate by inflicting ``harm and pain'' on the West.

Bush said he assumed the threat was related to the U.S. need for imported energy resources. ``For national security purposes we have got to become... not addicted to oil,'' he added.

The International Energy Agency said it would be able to plug the gap in global oil supply for several months if Iran, the world's No. 4 oil exporter, halted oil exports.

``The IEA would be capable of compensating for a number of months,'' President Claude Mandil said. ``According to my knowledge, OPEC would not be able to compensate in totality.''

The EU wants to keep the focus on the widely shared goal of stopping Iran acquiring nuclear bomb technology.

Ambassadors from the Security Council's five permanent members -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- meet again on Friday to draft a statement the Western powers hope will be adopted by the 15-nation world body next week.

Russia and China strongly oppose sanctions on Iran.

``Our goal is political, not at all punitive,'' French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said when asked about sanctions.

The EU, led by France, Britain and Germany, started talks with Iran in 2003 in the hope of convincing it to scrap uranium enrichment, which can produce fuel for power plants or weapons, in exchange for economic and political incentives.

The talks collapsed in August after Iran ended a suspension of enrichment. The latest bid to revive them failed last Friday.

EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said there was still room for a negotiated solution based on a Russian proposal for Iran to enrich uranium on Russian soil.

Iran, which concealed its nuclear work from the IAEA for 18 years, insists on continuing some enrichment at home.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov this week reiterated Moscow's opposition to hasty steps in the Iran crisis.

``As far as I know, the IAEA general director believes that the agency's role is far from being exhausted,'' he said in an interview with state-run Rossiya television on Wednesday.



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Iran Rejects Russian Uranium Proposal

By Karl Vick

TEHRAN, March 12 -- Iran said Sunday it has rejected a Russian proposal to enrich uranium on its behalf, closing the door on an option that offered a possible diplomatic solution to international concerns over Tehran's nuclear program.

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