EU diplomats seek Iran nuclear solution Guardian Unlimited
British, French and German diplomats representing the European Union today held talks with Iran to try to find a diplomatic route out of the crisis over its nuclear programme. The closed-door meeting with Iran's deputy nuclear negotiator, Javad Vaedi, was not a formal negotiating session but was intended to see if there were any grounds for resuming formal talks. The EU believes a Russian proposal for it to enrich uranium for Iran could be the way forward.
Iran: Nuclear Crisis Features In Two European Gatherings Payvand
Important Week Zaman Online
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Iran Says Will Use Ballistic Missiles If Attacked
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Iran_Says_...f_Attacked.html

Tehran (AFP) Jan 28, 2006 - "Iran has a ballistic missile capability of 2,000 kilometres (1,280 miles). We do not intend to attack any country, but if we are attacked we have the capability to give an effective response. Our policy is defensive," General Yahya Rahim Safavi told state television.

China Could Be Brought Into Moscow Talks On Iran
http://www.sinodaily.com/reports/China_Cou...ks_On_Iran.html

Bush to say wants Iranians to have greater freedom:

President George W. Bush will offer words of support on Tuesday in his State of the Union address to Iranians who want greater freedom as U.S. diplomats push for sanctions over the Islamic republic's nuclear program.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N30290443.htm

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Iran gives UN inspectors access to nuclear site:

UN nuclear inspectors have visited sites related to the former Lavizan military complex in Iran in what is a key concession in the UN investigation of the Islamic Republic's contested nuclear program, diplomats have told AFP.
http://tinyurl.com/d9r73

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Iran has inalienable right to nuclear energy :

Iran has an "inalienable right" to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes such as the production of electric energy and the enrichment of uranium for its nuclear reactors. Could it be that Iran's plan for an oil exchange trading in euros is the real issue? Or is it Israel?
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp...&Cat=14&Num=001

January 31, 2006
How to Listen for the Sound of Plutonium
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 — In March 2004, the science and technology directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency called a secret meeting of hundreds of the government's top experts in nuclear intelligence to address a problem that had bedeviled Washington for decades: how to know, with precision, when a country is about to cross the line and gain the ability to build an atomic bomb.

The aim of the two-day conference was to reinvigorate the nation's atomic espionage efforts, not with spies on the ground or satellites in space but with a new generation of advanced technologies meant to detect the faintest clues of nuclear activity.

The meeting, said an official who attended, "was to galvanize people to say, 'We recognize this is a big problem and we need to get everybody thinking about it.' "

"There was a hope that, out of this, promising new approaches might be identified," the official continued.

The experts discussed a range of potential tools, including new ways to monitor electric power lines for the signature of high-speed centrifuges as they purify uranium and lasers that can track radioactive dust. Also on the agenda were more fanciful items, like robotic butterflies that can monitor an atomic site while appearing to flutter by innocuously.

Nearly two years later, federal officials and scientists say that meeting and other secret actions have accelerated the government's efforts to develop new atomic espionage technologies. The research focuses on better detection of four basic, but inconspicuous, signatures that covert nuclear facilities and materials can emit: distinctive chemicals, sounds, electromagnetic waves and isotopes, or forms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons, a subatomic building block.

Now, the Iranian crisis could pose a big test of how far that technology has come. On Thursday in Vienna, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency is to consider what to do about Tehran's recent decision to restart its enrichment of uranium, which many Western nations see as a major step toward the acquisition of nuclear arms.

American officials say better remote monitoring — some of which appears to have already begun— could prove crucial if Iran follows through on its threat to limit cooperation with international inspectors.

At a minimum, the crisis is putting more pressure on intelligence agencies to find out if Iran harbors secret nuclear sites. And after Iraq, there is huge pressure to get it right.

It is hard to say which, if any, of the new ideas have come to fruition because the work is highly classified. So too, it is unclear how well an improved generation of monitoring devices are yet helping American intelligence officials see into Iran, North Korea or other states suspected of trying to build atomic weapons. The C.I.A. declined comment.

However, officials say that the program has become a high priority and that the work is now spread across the C.I.A., the Energy Department and the Defense Department, as well as government laboratories, military contractors and universities.

One participant in the C.I.A. meeting characterized the effort as a bureaucratic overreaction prompted by a string of recent intelligence failures. "We're throwing money at it," he said. "We've created a whole business of people looking for needles in haystacks." That participant, like many other scientists and officials, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the effort's secrecy.

One topic at the C.I.A. meeting was tiny monitoring devices that can fly. Federal researchers are creating new classes of such remote-controlled aircraft, pushing the art of miniaturization in what are known as microflyers. Discussion focused on whether such devices could carry minuscule sensors to sniff out atomic activity.

That effort is embryonic, experts say. The government's research program centers more immediately on developing larger but still stealthy sensors that can detect the making and manipulation of such key atomic ingredients as uranium hexafluoride gas, which is fed into centrifuges as part of the enrichment process.

One way to track the gas is to detect atmospheric rises in radioactivity as well as the uranium 235 isotope, which is unique to enrichment. Federal experts say research on that goal is under way at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as the Los Alamos and Livermore weapons labs. Steve Wampler, a Livermore spokesman, said the California laboratory could say nothing "beyond that the work is an important element for proliferation detection."

Another goal, officials say, is to develop remote means of tracking plumes from clandestine sites that leak the chemical byproducts of uranium hexafluoride, revealing the presence of the toxic gas. "That's the smoking gun," a nuclear expert said.

Sidney Drell, a Stanford University physicist who has long advised the federal government on national security issues, lauded the overall effort. "It's important to get, as early as possible, reliable evidence on what may be clandestine facilities," he said. "Being able to develop better ways to do things like this is a high-priority issue."

Tehran's acts have given sudden prominence not only to research meant to improve atomic espionage but, in less classified forms, to aid the nuclear inspectors of the United Nations' I.A.E.A.

Even the less secret versions of such technologies can be quite exotic, including sensors that track ghostly particles known as antineutrinos — a kind of antimatter.

There are signs that atomic espionage is already aiding Washington's hunt for clandestine Iranian sites. Late last year, Iran publicly complained to the United Nations about two unmanned American aircraft that it said crashed on its territory. In interviews, two federal intelligence experts said such drone aircraft, launched from Iraq, periodically spy on suspected nuclear sites.

"They look for all kinds of emissions," said a senior intelligence official.

The United States has practiced various forms of atomic surveillance since the earliest days of the cold war, flying jets around the globe to pick up radioactive dust from atomic testing, or to detect faint emissions from plants harvesting plutonium for bomb fuel.

In 1991, the research began focusing more intensely on uranium, the other main path to building nuclear weapons. This came about when United Nations inspectors discovered, after the gulf war, that the United States and its allies had vastly underestimated Iraq's progress on developing a uranium bomb.

In the mid-1990's, the I.A.E.A. conducted studies to investigate the monitoring of air, water and land for clues. A 1999 agency report found that uranium releases might be detected at distances of up to 64 kilometers, or 40 miles, but cautioned that, over wide areas, pinpointing the source would be difficult.

"The conclusion was, 'Yes, it's technically feasible,' " recalled Jill Cooley, a senior I.A.E.A. official. "However, it was seen as being extremely expensive to implement," requiring dense arrays of detectors to monitor target areas successfully. "For us, it didn't seem like the bang was worth the buck."

The landscape changed drastically by early 2004. After invading Iraq, the United States came to realize that it had overestimated Saddam Hussein's efforts to make unconventional arms. At the same time, intelligence officials saw that they had seriously underestimated the damage done by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear engineer who had secretly supplied nuclear know-how to Iran, Libya, North Korea and perhaps other countries.

The twin failures produced a surge of interest in improving the methods of atomic espionage.

The C.I.A. meeting, held on March 18 and 19 of 2004 at the Virginia offices of Science Applications International Corporation, a federal contractor, came just two months after Dr. Khan's arrest. Its speakers included Dr. Duane F. Starr, an expert on nuclear proliferation at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, a federal complex that specializes in how best to gather intelligence on the use of uranium abroad.

A recommendation of the meeting was that the United States build a secret center where scientists could practice monitoring the kind of first-generation centrifuges sold by Dr. Khan.

"The notion of a test bed was really pushed," a participant recalled, using the phrase to describe a centrifuge facility where American researchers could conduct surveillance experiments. "The problem was that it was seen as expensive, really expensive."

Although the United States obtained some of these centrifuges from Libya after it agreed to end its nuclear program, it is not known whether the government has used them as part of a testing facility.

Several intelligence experts said they believed Iran was well aware of the range of remote sensors trained on its corners, even if it did not know their specific technical capabilities, and was probably engaged in devising countermeasures. It is a kind of technological intelligence race.

Robert Joseph, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, who has led the drive within the administration to find new ways to pressure Iran and North Korea, called the research vital.

"There is an urgency and imperative to invest in the technology to determine which approaches are best," he said in an interview. While declining to discuss specific methods, he added: "Some will work. Some will not. But it is the geopolitics that makes this urgent."

Experts inside and outside the Bush administration agree that the new technologies, even if successful, are no substitute for the human inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who have the right, at least on paper, to examine closely suspect facilities.

The Iranians, say I.A.E.A. inspectors, are acutely aware that many if not all detection technologies work best in close proximity to nuclear facilities. That is one reason Iran's recent threat to stop cooperating with inspectors worries Western nations that are trying to negotiate limits on Tehran's nuclear efforts.

"There is a lot we can now do with remote sensing," a senior government official said recently. "But it is very hard when you talk about activities going on in buildings that don't generate a unique signature. There are real limits to what you can do."

David E. Sanger reported from Washington for this article and William J. Broad from New York and Vienna.



Copyright 2006The New York Times

January 31, 2006
China and Russia Support Sending Iran Case to U.N.
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
LONDON, Tuesday, Jan. 31 — The United States and Europe, after hours of negotiations on Iran, won support from Russia and China early Tuesday to refer Iran's nuclear activities to the United Nations Security Council this week, but with a promise that the Council would not act on the question for at least a month.

Bush administration officials described the decision, by senior envoys and ministers from the major nuclear powers and Germany and the European Union, as a breakthrough in the effort to press Iran to give up nuclear activities that the West suspects to be a nuclear weapons program.

"This is certainly the most decisive action taken on Iran by the international community in years," a senior State Department official said at a briefing. "This is a clear signal that the international community are saying, 'Enough.' "

A statement this morning by the top foreign officials of China, Russia, the United States and leading European countries also called on Iran to restore the suspension of all uranium enrichment, including activities restarted this month, when it broke internationally monitored seals at a plant in Natanz.

The statement on Iran, capping a day of urgent activity by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other diplomats, was issued after meetings on what the West should do after the victory of Hamas last week in the Palestinian elections. In those sessions, the United States joined with Europe, Russia and the United Nations to rule out an immediate suspension of aid to the Palestinian Authority. American officials said international aid could continue until Hamas took office in a few months.

The decision reflects an effort to buy time to avert an immediate crisis in the Midddle East, where the Palestinian Authority is nearly bankrupt.

On Iran, the State Department official, briefing under ground rules requiring anonymity, said the decision was significant because it was the first time Russia and China had joined in formally demanding that Iran step back from the crisis it helped provoke.

Russia and China had resisted the American and European demand for an early "referral" from the International Atomic Energy Agency to the Security Council, fearing that Iran would follow through on threats to expel international inspectors. Russia had proposed to avoid a confrontation by having the issue sent to the Security Council, as a matter of information, but without formally transferring it in a manner that paved the way for Council action.

The compromise worked out on Monday night and Tuesday morning, at the home of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, was that Iran would indeed be referred — the word used was "reported" —reflecting an actual transfer of its dossier, but that the Council would not act until an atomic energy agency meeting in March.

The compromise on the technical question of an informational report versus a formal referral, hammered out over dinner at Mr. Straw's house, appeared to mean that Russia and China would not simply let the international atomic agency act, but also possibly vote in favor of it rather than abstain.

A "yes" vote by them was the "clear implication" of the statement their foreign ministers signed, the American official said.

The action on Iran was the culmination of months of efforts by the United States, as well as Britain France and Germany, to ratchet up the pressure on Iran and rebuff its threats to halt what little cooperation remains on its nuclear programs.

Earlier on Monday in Brussels, the foreign ministers of those countries as well as the ministers of the European Union, met with a top Iranian envoy, who presented a new proposal to avert a confrontation. But European and American officials said Iran continued to insist on carrying out activities opposed in the West.

In meeting on the Palestinian government issue, the envoys noted that President Mahmoud Abbas and many of his ministers remained in office while Hamas assembled its government. The diplomats urged "measures to facilitate the work of the caretaker government to stabilize public finances" and institute reforms.

"There is a commitment here to try and live up to the obligations that were undertaken to the caretaker government, which Abu Mazen oversees," Ms. Rice said, referring to Mr. Abbas. "We do believe that Abu Mazen deserves to be supported."

As expected, the envoys also warned that most Western donors would cut off aid if Hamas took power and failed to renounce its commitment to violence and the destruction of Israel. American officials said they were far from disappointed over the failure of the statement to commit all countries to halting aid. "This is going to ring bells," a State Department official said, referring to the likely reaction by Hamas. "This is a very tough statement."

The Palestinian Authority receives $1 billion a year from outside donations, much of it to pay salaries and subsidize food, health and education. Its expenses run $600 million a year, partly because it raised salaries last year in an effort to shore up Mr. Abbas's Fatah Party.

At least officially, Ms. Rice and the other top officials in the so-called quartet that supervises the Middle East peace talks continue to hold out hope that Hamas might change its ways when it is in office. The officials hold that view despite many statements by Hamas leaders that they have no such intention.

A senior European official said the purpose of buying time was not only to head off a crisis, but also to avoid prejudging Hamas as it assembles its government. That could include officials who are not party members with whom the West could deal in spite of labeling Hamas itself as a terrorist organization, said the official, who was not authorized to speak for the record.

The envoys meeting here belong to the foursome, the European Union, Russia, the United States and the United Nations. Its main contribution has been a "road map" plan that calls for reciprocal steps by Israel and the Palestinians leading to a Palestinian state. For nearly three years, however, neither side has completed even the first phase. Since the Hamas victory, President Bush and Ms. Rice have been saying that the United States will cut off aid unless a Hamas-led government renounces its longstanding tenets on armed struggle with Israel.

Mr. Bush reiterated that point on Monday, saying at a cabinet meeting, "The Hamas Party has made it clear that they do not support the right of Israel to exist, and I have made it clear that so long as that's their policy that we will not support a Palestinian government made up of Hamas."

American officials have suggested that there is no intention of provoking a quick crisis. "We want to see them afloat, we want them to have a government, and we want the next government to deal with the reality that it's got to govern," said the senior State Department official who does not have the authority to speak for the record.

Ms. Rice has not made clear what aid Washington would provide or withhold if a Hamas-led government takes over. She left open the possibility that the administration might permit some programs to meet Palestinians' "humanitarian needs."



Copyright 2006The New York Times

Security Council to take up Iran nuclear issue
The United States and other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council agreed Monday that Iran should be hauled before that powerful body over its disputed nuclear program.
http://g.msn.com/0MN2ET7/2?http://www.msnb...=EmailThis&CE=1

UN Action Agreed for Iran Los Angeles Times
China and Russia join the US and Europeans in recommending that the nation be reported over its nuclear activity. Sanctions are possible. The five veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council reached agreement early today that the U.N. nuclear agency should report Iran to the Security Council for possible sanctions over its uranium enrichment program. But the foreign ministers of permanent council members China, Russia, the U.S., France and Britain — as well as Germany and the European Union — said that no Security Council action against the Tehran government should be considered until March.
Major Powers Agree on Security Council Referral of Iran Nuclear ... Voice of America
World powers to refer Iran to UNSC, but postpone action Malayala Manorama
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January 31, 2006
Iran: No Legal Basis for U.N. Sanctions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:32 a.m. ET

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's vice president said Tuesday that the United States and the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council had no legal basis for hauling Iran before the world body over its disputed nuclear program.

Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who is also Iran's nuclear chief, suggested there was still a chance the International Atomic Energy Agency would not go along with the five members.

''The biggest problem for the West is that they can't find any (legal) justification to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council,'' the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency quoted Aghazadeh as saying.

The U.N. nuclear agency is holding a meeting of its 35-nation board in Vienna on Thursday to consider referring Iran's nuclear file to the Security Council, which has the authority to impose sanctions against Iran.

Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States decided at a meeting of their foreign ministers in London on Tuesday to call on the agency to report Iran to the council.

But they also agreed that the Security Council should wait until March to take up Iranian nuclear file after a formal report on Tehran's activities from the atomic agency.

Last week Iran sent its top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, to Moscow and Beijing to seek Russian and Chinese support against the Western drive to refer Iran to the Security Council.

The United States accuses Iran of trying to build atomic weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is only for generating electricity.

Iran broke U.N. seals at a uranium enrichment plant ib Jan. 10 and said it would resume nuclear fuel research after a two-year freeze. Tehran said the research would involve what it called limited uranium enrichment, but the action raised fears Tehran was using its pursuit of atomic power as a front for a nuclear weapons program.

European foreign ministers met with Iran's deputy nuclear negotiator in Brussels on Monday but said they failed to make progress.



Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

Iran Condemns Call for UN Action on Its Nuclear Program
By VOA News
31 January 2006


UN Security Council (file photo)
Iran says any move to bring its nuclear standoff with the West to the U.N. Security Council would mean the end of diplomatic efforts to resolve the issue.

Senior Iranian officials also say the five permanent Security Council members have no legal justification to have Iran referred to the council.

Hours earlier, foreign ministers from Britain, France, Russia, China and the United States - supported by Germany and the European Union - issued a statement saying the International Atomic Energy Agency should vote Thursday to refer Iran to the council.

The statement also said any council action should wait until the IAEA director general, Mohamed elBaradei, delivers a report about Iran's activities in early March.

Iran has previously threatened to break off all cooperation with the U.N. nuclear agency and resume uranium enrichment - the most sensitive phase of the atomic fuel cycle - if the Security Council steps into the dispute.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.

January 31, 2006
Iran Warns U.N. Referral Would End Diplomacy
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:33 a.m. ET

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran struck back Tuesday at the Big Five's decision to refer the country's nuclear file to the Security Council, saying the move has no legal justification and would be the end of diplomacy.

At a London meeting that lasted into the early hours of Tuesday, envoys of the United States, Britain, China, France and Russia agreed to recommend that the International Atomic Energy Agency report Iran to the U.N. Security Council.

They also decided the Security Council should wait until March to take up Iran's nuclear file after a formal report on Tehran's activities from the U.N. agency, which meets Thursday in Vienna.

''Reporting Iran's dossier to the U.N. Security Council will be unconstructive and the end of diplomacy,'' said Iran's leading nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani. State television quoted him as sayiny Iran still believes the issue can be resolved peacefully.

Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who also runs Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, said it was difficult to predict how the IAEA meeting on Thursday would develop, the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency reported.

''The biggest problem for the West is that they can't find any (legal) justification to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council,'' ISNA quoted him as saying.

Larijani also reproached Europe for the London decision, which was taken at the home of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and attended by the foreign minister of Germany and the foreign policy chief of the European Union.

''Europeans should pay more attention. Iran has called for dialogue and is moving in the direction of reaching an agreement through peaceful means,'' Larijani said.

Hours earlier, British, French and German representatives had met Larijani's deputy, Javad Vaedi, in Brussels for last-ditch talks on the dispute, but failed to make any progress.

Last week, Larijani flew to Moscow and Beijing to seek Russian and Chinese support against the Western drive to refer Iran to the Security Council.

The decision by Russia and China to vote for referral surprised observers as the two nations have consistently counselled caution on Iran's nuclear file. Both have major economic ties with Iran.

A French government official, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity, said the Russian and Chinese ministers had been persuaded of the need to show a united front.

The United States accuses Iran of trying to build atomic weapons. Iran denies this, saying its nuclear program is only for generating electricity.

Iran broke IAEA seals at a uranium enrichment plant Jan. 10 and resumed small-scale enrichment. The decision provoked an outcry as enrichment is a process that can produce material for nuclear reactors or bombs. Britain, France and Germany, who had been negotiating with Iran, said they would press the IAEA to refer the matter to the Security Council.

If the IAEA votes to refer Iran to the Security Council on Thursday, Iran is likely to retaliate immediately.

Iran's parliament has approved a law requiring the government to stop all voluntary cooperation with IAEA in the event of referral. This would mean that Iran stops allowing IAEA inspectors to carry out intrusive searches of its facilities and the country resumes large-scale enrichment of uranium.

Iran insists it has the right as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to build nuclear power stations and produce their fuel by enriching its own uranium.

But the United States and Europe do not trust that Iran would enrich uranium only for peaceful purposes because the country has concealed significant aspects of its nuclear program in the past.

While the IAEA has said it has found no evidence of Iran's building nuclear weapons, it has refused to give Iran a clean bill of health because of numerous unanswered questions over its atomic program.



Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA31Ak02.html
A high-risk game of nuclear chicken
By F William Engdahl

In the past weeks, media reports have speculated that Washington is "thinking the unthinkable", namely, an aggressive, preemptive nuclear bombardment of Iran, by either the United States or Israel, to destroy or render useless the deep underground Iranian nuclear facilities.

The possibility of war against Iran presents a geostrategic and geopolitical problem of far more complexity than the bombing and occupation of Iraq. And Iraq has proved complicated enough for the US. We try to identify some of the main motives of the main actors in the new drama and the outlook for possible war.

The dramatis personae include the Bush administration, most especially the Dick Cheney-led neo-conservative hawks in control now of not only the Pentagon, but also the Central Intelligence Agency, the UN ambassadorship and a growing part of the State Department planning bureaucracy under Condoleezza Rice.

It includes Iran, under the new and outspoken President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. It includes President Vladimir Putin's Russia, a nuclear-armed veto member of the UN Security Council. It includes a nuclear-armed Israel, whose acting premier, Ehud Olmert, recently declared that Israel could "under no circumstances" allow Iranian development of nuclear weapons "that can threaten our existence". It includes the European Union, especially Security Council permanent member, France, and the weakening President Jacques Chirac. It includes China, whose dependence on Iranian oil and potentially natural gas is large.

Each of these actors has differing agendas and different goals, making the issue of Iran one of the most complex in recent international politics. What's going on here? Is a nuclear war, with all that implies for the global financial and political stability, imminent? What are the possible and even probable outcomes?

The basic facts
First the basic facts as can be verified. The latest act by Ahmadinejad in announcing the resumption of suspended work on completing a nuclear fuel enrichment facility along with two other facilities at Natanz, sounded louder alarm bells outside Iran than his inflammatory anti-Israel rhetoric earlier, understandably so.

Mohamed ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize-winning head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN body, has said he is not sure if that act implies a nuclear weapons program, or whether Iran is merely determined not to be dependent on outside powers for its own civilian nuclear fuel cycle. But, he added, the evidence for it is stronger than that against Saddam Hussein, a rather strong statement by the usually cautious ElBaradei.

The result of the resumption of research at Natanz appears to have jelled for the first time a coalition between US and the EU, including Germany and France, with China and even Russia now joining in urging Iran to desist. Last August, President George W Bush announced, in regard to Iran's announced plans to resume enrichment regardless of international opinion, that "all options are on the table". That implied in context a nuclear strike on Iranian nuclear sites.

That statement led to a sharp acceleration of EU diplomatic efforts, led by Britain, Germany and France, the so-called EU-3, to avoid a war. The three told Washington they were opposed to a military solution. Since then we are told by German magazine Der Spiegel and others the EU view has changed, to appear to come closer to the position of the Bush administration.

It's useful briefly to review the technology of nuclear fuel enrichment. To prepare uranium for use in a nuclear reactor, it undergoes the steps of mining and milling, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication. These four steps make up the "front end" of the nuclear fuel cycle.

After uranium has been used in a reactor to produce electricity it is known as "spent fuel", and may undergo further steps, including temporary storage, reprocessing and recycling before eventual disposal as waste. Collectively these steps are known as the "back end" of the fuel cycle.

The Natanz facility is part of the "front end" or fuel-preparation cycle. Ore is first milled into uranium oxide (U3O8), or yellowcake, then converted into uranium hexaflouride (UF6 ) gas. The uranium hexaflouride then is sent to an enrichment facility, in this case Natanz, to produce a mix containing 3-4% of fissile U-235, a non-weapons-grade nuclear fuel. So far, so good, more or less in terms of weapons danger.

Iran is especially positioned through geological fortune to possess large quantities of uranium from mines in Yazd province, permitting Iran to be self-sufficient in fuel and not having to rely on Russian fuel or any other foreign imports for that matter. It also has a facility at Arak which produces heavy water, which is used to moderate a research reactor whose construction began in 2004.

That reactor will use uranium dioxide and could enable Iran to produce weapons-grade plutonium, which some nuclear scientists estimate could produce an amount to build one to two nuclear devices per year. Iran officially claims the plant is for peaceful medical research. The peaceful argument here begins to look thinner.

Nuclear enrichment is no small item. You don't build such a facility in the backyard or the garage. France's large Tricastin enrichment facility provides fuel for the nuclear electricity grid of Electricite de France (EDF), as well as for the French nuclear weapons program. It needs four large nuclear reactors, just to provide more than 3,000MWe (megawatts electrical) power for it. Early US enrichment plants used gaseous diffusion. Enrichment plants in the EU and Russia use a more modern centrifuge process that uses far less energy per unit of enrichment. The latter or centrifuge process is also the Iranian type.

To make weapons-grade uranium requires more than conventional civilian electric power-grade uranium fuel. "Unmaking" weapons-grade uranium today is also a geopolitically interesting process, not irrelevant to the current dispute over Iran. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, under agreements designed to ensure that the Soviet nuclear arsenal would be converted to peaceful uses, military weapons uranium came on to the civilian market under a US-Russian agreement.

Today more than half of all the uranium used for electricity in the US nuclear power plants comes from Russian military stockpiles. Currently, 20% of all electricity produced in the US is nuclear-generated, meaning that Russian uranium fuels some 10% of all US electricity.

In 1994, a US$12 billion contract was signed between the US Enrichment Corporation (now USEC Inc) and Russia's Techsnabexport (Tenex) as agents for the US and Russian governments. USEC agreed to buy a minimum of 500 tonnes of weapons-grade uranium over 20 years, at a rate of up to 30 tonnes/year beginning in 1999. The uranium is blended down to 4.4% U-235 in Russia. The USEC then sells it to its US power utility customers as fuel. In September this program reached its halfway point of 250 tonnes, or elimination of 10,000 nuclear warheads.

Worldwide, one sixth of the global market of commercial enriched uranium is supplied by Russia from Russian and other weapons-grade uranium stocks. Putin has many cards to play in the showdown over Iran's nuclear program.

The issue of whether Iran was secretly building a nuclear weapon capability first surfaced from allegations by an Iranian exile opposition group in 2002.

Natanz has been under the IAEA's purview since suspicions about Iran's activities surfaced. It was prompted by reports from an Iranian opposition organization, National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and led ElBaradei to tour Iran's nuclear facilities in February 2002, including the incomplete plant in Natanz about 500 kilometers south of Tehran.

The NCRI is the political arm of the controversial People's Mujahideen of Iran, which both the EU and US governments officially brand terrorist but unofficially work with increasingly against the Tehran theocracy.

Possible Iranian strategy
It's undeniably clear that Ahmadinejad has a more confrontational policy than his predecessor. The Iranian ambassador to Vienna, speaking at a conference in Austria where this author was present last September, shocked his audience by stating essentially the same line of confrontational rhetoric: "If it comes to war, Iran is ready ..."

Let's assume that the Western media are correctly reporting the strident militant speeches of the president. We must also assume that in that theocratic state, the ruling mullahs, as the most powerful political institution in Iran, are behind the election of the more fundamentalist Ahmadinejad. It has been speculated that the aim of the militancy and defiance of the US and Israel is to revitalize the role of Iran as the "vanguard" of an anti-Western theocratic Shi'ite revolution at a time when the mullahs' support internally, and in the Islamic world, is fading.

Let's also assume Ahmadinejad's actions are quite premeditated, with the intent to needle and provoke the West for some reason. If pushed against the wall by growing Western pressures, Ahmadinejad's regime has apparently calculated that Iran has little to lose if it hit back.

He is also no rogue agent in opposition to the Iranian clergy. According to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn of January 24, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, secretary of the Guardian Council of the Constitution, stressed Iran's determination to assert its "inalienable" rights: "We appreciate President Ahmadinejad because he is following a more aggressive foreign policy on human rights and nuclear issues than the former governments of [Mohammed] Khatami and [Hashemi] Rafsanjani," the ayatollah reportedly said. "President Ahmadinejad is asking, 'why only you [Western powers] should send inspectors for human rights or nuclear issues to Iran - we also want to inspect you and report on your activities'."

The paper's Tehran correspondent added, "The mood within the country's top leadership remains upbeat and the general belief was that it would be possible to ride out international sanctions - if it comes to that."

In this situation, some exile Iranians feel it would bolster Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs to be handed a new UN sanction punishment. It could be used to whip up nationalism at home and tighten their grip on power at a time of waning revolutionary spirit in the country.

Ahmadinejad has been taking very provocative, and presumably calculated measures including breaking nuclear-facility seals, and announcing a major conference that would question evidence that the Nazis conducted a mass murder of European Jews during World War II. Yet he also has stressed several times publicly that in accord with strict Islam law, Iran would never deploy a nuclear device, a weapon of mass destruction, and that it is only asserting its right as a sovereign nation to an independent full-cycle civilian nuclear program.

The history of Iran's nuclear efforts should be noted. It began in 1957 when Reza Shah Pahlevi signed a civilian Atoms for Peace agreement with Dwight D Eisenhower's administration. Iran received a US research reactor in 1967. Then in 1974 after the first oil shock, the shah created the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, explicitly tasked to develop civilian nuclear power to displace oil, freeing more oil for export, and for developing a nuclear weapon.

The Bushehr reactor complex of civilian power reactors was begun by West Germany in the 1970s under the shah, the same time Iran began buying major shares of key German companies, such as Daimler and Krupp. After his 1979 ascent to power, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered all work on the nuclear program halted, citing Islamic beliefs that weapons of mass destruction were immoral.

In 1995, the Russian Foreign Ministry signed a contract with the Iranian government to complete the stalled Bushehr plant, and to supply it with Russian nuclear fuel, provided Iran agreed to allow IAEA monitoring and safeguards. According to an article in the March 2004 MERIA Journal, that 1995 Russia-Iran deal included potentially dangerous transfers of Russian technology, such as laser enrichment from Yefremov Scientific Research Institute. Iran's initial deal with Russia in 1995 included a centrifuge plant that would have provided Iran with fissile material. The plant deal was then canceled at Washington's insistence.

The monitoring of Bushehr continued until the reports from the NCRI of secret nuclear weapons facilities in 2002 led to increased pressure on Iran, above all from Bush, who labeled Iran one of a three-nation "axis of evil" in his January 2002 State of the Union speech. That was when the Bush administration was deeply in preparation of regime change in Iraq, however, and Iran took a back seat, not least as Washington neo-conservatives such as Ahmad Chalabi had convinced the Pentagon his ties to Tehran could aid their Iraq agenda.

Since that time, relations between Washington and Tehran have become less than cordial. Iran has been preparing for what it sees as an inevitable war with the US. Brigadier General Mohammad-Ali Jaafari, commander of the Revolutionary Guards, told the official IRNA news agency on October 9: "As the likely enemy is far more advanced technologically than we are, we have been using what is called 'asymmetric warfare' methods. We have gone through the necessary exercises and our forces are now well prepared for this." This presumably includes terrorist attacks and the use of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, ballistic missiles.

On January 20, Iran announced it had decided to withdraw investments from Europe. This was the same week UBS Bank in Zurich announced it was closing all Iranian accounts. According to US Treasury reports, Iran has an estimated $103 billion in dollar-denominated assets alone. There is potential to cause short-term financial distress, though likely little more should Iran sell all dollar assets abruptly.

What seems clear is that Iran is defiantly going ahead with completion of an independent nuclear capability and insists it is abiding by all rules of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the IAEA.

Iran also apparently feels well-prepared to sit out any economic sanctions. The country is the second-largest Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil producer (4.1 million barrels per day in 2005) next to Saudi Arabia (9.1 million.) Russia with 9.5 million bpd production in 2005 takes claim to being the world's largest oil-producing country.

Iran has also accumulated a strong cash position from the recent high oil price, earning some $45 billion in oil revenue in 2005, double the average for 2001-03. This gives it a war chest cushion against external sanctions and the possibility to live for months with cutting its oil exports, all or partly. That is clearly one of the implicit weapons Iran knows it holds and would clearly use in event the situation escalated into UN Security Council economic sanctions.

In today's ultra-tight oil supply market, with OPEC producing at full capacity, there would be no margin to replace 4 million Iranian barrels a day. A price shock level of $130 to $150 is quite likely in that event.

Iran now has decisive influence within the Shi'ite-dominated new Iraqi government. The most influential figure in Iraq is Shi'ite spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the 75-year-old cleric born in Iran. On January 16, after the new Iraqi government offered Sistani Iraqi citizenship, he replied, "I was born Iranian and I will die Iranian." That also gives Tehran significant leverage over political developments in Iraq.

The Israeli options
Israel has been thrown into political crisis at just this time of Iran's strident moves, with the removal of the old warrior, Ariel Sharon, from the scene following his illness. Israeli elections will be held on March 28 for a new government. Contenders include the current acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert. Israeli media report that Bush has decided to do what he can to try and ensure that Olmert, standing in for the incapacitated Sharon, is elected to be full-time prime minister. Rice has invited Olmert to visit Washington, probably some time next month.

Other reports are that the vice president, we might say the "spiritual leader" of the US hawks, Cheney, has been covertly aiding the Benjamin Netanyahu candidacy as new head of the right-wing Likud. Netanyahu is also directly tied to the indicted US Republican money-launderer, Jack Abramoff, during the time Netanyahu was Sharon's finance minister.

Washington journalists report that Cheney, and his advisers David Addington and John Hannah, are working behind the scenes to ensure that former premier Netanyahu succeeds Olmert. Cheney is working to defeat the more moderate Kadima Party formed by Sharon and his more moderate ex-Likud allies.

Bush has not come out with direct vocal support for Olmert, but Olmert has stressed that he will continue to work with America to realize a Palestinian state. Israeli media report the new middle-of-the-road (Israeli middle) party of Olmert and Sharon-Kadima will probably win a landslide - to the dismay of Cheney's and Karl Rove's Christian Right and the neo-conservative base.

According to the Palestine newspaper, al-Manar, the Bush administration is conducting secret contacts with the Palestinian Authority and Arab countries in an effort to have them help strengthen Olmert's stature. The US reportedly informed them that it was interested in having Olmert head Kadima and "continue the process that Sharon began to solve the Palestinian-Israel conflict".

The paper further reports that Washington feels that Olmert is a "smart leader who will be able, with his advisors, to lead the peace process and rebuff the political machinations against him".

The Bush White House even informed Olmert, according to the paper, that it would like him to keep Sharon's advisors on his team, especially Dov Weisglass and Shimon Peres. Weisglass, Sharon's personal lawyer and broker of ties to Washington, recently said he was in almost daily contact with Rice.

On January 22, Olmert addressed the issue of Iran. According to Israeli State Radio, he said Iran was trying to engage Israel in the conflict surrounding Tehran's ongoing nuclear enrichment efforts, and that he concurred with Sharon's position that Israel would not lead the battle against Iran. He said that "responsibility falls first and foremost on the United States, Germany, France and the Security Council. We do not have to be the leaders".

By contrast, his defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, stated Israel would not tolerate Iran achieving nuclear independence, a statement that analysts feel signals a military action by Jerusalem is possible, with or without official US sanction.

This all would indicate that there is a definite split within Israel between a future Olmert government not eager to launch a preemptive military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities versus the ever-hawkish, neo-conservative-tied Netanyahu. Notably, prominent Washington neo-conservative, Kenneth Timmerman, told Israeli radio in mid-January that he expected an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran "within the next 60 days", ie just after Israeli elections or just before.

Timmerman is close to Richard Perle, the indicted Cheney chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Douglas Feith and Michael Ledeen.

The question is whether ordinary Israelis are war weary, whether with Palestine or with Iran, and seek a compromise solution. Polls seem to indicate so. However, the very strong showing of Hamas in the January 25 Palestine elections could change the Israeli mood. The day after their vote success, Hamas leader Mahmud al-Zahhar claimed that his movement would not change its covenant calling for the destruction of Israel, reported the Israeli online news portal Ynet.

Last week, a new element appeared in the chemistry of the long-standing Israeli Likud-US Congress influence nexus. Larry A Franklin, a former Pentagon Iran analyst and close friend of leading Pentagon neo-conservatives, was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in jail for sharing classified Pentagon information with pro-Israel lobbyists through an influential Washington-based lobby organization, AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.

AIPAC has been at the heart of ties between the Israeli right-wing Likud and members of the US Congress for years. It is regarded as so powerful that it is able to decide which Congressmen are elected or re-elected. Previously it had been considered "untouchable". That is no longer true it seems.

Franklin pleaded guilty last October to sharing the information with AIPAC lobbyists and Israeli diplomat, Naor Gilon. Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who were fired from AIPAC in 2004 in the affair, are facing charges of disclosing confidential information to Israel, apparently about Iran. The sentencing is causing major shock waves throughout leading US Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith. The conviction has hit a vital lobbying tool of AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups, namely, expenses-paid trips for US Congressmen to Israel. Hundreds of politicians are taken to Israel every year by non-profit affiliates of groups such as AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee - trips Jewish leaders say are a vital tool in pro-Israel lobbying.

The Bush administration had tried to bury the Franklin case, unsuccessfully. It could only delay the trial until after the November 2004 US elections. The Franklin scandal as well as the Abramoff lobbying affair have both hit severe blows to the suspicious money network between Likud and the White House, potentially fatally weakening the Israeli hawk faction of Netanyahu.

The Russian factor in Iran
The role of Putin's Russia in the unfolding Iran showdown is central. In geopolitical terms, one must not forget that Russia is the ultimate "prize" or endgame in the more than decade-long US strategy of controlling Eurasia and preventing any possible rival from emerging to challenge US hegemony.

Russian engineers and technical advisers are in Iran constructing the Bushehr nuclear plant, involving at least 300 Russian technicians. Iran has been a strategic cooperation partner of the Putin government in terms of opposing US-United Kingdom designs for control of Caspian oil. Iran has been a major purchaser of Russian military hardware since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in addition to buying Russian nuclear technology and expertise.

In March, Iran-Russia relations took a qualitative shift closer when Moscow agreed to the sale of a "defensive" missile system to Tehran, worth up to $7 billion when taking future defense contracts into account. In 2000, Putin had announced Russia would no longer continue to abide by a secret US-Russia agreement to ban Russian weapons sales to Iran that the government of Boris Yeltsin had concluded. Since then, Russian-Iranian relations have become more entwined, to put it mildly.

Moscow currently says it is in talks with Iran to build five to seven additional nuclear power reactors on the Bushehr site after completion of the present reactor. Russia expects to get up to $10 billion from the planned larger Bushehr reactors deal and additional arms sales to Iran.

It is currently building the reactor on credit to be paid by Iran only after the completion of the project. Sanctions and admonitions will not change Russia's relationship with one of the most demonized states in America's "axis of evil". Iran has become a major counterweight for Moscow in the geopolitical game for Washington's total domination over Eurasia, and Putin is shrewdly aware of that potential.

A look at the map will reveal how geopolitically strategic Iran is for Russia, as well as for Israel and the US. Iran controls the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the choke point for oil from the Persian Gulf to Japan and the rest of the world. Iran borders the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Significantly, on January 23, the Russian daily Kommersant reported that Armenia, sandwiched between Iran and Georgia, had agreed to sell a 45% control of its Iran-Armenia gas pipeline to Russia's Gazprom. The Russian daily added, "If Russia takes over this [Iran-Armenia] pipeline, Russia will be able to control transit of Iranian gas to Georgia, Ukraine and Europe."

That would be a major blow to the series of Washington operations to insert US-friendly pro-North Atlantic Treaty Organization governments in Georgia as well as Ukraine. It would also bind Iran and Russian energy relations. While the Armenian government denies it has agreed, negotiations continue, with Gazprom holding out the prospect of demanding double the price or $110 per 1,000 cubic meters rather than the present $54 unless Armenia agree to sell the stake to Gazprom.

Russia is pursuing a complex strategy regarding its cooperation with Iran. Minatom, the Russian nuclear energy group, announced some time back that Russia was in discussion with Tehran to increase Iran's nuclear capacity by 6,000 megawatts by 2020. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed a year ago that Moscow would supply Iran with fuel for the Bushehr reactor, even if it did not sign the IAEA Additional Protocols.

While Putin has assured the world that Iran must demonstrate full NPT compliance before the Russian nuclear transfers occur, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated previously that the IAEA's failure to condemn Iran opened the door for Russia to help build future reactors in that country.

Putin has managed to put Russia square in the middle of the present global showdown over Iran, a position which clearly tells some in Moscow that Russia is indeed again a global player. Undoubtedly more.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, in a January 18 discussion with the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, stated: "It is not profitable for Russia to impose sanctions on Iran, since we just recently signed an agreement to sell them nearly $1 billion worth of medium-range anti-aircraft weapons. These modern weapons are capable of hitting targets up to 25 kilometers away and will probably be used to defend various testing sites in Iran. Therefore, if some attempt is made to strike at the country and the deliveries from Russia are made quickly enough, we can expect a strong response. In other words, Iran will be able to defend itself."

Ivanov added a significant caveat: "However, if ballistic missiles are used, then nuclear sites can be targeted effectively. We must not forget that Russia has its experts working on some of these sites, and is not interested in a military scenario, if only to protect them."

Russia's current strategy is to renew its earlier offer, rejected initially by Tehran, to take the uranium fuel from Iran to Russia for reprocessing - then returned to Iran for use in the country's reactors - thus defusing the crisis significantly. Last Wednesday, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said that Tehran viewed Moscow's offer as a "positive development", but no agreement has been reached between the countries. Talks have continued over the specifics, including Tehran's proposal to have China involved in the Russian enrichment process.

After his meeting with Russian Security Council chief, Igor Ivanov, Larijani told the media, "Our view of this offer is positive, and we are trying to bring the positions of the sides closer." Further talks come in February, after the planned emergency IAEA meeting of this Thursday. Iran opposition groups claim the Russian talks are merely a ploy to divide the West and buy more time. Larijani and Ivanov said in a joint statement that Tehran's nuclear standoff must be resolved by diplomatic efforts in the UN atomic watchdog agency.

The China factor in Iran
China, in its increasingly urgent search for secure long-term energy supplies, especially oil and gas, has developed major economic ties with Iran. It began in 2000, when Beijing invited Iranian president Mohammed Khatami for a literal red carpet reception and discussion of areas of energy and economic cooperation. Then in November 2004, curiously at the occasion of the second Bush election victory, the relation took a major shift as China signed huge oil and gas deals with Tehran.

The two countries signed a preliminary agreement worth potentially $70 billion to $100 billion. Under the terms, China will purchase Iranian oil and gas and help develop the Yadavaran oil field, near the Iraqi border. That same year, China agreed to buy $20 billion in liquefied natural gas from Iran over a quarter-century.

Iran's oil minister stated at the time, "Japan is our number one energy importer for historical reasons ... but we would like to give preference to exports to China." In return, China has become a major exporter of manufactured goods to Iran, including computer systems, household appliances and cars. In addition, Beijing has been one of the largest suppliers of military technology to Tehran since the 1980s. The Chinese arms trade has involved conventional, missile, nuclear and chemical weapons. Outside Pakistan and North Korea, China's arms trade with Iran has been more comprehensive and sustained than that with any other country.

China has sold thousands of tanks, armored personnel vehicles and artillery pieces, several hundred surface-to-air, air-to-air, cruise and ballistic missiles as well as thousands of antitank missiles, more than 100 fighter aircraft and dozens of small warships.

In addition, it is widely believed that China has assisted Iran in the development of its ballistic and cruise missile production capability. In addition, China has supplied Iran scientific expertise, technical cooperation, technology transfers, production technologies, blueprints and dual-use transfers.

In sum, Iran is more than a strategic partner for China. In the wake of the US unilateral decision to go to war against Iraq, reports from Chinese media indicated that the leadership in Beijing privately realized its own long-term energy security was fundamentally at risk under the aggressive new preemptive war strategy of Washington. China began taking major steps to outflank or negate total US domination of the world's major oil and gas resources. Iran has become a central part of that strategy.

This underscores the Chinese demand that the Iran nuclear issue be settled in the halls of the IAEA and not at the UN Security Council, as Washington wishes. China would clearly threaten its veto were Iran to be brought before the UN for sanctions.

EU relations with Iran
The EU is Iran's main trading partner concerning both imports and exports. Clearly, they want to avoid a war with Iran and all that would imply for the EU. The EU's balance of trade with Iran is negative due to large imports of oil. Germany's new government under Chancellor Angela Merkel has made a clear point of trying to reaffirm close ties with Washington following the tense relations under former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who openly opposed the Iraq war along with France's Chirac in 2002 and 2003.

Chirac for his part is the subject of major controversy since he gave a speech on January 19 in which he overturned the traditional French nuclear doctrine of "no first strike" to say that were a terrorist nation to attack France, he would consider even nuclear retaliation as appropriate.

This declaration by a French president triggered an international uproar. Whether it was French psychological warfare designed to pressure Iran, or the reflection of a fundamental change in French nuclear doctrine to one of preemptive strike or something similar, is so far not clear. What is clear is that the Chirac government will not stand in the way of a US decision to impose UN sanctions on Iran. Whether that also holds for a US-sanctioned nuclear strike is not clear.

The EU-3, whose negotiations diplomatically have so far produced no results, are now moving toward some form of more effective action against Iran's decision to proceed with reprocessing. The only problem is that other than nuclear saber-rattling, the EU has few cards to play. It needs Iranian energy. It is also aware of what it would mean to have a war in Iran in terms of potential terror retaliations. The EU, to put it mildly, is highly nervous and alarmed at the potential of a US-Iran or Israel-US vs Iran military showdown.

The Bush administration role in Iran
Unlike the Iraq war buildup where it became clear to a shocked world that the Bush administration was going to war regardless, Washington with Iran has so far been willing to let the EU states take a diplomatic lead, only stepping up pressure publicly on Iran in recent weeks.

On January 19, the US repeated that neither it nor its European partners wanted to return to the negotiating table with Iran. "The international community is united in mistrusting Tehran with nuclear technology," said Rice. "The time has come for a referral of Iran to the [UN] Security Council." Rice's choice of the word "referral" was deliberate. If Iran is only "reported" to the Security Council, debate would lack legal weight. A formal "referral" is necessary if the council is to impose any penalty, such as economic sanctions.

The neo-conservatives, although slightly lower profile in the second Bush administration, are every bit as active, especially through Cheney's office. They want a preemptive bombing strike on Iran's nuclear sites. But whatever Cheney's office may be doing, officially, the Bush administration is pursuing a markedly different approach than it did in 2003, when its diplomacy was aimed at lining up allies for a war. This time, US diplomats are seeking an international consensus on how to proceed, or at least cultivating the impression of that.

Iraq and the deepening US disaster there has severely constrained possible US options in Iran. In 2003, in the wake of the Iraqi "victory", leading Washington neo-conservative hawks were vocally calling on Bush to move on to Tehran after Saddam Hussein. Now, because of the "bloody quagmire" in Iraq, the US is severely constrained from moving unilaterally. With 140,000 troops tied down in Iraq, the US military physically cannot support another invasion and occupation in yet another country, let alone Iran.

Because of Iran's size, a ground invasion may require twice as many troops as in Iraq, says Richard Russell, a Middle East specialist at the National Defense University in Washington. While an air campaign could take out Iran's air defenses, it could also trigger terrorism and oil disruptions. Washington is internally split over the issue of a successful nuclear strike against Iran,

The AIPAC and Abramoff impact Washington
Another little-appreciated new element in the US political chemistry around the Bush White House are two devastating legal prosecutions that have hit the heart of the black and grey money network between Washington Republicans and the Israeli right-wing Likud.

Abramoff, the financial patron of several prominent Republicans, including ex-House majority leader, Tom Delay, and Steve Rosen, the key force behind AIPAC, were two of the most influential Jewish lobbyists in Washington before legal scandals effectively ended their careers and sent them scrambling to stay out of prison.

Abramoff has pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy arising out of his work lobbying for Indian gambling casino interests. That scandal could implicate far more Congressmen and even some in the White House.

Rosen is fighting allegations that as chief strategist at AIPAC, he received and passed classified national security information, received from Pentagon aide Larry Franklin, to unauthorized parties. Perhaps it is coincidence that two such high-profile damaging cases to the lobbying power of right-wing Israeli hawk elements surface at the same time, at just this time when war drums are pounding on Iran.

AIPAC's drama began on August 2004, when on the eve of the Republican national convention, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the organization's offices, looking for incriminating documents. A year later, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia indicted Rosen, by then AIPAC's director of foreign policy issues, and Keith Weissman, who had been an AIPAC Iran analyst.

The government disclosed it had had the men under surveillance for more than four years and alleged that they had received and passed along classified information. The indictment named Franklin as their co-conspirator. Franklin, who has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, pleaded guilty in October to passing classified documents to unauthorized persons and improperly storing such documents in his home. He was sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in prison last week.

Bush, as de facto head of his party, faces a potentially devastating November Congressional election. With the quagmire of Iraq continuing and more Americans asking what in fact they are dying for in Iraq, if not oil, Bush's popularity has continued to plunge. He has now only 46% of popular support. More than 53% of people have expressed an unfavorable opinion of Bush. The Hurricane Kartina debacle of bungled responses by the White House, the growing perception that Bush has "lied" to the public, all are working to seriously undermine Republican chances in November.

The stench of insider deals, not only with Cheney's Halliburton, is growing stronger and getting major media coverage, which is new. Conservative traditional Republicans are outraged at the unprecedented federal spending binge Bush Republicans have indulged in to protect their own special interests.

In a recent article Michael Reagan, conservative son of the late president Ronald Reagan, wrote, "Republican congressional leaders promised individual members of Congress up to $14 million 'in free earmarks' [special spending allocations] if they would support, which they did, the massive $286.5 billion Bush transportation bill." According to Reagan: "The bill came to a total of 6,300 earmarked projects costing the taxpayers $24 billion, a clear case of bribery. The people being bribed were members of Congress. The people making the bribes were members of Congress. Congressmen bribing congressmen."

A recent Fox News poll indicated that Americans saw the Republican congressional majority as materially more corrupt and more responsible for the current spate of scandals than the Democrats by a wide margin.

Conplan 8022
In January 2003, Bush signed a classified presidential directive, Conplan 8022-02. This is a war plan different from all prior in that it posits "no ground troops". It was specifically drafted to deal with "imminent" threats from states such as North Korea and Iran.

Unlike the warplan for Iraq, a conventional one, which required coordinated preparation of air, ground and sea forces before it could be launched, a process of months, even years, Conplan 8022 called for a highly concentrated strike combining bombing with electronic warfare and cyberattacks to cripple an opponent's response-cutting electricity in the country, jamming communications and hacking computer networks.

Conplan 8022 explicitly includes a nuclear option, specially configured earth-penetrating "mini" nukes to hit underground sites such as Iran's. Last summer, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a top secret "Interim Global Strike Alert Order" directing around-the-clock military readiness to be directed by the Omaha-based Strategic Command (Stratcom), according to a report in the May 15 Washington Post.

Previously, ominously enough, Stratcom oversaw only the US nuclear forces. In January 2003, Bush signed on to a definition of "full spectrum global strike", which included precision nuclear as well as conventional bombs, and space warfare. This was a follow-up to the president's September 2002 National Security Strategy, which laid out as US strategic doctrine a policy of "preemptive" wars.

The burning question is whether, with plunging popularity polls, a coming national election, scandals and loss of influence, the Bush White House might "think the unthinkable" and order a nuclear preemptive global strike on Iran before the November elections, perhaps early after the March 28 Israeli elections.

Some Pentagon analysts have suggested that the entire US strategy towards Iran, unlike with Iraq, is rather a carefully orchestrated escalation of psychological pressure and bluff to force Iran to back down. It seems clear, especially in light of the strategic threat Iran faces from US or Israeli forces on its borders after 2003, that Iran is not likely to back down from its clear plans to develop full nuclear fuel cycle capacities, and with it the option of developing an Iranian nuclear capability.

The question then is, what will Washington do? The fundamental change in US defense doctrine since 2001, from a posture of defense to offense, has significantly lowered the threshold of nuclear war, perhaps even of a global nuclear conflagration.

Geopolitical risks of nuclear war
The latest Iranian agreement to reopen talks with Moscow on Russian spent fuel reprocessing has taken some of the edge off of the crisis for the moment. On Friday, Bush announced publicly that he backed the Russian compromise, along with China and ElBaradei of the IAEA. Bush signaled a significant backdown, at least for the moment, stating, "The Russians came up with the idea and I support it ... I do believe people ought to be allowed to have civilian nuclear power."

At the same time, Rice's State Department expressed concern the Russian-Iran talks were a stalling ploy by Tehran. Bush added. "However, I don't believe that non-transparent [sic] regimes that threaten the security of the world should be allowed to gain the technologies necessary to make a weapon." The same day at Davos, Rice told the World Economic Forum that Iran's nuclear program posed "significant danger" and that Iran must be brought before the UN Security Council. In short, Washington is trying to appear "diplomatic" while keeping all options open.

Should Iran be brought before the UN Security Council for violations of the NPT and charges of developing weapons of mass destruction, it seems quite probable that Russia and China will veto imposing sanctions, such as an economic embargo on Iran, for the reasons stated above. The timetable for that is likely some time about March-May, that is, after a new Israeli government is in place.

At that point there are several possible outcomes.


The IAEA refers Iran to the UN Security Council, which proposes increased monitoring of the reprocessing facilities for weapons producing while avoiding sanctions. In essence, Iran would be allowed to develop its full fuel cycle nuclear program and its sovereignty is respected, so long as it respects NPT and IAEA conditions. This is unlikely for the reasons stated above.

Iran, like India and Pakistan, is permitted to develop a small arsenal of nuclear weapons as a deterrent to the growing military threat in its area posed by the US from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Emirates, as well as by Israel's nuclear force.

The West extends new offers of economic cooperation in the development of Iran's oil and gas infrastructure and Iran is slowly welcomed into the community of the World Trade Organization and cooperation with the West. A new government in Israel pursues a peace policy in Palestine and with Syria, and a new regional relaxation of tensions opens the way for huge new economic development in the entire Middle East region, Iran included. The mullahs in Iran slowly loose influence. This scenario, desirable as it is, is extremely unlikely in the present circumstances.

Bush, on the urging of Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neo-conservative hawks, decides to activate Conplan 8022, an air attack bombing of Iran's presumed nuclear sites, including, for the first time since 1945, with deployment of nuclear weapons. No ground troops are used and it is proclaimed a swift surgical "success" by the formidable Pentagon propaganda machine. Iran, prepared for such a possibility, launches a calculated counter-strike using techniques of guerrilla war or "asymmetrical warfare" against US and NATO targets around the world.

The Iran response includes activating trained cells within Lebanon's Hezbollah; it includes activating considerable Iranian assets within Iraq, potentially in de facto alliance with the Sunni resistance there targeting the 135,000 remaining US troops and civilian personnel. Iran's asymmetrical response also includes stepping up informal ties to the powerful Hamas within Palestine to win them to a Holy War against the US-Israel "Great Satan" Alliance.

Israel faces unprecedented terror and sabotage attacks from every side and from within its territory from sleeper cells of Arab Israelis. Iran activates trained sleeper terror cells in the Ras Tanura center of Saudi oil refining and shipping. The Eastern province of Saudi Arabia around Ras Tanura contains a disenfranchised Shi'ite minority, which has historically been denied the fruits of the immense Saudi oil wealth. There are some 2 million Shi'ite Muslims in Saudi Arabia. Shi'ites do most of the manual work in the Saudi oilfields, making up 40% of Aramco's workforce.

Iran declares an immediate embargo of deliveries of its 4 million barrels of oil a day. It threatens to sink a large oil super-tanker in the narrows of the Strait of Hormuz, choking off 40% of all world oil flows, if the world does not join it against the US-Israeli action.

The strait has two 1-mile-wide channels for marine traffic, separated by a 2-mile-wide buffer zone, and is the only sea passage to the open ocean for much of OPEC oil. It is Saudi Arabia's main export route.

Iran is a vast, strategically central expanse of land, more than double the land area of France and Germany combined, with well over 70 million people and one of the fastest population growth rates in the world. It is well prepared for a new Holy War. Its mountainous terrain makes any thought of a US ground occupation inconceivable at a time the Pentagon is having problems retaining its present force to maintain the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations. World War III begins in a series of miscalculations and disruptions. The Pentagon's awesome war machine, "total spectrum dominance" is powerless against the growing "asymmetrical war" assaults around the globe.

Clear from a reading of their public statements and their press, the Iranian government knows well what cards its holds and what not in this global game of thermonuclear chicken.

Were the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis to risk launching a nuclear strike on Iran, given the geopolitical context, it would mark a point of no return in international relations. Even with sagging popularity, the White House knows this. The danger of the initial strategy of preemptive wars is that, as now, when someone like Iran calls the US bluff with a formidable response potential, the US is left with little option but to launch the unthinkable - nuclear strike.

There are saner voices within the US political establishment, such as former National Security Council heads, Brent Scowcroft or even Zbigniew Brzezinski, who clearly understand the deadly logic of Bush's and the Pentagon hawks' preemptive posture. The question is whether their faction within the US power establishment today is powerful enough to do to Bush and Cheney what was done to Richard Nixon when his exercise of presidential power got out of hand.

It is useful to keep in mind that even were Iran to possess nuclear missiles, the strike range would not reach the territory of the US. Israel would be the closest potential target. A US preemptive nuclear strike to defend Israel would raise the issue of what the military agreements between Tel Aviv and Washington actually encompass, a subject neither the Bush administration nor its predecessors have seen fit to inform the American public about.

F William Engdahl, author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press, can be contacted via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

(Copyright 2006 F William Engdahl.)

The compromise solution over Iran Radio Netherlands
The issue of Iran's nuclear programme is to be referred to the United Nations Security Council after a meeting of the five permanent members, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China. But the decision doesn't necessarily mean that sanctions against Iran will be the next step. In fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna will have to decide on the main question of whether the matter should be dealt with by the Security Council or not. That's because of earlier concerns from Russia and China about punishing Iran. Russia and China had threatened to veto a decision made by the IAEA because both countries have huge interests in Iran: China needs Iranian oil and Russia invested and helped build a new nuclear plant in Iran.
India hopes Russia will pull Iran chestnut out of nuclear fire Malayala Manorama
Iran nuke row to UN Melbourne Herald Sun
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http://www.cuttingedge.org/news_updates/newsupdatemain.html

The rumor is that Iran will carry out a nuclear experiment in March...
Published: 1/29/2006


Teheran is getting ready to counter a “preemptive strike” by USA and Israel. The Air Force Command of the Revolutionary Guard has ordered its Shahap-3 Missile Units to keep their mobile missile ramps in motion in preparation for such an attack. Responding to this order, in darkness of the night the primary missile ramps have been moved to Kirmanshah and Hamedan, and the reserve ramps to Isfahan and Fars regions.
The above actions are the basis for the efforts of the USA to attract Russia and China, as well as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to its side, and for commenting that a military intervention is always on the table. These actions are also the basis for Israel’s overt preparation for a possible offensive action and for making authoritative announcements that it “will not permit Iran” to proceed with its nuclear plans. Suddenly, all these activities have created a renewed global atmosphere of war. They are spreading anxiety and paranoia.

Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. It has never accepted any international agreement on nuclear weapons, and has never allowed inspections of its nuclear facilities. Yet, it is aggressively beating the war drums as if Iran is the country involved in nuclear development in the area. What kind of innocence is this?

Attacks to selected centers in Iran are foreseen to take place sometime in March-June.

Even the Pope called upon Russia and China, requesting that they reconsider the subject of Iran. Iran can do what the Arab countries cannot: withdrawing its funds deposited at Western banks and moving them to Asian banks.

Somehow, big steps are seemingly being taken toward a war. According to them, just two months remain. Within the next two months, confusing allegations will resonate as to how much of a threat Iran has become.

So, why was the month of March chosen? What is behind the prediction that Iran will carry out a nuclear experiment in March? In other words, why are the USA and Israel drawing global attention to the month of March? Why are Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia being pushed into a race of weapons build-up by bringing up the possibility that they may also acquire nuclear weapons?

Because, there is another event expected to occur in March, which could have an impact on the economy of the USA equivalent to a nuclear attack: in March, Teheran will implement its 2004 decision that it will start using the Euro instead of the Dollar in its petroleum trade, establishing a petroleum market, and breaking the “petrodollar” monopoly. Iran will open its petroleum market in March. Euro will replace Dollar in the petroleum trade. This will constitute a major attack on a vital component of the American Empire. Once the decision is implemented, a real debate will start on this doomsday scenario for the American economy.

Thereafter, the monopoly of USA/United Kingdom in international petroleum trade will collapse. The petroleum markets in New York and London will receive a heavy blow. The International Petroleum Market in London and the New York Mercantile Exchange controlled by the Americans are in a state of panic.

The Iranian position is being supported by the Chinese. The Japanese are also inclined to switch to Euro; this way, they could lower their Dollar reserves.

What are the implications of the widespread switch to the Euro, and the preference of Russia, European Union, Japan and some of the Arab countries to use the Euro in petroleum trade? What would happen if Russia that has major trade relations with Europe, China and Japan were to start using the Euro in the energy market? What would happen if the petroleum-producing Arab countries would also see the Euro as the alternative to compensate for the loss of Dollar’s value? Indeed, loss of Dollar’s value will force many countries to prefer the Euro.

This scenario will progressively lead to a profitable business.

If these issues were to lead to an escape from the Dollar, and dramatically reduce the flow of money to the USA, what will be the shape of the American economy?

There lies the wisdom of the month of March. This danger hides behind the hullabaloo that Iran will conduct a nuclear experiment in March. An Iranian petroleum market that is indexed on the Euro is more dangerous for the USA than any nuclear weapon.

The USA, which is working on controlling global petroleum markets under the label of “fighting terrorism” is actually fighting an economic war. However, as it becomes more and more aggressive, it is sinking deeper and deeper...


Information distributed by electronic mail by a reliable source in Turkey. Verbatim translation from Turkish into English language.

Iran prepares for nuclear enrichment Wired News
The UN nuclear watchdog confirmed on Tuesday that Iran had begun preparing for nuclear enrichment, which can make fuel for bombs, and continued to hinder a probe of unanswered questions about Iran's atomic aims. In a confidential report to the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) 35-nation board of governors, the agency said Iran had not yet begun uranium enrichment itself but had started renovation work at its Natanz enrichment site. "Substantial renovation of the gas handling system is underway at the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP) at Natanz," said the report, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters. Iran has said it will begin small-scale enrichment and the IAEA said earlier this month that Iran had broken U.N. seals on atomic equipment. The report, by deputy IAEA chief Olli Heinonen, said Iran had provided more information on attempts to buy equipment that could have been used in a nuclear weapons program but also has peaceful uses. Iran said the attempts were unsuccessful. Tehran refused, however, to let the IAEA question a key scientist linked to the buying attempts for a site called Lavizan, the report said.
Iran: Inspections end if we are referred to UNSC Jerusalem Post
Agency: Iran Papers Are for an Atomic Bomb Forbes
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February 1, 2006
Atomic Agency Sees Possible Link of Military to Iran Nuclear Work
By ELAINE SCIOLINO and WILLIAM J. BROAD
VIENNA, Jan. 31 — The International Atomic Energy Agency says it has evidence that suggests links between Iran's ostensibly peaceful nuclear program and its military work on high explosives and missiles, according to a report from the agency that was released to member countries on Tuesday.

The four-page report, which officials say was based at least in part on intelligence provided by the United States, refers to a secretive Iranian entity called the Green Salt Project, which worked on uranium processing, high explosives and a missile warhead design.

The combination suggests a "military-nuclear dimension," the report said, that if true would undercut Iran's claims that its nuclear program is solely aimed at producing electrical power.

The report will be debated by the 35 countries that make up the international agency's board when it meets in emergency session on Thursday to decide whether Iran should be reported to the United Nations Security Council for its nuclear activities.

The agency says it has repeatedly confronted Iran with the allegations, which Tehran dismissed as "baseless," adding that "it would provide further clarifications later," the report said.

Iran also reiterated that all of its nuclear projects were conducted under the authority of its national atomic energy agency and not the military.

More broadly, the report states that the country has not been fully cooperative on all of the outstanding nuclear issues that the agency has questioned for years, and that formed the basis of a resolution by the agency's board last fall that Iran was not complying with its international obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The Green Salt Project derives its name from uranium tetrafluoride, also known as Green Salt, which is an intermediate product in the conversion of uranium ore into uranium hexafluoride — a toxic gas that can undergo enrichment or purification into fuel for nuclear reactors or bombs.

The report suggests that the fuel project, the high explosives tests and the design of a missile re-entry vehicle "appear to have administrative interconnections."

It would seem to be the first time the agency has publicly suggested that the fuel production — which Iran has said is purely for civilian purposes — was linked to its military programs.

The tests of high explosives are of particular concern: one of the key challenges in making a nuclear weapon is designing the ring of conventional explosives that can be used to compress the nuclear material, setting off a nuclear chain reaction.

It is highly unusual, Western experts said, for a group of uranium conversion experts ostensibly making fuel for nuclear reactors to also have administrative ties to people doing studies on explosives and re-entry vehicles, the technical name for missile warheads.

"The obvious technical connection is that these are all central elements of a program to develop nuclear weapons and delivery capability," said Per F. Peterson, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

The alleged bureaucratic linkage of the various efforts would make them highly suspicious, Dr. Peterson said, because each could be separately viewed as potentially unrelated to nuclear weapons.

While the Bush administration has long argued that Iran was using its civilian program to hide ambitions to build a nuclear weapon, the agency has always steered clear of that accusation. With the report, it has for the first time provided evidence directly suggesting that at least some of Iran's activities point to a military project.

The Mujahedeen Khalq, an Iranian resistance group that both the United States and the European Union describe as a terrorist organization, has often drawn links among the Iranian military, the Revolutionary Guard Corps and Tehran's nuclear program, claiming that the separate groups were working together to gain the ability to build and deliver an atom bomb.

But Western experts said they knew of no instances in which the I.A.E.A. had pressed that accusation home. "We haven't heard this from the I.A.E.A. before," said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. "It's interesting that the I.A.E.A. is putting that level of credence into it. I don't believe there has previously been any I.A.E.A. reference to such interconnections."

Even though the report was designated as confidential, copies began to surface in Vienna almost as soon as it was posted on a Web site available only to member countries of the agency.

The Vienna-based international nuclear agency also said in its report that a 15-page document Iran had allowed it to read described procedures that would be useful only in making parts for nuclear weapons.

The agency for the first time stated its own conclusions on the matter and did so quite bluntly, saying the document that Iran obtained from the black market "related to the fabrication of nuclear weapon components."

The I.A.E.A., in a report issued in November, made reference to suspicious documents that the nuclear black market had offered to Tehran. While making no reference to weaponry, the report indicated that the black market had offered to help Iran shape uranium metal into "hemispherical forms," which Western experts said at the time had suggested the making of nuclear bomb cores.

In the past, Iran told the agency that the document was provided — without its asking — by an international smuggling network that has been identified as run by the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and that it has not used the information for a weapons project.

The report is a short, informal update by Olli Heinonen, the agency's director of safeguards, following a request by the United States, France, Britain and Germany for an assessment of Iran's nuclear activities before the board meeting on Thursday. It does not give the precise sources of its information, but American officials say the allegations are based in part on material from a laptop computer seized in Iran.

What prompted the meeting was a decision by Iran to reopen its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz in violation of a voluntary agreement it made with France, Germany and Britain in November 2004 that froze Iran's enrichment-related activities while it negotiated a package of economic and political incentives.

That led to a statement on Monday in which Russia and China joined the United States, France, Britain and Germany in agreeing that the Security Council should be informed of Iran's nuclear activities.

In response, Iran lashed out on Tuesday, saying that there was no legal justification for such a move and that it would bring "an end to diplomacy."

"Informing the Security Council or referring the Iranian case to it will bring an end to diplomacy and that is not at all positive," said Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, who is close to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Mr. Larijani also said Iran would most likely strike back. "If these countries use all their instruments to exert pressure on Iran, Iran will use its capability in the region," he said in a meeting with Armenian officials in Iran, according to the Iranian Student News Agency.

Elaine Sciolino reported from Vienna for this article, and William J. Broad from New York. David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington, and Michael Slackman and Nazila Fathi from Tehran.



Copyright 2006The New York Times

January 31, 2006
Bush: Iran 'Held Hostage' by Clerical Elite
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:25 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush said on Tuesday that Iran was ``held hostage'' by clerical leaders who repress their people, and urged the world not to allow Tehran to gain nuclear weapons.

In his State of the Union address, Bush also accused Iran of sponsoring terrorists in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon and said, ``that must come to an end.''

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had earlier said she was confident Russia and China would support sending the Iran nuclear case to the U.N. Security Council but said she expected differences over what steps to take. The council could impose sanctions but these penalties are unlikely to be the first response.

``The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions -- and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons,'' Bush said.

``America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats,'' he said.

Iran rejects accusations that it is trying to build a nuclear bomb, and says it will not give up its right to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

Four years ago in his State of the Union address, Bush named Iran along with North Korea and Iraq as countries that, with their ``terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.''

There was no such fierce rhetoric in Tuesday's speech, although Bush described Iran as ``a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people.''

Bush said he was speaking directly to the Iranian people to let them know the United States supported them.

``America respects you, and we respect your country,'' Bush said. ``We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran,'' he said.

But Bush did not say how this could be accomplished, despite pressure from some U.S. officials and Republican allies outside the administration who have been pushing for stronger overt and covert initiatives to encourage political change.

In the speech, Bush reiterated that the United States supported democratic reforms across the Middle East.

On the victory by the militant group Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary election last week, he said the group must now recognize Israel, disarm and work for peace. Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel.

Bush also pointed to Saudi Arabia as having taken the first steps of reform, ``now it can offer its people a better future by pressing forward with those efforts.''

While Egypt had a multi-party presidential election, the government should now ``open paths of peaceful opposition that will reduce the appeal of radicalism,'' he said.



Copyright 2006 Reuters Ltd.

Iran Calling Wider World to Its Side
Tehran Looks Beyond Muslim Nations as It Faces Off With West

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 1, 2006; A18



TEHRAN -- On the afternoon of Jan. 4, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reached for the phone and got Latin America on the line. In quick succession, he chatted with President Fidel Castro of Cuba, rang up President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and, sensing yet another kindred spirit, reached out to Evo Morales, the young firebrand who had just been elected president of Bolivia.

Person-to-person and peer-to-peer, the transatlantic calls described on Ahmadinejad's presidential Web site linked self-styled populists who glory in defying the West. But for Iran, the exchanges carried significance reaching well beyond Ahmadinejad and the controversy enveloping him personally after questioning the Holocaust and saying Israel should be "wiped off the map."

In its bid to proceed with a nuclear program opposed by Washington and Western Europe, Iran's leadership appears settled on a revived policy of confrontation with "global arrogance," as the country's rulers have referred to the foreign policy of United States for almost three decades. But the contest is now being framed as a David-vs.-Goliath battle, and Iran is seeking to attract relatively poor, disempowered nonaligned nations to its side, not simply the Muslim world it once saw itself as leading, Iranian officials and analysts say.

"With our knowledge of the present world, we can use the power of weakness. The weak people also have power," said Emad Afrough, an Iranian lawmaker. "We can have more political bargaining power, and instead of just us confronting the dominant powers, the world can confront them."

The strategy came into sharper focus last week with the announcement that the speaker of Iran's parliament would travel to Cuba and Venezuela next month. The itinerary carried particular weight because, in the indirect way of politics here, it implied the endorsement of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the unelected cleric who holds ultimate power in Iran.

Khamenei is the parliamentary leader's father- in-law and holds the formal title of supreme leader of the revolution. He has final say over Iran's nuclear strategy and approved -- grudgingly, diplomats say -- the bargain with Europe that froze Iran's nuclear program in 2003 when its existence came to light after 18 years of secrecy. And he authorized the reactivation of the same program last month, when Iran took the seals off equipment at its main uranium enrichment plant, which led the United States and other foreign powers to decide this week to haul Iran before the U.N. Security Council.

Khamenei prefers to remain in the background, however, leaving nuclear diplomacy to the mild-mannered loyalist he named head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani.

"Larijani is very much in charge of major defense and foreign policy questions," said Nasser Hadian-Jazy, a political scientist at Tehran University. "He is the one who would represent the consensus of various factions more than Ahmadinejad."

Yet Ahmadinejad has come to embody Iran's new defiance, attracting international attention -- and, from the West, opprobrium -- out of proportion to the powers of the office he assumed in August. Under the theocratic constitution written after the popular revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, the powers of the executive were so tightly limited that Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, argued that the typical Iranian citizen had more power than the president.

What the president does have is a bully pulpit. Khatami used his eight years in office to nudge Iran out of isolation, encouraging a "dialogue between civilizations" aimed at rapprochement with Europe and even Washington, which severed diplomatic relations in 1980.

But the approach was viewed as largely futile, especially after President Bush lumped Iran with North Korea and Iraq in an "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address. The speech strengthened Iranian hard-liners who argued that the country must define itself in opposition to the United States.

"Especially after Iran was branded in the axis of evil, these guys turned to the leader and said, 'What has Khatami gotten us?' " said an Iranian political analyst who asked not to be named because his employer had not authorized public comment.

But the new policy of confrontation differs from the bare-knuckled militancy of the early 1980s, a period Ahmadinejad invoked with nostalgia during his June election campaign. In the years following the 1979 Islamic revolution, the newly formed theocracy married ideology with religion to cast Iran as leader of the Muslim world. Ruling clerics vowed to export the revolution and fashion a civilization independent of Western "toxins."

Ahmadinejad's attention-getting screeds against Israel harked to that heritage. But analysts and diplomats said the outreach to Latin America smacked of realpolitik, dovetailing neatly with Iran's nuclear diplomacy.

It also involves reviving another moribund concept: the Non-Aligned Movement, as many Third World nations dubbed themselves during the Cold War to signal their independence from the Western and Communist blocs. To them, Iran argues that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it is guaranteed the right to an atomic program to produce electricity. The world's most powerful counties are exercising a double standard by threatening sanctions if Iran proceeds with plans to do just that, say Iranian officials, who deny allegations that the country wants nuclear weapons.

The argument has found traction among some developing countries that account for 17 of the 35 seats on the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog. India, with its 1 billion people a natural nonaligned leader, is considered pivotal in any vote. Cuba and Venezuela sit on the board as well, along with South Africa, a respected nonaligned spokesman.

"Iran has managed to do two important things. First, it revived the nonaligned movement as a powerful, swayable group," said a European diplomat who asked not to be quoted by name. Second, Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States -- the five permanent members of the Security Council -- reacted by starting to coordinate their stance toward Iran.

"Both are probably bad things, because the effect has been to deeply politicize the IAEA," the diplomat said.

Ahmadinejad appears to relish his role in the effort. "He wants to fight the powerful, whether they be domestic or international," said Hadian-Jazy, who has stayed in touch with Ahmadinejad since they were in grade school together.

Elected in June on a populist platform that promised poor Iranians a share of the country's oil wealth, Ahmadinejad speaks often of what he calls painful truths. He often speaks expansively of the human appetite for "spirituality" and "justice" and refers to himself as "just a teacher."

"His speeches are great, fantastic, kind of '60s Third World stuff," said a European diplomat based in Tehran. "It's funny this stuff is going on in South America at the same time."

Some in Iran's establishment question whether rhetoric is most effective. "We can't achieve our demands only with shouting," said Afrough, the lawmaker. "The Western world, having these very complex facilities, they still use the media. We need to use that more, because that's the only tool we have."

But others point out that Iran is working other levers as well. Last week the country's central bank said Iran was pulling its cash out of European banks. A day later the same office denied that any transfers had occurred. The resulting confusion was intentional, said Hamidreza Taraqqi, a senior official of the Islamic Coalition, an Iranian religious party.

"It depends on the decision of Europe," he said with a smile. "If they defend our rights on the nuclear issue, the money will stay. If they follow America, the money will go out."

Staff writer Dafna Linzer in Vienna contributed to this report.


© 2006 The Washington Post Company

DEBKAfile Exclusive: Moscow believes Iran has developed a large nuclear device in its “preliminary stage.”

January 31, 2006, 8:11 AM (GMT+02:00)

Russian FM Sergei Lavrov put this information before the five permanent UN Security Council and Germany, which Tuesday night, Jan. 30, agreed for the first time to haul Iran before the UN body over its nuclear program. Until then, Moscow and Beijing had stood out against the UN nuclear watchdog’ referring the Iran dossier to the Security Council. Tehran hit back Wednesday by saying the decision was unconstructive and the end of diplomacy

According to Lavrov, Russian intelligence estimates that Iran is now capable of detonating this non-weaponized nuclear device - or in other words carrying out its first nuclear test.

DEBKAfile sources add: This estimate which Russian president Vladimir Putin passed to President George Bush some weeks ago is challenged by US and Israeli nuclear experts, who do not believe Iran is up to the stage of a nuclear device. However, on Jan. 21, the opposition FDI claimed Iran would carry out its first nuclear test before the Iranian new year, which falls on March 20.

Ahead of the IAEA’s Thursday meeting in Vienna, a leaked report claimed Iran had last week given the watchdog sensitive documents which apparently showed how to mold highly enriched uranium into the hemispherical shape of warheads, in an effort to stave off referral to the Security Council. At the same time, according to the same unnamed diplomats, the agency passed to Tehran intelligence provided by the US that suggests Iran has been working on details of nuclear weapons, such as missile trajectories and ideal altitudes for exploding warheads. When the IAEA asked Iran for an explanation of the documents, Tehran replied they had been obtained from members of a nuclear black market network.

Still ahead of the nuclear watchdog’s meeting, Moscow and Beijing dispatched diplomats to Tehran to explain that their support for referral to the Security Council did not mean an end to diplomacy.


Referring the issue to the UN would have a “very big effect” on oil prices, Libyan Energy Scretary Fathi Hamed bin-Shatwan said Tuesday at an OPEC meeting in Vienna.
Copyright 2000-2006 DEBKAfile. All Rights Reserved.

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Iran threatens to end snap UN checks
Wednesday 01 February 2006, 0:49 Makka Time, 21:49 GMT


Mottaki: Reporting or referring Iran to the UN is of equal weight

Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister, has said Iran will end snap inspections of its facilities by UN monitors as of Saturday if the country is reported to the Security Council.

Speaking on Iranian television on Tuesday, Mottaki appeared to be anticipating a session of the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors in Vienna, Austria, on Thursday, where Iran's nuclear programme may be reported to the Security Council.

"Reporting or referring Iran to the UN Security Council is of equal weight. If it happens, the government will be required under the law to end the suspension of all nuclear activities it has voluntarily halted," Mottaki said.

"The first victim will be the additional protocol (intrusive inspections). If it happens, Iran will definitely terminate its cooperation (with the IAEA) as of Saturday, 4 February," he said.

Despite Iran's tough line in the face of the Big Five powers' threat to put it before the Security Council, Iran signalled its willingness to cooperate over its nuclear programme.

Black-market document

Teheran provided the UN watchdog this week with an extensive document obtained by Iran on the nuclear black market that the IAEA said served no other purpose than to make an atomic warhead.

The documents were handed over in an apparent last-minute attempt to stay out of the Security Council, according to diplomats in Vienna.


Rice © is leading international
efforts to refer Iran to the UN


The one-and-a-half-page document describes how to cast fissile uranium into the hemispherical shape of warheads, diplomats in Vienna said, speaking on condition of anonymity in exchange for revealing the confidential information.

Iran said it received the document from members of the nuclear black-market network. It claimed it did not ask for the document but was given it any way as part of other black-market purchases.

The finding is in a confidential report due for presentation to the 35-nation IAEA board when it meets will be discussed on Thursday.

The report confirms information provided over the past few weeks by diplomats familiar with the Iran probe that Tehran has not started small-scale uranium enrichment since announcing its plan to do so earlier this month.

Interviews refused

The four-page IAEA report also criticises Iran for refusing to allow interviews with at least one nuclear scientist linked to the military and dismissing requests for information on "tests related to high explosives and the design of a missile re-entry vehicle, all of which could have a military nuclear dimension".

Nevertheless, on Tuesday the Europeans and Russians insisted the opportunity for negotiations was not lost, even after envoys from Britain, China, France, Russia and the US reached a deal in London overnight recommending the IAEA report Iran to the Security Council.

"If it happens [reporting or referring Iran to the UN Security Council], the government will be required under the law to end the suspension of all nuclear activities it has voluntarily halted"

Manouchehr Mottak,
Iranian Foreign Minister


The deal means the IAEA will almost certainly take the step in a vote on Thursday. But instead of taking immediate action on the IAEA report, the Security Council will wait until March, leaving time for last-ditch talks with Iran.

Earlier on Tuesday Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, said: "In the case Iran is brought before the UN Security Council, the Islamic Republic of Iran will be obliged under the law passed by parliament to lift voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol."

Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said a move to the council - whether notification or reporting - would "be unconstructive and the end of diplomacy".

Iran's assertion

Larijani also threatened a halt to the Additional Protocol and said: "We will have to start all nuclear work that has been voluntarily suspended."

He stopped stopped short of specifying that Iran will restart its uranium enrichment programme.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful and has no other purpose than to generate power. A three-year IAEA investigation has not found firm evidence to back assertions by the US and others that Iran's nuclear activities are a cover for an arms programme.

But it has not been able to dismiss such suspicions either.


Agencies

Iranian leader defiant over nuclear programs RIA Novosti
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went on the offensive Wednesday over Western criticism of his country's nuclear programs by vowing to press ahead with the controversial research and branding US President George Bush a war criminal. After arriving in the southern town of Bushehr, where Russia is building a $800-million nuclear power plant, Ahmadinejad told journalists: "The West's has been living with its colonial dreams throughout the last 200 years, and its decisions on Iran's 'nuclear file" will not influence the decisions of the Iranian people." He said the country would "resolutely defend its legitimate rights" to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, though other nations suspect it of a pursing a weapons program, and criticized the position of the trio of European negotiating with Iran - Great Britain, France and Germany. The nations recently announced that they would seek to refer the matter to the UN Security Council through the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog. "The Europeans themselves lost the opportunity to hold negotiations with Iran," he said, alluding to the three countries' decision. Although Javad Vaeedi, the head of the Iranian delegation for the last round of talks in Brussels January 30, was cautiously optimistic, the Europeans did not change their position, citing a lack of progress. French Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said the talks had come to a dead end, but did not exclude progress if Iran took relevant measures. On Tuesday, a leading Iranian negotiator said the referral of Iran's nuclear file to the UN Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions on the Islamic Republic if it is found to be in breach of its international commitments, would mark "the end to diplomacy."
The noose tightens around Iran Asia Times Online
Teheran threatens to bar UN inspections Hindu
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