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
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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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Iran's President Lashes Out at Bush
By VOA News
01 February 2006




Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (file photo)
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has lashed out at the United States, accusing Washington of trying to "bully" Iran into giving up its nuclear program.

In the southern Iranian city of Bushehr Wednesday, President Ahmadinejad said his country will resist until its right to develop nuclear energy is "fully realized."

Hours earlier, President Bush in his State of the Union address described Iran as a nation "held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people." He accused the Iranian government of sponsoring terrorists in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon - and said that must come to an end.

Mr. Ahmadinejad said the United States is "tainted with the blood of nations" from wars and oppression.

President Bush said the Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions, and that other nations must not permit Tehran to develop nuclear weapons.

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

World gives Iran 'final chance' CNN International
The international community has given Iran a "final opportunity" to meet its nuclear obligations, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has said. Straw met with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki for more than an hour Wednesday. The pair also met Tuesday at a conference on Afghanistan in London. "He (Mottaki) really needs to see this agreed position by the leaders of the international community, not as a threat but as an opportunity ... a final opportunity for Iran to put itself back on track," Straw told BBC radio. "Mottaki was warned not to walk away from the IAEA additional protocol or to make threats," a British Foreign Office spokesman said, referring to demands by the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. "This was not in Iran's interest." Later, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the House of Commons that it was important to "send a signal of strength" to Iran. "It is important that they understand ... that we are united in determining that they should not be able to carry on flouting their international obligations," he told MPs.
Q&A involving Iran and nuclear activities Seattle Post Intelligencer
The noose tightens around Iran Asia Times Online
Reuters - MOSNEWS - United Press International - IranMania News - all 3,188 related »

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b540ae90-9284-11d...00779e2340.html

Wednesday Feb 1 2006 . All times are London time.

Iranians hit back in nuclear dispute
By FT reporters
Published: January 31 2006 18:26 | Last updated: February 1 2006 12:45

Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran’s foreign secretary, issued a warning on Wednesday against any western attack on his country’s nuclear facilities as international pressure to report Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme increased.


“Any aggression against Iran’s peaceful nuclear installations will receive an extremely quick and destructive response from the armed forces,” he said, ahead of a visit to London to meet Jack Straw, his UK counterpart.

Mr Straw told the BBC on Wednesday: “I shall be saying to him that he really needs to see this agreed position by the international community not as a threat but as...a final opportunity (for Iran) to put itself back on track.”

Tony Blair, during his weekly Prime Minister’s Questions, on Wednesday reiterated that “It is important that they understand...that we are united in determining that they should not be able to carry on flouting their international obligations,” adding that it was important to “send a signal of strength” to Tehran over the dispute.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, earlier on Wednesday told a large rally of supporters: “I am telling those fake superpowers that the Iranian nation became independent 27 years ago and ... on the nuclear case it will resist until fully achieving its rights”.

Senior Russian and Chinese officials are due in Tehran as early as Wednesday to stress international concern at Iran’s plans and urge co-operation ahead of the expected reporting of the case to the Security Council this week.

The visit by officials from two countries sympathetic to Iran follows an agreement reached in London late on Monday night between all five permanent members of the council – the US, UK, France, Russia and China – to put the nuclear dispute on the council’s agenda but postpone any action against Iran for another month.

Tehran insisted on Tuesday it would not back down. Ali Larijani, Iran’s top nuclear official, said referral would spell “the end of diplomacy” but clarified he was referring to diplomacy with Europe rather than talks on Moscow’s proposal to enrich Iran’s uranium in Russia.

Playing on Europe’s fears that Iran could fuel instability across the already volatile Middle East, Mr Larijani added: “If these countries use all their means to put Iran under pressure, Iran will use its potential in the region.” Mr Mottaki warned on state television that “the first victim” would be the additional protocol – Iran’s voluntary commitment to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to allow snap inspections of its facilities.

He said Iran would halt these non-routine inspections as of Saturday if the 35-member IAEA board voted this week to report Iran to the council, Associated Press reported.


Big five powers’ unified stance faces severe test
Click here


The London agreement marked a compromise between the US and the European Union, which wanted Iran immediately referred to the council, and the Russians and Chinese, who have been urging a more cautious approach. It will form the basis of a resolution to be voted on by the board of the IAEA, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog. Although it remains unclear what, if any, action will be taken by the council in March when the IAEA board is due to meet again, the agreement projected rare international unity on Iran. It emphasised that all members of the council wanted Tehran to resume the suspension of enrichment-related activity.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said the Tehran visit was aimed at explaining the London agreement and urging Iran to “give precise answers to the questions that the IAEA has presented”.

The Monday deal capped weeks of intense diplomatic activity by US and European officials to forge a common international response to Tehran’s decision last month to restart nuclear research. Iran had agreed to suspend the work in 2004 to build international confidence in the peaceful intentions of its nuclear programme.

The end of the suspension prompted the UK, France and Germany – the EU3 governments that had led negotiations with Tehran – to declare the talks at a dead end and seek a report to the council, possibly culminating with sanctions.

“The fact that the P5 [with Germany] are sending a united signal will give Iranians some cause for thought,” said a senior British official.

The London agreement essentially gives Iran a last chance to reinstate the suspension of research and step up its co-operation with the IAEA before its board meets on March 6.

There are many potential diplomatic twists in the meantime. Russia still hopes to reach a compromise over its proposal that Iran carry out uranium enrichment in Russia. However, Iran has insisted on keeping all research work on its soil.

Reporting by Roula Khalaf in London and Gareth Smyth in Tehran and FT staff

http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20060...00122-2107r.htm

A-bomb intent found in black-market paper
By George Jahn
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 1, 2006


VIENNA, Austria -- A document obtained by Iran on the nuclear black market serves no other purpose than to make an atomic bomb, the International Atomic Energy Agency said yesterday.
The finding was made in a report prepared for presentation to the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board when it meets, starting tomorrow, on whether to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which has the power to impose economic and political sanctions on Iran.
The document was first mentioned late last year in a longer IAEA report. At that time, the agency said only that the paper showed how to cast "enriched, natural and depleted uranium metal into hemispherical forms."
The agency then refused to make a judgment on what uses such casts could have. In the brief report obtained yesterday, however, the agency said bluntly that the 15-page document showing how to cast fissile uranium into metal was "related to the fabrication of nuclear weapon components."
The report said the document was under agency seal, meaning that IAEA specialists were able in theory to re-examine it, but "Iran has declined a request to provide the agency with a copy."
Diplomats said Iran has given part of the document to the agency in an effort to deflect international momentum to report the country to the Security Council.
The document was given to Iran by members of the nuclear black market network, the IAEA said. The same network provided Libya with drawings of a crude nuclear bomb, which that country handed over to the IAEA as part of its 2003 decision to scrap its atomic weapons program.
Separately, U.S. intelligence, based on information found on a laptop computer reportedly smuggled out of Iran, suggested that Tehran's scientists were working on details of nuclear weapons, including missile trajectories and ideal altitudes for exploding warheads.
The developments were revealed just hours after a surprising agreement by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to advise that Iran be hauled before the powerful body over its disputed nuclear program.
The five members also decided that the U.N. council should wait until the IAEA issues a report in March before tackling the issue.
Iran struck back at the decision yesterday, saying the move would mean the end of diplomacy over its atomic program, but pledged not to curtail oil output over the standoff.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said his country's response would be a resumption of suspended nuclear activities and a halt to surprise U.N. inspections of facilities.
"In case of referring or reporting Iran to the U.N. Security Council, we have to start all nuclear work that has been voluntarily suspended and stop implementation of the Additional Protocol" that allows inspections, he told reporters.

IRAN NUKES

- Iran Vows 'Quick, Destructive' Response To Any Attack
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Iran_Vows_...Any_Attack.html

Tehran (AFP) Feb 01, 2006 - Iran will give an "extremely quick and destructive response" to any attack against its nuclear facilities, the Islamic republic's defence minister said Wednesday.

- IAEA Report Shows Iran Intent On Developing Nukes Says US
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/IAEA_Repor...es_Says_US.html

- Permanent UN Security Council Members Agree On Iran Resolution
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Permanent_...Resolution.html

In the shadow of Iran's nuclear threat
The world should be paying more attention to Iran-sponsored terrorism.
By Abbas William Samii
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0202/p09s02-coop.html?s=hns

Military linked to Iran nuclear program:

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.
http://tinyurl.com/7rnzg

===
War pimp alert:

Iran building secret nuke tunnel: claim: -

Iran is building a secret tunnel in Tehran for nuclear weapons research and development, an Iranian dissident has claimed.
http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view....31-054739-1310r

===
Here we go again:

British lawmakers rally behind Iran dissidents :

An array of British parliamentarians and distinguished jurists called on the British government to cease its “policy of appeasement” towards the government of hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and remove the proscription of Iran’s main opposition group as a terrorist organisation.
http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/arti...hp?storyid=5561

===
Iran Incapable of Building Nuclear Bomb — Russian Expert :

Iran is not capable of building its own nuclear weapons, the former head of a nuclear power plant and current regional leader in southern Russia said Wednesday.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11744.htm

===
Iran vows 'crushing response' if its nuclear facilities are attacked :

Iran would deliver a ''crushing response'' to any nation that attacked its nuclear facilities, its defense minister warned Wednesday.
http://www.newspress.com/Top/Article/artic...674696592098429

===
Iran's president lashes out at Bush:

Nuclear energy is our right, and we will resist until this right is fully realized," Ahmadinejad told the crowd in the southern Iran city of Bushehr, the site of Iran's only nuclear power plant.
http://www.saukvalley.com/news/304678351151218.bsp

===
Russia Min: Russia, China Have Same Views On Iran -Report
http://tinyurl.com/bgpx7

===
Russia-China visit to Iran no form of pressure - official :

The Wednesday visit of high-ranking Russia and Chinese diplomats to Tehran cannot be viewed as a form of pressure on Iran over its controversial nuclear programs, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20060201/43276291.html

===
Iran's president says Bush should face 'people's tribunal' :

"You who support the Zionist puppet regime, you who support the destruction of Palestinian homes, you have no right to talk about liberty or human rights," Ahmadinejad said in comments directed at the US president.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp.../191093/1/.html

===
Bush says U.S. would defend Israel against Iran:

U.S. President George W. Bush vowed on Wednesday the United States will rise to Israel's defense if needed against Iran and denounced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for "menacing talk" against Israel.
http://tinyurl.com/dgdgy

UN watchdog weighs sending Iran to Security Council Reuters
The UN nuclear watchdog's board of governors began a crisis session on Thursday to decide whether to report Iran to the UN Security Council over fears that it is secretly trying to build atomic bombs. With diplomats forecasting passage of a resolution, agreed by the council's five permanent members, to send Iran's case to New York, Iran threatened to respond by halting U.N. spot checks of its atomic sites and pursuing wide-scale uranium enrichment. But U.S. and European Union leaders, in a nod to Russian, Chinese and developing world concerns, said Security Council involvement did not signal an end to diplomacy or mean that Iran would necessarily face punitive sanctions. The United States and its European allies persuaded Russia and China this week to back reporting Iran to the council after Tehran stripped IAEA seals from nuclear equipment on January 9, breaking a 2 1/2-year moratorium on atomic development activity. But the rare show of unity emerged only after Washington and the EU negotiating trio of Britain, France and Germany agreed the council would not act against Iran until after the IAEA's director reports to the agency's regular meeting on March 6. This would allow time for Russia and Iran to work on details of Moscow's offer to purify uranium for Tehran, a joint venture aimed at preventing diversion of nuclear fuel to bomb-making. "We seek to support the ongoing IAEA efforts with the weight of Security Council authority. We seek a carefully calibrated approach in which the Council applies escalating measures on Iran's regime," U.S. Ambassador Gregory Schulte told the board.
Roundup: Iran says determined to defend nuclear right People's Daily Online
IAEA holds extradionary meeting on Iran nuclear issue Xinhua
New York Sun - Asia Times Online - Bloomberg - CBC News - all 3,522 related »

A more united front against Iran Christian Science Monitor
As Tehran resists efforts to clip its nuclear ambitions, tensions may mount before UN debate in March. Iran and its nuclear program are poised to become Topic No. 1 of the United Nations Security Council - but that doesn't mean that resolution of the international debate swirling around them is imminent. With Iran unlikely to back down under mounting international pressure - and perhaps prepared to take defiant measures, ratcheting up the crisis - tensions seem likely to grow before an expected Security Council meeting in March, rather than to subside. For now, the international community appears more united than before in a desire to curtail Iran's nuclear advance, and Tehran seems more isolated than ever. In an emergency session that continued at press time Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency was expected to pass a resolution reporting Iran to the Security Council, and calling on the IAEA to report to the council on Iranian violations of nuclear research commitments, for deliberations in March.
Iran nuke work not a crisis: IAEA Expressindia.com
Call made for atomic agency to act on Iran International Herald Tribune
Bloomberg - Times of India - CNN - Guardian Unlimited - all 3,802 related »

New York Times





February 3, 2006
In Another Threat, Iran Warns It May Ban All Inspectors

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
VIENNA, Feb. 2 — Iran formally notified the International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday that it will end all "voluntary" nuclear cooperation with the agency if, as expected, its 35-country board refers Iran's nuclear activity case to the United Nations Security Council.

If the threat, in a letter from Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, to Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the agency, is carried out, inspectors will no longer be permitted to conduct spot inspections and will lose access to crucial sites, including several military areas that have aroused the agency's suspicions.

In addition, Iran has said it will resume its program to build 50,000 centrifuges at Natanz and begin full-scale production of enriched uranium, which can be used to produce electricity or to build nuclear bombs.

Iran delivered its threat as John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that "we judge that Tehran probably does not yet have a nuclear weapon and probably has not yet produced or acquired the necessary fissile material" to produce one.

Nevertheless, he said, "the danger that it will acquire a nuclear weapon and the ability to integrate it with ballistic missiles Iran already possesses is a reason for immediate concern."

Mr. Negroponte made no estimate of how much time Iran would require to produce a weapon. But he focused on the new government's increasingly strident threats against Israel, and said, "The regime today is more confident and assertive than it has been since the early days of the Islamic republic."

That assertiveness was clear in Mr. Larijani's letter, which put into writing a threat that several Iranian officials have made orally.

Iran "would have no other choice but to suspend all the voluntary measures and extra cooperation with the agency," the letter said. "In that case, the agency's monitoring would extensively be limited and all the peaceful nuclear activities being under voluntary suspension would be resumed without any restriction."

The letter was delivered as the board opened talks on a resolution sponsored by Britain, France and Germany that for the first time would open the door to possible Security Council action against Iran.

The resolution was challenged by the 16-country nonaligned bloc, which proposed amendments deleting all references to the Security Council and keeping Iran's case the responsibility of the nuclear agency.

But the resolution as drafted enjoys the support of the United States, Russia and China, and is expected to win passage. Only Cuba, Syria and Venezuela have said they will definitely vote against it.

Iran would not violated any treaty obligations if it carried out its threat. But the action would almost certainly further erode confidence in Tehran as a reliable negotiating partner and fuel suspicion that its nuclear program is not peaceful.

In various public statements Iranian officials, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have explained that Iran is obliged under a law passed last year to end voluntary monitoring activities if its case is reported to the Security Council.

Mr. Larijani has assured the I.A.E.A. that Iran has no intention of withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a senior agency official said.

But "voluntary" measures are different, and refer to Iran's de facto implementation of the treaty's 1997 "additional protocol," which gives expanded rights to the agency to inspect a country's facilities. Iran has signed the protocol but has not ratified it, so is not obliged to enforce it.

The letter delivered Thursday means Iran has rejected the demands of the five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain — as well as Germany and Dr. ElBaradei himself, that Iran once again close its uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.

The plant was shut down under a November 2004 agreement with France, Britain and Germany that froze Iran's enrichment activities while the two sides negotiated economic and political incentives for Tehran. Tired of waiting for the rewards, Iran last month reopened part of the plant for what it called research, but it has yet to operate any of the machinery or process any uranium.

Dr. ElBaradei sought to calm fears about the looming referral to the Security Council. "We are reaching a critical phase, but not a crisis," he told reporters on Thursday, adding that there would still be a monthlong "window of opportunity" before the Security Council could take up the issue. He said the threat was not "imminent," a word that he appeared to choose carefully to tamp down discussion of turning to a military solution.

On Wednesday evening, Robert Joseph, the under secretary of state for proliferation issues, said in a speech, "The president has repeatedly emphasized that all options are on the table to deal with the threat from Iran, but that our strong preference is to do so through effective diplomacy."

Until Thursday night, Iran's delegation was struggling with Dr. ElBaradei to find a face-saving formula that would allow Tehran to keep Natanz open but essentially nonoperational, said two officials involved in the talks.

In a last-ditch effort to avoid any involvement of the Security Council, Dr. ElBaradei met with Iranian officials at their request at his home, the officials said. But the Iranian side offered no new substantive concessions, they said.

Even on Thursday, multilateral diplomacy continued, as the senior Russian and Chinese nuclear negotiators met in Tehran to press Iran's leaders to avoid a crisis and close Natanz.

The Iranian letter reflects the victory of the faction in Iran that has argued, even before the victory of a hard-liner, Mr. Ahmadinejad, as president last summer, that the Europeans had not reached the nuclear agreement with Iran in good faith and were determined to permanently deprive Iran of its right to develop a fuel cycle for peaceful purposes.

As evidence, Iranian negotiators continually refer to a lengthy implementation document presented last August by the Europeans side that asked Iran to give up two rights guaranteed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: its right to enrich uranium to produce electric power, and its right to withdraw from the treaty if its security is threatened.

Indeed, in demanding that Iran close Natanz, the international community is essentially reinterpreting the treaty by holding Iran to a higher standard than other countries because, the United States and other countries argue, Iran cannot be trusted with the technology to produce nuclear fuel that can also be used for weapons.

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

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Calls for ME N-free zone complicate Iran talks IranMania News
Demands by some non-aligned countries to include mention of a Middle East nuclear-weapons-free zone in a UN atomic agency resolution on Iran are complicating talks on sending Iran to the UN Security Council, diplomats said Friday. The resumption of the debate by the board of International Atomic Energy Agency was delayed by two hours to 1600 GMT to allow for consultations on the question, the UN nuclear watchdog said, according to AFP. The non-aligned representatives want the zone to be mentioned if Iran is to be reported to the Security Council for its nuclear program but the United States opposes this, diplomats said. A vote was expected Friday but diplomats said this may have to wait until Saturday due to the argument. "The Americans are worried that once it (mention of a nuclear-weapons-free zone) is there (in the resolution), it will stay there forever and allow the Iranians to hide behind it," avoiding complying with IAEA demands, one said. Diplomats said Egypt was lobbying strongly for the zone to be mentioned. Egypt and other Arab states regularly bring up the matter at IAEA general conferences, insisting that Israel, which is believed to have nuclear arms but refuses to admit it, be part of a general security framework in the Middle East that bans such weapons.
IAEA set to vote on Iran’s UNSC referral Aljazeera.com
Nuclear watchdog likely to report Iran to UN CBC News
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UN's IAEA Refers Iran to Security Council Over Nuclear Program Bloomberg
The United Nations nuclear watchdog agency voted to refer Iran to the Security Council over a nuclear program other countries fear is a cover for making weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors voted 27 to 3 to make the referral, with five countries abstaining, at a meeting today in Vienna. The Security Council may now defer acting until March 6, when the IAEA meets again. Iran "would have no other choice but to suspend all the voluntary measures and extra cooperation with the agency'' should it be sent to the Security Council, the country's National Security Council secretary Ali Larijani, wrote in a letter to the IAEA. Iran's withdrawal of cooperation would mean that the Vienna- based IAEA would no longer be able to conduct spot inspections of Iranian nuclear sites or have ready access to people and documents. Iran isn't threatening to withdraw from the nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, meaning that scheduled IAEA inspections would continue at declared nuclear sites.
Tehran to boost nuclear program if file is sent to UN - official RIA Novosti
Merkel likens Iranian president to Hitler ABC News
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Iran's president orders end to snap UN inspections Xinhua
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered an end to snap inspection of its nuclear facilities from Sunday in reaction to the UN nuclear watchdog's decision to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council, state television announced late Saturday. Ahmadinejad ordered Iran's Atomic Energy Organization to stop voluntary implementation of the additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and other cooperation from Sunday, the report said. The additional protocol, signed by Iran's former government but never ratified by the parliament, allows short-notice inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran's Majlis (Parliament) passed a law last November which requires the government to cease all voluntary confidence-building measures if the country's nuclear case were referred to the UN Security Council. Iran suspended all uranium enrichment related activities and allowed snap inspection of its nuclear sites to pave the way for nuclear negotiation with the EU trio of Britain, France and Germany in late 2004.
Iran halts cooperation with IAEA after referral to UN (Roundup) Monsters and Critics.com
Russia urges Iran to cooperate fully with IAEA Jerusalem Post
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February 5, 2006
Nuclear Panel Votes to Report Tehran to U.N.
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
VIENNA, Feb. 4 — The 35-nation board of the United Nations atomic energy agency voted here on Saturday to report Iran to the Security Council, a move that reflects increasing suspicion around the world that Iran is determined to develop nuclear weapons.

The resolution, which passed by a vote of 27 to 3, could change the course of diplomacy toward Iran and open the door to international punishment of the country.

Only Cuba, Syria and Venezuela voted against the European-drafted resolution. Five countries — Algeria, Belarus, Indonesia, Libya and South Africa — abstained.

After the vote, Iran announced that it would immediately end its voluntary nuclear cooperation with the agency and that it would begin full-scale production of enriched uranium, which can be used to produce electricity or to help build nuclear bombs.

In a letter ordering the country's nuclear commission to take those actions, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote that after Iranian demonstrations of compliance and good will, "the nuclear agency has voted under pressure by few countries and has ignored our extensive cooperation and negated our legal right," the official IRNA news agency reported.

However, Mr. Ahmadinejad stressed that "all the country's peaceful activities will remain within the framework of the Nonproliferation Treaty."

The vote in Vienna was the climax of a two-and-a-half year campaign by the Bush administration to convince the world that suspicions about Iran's nuclear program are so serious that the issue must come before the Security Council for judgment.

It also signals the failure, at least for now, of the two-and-a-half year strategy of France, Britain and Germany that was based on the premise that Iran could be coaxed into freezing crucial nuclear activities if the political, technological, economic and security rewards from the West were enticing enough.

In recent months, the three countries have moved much closer to the position of the Bush administration, which has branded Iran as part of an "axis of evil" and never held out much hope for the European negotiating track.

The resolution is a compromise between the Americans, who wanted immediate action, and the Russians and Chinese, who wanted a delay, and it will allow concrete Security Council action against Iran only after a delay of at least a month.

If that happens, the focus on Iran will begin to shift away from the largely technical atmosphere at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to the diplomatic arena of the Security Council in New York, which has responsibility for keeping peace and security in the world.

"The authorities in Tehran, rather than threatening the world, should listen to the world and take the steps necessary to start regaining its confidence," Gregory Schulte, the American ambassador to the I.A.E.A., told reporters after the vote.

Peter Jenkins, the British ambassador, told reporters that Iran should take the monthlong grace period to change its behavior and "begin rebuilding international confidence" as the only way to restart negotiations.

The month coincides with the schedule for the atomic agency's next formal, comprehensive assessment of the country's nuclear program.

It is conceivable, although highly unlikely, that by then Iran will take the bold steps necessary to convince both the team of nuclear inspectors at the I.A.E.A. as well as the international community that it is a reliable negotiating partner that can be trusted.

But if Iran carries out its threat to end all cooperation, it would severely limit the work of the agency's expert inspectors, who will no longer be allowed to do voluntary spot inspections in Iran and would lose access to important sites — including, for example, Iran's research centers and factories that make parts for the centrifuges that enrich uranium.

The vote in Vienna was touted as a significant victory for the Bush administration, which spent months briefing members of the agency's board on intelligence that it said strongly suggested but did not prove that Iran's intent was to develop a weapon.

But suddenly, the United States will have to decide what comes next. So far, the Bush administration has signaled only that it favors a go-slow approach based on diplomacy, not military force, and ruling out immediate sanctions or other punitive measures.

In Washington on Saturday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on Iran to "heed this clear message" from the atomic agency and said Iran would have to suspend its enrichment-related uranium activities, cooperate fully on inspections and return to negotiations in order to avert its case being taken up at the Security Council.

Reiterating her statement in a telephone briefing, two top State Department officials held out little hope that Iran would change its behavior.

"Today is a significant victory for those countries that want to deny Iran a nuclear capability," said R. Nicholas Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs. He added, "I cannot say that we are filled with hope that Iran is now going to do the right thing and suspend its nuclear programs and return to negotiations."

Mr. Burns and Robert Joseph, under secretary of state for arms control and international security, said that Iran had engaged in a pattern of making small concessions over recent months, even as it moved forward on suspicious uranium activities, but that no small concessions, like simply keeping the talks going, would be enough to avoid a Security Council debate.

They did not specify what sort of actions that the United States would seek at the Security Council, but in the past, administration officials have said that no move will be made to impose heavy economic penalties on Iran, like an oil embargo. Instead, the United States would likely seek punitive diplomatic or political steps, like suspending travel or freezing assets for top Iranian officials and business leaders in nuclear-related industries.

Some administration officials have publicly taken more hawkish public line in recent days, repeating that President Bush was keeping open all of his options — the code words for reserving the right to take military action if diplomacy fails as part of the campaign to get the Iranian government to back down.

Reporting a country to the Security Council is deeply humiliating and singles out a country as an unreliable actor on the global stage. Until recently, a pillar of Iran's foreign policy had been to avoid being judged in the world organization and to seek alignments with the Europeans, Russia and China against the United States and Israel.

But that changed last August, after Iran resumed converting uranium yellowcake into a gas that can be further purified for use in nuclear reactors as well as weapons. It was the first breach of its voluntary agreement with the Europeans and essentially broke off negotiations.

That was followed by the reopening the last month of a small part of its nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz for what Iran called "research purposes." Even though Iran has yet to operate any of the machinery or process any uranium material there, its reopening was the second, much more serious violation of the agreement with the Europeans.

The resolution at the I.A.E.A. came at the end of a three-day emergency session of the agency board that was triggered by Iran's refusal to heed calls to close down the uranium enrichment facility again.

It calls for the immediate suspension of all activities related to the enrichment of uranium, which can be used to make electricity or in making nuclear bombs.

It also recalls Iran's "many failures and breaches of its obligations" under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and "the absence of confidence that Iran's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes resulting from the history of concealment of Iran's nuclear activities."

Iran insists that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes like generating electricity. But it kept its program hidden for 18 years from the I.A.E.A., fueling suspicions that it may have secret plans to become a nuclear weapons power.

The resolution was passed after the United States reversed itself and agreed late Friday to include a clause expressing support for a nuclear-free Middle East that indirectly criticized Israel's secret nuclear weapons status.

Even the United States' closest European allies favored the clause, which had been demanded by Egypt and also had the support of Russia and China. Isolated, the United States backed down.

The final resolution included a clause stating that "a solution to the Iranian issue would contribute to global nonproliferation efforts and to realizing the objective of a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, including their means of delivery."

The vote on Saturday was particularly important because it had the backing of Russia and China, which had abstained in the last resolution on Iran last September.

Among those also backing the resolution was India, which had been pressured by the United States to vote yes if it expected to finalize a sweeping deal on nuclear energy cooperation with the United States, but will face intense domestic political opposition because of the decision.

Brazil, which has its own nuclear enrichment program similar to that of Iran, also voted in favor of the resolution, despite initial reservations that it could sent a precedent for countries like it.

The countries that voted in favor of the resolution were Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Britain, Canada, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sweden, the United States and Yemen.

In recent years, the agency board has reported Iraq, North Korea, Libya and Romania to the Security Council for possible censure because of their nuclear programs. But such action does not necessarily translate into action.

North Korea, which secretly built nuclear weapons and withdrew from the Nonproliferation Treaty three years ago, has been reported twice. Although the Security Council has denounced North Korea, it has never voted to punish it.

David E. Sanger and Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Nazila Fathi from Tehran.



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February 5, 2006
Nuclear Dispute Arouses Patriotism Among Iranians
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
ISFAHAN, Iran, Feb. 4 — Iran's nuclear program will not help Ali Shafiei pay his bills, or Muhammad Soheili Pour sell appliances or Yussefi Janali sell rugs, but they all said that they support Iran's right to nuclear energy and do not much care how other nations of the world react.

News that the International Atomic Energy Agency had voted by an overwhelming margin to refer Iran to the United Nation's Security Council was very slow to get out in Iran, where people have for the most part focused their concerns on domestic economic conditions and their own day-to-day challenges.

But in interviews in this ancient central Iranian city, and in the hills of northern Tehran, people expressed similar ideas — trepidation over what awaits them, especially the prospect of penalties, but an almost universal commitment to support their government's drive for nuclear energy.

"I do not know what will happen now, but we are worried if sanctions are imposed," said Arash Shahroussian, 26, a government employee in Tehran. "My father is a transit driver and he might not be able to work anymore."

The nuclear case has become a matter of national pride, but it also has tapped into broader sense of victimization and a glorification of martyrdom that many people here describe as a part of their national and religious identities.

Muhammad Jaavad Molkoti was seated behind a cash register in a small appliance store here when he compared this struggle, against the west, to a struggle faced by the Prophet Muhammad in the early days of his prophecy. In the story that Mr. Molkoti offered, the prophet and a small band of his followers were surrounded by enemies in the desert with little to eat, and still they stood strong.

"Eight people would have to share one single date, and still they resisted," Mr. Molkoti said. "They did not give in, and we are inspired by them."

The men standing around nodded in agreement, and even shrugged off the prospect, no matter how distant, of international penalties and isolation. "It's not going to be any worse than wartime for us, and we had eight years of that," Muhammad Soheili-Pour said.

"Whether they refer us or not, we are ready for anything," said Rasoul Soheili, standing nearby.

Of course, it is possible Iranians choose to show a face of solidarity and defiance because that is the position their government has asked them to take. But the feelings expressed are often raw, angry and consistent across social, economic and geographic lines. If there is a divide, it seems that those with more to lose economically tend to be a bit more anxious about a showdown.

"The first thing any one thinks of is his own job," said Behzad Moussavi, who works as a driver for a private company. "I heard the news on the radio today, and I told myself I would not be able to work anymore if there are sanctions."

But for those on the lower end of the economic ladder — the vast majority of the population — the prospect of penalties poses little more than a distant threat.

"Even if they did impose sanctions, what difference will it make?" asked Ali Shafiei, who sold nuts inside the old bazaar. "I don't care. It won't make it any worse than today."

Just outside the catacomblike corridors of the bazaar, Javad Reekhtehgaran stood chatting with a friend who was selling small rugs off a cart. Neither had heard the news about the referral, but when informed, both grew angry.

"We have all signed off on our will to say we want atomic energy." Mr. Reekhtehgaran said. "Everybody agrees."

"They should stop everybody," shouted Yussefi Janali, a wool hat pulled tight over his head. "Does France have permission to have it? Does Israel have a permit? How about Pakistan? Who do these countries talk to get authorization? America should disarm itself."

The conversation grew more heated, and hands were flying. Mr. Janali leaned over his cart to make his point. "Even if they want to put pressure on Iran, Iranians will never give up their rights."

But there is at least one person who has expressed anxiety over his country appearing before the Security Council: former President Muhammad Khatami. In comments reported Friday by the Iranian Student News Agency, the former president was quoted as saying that confrontation threatened to hurt Iran's chances and developing a nuclear program as well as the economy.

He called on the government to return to the strategy that had been pursued by his government, which hoped to convince the West that Iran was only looking to develop an energy program, not build weapons. The present administration has been far more aggressive, taking unilateral action to restart its nuclear program.

"It is necessary to act wisely and with tolerance so that our right to nuclear energy will not be abolished," Mr. Khatami said. "We cannot defend anything if we do not have a developed country, not our country and sovereignty but not even our religion."

Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

February 5, 2006
Germany's Chancellor Emphasizes Urgent Need for Action to Quash Nuclear Program in Iran
By JUDY DEMPSEY
By JUDY DEMPSEY

MUNICH, Feb. 4 —Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said Saturday that the world must act now to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, evoking her nation's own history as a cautionary tale of what can happen when threats to peace remain unchecked.

"We want, we must prevent Iran from developing its nuclear program further," Mrs. Merkel told an audience of top security officials and policy makers during a speech to the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy.

Mrs. Merkel, whose speech came on the same day that the International Atomic Energy Agency voted to report Iran's case to the United Nations Security Council, said Germany's own experiences during the 1930's should be a warning over how to deal with Iran.

"Now we see that there were times when we could have acted differently," she said. "For that reason Germany is obliged to make clear what is permissible and what isn't."

The annual Munich conference was first established in the height of the cold war, when Germany was divided and more than 350,000 American troops were stationed in Western Europe to protect it against communist Warsaw Pact forces.

At the conference, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld urged the world to work for a "diplomatic solution" to halt the nuclear program of Iran, saying that the United States stands "with the Iranian people, who want a peaceful, democratic future."

"The Iranian regime is today the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism," he added. "The world does not want, and must work together to prevent, a nuclear Iran."

Mrs. Merkel, discarding any diplomatic niceties and raising her voice in a tone of frustration, said Iran had "blatantly crossed the red line" — and not only with regard to respecting its international obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

She said it was also "unacceptable" for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to deny the Holocaust and say that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

"A president that questions Israel's right to exist, a president that denies the Holocaust, cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany," Mrs. Merkel said to applause. "We have learned our history."

Germany is one of the three European Union countries that has negotiated with Iran over the past two and a half years to try to persuade it to stop its uranium enrichment program, which can ultimately be used to produce either electricity or nuclear weapons. Iran has always insisted the enrichment program is for peaceful purposes only.

Mrs. Merkel, 51, said Iran was a threat to both Europe and Israel. But she insisted that diplomacy rather than military action was the way to deal with the threat.

"Diplomatic avenues need to be exhausted," she said. "We need to keep our nerves, go step by step."

Abbas Araghchi, deputy foreign minister of Iran, challenged Mrs. Merkel, saying Iran had not crossed any lines.

If Iran was referred to the United Nations Security Council, he said, it is obliged by its own laws to stop all cooperation with the atomic energy agency, a position Iran reiterated after the agency's vote.

Mrs. Merkel said Iran should "change the law."

She then urged China, Russia and others to join the United States, Germany and European nations to pressure Iran to return to the negotiating table. "The broader this is, the more significant it will be for Iran," she said.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who spoke after Mrs. Merkel, gave a short speech painting a grim picture about the campaign against terrorism, warning that it would it would be a long, though winnable, one. "Our situation today resembles that of free nations in the early days of the cold war," he said.

Mr. Rumsfeld did not comment on the decision to refer Iran to the Security Council.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said at the conference that he was "very pleased" that Iran would be referred to the Security Council. "With a nuclear deterrent, Iran would feel unconstrained to threaten anyone," he told the participants. "It would induce Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and others to reassess their defense postures."

"Every option must remain on the table," he added. "There is only one thing worse than military action. That is a nuclear armed Iran. The regime must understand it can't win a showdown with the world."

Mr. McCain called for a travel ban and an asset freeze for some Iranian officials and nuclear scientists, saying, "it is in the interests of Russia and China to support these moves, regardless of their economic interests."



Copyright 2006The New York Times

Iraq errors show West must act fast on Iran: Perle
Sat Feb 4, 2006 11:07 AM ET



MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - Richard Perle, a key architect of the U.S.-led war against Iraq, said on Saturday the West should not make the mistake of waiting too long to use military force if Iran comes close to getting an atomic weapon.

"If you want to try to wait until the very last minute, you'd better be very confident of your intelligence because if you're not, you won't know when the last minute is," Perle told Reuters on the sidelines of an annual security conference in Munich.

"And so, ironically, one of the lessons of the inadequate intelligence of Iraq is you'd better be careful how long you choose to wait."

Perle said Israel had chosen not to wait until it was too late to destroy the key facility Saddam Hussein's secret nuclear weapons program in Osirak, Iraq in 1981. The Israelis decided to bomb the Osirak reactor before it was loaded up with nuclear fuel to prevent widespread radioactive contamination.

"I can't tell you when we may face a similar choice with Iran. But it's either take action now or lose the option of taking action," he said.

Asked if he thought a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities was an inevitability, Perle said: "I hope that can be avoided but that's always a possibility. We are talking about physical facilities and they're always vulnerable."

Perle is one of the top U.S. neoconservatives who advocated a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam and seize alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. No such stockpiles were found after the war and U.S. President George W. Bush has acknowledged that the intelligence was bad.

Perle served under U.S. President Ronald Reagan as an assistant secretary of defense and on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004. He was an influential chairman of the Board from 2001 to 2003.



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

© Reuters 2006. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

'Iran will cooperate with IAEA' Sify
Tehran: Iran is committed to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and will continue to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran’s Vice President Gholam-Reza Aqazadeh said. "I will inform the IAEA about our new decisions, which, however, does not mean that we have changed our basic stance toward NPT or IAEA," Aqazadeh, who is also the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation, told state television. The 35-member IAEA board of governors voted on Saturday by a clear majority to refer Iraq's nuclear programme to the UN Security Council. India backed the resolution. He confirmed receipt of a written order by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to immediately halt all voluntary cooperation with the IAEA.

Read: Left demands debate in Parliament on Iran issue
"What we will revise are only those nuclear activities which we voluntarily suspended for building confidence with the West," Aqazadeh said.
IAEA referral stokes Iranian defiance CNN International
Iran Ends Voluntary Cooperation With IAEA Forbes
CTV.ca - Fort Wayne Journal Gazette - Zaman Online - Scotsman - all 3,188 related »

Iran to start uranium enrichment after vote :

"Commercial scale uranium enrichment will be resumed in Natanz in accordance
with the law passed by the Parliament." Vaeidi said, referring to Iran’s main
enrichment plant.
http://tinyurl.com/c2dyb

===
India voted against Iran at IAEA:

The resolution was adopted 27-3 with five abstentions. Cuba, Syria and Venezuela
voted against the resolution while Algeria, Belarus, Indonesia, Libya and South
Africa abstained.
http://www.kuna.net.kw/Home/Story.aspx?Lan...=en&DSNO=811299

===
Russia on referring Iran's nuclear file to UNSC: "only a warning"
http://www.kuna.net.kw/Home/Story.aspx?Lan...=en&DSNO=811305

===
War pimp alert:

McCain urges Iran sanctions, outside UN if needed:

U.S. Senator John McCain, a top member of President George W. Bush's Republican
Party, urged the world on Saturday to impose economic and other sanctions on
Iran, bypassing the United Nations if needed.
http://tinyurl.com/8ow7w

===
War pimp alert:

Iran Referal Not All Good News: With Tehran warning it will speed up its nuclear
enrichment program and will prevent U.N. weapons inspectors from visiting key
nuclear sites, the likelihood of a missile strike is increased if anything, TML
analysts added.
http://themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=12642

===
Iran threatens to close Hormuz in retaliation:

Iran also threatened retaliation against any country providing the US with bases
or other means to launch its military campaign.
http://www.india-defence.com/reports/1301

Russia Calls on Iran to Answer Concerns About is Nuclear Program Voice of America
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov is urging Iran to provide answers about its nuclear program in order to allay international concerns. He says Russia will continue seeking a diplomatic solution to the stand-off over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov says the international community expects unequivocal answers from Iran about its nuclear program to questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency. On Saturday, the agency voted to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council. In a speech at a security conference in Munich, Germany, Sergei Ivanov said he believes the dispute over Iran's nuclear ambitions can be resolved diplomatically. Russia has long been assisting Tehran in what both countries say is a peaceful quest to develop nuclear energy. On Saturday, Russia backed the IAEA decision to refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council. However both Russia and China - two of the permanent members of the Security Council - continue to oppose sanctions, saying these are unlikely to pressure Iran into halting its nuclear program. At the Munich conference, Ivanov said the IAEA should continue to monitor developments in Iran.
Iran Vows to Continue Nuclear Work, Says `Middle Ages' Are Over Bloomberg
UN Diplomats Differ Over Iran Issue Forbes
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Iran Ends Voluntary Cooperation With IAEA :

It means Iran will resume uranium enrichment and will no longer allow snap IAEA
inspections of its nuclear facilities — voluntary measures it had allowed in
recent years in a gesture to build trust.
http://pakistantimes.net/top02060609.htm

===
Iran bans oil tankers' Gulf passage if oil exports sanctioned -- MP:

"If a ban is imposed on our oil exports, we will not allow oil tankers to sail
in the Gulf waters," Mehr news agency quoted Sulaiman Jaafar Zadeh, member of
the national committee for security and foreign policy in the Shura council, as
saying.
http://www.kuna.net.kw/Home/Story.aspx?Lan...=en&DSNO=811257

===
Will Iran's 'petroeuro' threat lead to war?:

If Iran does open an oil bourse next month, we should expect the warplanes will
soon thereafter begin to fly.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11789.htm

===
Iran nuclear file a non-NPT issue, says Veteran UK politician:

The Iran issue has nothing to do with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, said Tony
Benn a former minister in the labour administration.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11793.htm

===
War pimp alert:

Frist says military action a posssibility against Iran:

Asked whether Congress had the political will to use military force against Iran
if necessary, First said: "The answer is yes, absolutely."
http://www.kctv5.com/Global/story.asp?S=4457018

===
War pimp alert:

Iraq errors show West must act fast on Iran: Perle:

Richard Perle, a key architect of the U.S.-led war against Iraq, said on
Saturday the West should not make the mistake of waiting too long to use
military force if Iran comes close to getting an atomic weapon.
http://tinyurl.com/dqnjm

===
Israel predicts Iran will pay 'heavy price' for nuclear defiance :

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert voiced confidence on Sunday that Iran would
pay "a very heavy price" by resuming full-scale uranium enrichment after being
reported to the UN Security Council over its nuclear program.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/678518.html

===
The hidden stakes in the Iran crisis:

At the end of this operation, Washington should have complete control over the
world’s main hydrocarbon production and reserves. It will control the world
economy without the need to share power.
http://tinyurl.com/9cqox

Iran furious after being reported to the Security Council Radio Netherlands
The 35 members of the IAEA governing body decided by a large majority on Saturday to let the UN Security Council deal with the matter of Iran. However, that doesn't mean that the Security Council will come to a decision quickly about, for example, the imposition of economic sanctions, let alone clear the way for stronger initiatives such as a blockade or even military action. The decision taken on Saturday literally states that Iran is first to be given another month to answer a whole list of additional questions about its nuclear activities. The IAEA will then meet again on 6 March, and send the answers and its own analysis to the Security Council. Iran decided on Sunday, in reaction to the IAEA decision, to resume enriching uranium and put an end to the UN nuclear watchdog's extensive inspection remit, which Tehran agreed to in 2003 following the discovery that the country had been secretly carrying out nuclear research programmes for the past 18 years.

Iran furious
Initially, some Iranian spokespeople said all cooperation with the IAEA should be ended, but it was later made clear that Iran does not yet wish to shut that particular door completely. IAEA Director General Mohammed elBaradei has described the situation which has now arisen as "critical, but still not a crisis". As he said himself, Iran now has until 6 March to suspend its enrichment of uranium once again and end the crisis of confidence.
'Bias' is possible in Iran crisis: RI Jakarta Post
Russia last hope in Iran standoff Australian
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Iranian president sniffs at IAEA resolution People's Daily Online
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sniffed at a resolution adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which reports Iran's nuclear case to the UN Security Council, the official IRNA news agency said on Sunday. "You (countries which supported to report Iran's case to the U. N.)can issue as many resolutions as you like and dream on. But you cannot prevent Iranian nation's progress," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying. Ahmadinejad accused the concerned countries of "inspecting Iran 's military sites in the name of the IAEA to become aware of Iran's defensive might, but we will not allow them to do so." The IAEA board of governors on Saturday adopted a resolution drafted by the European Union (EU) to report Iran's case to the U. N. Security Council. The hardline president said "the enemies of Iran" could not prevent Iran from making progress in nuclear technology. "The enemies of the Islamic Republic are furious because the Iranian nation has dared to grow its self-confidence out of their domination sphere," he said. In response to the IAEA resolution, Ahmadinejad said late Saturday that Iran would end the implementation of the additional protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and other confidence-building measures on the nuclear issue as of Sunday. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said at a news conference on Sunday that the Islamic Republic had ended all voluntary cooperative measures with the IAEA including snap inspections and suspension of sensitive uranium enrichment according to the president's order.
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Munich, Germany (AFP) Feb 05, 2006 - Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov called Sunday for continued diplomacy in the standoff over Iran's nuclear programme and said it would be "a very bad sign" if international inspectors were expelled from the country.

- UN Referral Would Fail To Halt Iran Nuclear Activities
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/UN_Referra...Activities.html

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm...06&format=print

Mon 6 Feb 2006

Use of force against Iran is on agenda, warns bullish Rumsfeld
MARGARET NEIGHBOUR
AMERICAN military action against Iran because of its nuclear ambitions is still an option, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has warned.

With Iran remaining defiant in the face of international pressure over its atomic programme - it yesterday ended snap United Nations inspections of its atomic sites - Mr Rumsfeld upped the stakes, describing Iran as a "main sponsor" of terrorist groups.


A senior Iran defence official added to the tough talk yesterday with a senior military commander saying its forces would teach any attackers "a lesson that will be remembered throughout history".

And Iranian MPs agreed yesterday to urgently debate a parliamentary bill that would put restrictions on the sale of "unnecessary" American goods sold in the country in response to US stance on its nuclear ambitions.

Iran was reported to the UN Security Council on Saturday after failing to allay suspicions that it is seeking nuclear weapons. However, despite the rhetoric, there were signs that Iran, which insists its nuclear programme is designed only to produce energy, may be starting to look for a way out of the crisis.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman said it would discuss a proposal that Iranian uranium could be enriched in Russia to ensure it was not turned into weapons-grade material.

Mr Rumsfeld, who attended a weekend security conference in Munich, Germany, made no bones about the seriousness of the situation.

"All options - including the military one - are on the table," he told a German newspaper. "Any government that says Israel has no right to exist is making a statement about its possible behaviour in the future."

At the conference, Mr Rumsfeld accused Tehran of being behind international terrorism. "Iran is the main sponsor of terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas," he said.

His belligerent tone was echoed by Abdolrahim Moussavi, the Iranian head of the joint chiefs of staff, who told Iranian troops yesterday: "We are not seeking a military confrontation, but if that happens we will give the enemy a lesson that will be remembered throughout history.

"This nation has proved its will many times to its enemies. Why do they want to test this great nation once again?"

Iran is armed with an unknown number of Shahab-3 ballistic missiles that could reach Israel and US bases in the Gulf, and coupled with nuclear warheads would give it the ability to fulfil President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's desire to "wipe Israel off the map".

Mr Ahmadinejad said nothing could deflect Tehran's pursuit of atomic know-how.

"Our enemies cannot do a damn thing. We do not need you at all. But you are in need of the Iranian nation," he told a crowd in Tehran yesterday. Content yourself with as many resolutions as you like, you cannot prevent the will of the Iranian people."

Iran has warned that any sanctions against it would send oil prices beyond a level industrialised economies could bear.

However, there was a glimpse of a compromise yesterday. On Saturday, Iran had declared dead a proposal by Moscow that Russia could enrich Iranian uranium for use in power stations, but yesterday Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Iranian officials would meet with Russian counterparts to discuss the idea.

"The situation has changed. Still, we will attend talks with Russia on 16 February," he said.

It was not clear if the change of course represented a major shift in Iran's strategy in the developing crisis over its nuclear activities.

Uranium enriched to a low degree is used as fuel for nuclear reactors. But highly enriched uranium is suitable for making atomic bombs.

February 6, 2006
Iran Tells Nuke Agency to Remove Cameras
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:35 p.m. ET

VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Iran has told the International Atomic Energy Agency to remove surveillance cameras and agency seals from sites and nuclear equipment by the end of next week in response to referral to the U.N. Security Council, the agency said Monday.

Iran's demands came two days after the IAEA reported Tehran to the council over its disputed atomic program.

In a confidential report to the IAEA's 35-member board, agency head Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran also announced a sharp reduction in the number and kind of inspections IAEA experts will be allowed, effective immediately.

The report was dated Monday and made available to The Associated Press.

The moves were expected. Iranian officials had repeatedly warned they would stop honoring the so-called ''Additional Protocol'' to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- an agreement giving IAEA inspectors greater authority -- if the IAEA board referred their country to the council.

A diplomat close to the Vienna-based IAEA told the AP that Iran had also moved forward on another threat -- formally setting a date for resuming full-scale work on its uranium enrichment program. Iran says it wants to make fuel through enrichment, but the activity can also generate the nuclear core of warheads.

The diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter was confidential, refused to divulge the date set by Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, in a letter received Monday by ElBaradei.

In Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was still hopeful that Iran will take confidence-building measures with the IAEA.

''It's not the end of the road,'' Annan said of the Security Council referral. ''I hope that in between, Iran will take steps that will help create an environment and confidence-building measures that will bring the partners back to the negotiating table.''

In his brief report, ElBaradei cited E. Khalilipour, vice president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, as saying: ''From the date of this letter, all voluntarily suspended non-legally binding measures including the provisions of the Additional Protocol and even beyond that will be suspended.''

Calling on the agency to sharply reduce the number of inspectors in Iran, Khalilipour added: ''All the Agency's containment and surveillance measures which were in place beyond the normal Agency safeguards measures should be removed by mid-February 2006.''

Earlier, Russia's foreign minister warned against threatening Iran after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reportedly agreed with an interviewer at the German daily newspaper Handelsblatt that all options, including military response, remained on the table.

''That's right,'' Rumsfeld reportedly responded.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called for talks to continue with Tehran, adding: ''I think that at the current stage, it is important not to make guesses about what will happen and even more important not to make threats.''

Lavrov said the use of force would be possible only if the United Nations consented.

U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the Security Council to impose strict sanctions on Iran if it fails to comply with U.N. resolutions and arms agreements and warned that inaction would greatly increase the chances of military conflict. He nonetheless stressed that the United States favors a diplomatic solution.

''Diplomatic and economic confrontations are preferable to military ones,'' Lugar said. But he cautioned that ''in the field of nonproliferation, decisions delayed over the course of months and years may be as harmful as no decisions at all.''

The Additional Protocol was signed by Iranian officials in 2003 as pressure intensified on Tehran to cooperate with IAEA inspectors probing more than 18 years of clandestine nuclear activities. But it was never ratified by parliament.

The protocol gives the agency inspecting powers beyond normal, allowing for inspections on short notice of areas and of programs suspected of being misused for weapons activity.

North Korea -- the world's other major proliferation concern -- unilaterally quit the Nonproliferation Treaty in January 2003, just a few months before U.S. officials announced that Pyongyang had told them it had nuclear weapons and may test, export or use them depending on U.S. actions.

Iranian officials have repeatedly said they will continue honoring the Nonproliferation Treaty. Still, the agreements linked to that treaty are insufficient for agency inspectors trying to establish whether Iran has had a secret nuclear arms program.

Unless Iran relents, the move to curtail voluntary cooperation means that ElBaradei will be stymied in trying to close the Iran nuclear file by March. And that could backfire on Tehran.

Russia and China agreed to Security Council referral on condition that the council take no action until March, when the IAEA board next meets. But if ElBaradei reports to that March 6 meeting that he was unable to make progress in establishing whether Iran constitutes a nuclear threat, the council will likely start to pressure Iran, launching a process that could end in U.N. economic or political sanctions.

------

Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.



Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?artic...rnational_news/

Iran: 'We do not need you at all'

06 February 2006 07:12

Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, taunted the West on Sunday after his country was referred to the United Nations Security Council over its suspected nuclear weapons ambitions.

As Tehran took swift retaliatory action, Ahmadinejad told the West there was nothing it could do to stop Iran.

He said: "Our enemies cannot do a damn thing. We do not need you at all. But you are in need of the Iranian nation."

His defiant response came after the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's atomic watchdog, voted on Saturday by 27 to three -- Syria, Cuba and Venezuela -- with five abstentions to refer the issue to the security council, which could impose sanctions. Ahmadinejad's remarks will add to jitters when the markets open on Monday, with a possible jump in oil prices.

Iran, the world's fourth biggest oil producer, has threatened to respond to sanctions by pushing up oil prices.

Tehran responded to the security council referral by:
Stopping IAEA inspectors from carrying out surprise inspections of Iranian nuclear sites, making it harder for the international community to police Iran's activities.

Scrapping a voluntary agreement reached in 2003 that included not only the surprise inspections but a suspension of uranium enrichment, a step towards attaining a nuclear weapons capability.

Initiating a Bill in the Iranian Parliament to restrict the sale of American goods in Iran.


Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's Foreign Minister, said on Sunday that the IAEA's decision presented Iran with two options. "One was the option of resistance and the other was surrender. We chose resistance," he said.

Although the issue goes to the security council immediately, it would not make any decision about action against Iran until after the IAEA meets again on March 6, giving Tehran a month's breathing space.

Iran sent conflicting signals over the weekend over whether it would pursue diplomatic options during this period. On Saturday Javad Vaeidi, deputy head of the powerful National Security Council, ruled out acceptance of a Russian compromise plan, the only deal left on the table. But a foreign ministry spokesperson, Hamid Reza Asefi, told a press conference in Tehran on Sunday that Iran would go ahead with talks with Russia on February 16 but Russia's proposal would have to be "adjusted". Sergei Ivanov, Russia's Defence Minister, backed Ahmadinejad's view that there was little the West could do. He said sanctions would not have much effect.

The US, emboldened by the IAEA's decision, which will give it more control over the issue, expressed a determination to prevent Tehran acquiring a weapons capability. US President George Bush said the referral to the security council "sends a clear message to the regime in Iran that the world will not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons".

Ehud Olmert, the acting prime minister of Israel, which Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe off the face of the Earth said Iran would pay "a very heavy price" for resuming full-scale uranium enrichment.

The US and Israel have refused to rule out air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, reiterated this on Sunday. He said this was partly because of Ahmadinejad's approach to Israel. "Any government that says Israel has no right to exist is making a statement about its possible behaviour in the future," he said.

But Abdolrahim Moussavi, head of Iran's joint chiefs of staff, warned that any military strike would be useless. "We are not seeking a military confrontation, but if that happens we will give the enemy a lesson that will be remembered throughout history," he said. - Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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===
Will Israel Strike Iran? :

As scary as the idea may sound, the Israelis may not be bluffing. Their defense experts display no doubt whatsoever that Israel's Air Force can cripple Iran's nuclear program if necessary. The trick, they say, is to go after the system's weak spots. "
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11805.htm

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Use of force against Iran is on agenda, warns bullish Rumsfeld:

A senior Iran defence official added to the tough talk yesterday with a senior military commander saying its forces would teach any attackers "a lesson that will be remembered throughout history".
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=185482006

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Ray McGovern : Juggernaut Gathering Momentum, Headed for Iran :

It is altogether reasonable to expect that Iran's leaders want to have a nuclear weapons capability as well, and that they plan to use their nuclear program to acquire one. From their perspective, they would be fools not to.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020606A.shtml

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Iran Secretly Tests New Surface-To-Surface Missile:

"We do not intend to attack any country, but if we are attacked, we are capable of effectively responding. Our position is defensive."
http://tinyurl.com/73wq3

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McCain Starts Bombing Run on Iran:

The senior senator for Arizona is, thus far, sparing the Iranians his riper bouts of pugilism, as when he bellowed for "lights out in Belgrade" and for NATO to "cream" the Serbs back at the close of the Nineties.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11801.htm

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U.S.: Iran sanctions without UN backing would be legitimate :

Imposing economic sanctions on Iran without United Nations backing would be legitimate if other efforts failed to convince Tehran to halt uranium enrichment, a senior U.S. State Department official said on Monday.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/679453.html

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Russia: Do Not Threaten Tehran, Lavrov Says:

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday warned world powers against threatening Iran and said the dispute over Tehran's nuclear program must be resolved through negotiations.
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2006/02/07/012.html

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The gullibility that led us into the last war could yet bring us a new conflict :

Our leaders were never trustworthy, yet many people were only too willing to
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1702935,00.html

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/02/06/D8FJMH5G0.html
Russia Warns Against Conflict With Iran
Feb 06 10:17 AM US/Eastern
Email this story

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
Associated Press Writer


MOSCOW


Russia's foreign minister warned against threatening Iran over its nuclear program Monday after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reportedly agreed with a German interviewer that all options, including military response, remained on the table.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called for talks to continue with Tehran, which was reported to the U.N. Security Council on Saturday by the International Atomic Energy Agency.



"I think that at the current stage, it is important not to make guesses about what will happen and even more important not to make threats," Lavrov said during a visit to Athens, Greece.

Rumsfeld, in an interview with the German daily newspaper Handelsblatt, was asked if all options, including the military one, were on the table with Iran.

"That's right," Rumsfeld responded, according to Handelsblatt's print edition Monday.

Lavrov said the use of force would be possible only if the United Nations consented.

The IAEA's 35-nation board of governors voted to report Iran to the Security Council, which has the power to impose economic and political sanctions. Tehran responded by saying it would start full-scale uranium enrichment and bar surprise inspections of its facilities.

Meanwhile, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak said Monday a proposed joint venture to enrich Iranian uranium in Russia would be possible only if Tehran resumed its moratorium on enrichment activities, Interfax reported.

Despite an earlier threat to the contrary, Iran said Sunday it was willing to discuss Moscow's proposal to shift large-scale enrichment operations to Russian territory in an effort to allay suspicions it is pursuing nuclear weapons.

Talks on the project were scheduled for Feb. 16 in Moscow. The Bush administration supports the proposal.

Uranium enriched to a low degree can be used for nuclear reactors, while highly enriched uranium is suitable for warheads. Iran insists it only wants to generate electricity, but the United States and some of its allies contend Tehran is trying to build a bomb.

The Islamic republic also left the door open for further international negotiations over its program.

Radzhab Safarov, a Moscow-based expert on Iran, said this month's talks in Moscow could produce a breakthrough because some Iranian politicians had questioned the wisdom of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's uncompromising course and had grown increasingly worried about growing international isolation.

"There is a strong chance that these talks will lead to a decision that would help defuse the situation," Safarov said at a news conference.

Safarov said any U.S. or Israeli military action against Iran would prompt Iran to retaliate by blocking oil deliveries through the Persian Gulf and throwing the global market into chaos.

France's foreign minister told Iranian officials Monday to "be careful" when considering whether to use economic sanctions to retaliate after the Security Council referral.

"The Iranians should be careful," Philippe Douste-Blazy said on France-Inter radio. "Isolating themselves would be very serious for them."

"They also need economic cooperation for their industries."

Iran reiterated its stance that it would not negotiate with the United States.

"There is no debate about relations and negotiation with the U.S. There has been no change in our policy," Gholamhossein Elham, Iran's government spokesman, said Monday.

___

Associated Press reporter Nicholas Paphitis in Athens, Greece, contributed to this report.

February 7, 2006
In Protest, Iranian Paper Solicits Holocaust Cartoons
By NAZILA FATHI
TEHRAN, Feb. 7 — Iran's largest newspaper is holding an international competition for cartoons on the Holocaust to retaliate for the publication of cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers last year.

The daily Hamshahri, which is run by the capital's municipal government, said the competition would be co-sponsored by the House of Caricatures, a cartoon exhibition center in Tehran. It said further information would be announced next week.

The newspaper made it clear that the contest was being held to see whether freedom of expression extended to mocking the Holocaust. It invited foreign cartoonists to enter the competition.

"The serious question for Muslims," the newspaper asked, "is whether the West extends freedom of expression to the crimes committed by the United States and Israel, or an event such as Holocaust?"

"Or is its freedom only for insulting religious sanctities?" it added.

The Iranian Student News Agency reported that the Commerce Ministry d called for changing the name of Danish pastry to the name of a flower that is named after Prophet Muhammad. The idea was proposed in a letter to the ministry, the news agency said.

The newspaper announced the contest today after hundreds of demonstrators hurled stones and petrol bombs at the Danish embassy in Tehran on Monday.

Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, praised the anti-Danish protests in a speech today, and compared the cartoons with questioning whether the Holocaust happened.

"In this (Western) freedom, casting doubt or negating the genocide of the Jews is banned, but insulting the beliefs of 15 billion Muslims is allowed," IRNA news agency quoted him as saying. "The reaction of the Muslim world was in time and they should have reacted this way," he said. "This anger is not targeted at Christians but at those who planned this conspiracy." Mr. Khamenei was referring to the reaction of European leaders last year after Iran's conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called the Holocaust a myth and urged the destruction of Israel.

The Foreign Ministry has announced that it will hold a seminar on the Holocaust but no date has been set.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company