Iran Affairs

End of this blog

Reports say that Iran's Bushehr reactor will start up in earnest in a few weeks. I have decided to significantly reduce my participation/involvment in Iran-related political issues as of that date. This blog will remain in online for a few more years, and maybe I'll post very occasionally, but that's about all folks! All good things come to an end, and the time comes to pursue other things.

US hiker-spies in Iran?

So we have reports that the US is waging a clandestine war with a "Wilderness of Mirrors" -- boy, that's not doing too many favors to the American "hikers" detained in Iran who are accused of espionage, does it? You can't on one hand boast about waging secret clandestine wars and yet on the other hand swear up and down that the "hikers" who "accidentally strayed" into Iran could not possible be spies, can you?

"Zero enrichment" in Iran is pretextual

File this under "I told you so":

First, US and EU officials are quoted as demanding that Iran “restore confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature" of their nuclear program” and live up to its vague "obligations" in that regard, yada yada yada.

Just in case you're wondering what this all means, it is simply this: it is all code for "Iran must give up enrichment." This, of course, is clearly a non-starter so one has to ask why the US and EU insists on this "zero enrichment" standard. The answer is that the US/EU do not want to see the nuclear issue resolved. They need it as a pretext for regime change. In fact former IAEA head ElBaradei, during an interview with Der Speigel, that the US and European powers actively sabotaged IAEA mediation efforts with Iran over Iran's nuclear program, and that the Americans and Europeans withheld important documents and information. He emphasized that the US and Europe were not interested at all in reaching a deal with Tehran on its nuclear program but were really after a regime change - "by any means necessary."

And on this topic, Roberto Toscano, the former Italian Ambassador to Iran, had this to say in April 2011 (on Gulf2000 Project's listserve - quoted with his permission) - notice the bolded part in particular:

The exchange prompted by El Baradei’s interview has become so interesting and important that I cannot refrain from joining. (Full disclosure: I have been an avid but silent “consumer” of Gulf2000 since I was Italy’s ambassador to Iran. Now, given my newly gained freedom – I recently retired – I can finally contribute).

I believe that the so-called EU3 did not achieve any significant result in their attempt at finding a solution for the Iranian nuclear question for two basic reasons. First, the Iranians have always seen the US as the real adversary/interlocutor, and the Europeans as partners that could be interesting for bilateral relations, but doubting that they could be truly relevant in matters of security and strategy. They are not the only ones to have such doubts, of course.

However the real issue was not their view of the EU, but rather the concrete problem, which they often lamented, that any agreement with the Three was actually ad referendum, since the real decider was not sitting at the table. (Actually the EU3 were in the same frustrating predicament, insofar as the real Iranian decider, the Supreme Leader, could always - and I believe he did at a certain stage of the talks – take back even minor concessions that the Iranian negotiators had acceded to. It would be interesting to hear Javier Solana on this).

The “limited sovereignty” of the negotiators was however, only part one of the problem. Part two had to do with substance. I always found curious that we (meaning both the US and Europe) have used the expression “objective guarantees” not referring, as would be logically correct, to inspections, thresholds etc., but to the need for Iran to give up enrichment, period. And we expected (and still expect, apparently) that Iran will accept that, forgetting that the right to enrichment is probably the only item within the regime’s policy that draws the approval not only of the different factions within the regime, but also of those who are opposed to it. Try and ask the leaders of the Green Movement, or any Iranian citizen.

I know, and those who were in Iran at the time know, that until 2005 - i.e. the election of Ahmadinejad and the “change in the regime” (to our regret, we discovered that no, they were not “all the same”) Tehran was willing to consider a compromise based on a mix of limited enrichment, Additional Protocol, some form of international consortium. But we insisted on “zero enrichment”, and the result was that now Iran has hundreds of centrifuges spinning.

Thus I do not agree with [another G2K member] when he deplores Iran’s “total unreadiness to negotiate on enrichment”, since it would be more correct to say “total unreadiness to give up enrichment”, which is not the same.

Yup - so like I have always said, the nuclear issue is pretextual. It is not about "Iranian nukes" at all (indeed, Bill Gerz of the Washington Times reports that the latest NIE goes further than the previous NIE regarding Iran's nuclear program - the last one said Iran had no active nuclear program, and latest NIE apparently has dropped all references to even "potential" nuclear weapons in Iran. Not that you would know this, considering how the media in the US continue with the standard line about "fears that it’s building a nuclear bomb".)

And in case you missed it, here it is again: the nuclear conflict with Iran has nothing to do with nukes but is about regime change, and so no amount of Iranian nuclear compromises would settle the issue, which is why Iran's many perfectly legitimate compromise offers have been consistently ignored.

 

so they finally got Bin Laden

yes so they got him. details unknown but in Pakistan (imagine what would have been said if he had been in Iran!) No big deal. 10 years later, and one Arab spring later. They got him pretty much when he had grown irrelevant. Made sure not to distract from the royal wedding either. Now, prepare yourself for a month or so of triumphalist news coverage.