Iran Affairs

Iran-related blog commentary & Operation Earnest Voice

A lot of people write me expressing frustration and disgust with some blog commentary they've been reading about Iran, specifically commentary from the "Tea Party" variety that essentially boils down to racist Islamophobic rants, etc.

I just wanted to remind everyone that most of those blog comments are probably the work of government or government-funded public relations agencies and are not "genuine". Lets remember Operation Earnest Voice:

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

The Israelis of course have the same or better form of online propaganda operations and have a long history of recruiting people to promote their agenda. For example:

The National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS) has become a full-time partner in the Israeli government’s efforts to spread its propaganda online and on college campuses around the world.

NUIS has launched a program to pay Israeli university students $2,000 to spread pro-Israel propaganda online for 5 hours per week from the “comfort of home.”

These are just some examples which have been exposed. There are plenty more. God only knows what else is going on behind the scenes, but certainly bribing or otherwise influencing journalists to sell wars has a long, long, long history, and the rest don't need to be bribed because they inherently identify with power and are promoted by toeing the line of the status quo. This is standard stuff, and the subject of much academic study.

And, we all of course remember the Democracy Council's "Taash Network" plans, for creating a fake front in Europe to promote US propaganda under the guise of the "Green Movement", that were exposed on this very blog, right?

The US undermined the Moscow talks on Iran's nuclear program

Laura Rozen and Barbara Slavin write in Al-Monitor that "US Hardens Stance in Iran Nuclear Talks"

“Earlier, the US had implied that they were ready to address the three E3+3 demands … separately,” a briefing shared with Al-Monitor said, using the terminology Europeans employ for the P5+1. “However, this position had changed in Moscow,” where the US insisted “that the three demands should be treated inseparably, as a package.”

Indeed, after the P5+1 presented its proposal to Iran in Baghdad last month, Washington’s clear expectation was that Iran would not accept it as-is.

They downplay the Israeli pressure intended to kill any remote chance of the talks succeeding:

Prospects for compromise on the terms of an interim deal also seem to be increasingly constrained by a number of factors, including western skepticism that Iran is serious about negotiations and domestic political concerns, as well as Israeli pressure not to agree to a small deal that might reduce momentum for further economic sanctions.

Of course, this was always going to be this way. This is part of a long and well-recognized  pattern as MJ Rosenberg recognizes:

The new American position is precisely the same as Netanyahu’s. And it is classic Israeli “negotiating.” Rather than sit down and talk without conditions, Israel invariably sets the results it wants to achieve as preconditions for negotiations...

And now, under Netanyahu’s tutelage, that is what we are doing with the Iranians. We issue ultimata.

The only reason Obama is doing this is because he believes that the key to keeping the money flowing from the “pro-Israel” community is by simply doing what AIPAC tells him to do.

My view on Waltz's thesis on why Iran should get nukes

So the internet is a-buzz about a piece written by Kenneth Waltz, a top international affairs academic, in which he suggests that a nuclear-armed Iran would bring stability in the Mideast by counter-balancing Israel. And people have been asking my view of it.

Frankly, I think this is a lot of ivory tower musings about hypothetical situations that don't exist. Sort of like when armchair historians sit around and play mental "what if" games such as 'What if Hitler defeated Russia" or "What if Columbus didn't reach North America"

Whatever may be the merits of Waltz' view, the fact remains that there is no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran, something that all this distracting chatter created by Waltz is obfuscating.

Iran sanctions a case of self-inflicted wound for West?

Two experts from India -- one a former Ambassador -- write in the Financial Times:

The [Iran] sanctions are an issue for energy exporters like Brazil and Russia too. The Western-dominated system that is strangling Iran, can do the same to others should their geopolitics be deemed inconvenient. Iran today, could be Russia or Brazil tomorrow.

They then propose some ways in which BRIC nations can create an alternative to the Western-dominated economic system.

Unquestionably there will be resistance from the U.S. and Europe. Not only will they lose control of instruments like sanctions, but any alternative platform will be a direct threat to the almighty dollar and hit the near-monopolies of NYMEX and ICE.

So ultimately the sanctions end up undermining US power around the world as they convince other nations to get away from the Western-dominated sytem. Wow, talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Ray Takeyh embarrasses himself on Iran -- again

You know, I was going to just let this pass because frankly I was too embarassed for Ray Takeyh to raise the issue, but after some thought I just decided I couldn't, and shouldn't. After all he's whoring out his PhD as an 'expert' on Iran, so he should be willing to suffer the consquences including people laughing out loud at his obvious dishonesty.

So, in a recent analysis on Iran in which he accuses Iran of "intransigence", Ray Takeyh proclaims that Iran's expectation that the US should recognize Iran's right to enrich uranium -- a right, by the way, that many other nations have recognized (including US-allies Brazil and Turkey) -- is supposedly "impossible, given the fact that the enrichment stands in violation of Security Council resolution".

Not so long ago, Paul Pillar addressed this very same argument that the UNSC resolutions prevent the US from recognizing Iran's rights under the NPT, even though the US itself was the force behind those UNSC resolutions in the first place:

I wonder if the Iranian negotiators, while looking across the table at the P5 portion of the P5+1, mentioned how peculiar it is to use as a supposed legal reference actions that the P5 themselves took and that amount to a bill of attainder against Iran.

Come on Ray, you can do better than this nonsense.

Iran's enrichment program: "intransigence" or US stupidity?

So as was expected, the Iran-bashers like Ray Takeyh are busy trying to blame the failure of the Moscow talks on "Iranian intransigence" -- as if Iran's completely legitimate expectation that the talks would proceed on the basis of the relevant international treaty AS PROMISED (which includes recognition of the right to enrich uranium) is somehow just too crazy and far out to be acknowledged. God forbid that the US should have to abide by international law, after all. Hey, remember this?

“We have agreed that the Non-Proliferation Treaty forms a key basis for what must be serious engagement to ensure all the obligations under the treaty are met by Iran while fully respecting Iran’s right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy,” EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said following the meeting with Iran’s top negotiator, Saeed Jalili.

LOL. Ashton baby, you're such a good comedienne.

And naturally the media are busy repeating the standard talking points about how the negotiations fell apart because Iran was "intransigent" about giving up their 20% enrichment.

Apart from the lie about the talks proceeding on the basis of the NPT, what the media completely fail to mention, of course, is that the US would never have had to negotiate over the 20% enriched uranium in the first place had the US not interferred in Iran's right to simply purchase the reactor fuel it needed for the Tehran Research Reactor, thus forcing Iran to resort to 20% enrichment in order to manufacture that fuel. Considering that the Tehran Research Reactor is not only NOT a nuclear weapons proliferation threat at all (the reactor operates under IAEA safeguards, and is also entirely too small to be a weapons threat) but is also used to make isotopes to treat Iran's 800,000 cancer patients, you can see how stupid this was. In short, the US has shot itself in the foot by denying Iran's right to buy the fuel, and now has to negotiate in the hopes to convince Iran to give up 20% enrichment which is used by Iran to manufacture that fuel. What a success! This is never even mentioned or considered in the media analyses. Instead the expectation that Iran should give up enrichment, and is "intransigent" for not doing so as the US demands, is simply taken for granted in the reports/analyses.

And if that wasn't funny enough, there are  top-level international affairs experts who are now actually starting to argue that Iran obtaining nukes would be a good thing! Wow.

Iran Media Use 2012

The Broadcast Board of Governors, which is in charge of US  propaganda broadcasts, and Gallup teamed up to do a report on "Iran Media Use 2012"

A summary of the report:

"Despite living in a restrictive media environment, where the internet and satellite television are restricted, Iranians are relatively well-connected, the survey found: Ninety percent of households had at least one mobile phone, 67 percent had a computer and 26 percent had a satellite dish. That put the prevalence of such technology in Iran roughly on par with that in Turkey, less well-connected than the rich Persian Gulf states, but more so than North African and Middle Eastern countries like Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

 

When it comes to news, 49 percent of IRIB’s viewers rated its programming as “very trustworthy,” while 40 percent said it was “somewhat trustworthy.” The fact that so many respondents expressed less than total satisfaction with IRIB is significant, given that they were speaking on the phone to a foreign pollster, and likely were self-censoring, said William Bell, the BBG's director of research. “If people were fearful about talking about state television, it's striking that half of them would say it's not very trustworthy,” Bell said.

 

The perceived trustworthiness of foreign broadcasting, however, was not dramatically different, according to the same survey. Of four international news sources (which the BBG did not publicly name), the number of respondents rating them either very or somewhat trustworthy ranged from 65 percent to 80 percent.

 

Iranian news consumers are cynical about all sources of news, Bell said. While they appreciate international broadcasters' lack of censorship and the airing of entertainment programs not shown by Iranian broadcasters, they also tend to believe that international broadcasters have a political agenda and they resent criticism from outside, he said.

 

Iran nuclear talks fizzle out

So lets see now: After months of talks, across two continents and three cities, and the whole thing came down to the fact that the US wants Iran to abandon her rights, with nothing given in exchange.

Well, I hate to say it, but I told you so. Add the 2012 Istanbul-Baghdad-Moscow talks to a long, long list of events in which "negotiations" were supposely being held with Iran that ultimately consisted of little more than the US imposing unreasonable demands whilst not giving a thing in return. If there were people who were resistant to acknowleding this long and well-established pattern, the latest events should be the final proof.

The bottom line is that as long as the US is not willing to recognize such a basic principle -- that Iran, like any other sovereign country, has a right to enrich uranium, just as Brazil, Argentina, Netherlands etc. -- then really there just isn't anything to talk about. And the US won't acknowledge that because 1- Israel won't tolerate it, and 2- the US needs to keep the nuclear issue alive as a justification and pretext for a policy of imposing regime change in Iran.

Of course there will be analysts who will attempt to cut a "middle of the road" path for themselves by blaming both sides equally, thus making themselves appear to be objective and neutral, but really, I don't see how Iran can be criticized for not giving up a right to enrichment. No country on the face of the planet would do that. (The US trumpets a nuclear agreement it recently signed with the UAE according to which the UAE agreed to not enrich uranium BUT what the US doesn't mention is that the agreement only applied to US-provided nuclear material, and the UAE never gave up its right to enrichment as a whole. )

 

Iranians targetted by FBI to become informants

So reportedly the FBI places American-born US citizens of Iranian descent on "no fly" lists, as part of a tactic to pressure them into becoming informants. There has been a lot of reporting on these no-fly lists, which is a totally out of control method used to suppress domestic dissent in the US, but this is the first I've heard of this sort of thing being directed against an American of Iranian background.

Note that it is now only a matter of time before one of these Iranian-Americans is going to give in to the pressure and act as an informant, and eventually one will also act as an agent provacateur, doing the FBI's own bidding to recruit other people into a plot against the US which can be then busted by the FBI with much public fanfare...and political consequence. Emad Salem, the Egyptian-born FBI informant who was complicit in the first World Trade Center bombing, found himself in a similar situation when he was instructed to infiltrate the bombers' circle, but his pleas directed to his handlers at the FBI to allow him to substitute a harmless substance for the explosive material in the bomb were ignored. He taped the conversation to prove it.

 

Moscow talks with Iran: a setup for failure

David Elliot and Roshan Alemi write in Foreign Policy:

This week, a European diplomat exuberantly told The Washington Post's David Ignatius that Iran had "backed down" from its threat to pull out of talks scheduled to be held in Moscow if lower level talks did not take place first. The diplomat added, "the formula we have agreed [upon] is that they [Iran] will engage in the substance of our proposal. In turn we will think a bit about their ideas."

While it is unclear exactly how avoiding preparatory talks before Moscow represents a "diplomatic victory," as the diplomat said, it is natural for the West to strike a confident posture before the negotiations.  However, if this show of confidence is really just arrogance -- as suggested by the notion that Western powers need only think "a bit" about Iran's objectives -- then the negotiations are very unlikely to succeed.

Yes, exactly. The talks are "unlikely to succeed" if by that you mean finding a resolution to the standoff between the US and Iran -- as I've always said. However, if the goal is to kill any chances of a peaceful resolution whilst trying to blame the failure of the talks on Iran --- in short, if the goal is setting up Iran -- then the talks will probably be "successful".

"Six plus one" talks on Iran's nuclear program

Today Xinhua reports that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said here Friday that the format of "six plus one" for Iranian nuclear talks should continue.

I assume this was an error by Lavrov but it is quite an interesting error. The talks are formally with the FIVE plus one -- specifically, the P5 and Germany (The P5 are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: Russia, US, France, UK, China.)

But there is a sixth member of the talks that does not get mentioned: Israel. Even though Israel is not formally involved in the talks, it has a significant effect and influence on these talks, so much so that it might as well be involved formally. After all, wasn't it Netanyahu who instructed Obama that the US red line should be moved from Iranian nuclear weapons to even an "capability", thus in effect requiring the US to press for an end to uranium enrichment in Iran entirely -- contrary to initial reports that the P5+1 had decided that the talks should be based on the NPT, which meant an implicit recognition of Iran's right to enrichment.  The demand that Iran abandon this right, by the way, obviously has no chance of being accepted by the Iranian side, thus ensuring that the talks fail -- which has been the goal of Netanyahu all along.

So, yes, perhaps the more accurate way to refer to these talks is not P5+1, but "Six plus one". I suggest everyone refer to them as such.

Obama not interested in resolving dispute with Iran peacefully

Robert Merry in the National Interest

America today is once again on a path to war—this time with Iran—and the road is dotted with many of the same signposts seen in Roosevelt’s path to war seventy years ago. Like Roosevelt in his dealings with Japan, President Barack Obama has helped place Iran under severe strain of economic sanctions. Like Roosevelt, he has received from the adversary signals of flexibility in the search for a mutually satisfactory solution. Like Roosevelt, Obama has rebuffed those overtures. Roosevelt was under pressure from Britain’s prime minister Winston Churchill to hang tough, and Obama is under similar pressure from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu....

if there is indeed any prospect for a negotiated settlement, Obama and the other P5+1 powers aren’t demonstrating any interest in exploring it.

From Baghdad to Moscow, Iran talks follow a familiar path

Peter Jenkins, the UK's former representative at the IAEA, writes at LobeLog that Iran Nuclear Talks Require Confidence Building:

Some of us are not surprised that the Baghdad offer was unattractive to Iran. It would not have attracted us had we been representing Iran. Instead of offering some of the sanctions relief of which Iran is in sore need, the West offered no additional sanctions–and this in return for one of Iran’s strongest negotiating assets: the 20% enrichment activity at Fordow. It was rather like a mugger saying to a victim:” Hand over your wallet and I promise to stop kicking you.”

And why do you think that the Baghdad offer was so paltry ? Was it because it is becoming obvious once again, that these talks are not really intended by the US to actually resolve the standoff with Iran? Mehdi Mohammadi (an "expert on nuclear issues") writes in Iran Review

Moscow talks can be a turning point in history of negotiations about Iran's nuclear program if and only if the United States takes practical and tangible measures to prove that its real goal is to make sure about exclusively peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear energy program and does not pursue regime change under the cover of such claims.

 I still don't see this process as ever panning out, especially as it already looks like that the US side is determined not to acknowledge certain basic realities, namely that Iran has a sovereign right to enrichment, and no Iranian government that wants to live long would give that up.

Christian Science Monitor: 5 surprising facts about Iran's nuclear program

Four days after I link to David Morisson's piece, the Christian Science Monitor decides to get inspired by Morisson's piece to summarize the issues themselves.

David Morrison on Iran's nuclear program

If you want a succint and clearly written article that explains the issues around Iran's nuclear program, I recommend Dr David Morrison's Some Facts About Iran's Nuclear Activities.

Summary
“The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three
things about Iran’s nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not
decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable
nuclear warhead.” (Reuters Special Report, 23 March 2012 [1])

• Iran has no nuclear weapons
• Iran has no nuclear weapons programme
• The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said that the
possession of nuclear weapons is a “grave sin”
• The November 2011 report of the IAEA did not claim that Iran has a
nuclear weapons programme
• Iran is not in breach of any obligations under the NPT
• Uranium enrichment is Iran’s “inalienable right” under the NPT
• The US and its allies are trying to deny Iran its right to uranium enrichment
under the NPT
• Iran’s nuclear facilities are open to IAEA inspection, Israel’s are not
• A double standard is being applied with regard to nuclear weapons in the
Middle East:-
(1) Iran, which has none, is the object of ferocious economic sanctions
and threats of military action;
(2) Israel, which has many (perhaps as many as 400) and the ability to
deliver them to any capital in the Middle East, is the object of over $3
billion a year of military aid.
• The US, Israel and others, who are threatening military action against Iran,
are in breach of Article 2.4 of the UN Charter, which requires that all UN
member states “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat
or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of
any state”.

Stephen Walt doesn't get it on Iran

Stephen Walt writes:

For the past decade, the US and its allies have been insisting that Iran
suspend enrichment. Back when we started making that demand (in 2001 or
so), Iran had no centrifuges in operation. We’ve continued to issue these
ultimatums for more than a decade, and Iran now has thousands of
centrifuges in operation and a stockpile of enriched uranium that we’re
now trying to get them to give up. In short, our take-it-or-leave-it
approach to this problem has been a complete failure, and you’d think
those in charge of U.S. policy would have recognized this by now.

Well, gee whiz Walt, maybe those in charge of US policy do recognize this? Maybe this isn't attributable to an "arrogance of power" but is in fact part of a deliberate policy? Like I've been saying for years, the total "suspension" (permanent elimination) of enrichment really isn't the goal, but is actually just a pretext for another policy: of regime change. I mean, seriously folks! When are we going to acknowledge this? The demand that Iran give up enrichment is and always was a "poison pill" inserted into the talks and intended to prevent a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue through negotiations.

Look, the US intelligence agencies themselves say that there is no sign of a nuclear weapons program in Iran, nor any actual proof that Iran seeks nuclear weapons. And yet the scaremongering about Iran's nuclear program continues unabated in the media and through "leaks".

I wonder: how many more times do we have to see this demand for ending enrichment in Iran killing off any negotiations, before we acknowledge the US simply has no desire for this standoff to the resolved whilst the regime in Iran is still there? No, just about the LAST THING the US wants is for the negotiations to be successful with the IRI left in charge.

And once we accept that fact, which is self-evident by now, we have to accept the corollary: no amount of Iranian compromises -- not even if Iran totally gives up its nuclear prorgram -- will end the standoff. The US goal is regime change, not simply ensuring that Iran's nuclear program doesn't result in weapons.