From Saturday through Thursday I will be on the road driving from North Carolina to Illinois and back. I will be updating the site as circumstances allow. During this period, I will be posting fewer news items and more of the free-ranging items that I’m now clustering under my catchall — attention to the unseen. This brief message will remain at the top of the page throughout this period. PW
Reuters reports: As the European Union prepares to ban Iranian oil and the United States turns the screw on payments, oil executives and policymakers say China and Russia stand to gain the most and Western oil firms and consumers may emerge the biggest losers.
Iran will continue to sell much the same volume of oil – 2.6 million barrels per day or around 3 percent of world supply – but almost all of it will flow to China, they reason. And being pretty much Iran’s only remaining customer, Beijing will be able to negotiate a much reduced price.
The EU will ban Iranian oil from July. The United States plans sanctions on Iran’s central bank and possibly its shipping firm. European headquartered oil firms such as France’s Total and Royal Dutch Shell have already abandoned Iranian oil purchases or are in the process of doing so.
Japan and South Korea have signaled they may reduce purchases of Iranian oil to comply with U.S. sanctions designed to put pressure on Tehran over its nuclear program.
That leaves a growing number of buyers competing for alternative supplies. Inevitably attention has turned to Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest exporter and the only country that can quickly increase oil output and help the West avoid a price spike that would deal a severe economic blow.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that “Iran’s parliament could ban oil exports to Europe as early as next week, in a move that could hit economically weak southern European countries.” The EU recognizes that Greece, Spain and Italy need several months to secure alternative supplies to the ones they now rely on from Iran.
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Nima Khorrami Assl writes: The US and EU have announced new sanctions in the hope of persuading Iran to abandon its alleged nuclear weapons programme, though how effective these will be is questionable. China, India, Russia, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea have already refused to go along with the new measures. Iran also has the means to evade the sanctions – through its proximity to Iraq.
Iran has often been singled out as the main beneficiary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, as well as the biggest threat to Iraq’s stability in the post-Saddam era. Iran’s uninterrupted support for Shia militia groups in southern Iraq, particularly the Mahdi army, is seen as one indication of its involvement in Iraqi politics and its ability to cause problems for adversaries.
And yet Iran’s key interest in Iraq is less about realpolitik than about trade. Iran is one of Iraq’s most important regional economic partners, with an annual trade volume between the two sides standing at $8bn to $10bn (£5bn to £6.4bn). However, it is Iraq’s 910-mile border with Iran, and therefore its geographical suitability as a smuggling hub for sanctioned goods, which is of paramount importance to Iran at present.
Until 2010, most of the sanctioned goods smuggled into Iran came through the UAE and Oman. Backed by the Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), “small-size” strategic goods, including aircraft components and sophisticated electronic equipment, were smuggled into the Iranian islands of Kish and Qeshm from Dubai, Ras al-Khaimah and Madha. Since the beginning of 2010, however, the US government has put immense pressure on the Emirati and Omani governments to curb smuggling, threatening that failure to do so would cost them access to US markets and technology.
Wary of this, the UAE and Oman have both made the obvious choice and cracked down on smuggling between the southern and northern edges of the Gulf. In response, the Iranian government has turned its attention to Iraq in order to bypass western sanctions, and has imposed restrictions on Iranian businesses in the Gulf.
So far, most of the smuggling through Iraq has taken place in the mountainous Kurdish regions. For instance, since June 2010, when the US and EU imposed tougher sanctions on Iran’s gasoline imports, hundreds of millions of dollars in crude oil and refined products from the Kurdish region, Kirkuk, and Baiji have been smuggled to Iran on a daily basis.
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Al Jazeera reports: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that global crude prices could rise as much as 30 per cent if Iran halted oil exports as a result of US and European Union sanctions.
If Iran halts exports to countries without offsets from other sources, it would likely trigger an “initial” oil price jump of 20 to 30 per cent, or about $20 to $30 per barrel, the IMF said in its first public comment on a possible Iranian oil supply disruption.
The IMF highlighted the risks of rising tensions over Iran sanctions in a note on Wednesday sent to deputies from G20 countries who met in Mexico City last week.
The price impact caused by a cut in Iranian exports could be exacerbated by below average oil stocks in many countries, the result of tight oil market conditions through much of last year, the IMF said.
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The Guardian reports: Iran is due to open talks with UN nuclear inspectors on Sunday in an attempt to allay their suspicions of a covert Iranian weapons programme, the first such discussions in more than three years.
The three days of meetings in Tehran between Iranian nuclear officials and a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) represent the only diplomatic progress in more than a year, as tensions mount over Iran’s nuclear programme and western attempts to cut off the country’s oil trade.
Diplomats familiar with the visit said that the IAEA team would seek assurances that they will be able to interview key Iranian scientists suspected of past involvement in weapons research, visit sensitive sites and see documents concerning the procurement of dual-use technology. The Iranian government denies it is seeking to make nuclear weapons, insisting its research is for scientific or civil power-generating purposes.
Diplomats and analysts have played down prospects of a quick breakthrough.
If the talks were to collapse, the pressure on Iran could intensify. The IAEA has warned that Tehran could be referred to the UN security council for possible further punitive measures if it fails to cooperate.
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Exceptionalism takes many forms but perhaps its most universal expression can be found among politicians and petty criminals. When contemplating doing something really stupid, they have an unusual capacity to become convinced that nothing can go wrong.
When it comes to Israel’s view of Iran, the contradictions seem boundless. The Islamic republic is the modern equivalent of Nazi Germany, Netanyahu and others like to say. But as for the risks involved in attacking Iran, the same fear-mongers claim that these risks have all been wildly overstated.
The lesson of the Holocaust, Netanyahu says, is: “We can only rely on ourselves.” So why does Israel still accept massive amounts of U.S. military aid and the support of such a powerful lobby in Washington?
The New York Times reports: Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.
The estimates, which have been largely adopted by the country’s most senior officials, conclude that the threat of Iranian retaliation is partly bluff. They are playing an important role in Israel’s calculation of whether ultimately to strike Iran, or to try to persuade the United States to do so, even as Tehran faces tough new economic sanctions from the West.
“A war is no picnic,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio in November. But if Israel feels itself forced into action, the retaliation would be bearable, he said. “There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1,000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.”
The Iranian government, which says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz — through which 90 percent of gulf oil passes — and if attacked, to retaliate with all its military might.
But Israeli assessments reject the threats as overblown. Mr. Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have embraced those analyses as they focus on how to stop what they view as Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons.
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The Israel-firster grumble rumbles on. I have no idea what round we’re in but here’s a snippet from Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest attack on Glenn Greenwald. Some of Goldberg’s readers are apparently upset with him for not attacking Greenwald with enough vigor and for that reason suggest that Goldberg himself is at risk of defining himself as a self-hating Jew. His response to one such challenge:
Self-hatred is a deeply-inexact description of the people this reader is trying to describe. In my experience, those Jews who consciously set themselves apart from the Jewish majority in the disgust they display for Israel, or for the principles of their faith, are often narcissists, and therefore seem to suffer from an excess of self-regard, rather than self-loathing.
Which is to say, if someone is Jewish and lacks the fondness for Israel that Goldberg and others would expect from a Jew, then this person must suffer from a character flaw.
The smear always conforms to the same structure: attack the person instead of the idea.
There is a transparent intellectual cowardice in this approach. If Israel’s defenders can only mount a defense by suggesting that Israel’s critics are all flawed human beings, what does this say about Israel?
It should be possible, for instance, to have an argument about Israeli democracy — for one person to say why they believe that Israel fails to uphold democratic values and another to say why they believe it succeeds in doing so. But what is much more likely to happen is that the defender of Israeli democracy will start demonizing, marginalizing, and belittling Israel’s critics.
Is this simply a sad commentary on Zionism, or does it reflect a form of realism — an implicit acknowledgment that the best the Zionists can do at this point is to close their ranks since long ago they gave up on the idea of winning anyone over to their side?
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When anyone gets rescued — whether they be the victim of a disaster or they were being held hostage — there is reason to celebrate. Even so, the story of the Navy Seals operation that resulted in the release of Jessica Buchanan resonates in other ways as well.
I imagine the Danish aid worker, Poul Hagen Thisted, realized that the odds of him being rescued in a dramatic military operation were boosted by the fact that he was being held alongside a blond young American woman. And it’s hard to imagine that the White House and the Pentagon did not take into consideration any applicable lessons learned from the Jessica Lynch episode. And it’s hard not to think that in an election year President Obama has a political investment in burnishing his image as a president who more than any other has championed the use of special operations forces around the globe.
What the celebrations obscure is that the United States has had an instrumental role in allowing Somalia to fester as an ungoverned state and U.S. counter-terrorism and counter-piracy operations will do little to aid that abandoned country’s political recovery. Neither will one rescue operation do anything to improve the chances for other hostages being released. Indeed, their chances may have significantly turned worse.
Around 2 a.m. Wednesday, elders in the Somali village of Galkayo said they began hearing an unusual sound: the whir of helicopters.
It was the culmination of a daring and risky mission by about two dozen members of the Navy Seals to rescue two hostages — an American aid worker and her Danish colleague — held by Somali pirates since October. The commandos had dropped down in parachutes under a cloak of darkness while 8,000 miles away President Obama was preparing to deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. The commandos hiked two miles from where they landed, grabbed the hostages and flew them to safety.
For the American military, the mission was characterized by the same ruthless efficiency — and possibly good luck — as the raid on Osama bin Laden in May, which was carried out by commandos from the same elite unit. Nine Somali gunmen were killed; not a single member of the Seals was hurt.
One pirate from the area who seemed to have especially detailed information about the Seal raid said it involved “an electrical net-trap, flattened into the land,” which presumably was the parachute. “Then they started launching missiles,” said the pirate, who spoke by telephone and asked not to be identified.
Pirates operate with total impunity in many parts of lawless Somalia, which has languished without a functioning government for more than 20 years. As naval efforts have intensified on the high seas, stymieing hijackings, Somali pirates seem to be increasingly snatching foreigners on land. Just last week, pirates grabbed another American hostage not far from where the Seal raid took place.
American officials said they were moved to strike in this case because they had received “actionable intelligence” that the health of Jessica Buchanan, the American aid worker, was rapidly deteriorating. The gunmen had just refused $1.5 million to let the two hostages go, Somali elders said, and ransom negotiations had ground to a halt.
Somali pirates have held hostages for months, often in punishing conditions with little food, water or shelter, and past ransoms have topped more than $10 million. One British couple sailing around the world on a little sailboat was kidnapped by pirates from this same patch of central Somalia and held in captivity for more than a year.
President Obama, who Pentagon officials said personally approved the rescue plan and raid, had called several high-level meetings on the case since the two aid workers were kidnapped by gunmen who Somali elders said were part of a well-established pirate gang. “As commander in chief, I could not be prouder of the troops who carried out this mission,” Mr. Obama said in a statement on Wednesday. “The United States will not tolerate the abduction of our people.”
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