NPR: Breaking the silence between the U.S. and Iran
Category Archives: Iran deal
Most Israelis would support unilateral strike on Iran
USA Today reports: Two-thirds of Israelis would support a unilateral Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear targets if they believed their country was in real danger of attack, according to a new opinion poll.
The poll was conducted less than a week after Iranian President Hasan Rouhani told the United Nations that his country’s nuclear power is intended solely for peaceful purposes, and that Iran is open to negotiations and clarifications related to its nuclear capabilities.
In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.N. that “Israel will not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons.”
“If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone,” he said.
The Oct. 2 poll, conducted for Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, a conservative newspaper that has the largest daily circulation in Israel, reveals deep Israeli public skepticism over Iran’s true intentions. It also indicates that Israelis question the value of the diplomacy being pursued by President Obama. [Continue reading…]
Rouhani is walking a political tightrope at home
Geneive Abdo writes: When President Hassan Rouhani touched down on Iranian soil after a dazzling week at the United Nations, he returned to criticism as well as cheers and applause. A crowd of demonstrators held placards and chanted the spent slogan “Death to America!” The protesters included members of the Basij militia, a hard-line paramilitary organization under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The theatrics of the demonstrators reflect a much deeper conflict that is already underway in Tehran, as different factions debate whether Rouhani should have accepted a phone call from President Barack Obama, and, more important, whether Iran should trust the United States to unlock the stalemate over Iran’s nuclear program. Even though Khamenei has apparently given Rouhani the authority to expedite nuclear talks, other leaders in key institutions, such as the IRGC, began this past weekend to express their disapproval. There is increasing evidence that a broader opposition to Rouhani has begun to organize to derail any further progress from his diplomatic efforts.
In Iran’s first public, high-level criticism of Rouhani’s U.N. visit, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, chief of the IRGC, said: “Just as he refused to meet Obama, he should also have refused to speak with him on the telephone and should have waited for concrete action by the United States.” Jafari also said, in an interview with the Tasnim news agency, “If we see errors being made by officials, the revolutionary forces will issue the necessary warnings.”
The operative word here is “revolutionary.” Jafari, defying a warning Rouhani issued to the Guards in mid-September to stay out of politics, is drawing a distinction between Rouhani and the president’s political faction anchored around former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and those who are seemingly more loyal to the values and ideology of the 1979 Islamic revolution. If, indeed, a line in the sand is being drawn, this is a remarkable development in Iranian politics whereby even the clerics of the system — such as Rouhani, one of Khamenei’s advisers and confidants for decades — are too far to the left to silence the hard-liners. [Continue reading…]
Israel should welcome Rouhani’s election victory
Meir Javedanfar writes: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was the most moderate candidate among those allowed to run in the country’s June election. Yet within one month of Rouhani’s victory, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly called him a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Such a reaction would be understandable if Saeed Jalili, the most anti-Western ultraconservative candidate, had won. But why has the Israeli government greeted Rouhani with hostility?
The common refrain in Israel is that Rouhani’s moderate image — in contrast to his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s — will hamper Israel’s efforts to keep Iran isolated. Furthermore, Rouhani’s moderate tone could fool the United States and Europe into a false sense of security, resulting in the lifting of sanctions against Iran and even passivity toward the threat of Iran’s nuclear program.
Such concern likely peaked after Rouhani’s recent visit to the United Nations General Assembly, which led to a number of milestones in Iran’s troubled relationship with the U.S. The meeting between Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry — the first such formal talks between the two countries since the 1978 Iranian Revolution — was followed by another major unprecedented milestone: a phone call between Rouhani and President Barack Obama.
To be sure, when it comes to Rouhani’s ability to usher real change to Iran’s nuclear program, a healthy dose of skepticism is called for. However, his election victory is not the threat that Netanyahu and his cabinet have alleged. In fact, there are good reasons for Israelis to welcome Rouhani’s rise to power.
Rouhani was elected on a platform of moderation. Among the presidential candidates, he was the most critical of Iran’s nuclear-negotiation strategy. His criticism focused on Iran’s intransigent posture at the talks, which forced it to pay a disproportionate price for its nuclear program. As Rouhani stated in a campaign video on June 5, 10 days before the election: “If centrifuges are turning, but the country is dormant, then we don’t choose this. If the arrangement is for Natanz [Iran’s nuclear enrichment site] to work but 100 other factories close because of sanctions and shortage of primary material or they only work at 20 percent of their capacity, then this is unacceptable.” [Continue reading…]
Israel suspected of conducting terrorist attack inside Iran
Suppose that an Israeli commander from the IDF’s Electronic Warfare (EW) Section was assassinated outside Tel Aviv. However terrorism might be defined legally, there’s little doubt that the press inside and outside Israel would describe such an event as an act of terrorism and likewise any country suspected of directing the attack would be described as a state-sponsor of terrorism.
At a time when Israel clearly feels threatened by an unprecedented diplomatic opening between the United States and Iran, there are strong grounds to suspect that the killing of an Iranian cyber warfare commander outside Tehran in the last few days should be viewed in the context of an ongoing secret war that Israel has been conducting against Iran for several years. Given the timing of the killing, it’s purpose appears quite transparent: to place President Rouhani in a more difficult negotiating position. Given, however, that the interests of the Israelis and the hardliners inside Iran are so closely aligned right now, it’s premature to conclude who was responsible.
The Telegraph reports: Mojtaba Ahmadi, who served as commander of the Cyber War Headquarters, was found dead in a wooded area near the town of Karaj, north-west of the capital, Tehran. Five Iranian nuclear scientists and the head of the country’s ballistic missile programme have been killed since 2007. The regime has accused Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, of carrying out these assassinations.
Ahmadi was last seen leaving his home for work on Saturday. He was later found with two bullets in the heart, according to Alborz, a website linked to the Revolutionary Guard Corps. “I could see two bullet wounds on his body and the extent of his injuries indicated that he had been assassinated from a close range with a pistol,” an eyewitness told the website.
The commander of the local police said that two people on a motorbike had been involved in the assassination. [Continue reading…]
Israel hopes to strengthen ties with Gulf rulers in anti-Iran alliance
The Times of Israel reports: Israel has held a series of meetings with prominent figures from a number of Gulf and other Arab states in recent weeks in an attempt to muster a new alliance capable of blocking Iran’s drive toward nuclear weapons, Israel’s Channel 2 reported Wednesday.
According to the report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been supervising a series of “intensive meetings” with representatives of these other countries. One “high ranking official” even came on a secret visit to Israel, the report said.
The report came a day after Netanyahu, in an overlooked passage of his UN speech, noted that shared concerns over Iran’s nuclear program “have led many of our Arab neighbors to recognize… that Israel is not their enemy” and created an opportunity to “build new relationships.”
The Arab and Gulf states involved in the new talks have no diplomatic ties with Jerusalem, the report noted. What they share with Israel, it said, is the concern that President Hasan Rouhani’s new diplomatic outreach will fool the US and lead to a US-Iran diplomatic agreement which provides for “less than the dismantling of the Iranian nuclear program.” [Continue reading…]
Israel’s increasing sense of isolation
Joanna Paraszczuk reports: A sense of isolation prevails in Israel’s media on Wednesday — reflected in both news reporting and opinion pieces — following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Tuesday speech to the UN General Assembly.
Populist outlet Ynet and Channel 2 focus on comments made by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon on Wednesday morning. Ya’alon spoke out in support of Netanyahu’s stance on Iran, saying that the Prime Minister had “drawn an accurate picture” of Israel’s stance on Iran and President Hassan Rouhani.
“In the UN, the Prime Minister described an accurate reality about how we see the Iranian threat, which is ongoing, even though President Rouhani spoke sweetly and Western officials prefer not to face reality with open eyes,” Ya’alon told reporters during a tour of the Golan Heights.
The Defense Minister echoed Netanyahu’s words, saying that Iran posed a terror threat in the region and beyond, “Iran carries out terror in Afghanistan, it trains and arms Hezbollah, it tries to smuggle weapons into Gaza, it is investing in infrastructure of terrorism in South America and Asia and its centrifuges continue to turn. That is why we say you have to stop the Iranian nuclear program by all means.”
Channel 2 also carries comments from Security Cabinet member and Minister Silvan Shalom, who warned that Israel stands alone.
“We are quite alone in facing the Iranian threat to destroy us,” Shalom said, adding that Rouhani is no different from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
“Israel is trying to remove the mask from Rouhani’s face, he speaks sweetly and in a different way from Ahmadinejad, but he did not really no different from him. His aim is to gain more time to build a nuclear bomb, which would be an eternal insurance certificate for the ayatollahs’ regime,” Shalom added. [Continue reading…]
Setting aside for now the fact that Iran’s leaders persist in denying that the Islamic republic’s nuclear program is geared towards weapons production, Shalom’s characterization of the implications of a nuclear-armed Iran is quite revealing.
Having referred to “the Iranian threat to destroy us,” he then suggests that nuclear weapons would serve as an “eternal insurance certificate for the ayatollahs’ regime” — acknowledging that such weapons would serve Iran in exactly the same way that they serve all other nuclear powers: as the ultimate deterrent. Shalom clearly doesn’t share the view promoted by Alan Dershowitz and other members of the rabid wing of the Israel lobby: that Iran is a “suicide nation” willing to see itself destroyed by a retaliatory nuclear strike from Israel.
Moreover, to suggest that Iran’s rulers would want or need nuclear insurance is to acknowledge that an ad hoc coalition of regional powers — preeminently Israel and Saudi Arabia — remain reluctant to abandon their dreams of bringing about regime change in Tehran.
At the same time as engaging in last week’s whirlwind of diplomatic outreach, Hassan Rouhani made it very clear that he has a relatively small window of opportunity to make real progress as he faces pressure from a new axis of extremism revealing the common interests of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, and the Assad regime, all of whom for their own reasons feel deeply threatened by the possibility of Iranian-U.S. rapprochement.
Iran president’s phone call with Obama stirs hardline suspicions
Reuters reports: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s historic phone call with U.S. President Barack Obama is likely to provoke resistance from powerful hardliners in the Islamic Republic who have built their support on enmity with the West.
The first thing Rouhani did on his return to Tehran at the weekend was to state that he had acted within guidelines set by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei when he took part in the highest-level contact between Iran and the United States in three decades.
The brief mobile phone conversation led many to speculate that since the election of the moderate Rouhani relations between Washington and Tehran, in the deep freeze since the U.S. embassy hostage crisis, may be about to improve.
Rouhani’s invocation of Khamenei, the man at the top of Iran’s complex political system, looked like a bid to ward off a backlash from hardline power centres and their supporters, some of whom were already lying in wait to throw eggs at the president’s motorcade.
The demonstrators’ chants of “Death to America” were, however, likely to be only the opening shots of a campaign against Rouhani by a conservative political and military establishment opposed to the West in general and to the United States and Israel in particular.
Such is the mistrust between Iran and the United States that a big sticking point of negotiations over Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme has been who should make the first move. [Continue reading…]
Netanyahu’s ‘The Speech that Never Was’
After Benjamin Netanyahu had delivered a speech at the U.N. which surprised no one, Chemi Shalev wrote:
In the streets and avenues leading up to the UN building on the East River, it was already clear the ball has long been over: the barricades were gone, the policemen were relaxed, the satellite trucks had moved elsewhere, the tension and anticipation of the first few days, when Rohani was in town, had all but dissipated. Inside the hall only a fraction of the fatigued foreign diplomats remained to hear Netanyahu, the last head of the state on the agenda, and even they seemed mainly anxious to go home and get back to their normal lives.
The situation in the media, where Netanyahu hopes to make an impact, wasn’t much better. A few hours after the US government had shut down many of its operations, with news networks anxiously breaking to their reporters in the Rose Garden where President Obama was set to make a statement; it was hard to drum up too much interest, not to mention excitement and buzz, over Netanyahu’s strident speech at the UN.
Because in the end, the Israeli prime minister gave the speech that everyone expected him to make, and, much to the media’s disappointment, he didn’t even bother this time to come up with an eye-catching gimmick for visuals.
Barak Ravid writes: One by one, Netanyahu’s donors, associates and supporters flocked in to watch. Casino magnate and owner of the Hebrew daily Yisrael Hayom, Sheldon Adelson, was followed by American-Jewish attorney Alan Dershowitz, former advisor Dore Gold, family friend Zeev Rubinstein and others. Last to enter was Sara Netanyahu, who took her place near the podium. When Netanyahu made his entrance, in front of a half-empty, drowsy hall, his friends, advisors, supporters and entourage all rose to their feet and applauded for several minutes.
Still, the fans the in stands hardly helped. The prime minister’s address resembled a game of the Israeli national soccer team. After weeks of aggressive marketing, spins, headlines and high expectations, the result was disappointing. We hoped to make it to the World Cup, but will have to do with the League Cup.
Netanyahu’s speech was tired, bothersome and boring. In contrast to the Iranian President Hassan Rohani’s sophisticated PR campaign, which led to his taking the UN by storm, Netanyahu sounded like an old, scratchy vinyl record. Not only did he fail to come up with a new effect that would call world attention to the Iranian nuclear threat, such as last year’s cartoon, the prime minister failed to offer any new pertinent information.
The New York Times reported: Mr. Netanyahu dismissed any thought of allowing Iran to enrich uranium to even a low level, insisting that the only way to assure it would never build a nuclear weapon was a complete dismantlement of its capability to enrich nuclear fuel. He exhorted the West to intensify economic sanctions on Iran instead of easing them, as Mr. Rouhani has demanded.
“I wish I could believe Rouhani, but I don’t,” Mr. Netanyahu told the General Assembly, where Iran’s seats were vacant. “Because facts are stubborn things.”
He said the international response to Iran’s entreaties for sanctions relief should be “distrust, dismantle and verify,” and he repeated his warnings that Israel reserved the right to preemptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities if it deemed the Iranians were close to producing nuclear weapons.
Mohammad Khazaee, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, said afterward that his country had found Mr. Netanyahu’s speech inflammatory, rejected the notion that Iran was building a nuclear arsenal, and asserted its right to self-defense.
“The Israeli Prime Minister better not even think about attacking Iran let alone planning for that,” the Iranian ambassador said. He capped his remarks by saying that Iran’s “smile policy” was better than “lying.”
Hours before Mr. Netanyahu spoke, Iranian diplomats sought to make a pre-emptive strike of their own, calling him a persistent liar and warning President Obama not to allow the Israelis to subvert the positive spirit cultivated by Mr. Rouhani in his visit to the United Nations.
Iranian media splits over diplomatic outreach
Tehran Bureau reports: Hossein Shariatmadari, the chief editor of Iran’s leading hardline newspaper, appears to be in quite a quandary. Long Kayhan’s primary editorial writer, he kept silent for weeks as Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, and his diplomatic team made a series of statements and gestures indicating their willingness to engage in substantive negotiations with the United States and its western allies. Then came the historic telephone exchange last week between Rouhani and Barack Obama, the first direct contact between the presidents of the Islamic republic of Iran and the United States since the 1979 revolution and the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran. On Sunday, Shariatmadari, faced with a choice between continued silence and condemnation, picked the latter.
“The last act of the New York trip, which should be considered most disheartening, and the largest advantage that our nation’s respectful president handed [our] opponent, was the phone conversation of his with the president of the US”, he said of Rouhani’s visit to address the UN General Assembly.
Rather than deal with the content of the conversation, Shariatmadari focused on the announcement by US national security advisor Susan Rice that the Iranian delegation had requested the call. “Based on what analysis and interpretation did his eminence, Mr Rouhani, and the meritorious entourage feel it necessary to trust the Americans and then present the United States’ trust-building efforts in such expansive and loud propaganda as one of the fruits of the New York trip? Furthermore, what kind of a ‘trust-building step’ is this, which neither side is willing to take responsibility for [initiating]?”
“Just take a look at the volume of reviews, analyses, and reports published by the American media, and by American and Zionist officials to see how they reframe the aforementioned telephone conversation in terms of the ‘capitulation of Islamic Iran’ and its weakness and despair due to the strain of the sanctions”, he wrote, without naming any specific media outlets.
Discussing the Kayhan editorial, a senior editor at an Iranian reformist publication told Tehran Bureau, “Shariatmadari is considered an icon in the principlist media realm. For about 20 years, his has been the first and last words among right-wing publications, and his first and last words have always been that under no circumstances should we negotiate with the United States.
“Undoubtedly, Rouhani did not converse with Obama without the consent of [supreme leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei. This has put Shariatmadari in a frightful predicament.”
The depth of that predicament was brought into clearer focus when the state-controlled Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, long a source of hardline views essentially identical to Kayhan’s, offered a very different perspective on the presidential phone call to its millions of viewers. In its Channel One news programming on Saturday, IRIB presented wall-to-wall coverage of Rouhani and his youthful entourage’s return to Iran. Even as it censored out any coverage of the protesters, including Basij militia members, who chanted anti-Rouhani slogans at the airport, the network’s reporters roamed the streets of Tehran asking apparently typical citizens for their opinions of the 15-minute conversation between Iran’s president and that of the nation which for years it had called “the Great Satan”.
Every single one of the people whose interviews were aired welcomed the event. [Continue reading…]
Iran opens its fist
Gary Sick writes: He came to New York. He saw almost everyone. Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s new president, may not have conquered, but at least he seems to have persuaded John Kerry and Barack Obama that his proposals for negotiating an end to the US-Iran conflict deserve to be taken seriously. When President Obama picked up his phone in the Oval Office on Friday to bid farewell to President Rouhani with the Persian phrase Khodahafez (“God be with you”), there was the sense that a tectonic shift between Washington and Tehran was taking place.
The Rouhani blitz was regarded by many cynics as nothing but a charm offensive. Of course, in one sense that is what it was. Rouhani dominated the media, with half a dozen one-on-one interviews, a well written and conciliatory op-ed in the Washington Post, a seemingly endless series of meetings with curated groups of journalists, scholars, former US government officials, business executives, and a throng of his fellow Iranians, many of whom had taken refuge in the United States from the regime he represents. He spoke to the UN General Assembly (the ostensible purpose of his visit), to the Non-Aligned Movement (which Iran chairs), and to a collection of some two hundred members of the Asia Society and the Council on Foreign Relations at a midtown hotel.
I watched him in the two meetings that I attended and in most of his televised appearances. Rouhani is a man of considerable gravitas. He is serious, businesslike, and fully in command of his brief. Except for the formal speeches, he spoke without notes and responded directly and thoughtfully to the many questions directed at him. He spoke in Persian, except for an occasional English phrase, but he listened to his English-speaking audience without simultaneous translation, and his responses indicated that he grasped not only the words but also the nuances. Rouhani is a cleric, and he wears the robes and turban appropriate to his status. But he prefers to be addressed as Doctor Rouhani, in recognition of his PhD in law from Glasgow Caledonian University. Addressing members of New York think tanks, he reminded them that until recently he was one of them, running the Center for Strategic Research in Tehran. That, however, is only a small part of his résumé.
He was national security adviser to presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami, and he has been the personal representative of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for nearly a quarter of a century. In those capacities, and other senior posts, he has been associated with virtually every security and foreign policy decision made by the Islamic Republic of Iran since at least the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s. Rouhani’s close ties to Khamenei were on display as he prepared to depart for the United States. Khamenei appeared before the leadership of the powerful and conservative Revolutionary Guards Corps to remind them politely but firmly that their proper concern was national security, not politics. Since the Revolutionary Guards played a major part in undermining both of Rouhani’s predecessors, this was a unique and unequivocal demonstration of solidarity. It does not, however, guarantee indefinite support for Rouhani’s initiatives. The Guards and the senior clerical establishment will look for results and weigh their own interests. Thus far, Rouhani, with the help of the Leader, has stayed ahead of his domestic and foreign opposition, but in New York he and his associates gave every indication of being men in a hurry. [Continue reading…]
Israel puts ‘Iranian spy’ on display but has yet to charge him after 20 days of detention
Ali Mansouri, an Iranian-born Belgian citizen also known as Alex Mans, was arrested by Israel’s internal security services Shin Bet on September 11. His possession of a couple of nondescript photographs in which the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv can be seen, has been presented as evidence that he was engaged in espionage. (Anyone who wants to find better photos of the embassy just has to use Google.)
The fact that after 20 days in detention (during the first nine of which Mansouri was prevented from consulting a lawyer) investigators don’t appear to have found sufficient evidence to put him on trial, might explain why he has yet to be charged.
At the same time, Israeli authorities were shameless in trying to exploit the political value of holding an Iranian in handcuffs as he was put on display for the press today.
Reuters reports: A man arrested on suspicion of being an Iranian spy appeared in an Israeli court on Monday and some Israeli analysts questioned the timing of the affair, suggesting it was being showcased as part of efforts to discredit Tehran’s new opening to Washington.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew on Sunday to the United States for a visit focused on Iran’s nuclear program, Israel’s Shin Bet security service announced that Ali Mansouri had been arrested on September 11 on suspicion of spying for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
It said Mansouri, a 55-year-old Iranian-Belgian national, had photographed the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and intended to establish business ties in Israel as a cover for espionage.
An Israeli official told reporters on Netanyahu’s flight that Mansouri’s picture-taking outside the embassy – whose exterior can be seen in numerous images on the Internet – was an attempt “to collect intelligence for a possible terror attack”.
That allegation was challenged by Mansouri’s lawyer, Michal Okabi, after a hearing on Monday in a court in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva in which the suspect, who did not speak, was ordered held for eight more days.
“The apocalyptic picture that the Shin Bet is painting is a lot more complicated and the attempt to claim that our client came here in order to carry out attacks in Israel is far from reality and without foundation,” Okabi told reporters.
Some Israeli media commentators questioned the timing of the news, released in a Shin Bet statement that included photographs it said he had taken outside the beachfront mission and at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport. No formal charges have been filed.
Asked by Reuters whether the decision to publicize Mansouri’s arrest was influenced by Netanyahu’s U.S. trip, the Shin Bet declined to comment.
Netanyahu’s Iran dilemma
Larry Derfner writes: By all appearances, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in New York Sunday in a state of near desperation over Iran. By his reckoning, the Iranians are now within arm’s reach — a few months or even just weeks short — of having a stockpile of enriched uranium that, if re-enriched, would be enough for a nuclear bomb. Reports in Israeli media even quote an unnamed government official claiming that Iran already has a bomb. And Netanyahu — who addresses the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday a day after visiting the White House — believes the Obama administration is falling for an Iranian ruse fronted by President Hassan Rouhani to get the West to drop sanctions in return for a deceitful demonstration of nuclear innocence.
But if the Israeli leader is feeling desperate, don’t expect him to show it in his U.N. speech; that, after all, is what his opponents expect. There will likely be no over-the-top gimmicks this time, no cartoon bomb audio-visuals. Neither should anyone wait for explicit, drawn-out analogies to the Holocaust. Instead, Netanyahu is likely to speak very quietly and starkly as he lays out his case that it’s too late to slow Iran’s advance to nuclear capability, that the only remaining choice for the world’s leaders is to force Iran to relinquish its capability to build nuclear weapons, or live with a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran.
Netanyahu’s dilemma is this: Not only does he have no trust in Tehran’s peaceful declarations, he is not confident that the U.S. and Europe are willing to escalate a confrontation in order to force Iran to give up its enriched uranium and dismantle its key nuclear facilities. It is not sufficient for Netanyahu for Iran to accept caps on its enrichment levels, because it’s nuclear infrastructure puts it within “a turn of the screwdriver” of weaponization if it followed North Korea’s example and broke out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Israeli leader believes the only acceptable scenario is for Iran to be presented with the choice of either dismantling its nuclear program or being bombed to ruins — and that’s not a likely outcome of renewed negotiations between the West and Iran, which are focused on limiting but not entirely eliminating Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium. [Continue reading…]
Video — Brzezinski: The U.S. can negotiate successfully with Iran
Iran hawks gear up
Mitchell Plitnick writes: Not everyone shares the optimism surrounding the recent communication between Presidents Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani. From Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Monarchies and, of course, Washington, DC, voices of war are in a panic that tensions between the U.S. and Iran might be reduced by some means other than further devastation of the Islamic Republic.
The concern that Iran might emerge with a better relationship with the United States is quite vexing for the Gulf rulers and for Israel. For some years now, the drive to isolate Iran has focused almost entirely on the nuclear issue. In fact, regionally, much of the concern has been the ascendancy of Iran as a regional player more broadly, with revolutionary rhetoric that challenges the dominance of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Since the destruction, by George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, of the dual containment policy, the issue for these parties has been how to contain Iran and its regional influence.
Iran has been cast as an “aggressor nation,” and this has been sold by illustrating Iran’s support for Hezbollah and other militant groups, its often bombastic rhetoric, and for the past decade, Iran’s ducking from some of its responsibilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). What gets left out is that Iran has never initiated an attack on another nation, its threats to “wipe Israel off the map” are factually known as (just not in mainstream discourse) to be a de-contextualized mistranslation of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s words, and even Iran’s failures with the IAEA have been part of a back and forth exchange, where they refuse or neglect to comply with some things in response to what they see as US-led unfair sanctions or restrictions. That doesn’t mean Iran has not caused some of these problems itself, it has. Lack of transparency on nuclear issues tends to raise the hackles of one’s enemies. But all this has hardly been the one-way street that’s been portrayed. [Continue reading…]
Netanyahu’s fight against Middle East peace
Daniel Levy writes: On Monday, Sept. 30, U.S. President Barack Obama will welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House for the first time in 18 months. Much has changed in the intervening period — both leaders have been re-elected, Obama has made his first visit as president to Israel, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have been relaunched, and that rather pragmatic-sounding Hasan Rouhani chap has been elected president in Iran.
In what might be called an anti-“Asia pivot” speech, Obama announced to the U.N. General Assembly this week that the United States is engaged in the Middle East “for the long haul” and that “in the near term, America’s diplomatic efforts will focus on two particular issues: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
That message will be viewed as a mixed bag in Jerusalem, which is keen for a greater American footprint in the region but is less enthusiastic about the idea of peacemaking with the Palestinians and deal-making with the Iranians taking top billing. For that reason, the upcoming White House meeting will likely find the two leaders back on familiar terrain, more focused on testing each other’s underlying intentions than on working together as close allies.
The U.S. president is something of an open book, but Netanyahu’s approach requires a little more interpretation and context. Too much of that analysis has been consistently wrong, and thankfully so. If prominent Netanyahu watchers had gotten it right, we would be marking the second or third anniversaries of Israeli bombing campaigns against Iran.
Netanyahu is indeed back in threatening mode. His latest rhetorical flourish is to quote Hillel’s ancient maxim “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” — an upgrade of his previous refrain regarding Israel’s “right to defend itself by itself.” That language is being widely interpreted by Israeli commentators as a reaffirmation of Israel’s willingness to strike Iran alone if Netanyahu’s red lines on Iran’s nuclear program are deemed to have been crossed.
This debate has taken on a new urgency given the diplomatic opening seemingly created by the election of Rouhani. It is no secret that Netanyahu has been dragged out of his comfort zone by the possibility of a U.S.-Iran rapprochement. Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s aggressive and insulting behavior made him a convenient adversary for Israel; Rouhani and his diplomatic team, notably polished Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, present a challenge of a very different order of magnitude. [Continue reading…]
Israel releases ‘Iranian spy’ story as Netanyahu heads to Washington
On September 11, Israel’s secret police (Shin Bet) arrested a Belgian windows and roofing salesman who is alleged to be an “Iranian agent … sent to Israel to set up a base for Iranian intelligence and terrorism networks”.
The Israeli government delayed releasing information about the arrest until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set off for Washington on his mission to counter the “the onslaught of smiles” that Americans have been subjected to over the last few days.
Reasons the Israelis give for regarding Ali Mansouri with suspicion, include:
- The fact that when he became a Belgium citizen in 2006, he changed his name to Alex Mans. Were it not for the fact that the father of Israel’s prime minister shed his Polish identity when he migrated to Palestine, Bibi might now be generally known as Benjamin Mileikowsky. As millions of Americans can attest, the adoption of a new name in a new homeland is far from unusual.
- Mans was found in possession of photos of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. Much more detailed photos can be found on Google Maps.
- “Iran offered him a million dollars in exchange for his activities.” But did he take a dime?
Mans left Iran the year after the revolution and has spent most of his adult life living in Turkey and Belgium.
The Jerusalem Post reports:
Public defense lawyers representing Mansouri said that their client is a Belgian businessman who is not motivated by any pro-Iranian agenda.
The attorneys, Michael Orkavi and Anat Yaari, said their client had been denied access to a lawyer for nine days. They added that a more complex picture exists than the one being presented by security forces, and that the full details would emerge in court after Mansouri is charged.
Mans’ cover as a ‘salesman’ seems quite convincing. But maybe that’s because he’s just a salesman. The only thing he’s definitely ‘guilty’ of is having been born in Iran.
Rouhani’s U.N. charm offensive
Barbara Slavin reports: In his speech to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 24, Rouhani protected his flank against domestic hard-liners by bemoaning efforts by unnamed nations to divide the world into a “superior us and inferior others,” to oppress the Palestinians and kill “innocent civilians” with drones. After a meandering start, however, the speech pivoted to promising that Iran would “act responsibly” and “seek to resolve problems, not create them.”
On Sept. 25, he addressed media executives in the morning and former US officials and proliferation experts in the evening — the latter a group of about 40 that included former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former nuclear negotiators Robert Einhorn and Gary Samore and former Ambassadors Bill Luers, Frank Wisner and William Miller.
“He’s a serious fellow and demonstrated tremendous self-confidence,” Gary Sick, a White House National Security Council staffer during the 1979-81 hostage crisis, told Al-Monitor. Yet, Sick said that when he pressed Rouhani at the Sept. 25 dinner on whether Iran was ready to try again for a “grand bargain” similar to a proposal made in 2003 that the United States rebuffed, Rouhani answered, “‘We need to take this a step at a time,’ not in one leap,” Sick said.
On the morning of Sept. 26, Rouhani told a UN meeting on disarmament that Iran wanted a world without nuclear weapons and that Israel — which is believed to have at least 100 nuclear weapons — should join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as Iran did under the shah. Since Israel does not admit it has nuclear weapons, that appears to be quite a stretch.
At night, Rouhani massaged an audience of about 300 — think tankers with a sprinkling of journalists and a few unusual guests of the Iranian mission to the UN including sports promoter Don King. Rouhani began by saying that he was addressing the group as a “colleague,” because prior to becoming president, he headed the Center for Strategic Research, a government-affiliated think tank.
But his comments were mostly platitudes about avoiding a “lose-lose approach” to world problems, asserting Iran’s right to play “a major role at the global level,” and focusing on the future, or as he put it, turning the “turbulent past into a beacon lighting the path forward.”
Asked by Al-Monitor if he would permit the United States to open an interests section in Tehran to process visas for Iranians, he talked instead about the importance of encouraging more academic and other exchanges with the United States. “Initial steps would have to be taken by the people,” he said, without explaining how that could be facilitated.
On the Holocaust — an issue that came up in almost every meeting with Americans Rouhani held this week — he said that Iran condemned “the crimes by the Nazis in World War II.” He added, “Many people were killed including a group of Jewish people.” One might argue that 6 million people are hardly just a “group,” but Rouhani had already gone about as far as he apparently felt he could in trying to overcome memories of Ahmadinejad’s chronic Holocaust denial without upsetting his right flank at home.
Asked if Iran would support a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, Rouhani repeated a formula first introduced by former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, by saying, “Whatever the people of Palestine accept, we shall accept as well.” But he did not give details, so it was not clear whether by “people of Palestine,” he also meant millions of Palestinian refugees living outside the West Bank and Gaza — a non-starter for Israel. [Continue reading…]