Surely, what’s happening now in Iraq and Syria must serve as a final wake-up call that we have been led into a horrific situation in the Middle East by a powerful Lobby driven by the interests of one tribe and one tribe alone.
Back in 1982, Oded Yinon an Israeli journalist formerly attached to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, published a document titled ‘A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties.’ This Israeli commentator suggested that for Israel to maintain its regional superiority, it must fragment its surrounding Arab states into smaller units. The document, later labelled as ‘Yinon Plan’, implied that Arabs and Muslims killing each other in endless sectarian wars was, in effect, Israel’s insurance policy.
Of course, regardless of the Yinon Plan’s prophesies, one might still argue that this has nothing to do with Jewish lobbying, politics or institutions but is just one more Israeli strategic proposal except that it is impossible to ignore that the Neocon school of thought that pushed the English-speaking Empire into Iraq was largely a Jewish Diaspora, Zionist clan. It’s also no secret that the 2nd Gulf War was fought to serve Israeli interests – breaking into sectarian units what then seemed to be the last pocket of Arab resistance to Israel.
Similarly, it is well established that when Tony Blair decided to launch that criminal war, Lord Levy was the chief fundraiser for his Government while, in the British media, Jewish Chronicle writers David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen were busy beating the drums for war. And again, it was the exact same Jewish Lobby that was pushing for intervention in Syria, calling for the USA and NATO to fight alongside those same Jihadi forces that today threaten the last decade’s American ‘achievements’ in Iraq.
Unfortunately, Yinon’s disciples are more common than you might expect. In France, it was the infamous Jewish ‘philosopher’ Bernard Henri Levy who boasted on TV that ‘as a Jew’ campaigning for NATO intervention, he liberated Libya.
As we can see, a dedicated number of Jewish Zionist activists, commentators and intellectuals have worked relentlessly in many countries pushing for exactly the same cause – the breaking up of Arab and Muslim states into smaller, sectarian units.
But is it just the Zionists who are engaging in such tactics? Not at all.
In fact, the Jewish so-called Left serves the exact same cause, but instead of fragmenting Arabs and Muslims into Shia, Sunnis, Alawites and Kurds they strive to break them into sexually oriented identity groups (Lesbian, Queer, Gays, Heterosexual etc.)
Recently I learned from Sarah Schulman, a NY Jewish Lesbian activist that in her search for funding for a young ‘Palestinian Queer’ USA tour, she was advised to approach George Soros’ Open Society institute. The following account may leave you flabbergasted, as it did me:
A former ACT UP staffer who worked for the Open Society Institute, George Soros’ foundation, suggested that I file an application there for funding for the tour. When I did so it turned out that the person on the other end had known me from when we both attended Hunter [College] High School in New York in the 1970s. He forwarded the application to the Institutes’s office in Amman, Jordan, and I had an amazing one-hour conversation with Hanan Rabani, its director of the Women’s and Gender program for the Middle East region. Hanan told me that this tour would give great visibility to autonomous queer organizations in the region. That it would inspire queer Arabs—especially in Egypt and Iran… for that reason, she said, funding for the tour should come from the Amman office” (Sarah Schulman -Israel/Palestine and the Queer International p. 108).
The message is clear, The Open Society Institutes (OSI) wires Soros’s money to Jordan, Palestine and then back to the USA in order to “inspire queer Arabs in Egypt and Iran (sic).”
What we see here is clear evidence of a blatant intervention by George Soros and his institute in an attempt to break Arabs and Muslims and shape their culture. So, while the right-wing Jewish Lobby pushes the Arabs into ethnic sectarian wars, their tribal counterparts within George Soros’ OSI institute, do exactly the same — attempt to break the Arab and Muslims by means of marginal and identity politics.
It is no secret that, as far as recent developments in Iraq are concerned, America, Britain and the West are totally unprepared. So surely, the time is long overdue when we must identify the forces and ideologies within Western society that are pushing us into more and more global conflicts. And all we can hope for is that America, Britain and France may think twice before they spend trillions of their taxpayers’ money in following the Yinon Plan to fight ruinous, foreign wars imposed upon them by The Lobby.
TEHRAN — Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has revealed for the first time that Iran has made a detailed proposal to the P5+1 group of states aimed at ensuring that no stockpile of low-enriched uranium would be available for “breakout” through enrichment to weapons grade levels.
In an exclusive interview with IPS, Zarif described an Iranian plan, presented at the meetings with the P5+1 last month in Vienna, that would exclude weapons grade enrichment. “The parameters of the proposal would be set to continue Iran’s enrichment but to provide the necessary guarantees that it would not enrich to anything over five percent,” said Zarif.
The proposal, which was later published by the Iranian government, included a series of “technical guarantees” against nuclear weapons proliferation.
The plan would involve the immediate conversion of each batch of low-enriched uranium to an oxide powder that would then be used to make fuel assemblies for Iran’s Bushehr reactor, according to Zarif.
Because Iran does not have the capability to manufacture fuel assemblies for Bushehr, the proposal implies that the oxide power would be sent to Russia, at least for several years, rather than remaining in Iran.
The previously undisclosed Iranian plan is part of a broader negotiating stance that insists on the need for a large increase in the number of centrifuges it would have in the future – a demand that the United States and its negotiating partners have rejected.
Obama administration officials have made it clear that they are insisting on very steep reductions in the number of centrifuges, based on the argument that Iran cannot be allowed to have the capability to enrich enough uranium to weapons grade for a single nuclear bomb in less than six to 12 months.
Zarif said he could not discuss the details of the Iranian proposal, because it is “still being negotiated”.
But he described it as involving a complete cycle “from conversion to yellowcake, to UF6, to enriched uranium, back to oxide powder, and back to fuel rods,” all of which would be “designed specifically to meet the requirements of the Bushehr reactor.”
Zarif revealed that the Iranian plan for guaranteeing that Iran could not have a nuclear weapons capability is very similar to the proposal that Iran made to a meeting with the European three (U.K., France and Germany) in Paris in March 2005.
The proposal, which was later published by the Iranian government, included a series of “technical guarantees” against nuclear weapons proliferation. It describes one of those guarantees as “immediate conversion of all enriched uranium to fuel rods to preclude even the technical possibility of further enrichment.”
The U.S.-educated Zarif said he had developed that 2005 proposal himself when he was Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, after he had consulted with a number of American nuclear scientists on ways to reassure the Europeans and the U.S. that Iran could not enrich enough uranium to weapons grade for a nuclear bomb.
“I asked them what would provide the necessary confidence,” said Zarif. “They gave me a number of elements, which I put in a package and sent to Tehran, and they took it to Paris.”
Frank N. Von Hippel, former assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology and now a professor at Princeton University, confirmed in an e-mail that he had been part of a small group of American scientists and others who had met with Zarif to discuss the problem of how to provide assurances that Iran’s civil nuclear programme would not be used to support a nuclear weapons programme.
Von Hippel said his recollection was that the group had suggested “not building up a stockpile but rather shipping [the low-enriched uranium] to Russia to make fuel for the Bushehr reactor.”
Peter Jenkins, then the U.K. permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, participated in the Mar. 23, 2005 meeting at which the Iranian plan was presented.
“All of us were impressed by the proposal,” he recalled in a 2012 interview. The Europeans did not accept it as the basis for negotiation, however, because the George W. Bush administration had insisted that Iran not be allowed to have any enrichment whatsoever, according to European diplomats involved in that earlier phase of negotiations.
Zarif rejected the Obama administration’s position that Iran should obtain whatever reactor fuel it needs for Bushehr or any future reactors from Russia or other foreign sources rather than relying on its own enrichment capabilities. “People should not tell us you have to rely on us,” he said. “It is 30 years too late.”
He was referring to Iran’s experience with its reliance during the early 1980s on a French-based uranium enrichment consortium called Eurodif in which it had a financial stake acquired during the Shah’s regime that entitled Iran to 10 percent of the enriched uranium produced by the consortium.
After the Islamic Republic resumed the nuclear programme begun by the Shah, however, the French government prevented Eurodif from supplying any enriched uranium for nuclear fuel for the nuclear reactor at Bushehr in the early 1980s.
The U.S. State Department acknowledged in 1984 that it had not only ended its own nuclear cooperation with Iran but had “asked other nuclear suppliers not to engage in nuclear cooperation with Iran, especially while the Iran-Iraq war continues.”
The foreign minister ruled out the acceptance of the P5+1 proposal in the last round of negotiations, which reportedly would limit the number of Iranian centrifuges to a fraction of its present total of 19,000.
“We’re not going to redefine our practical needs,” he said, referring to the language in the Joint Plan of Action agreed to last November calling for agreement on an Iranian enrichment programme whose “parameters” would reflect Iran’s “practical needs”.
But the foreign minister indicated that Iran was “prepared within the scope of those practical needs to work on timing, to work on various technical details….”
Zarif criticised statements by former and present U.S. officials to the news media as well in the negotiations referring to demands that the number of Iranian centrifuges must be geared to the need to extend the time required for “breakout” to 6 to 12 months.
Some of the statements made to the press, including those by former State Department proliferation official Robert Einhorn, as well as some of those made in the negotiations “amount to posturing”, Zarif said, adding that they “amount to creating expectations that can never be met.”
“It will be much more productive if everyone involved refrains from shaping the debate in a way that [it] will be out of control,” said Zarif.
Zarif said the U.S. insistence on Iran’s ending of all enrichment at its Fordow facility, which is located in a tunnel under a mountain, is based on “the argument that you can’t have this facility, because otherwise we can’t bomb it.”
The implied assertion of the right to bomb Iranian facilities “strikes the wrong chord in the Iranian psyche and produces exactly the opposite reaction,” he said.
Zarif challenged the view reflected in Western news coverage that the Rouhani government is under strong political pressure to produce results in the talks that would remove the worst sanctions.
The last round of talks in Vienna, which were unsuccessful “has been the easiest time at home,” he said, and “the toughest time” for him as he had to explain “each positive result to a population that is extremely skeptical of the West’s intentions.” If he rejected a deal, Zarif said, he would receive a “hero’s welcome.”
Iran’s nuclear program has been a subject of obsession for Western governments and media agencies for decades, as far back as the final years of Western-backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s reign. But over the course of the last decade, the subject has reached new hysterical heights, propelled by mainstream media coverage mired with distortion and misinformation. Enter: Gareth Porter.
Porter, 71 years old, is a man of many trades. He is a historian, an author, a policy analyst, and of late, has made a name for himself as a successful investigative journalist.
He began his career in journalism during the US war on Vietnam, serving as the Saigon Bureau Chief for the Dispatch News Service International from 1970-71. He then decided to leave journalism for decades, working in a variety of jobs as an anti-war activist, a university teacher, and sustainable development environment work.
It was after another American war at the dawn of the 21st century, this time against Afghanistan and Iraq, that Porter found himself back into the journalistic fold, mainly writing for the InterPress Service.
“It was only from the year 2000 I started writing this book on Vietnam, how the Americans went to war there. It was such an eye-opener. I realized that the problem of America’s wanton wars was not the problem of a president gone wrong or starting from the wrong values or ideas. It was a systemic problem that the war state was the real problem. That has shaped my political consciousness and my scholarship in journalism ever since then,” Porter told Al-Akhbar.
While working on the book, titled “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, which was eventually published in 2005, Porter started to write investigative journalistic articles, the first of which was on how Iraqi Kurdish groups were stealing and forging parliamentary elections at the time.
“That’s what started me on the road of becoming an investigative journalist. I never imagined it would happen but it just developed really quickly,” he said with a light laugh.
Porter started covering the Iranian nuclear issue in 2006; at first, he said, he had believed the overall narrative produced by various agencies.
One key evidence used in the allegations by the West of Iran’s attempts to militarize its nuclear program is the more than one thousand pages of documents that were supposedly acquired from the laptop of an Iranian nuclear scientist by intelligence agencies. They are known informally as the “Laptop Documents.”
But when Porter decided to examine the evidence presented against Iran, he began to discover certain anomalies.
“I went back to look at the recent history of the Iran nuclear issue, and that is when I came across a Wall Street Journal article quoting a German foreign office official, Karsten Voigt, saying this very intriguing thing: ‘Don’t rely on these documents because they came from an Iranian dissident group’ – meaning Mujihedin-E-Khalq (MEK).”
“It pushed me in the direction of questioning the narrative. As time went by I saw more and more of the pieces that didn’t fit the puzzle, particularly about these Laptop Documents,” he added.
In late 2007, Porter met with a German source in Washington DC, and asked him about the Wall Street Journal article. The German source confirmed Voigt’s statement, and thus cemented Porter’s belief that there was more to the story. He began working full-time examining the various evidence and raging debates over Iran’s nuclear program.
Many of his articles, however, have never garnered the attention of the mainstream press and traditional policy institutions within the US.
“The feedback was very weak. The biggest problem, of course, is that the news media and political elite in the US are very powerful, don’t need to respond to information and analysis that contradicts their narratives,” Porter said in regards to the reasons behind this general disinterest in his reports.
Nevertheless, his work in uncovering propaganda and unveiling uncomfortable truths about the problematic narratives regarding Iran’s nuclear program earned him the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, an annual award given by the London-based Frontline Club that celebrates courageous and ground-breaking journalism.
“The single biggest factor driving the elite’s obsession over Iran as a threat and as an enemy is that the basic premise was laid down early at the end of the Cold War,” Porter explained in terms of the reasons behind the American and European honing in on the Islamic republic.
“That the US must take a hand in constraining and preventing Iran from extending its power. It became a fundamental premise of post-Cold War US policy. It fit the interests of the national security state and the Israeli lobby together. Once that happened, and pretty quickly during the Clinton Administration, successive governments naturally followed the general lines set down.”
“Even Obama, just in the early days of office, had the NSA and Israelis come in and tell him about their plans for a cyberwar against Iran. Here he is, a guy who is allegedly planning to enter serious diplomatic engagement with Iran, was essentially conspiring with the Israelis to carry out cyberwarfare. He was going to be the first president to wage cyberwar against another country. That’s very serious,” Porter further remarked.
Overall, Porter mused, the biggest obstacles to any attempt to work out a deal with Iran and end a consideration of military action comes down to Israel.
“Even if there was a settlement of the issue that led to détente between the US and Iran, both of which I’m skeptical about, that would not change the Israeli point of view – which is they have to possess nuclear weapons to maintain superiority over every other country in the Middle East,” he said.
Porter has authored a new book entitled “Manufactured Crisis: The Secret History of the Iranian Nuclear Scare,” which recounts his journalistic work on the allegations about Iran’s nuclear program by the Americans and Israelis since 2006, and discusses in greater detail the numerous evidences and counter-evidences at play.
He recently presented a round table discussion on the topic and his book at the Issam Fares Institute (IFI) building within the American University of Beirut campus on June 9.
Below is the video of the entire talk, and subsequent discussion between Porter and the audience, posted on YouTube by IFI:
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has once again poisoned international efforts to settle the nuclear dispute, with his latest effort to sabotage talks between Iran and the P5+1.
Negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 group – US, Britain, France Russia and China plus Germany – are due to reconvene next week in Austria with the tentative prospect of a comprehensive settlement to the long-running nuclear dispute.
A successful outcome would see Western-imposed trade sanctions on Iran being lifted. The onerous impact of these legally questionable Western sanctions on the Iranian people make that outcome long overdue.
However, this week – just days before sensitive talks re-open in Vienna – France’s top diplomat raised a new obstacle to finding a possible final agreement. Fabius is now telling French media that Iran must reduce the number of its nuclear-enrichment centrifuges, by a 10-fold factor, from a few thousand to a few hundred instruments.
Iran has already agreed to significant guarantees that its nuclear program is for peaceful civilian purposes – and not for weaponization, as the US, Britain and France have long been claiming – by agreeing to cap uranium enrichment at levels far below that required to make atomic bombs.
Fabius’ latest demand that Iran must now also drastically scale back on the number of its centrifuges used in uranium enrichment represents a new pre-condition for settling the nuclear impasse. The number of centrifuges is irrelevant given that Iran has already agreed to impose a limit on uranium enrichment – a generous concession by Iran given that it is not mandated to do so by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That self-imposed restriction led to the interim agreement being signed between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers last November.
That initial groundbreaking nuclear deal at the end of last year was also nearly scuppered back then by Laurent Fabius, when days before he suddenly raised the issue of “guarantees for Israeli security”. That was also seen as a mischievous intervention from Fabius, even by other Western diplomats, which in the event did not prevent the interim deal being signed on November 26.
Days before the next round of crucial talks, Fabius is up to his toxic diplomacy yet again.
Without exaggeration, no other contemporary Western diplomat has as much bad blood in his political veins than the French foreign minister.
He is currently overseeing French state-sponsored terrorism in Syria to illegally overthrow the elected government of President Bashar al Assad. Fabius is also currently overseeing the illegal French invasion of two African countries – Mali and Central Africa Republic – which has sparked the death of thousands of people from internecine violence. And yet this politician has the temerity and arrogance to hold the Iranian nation to ransom over trumped-up nuclear concerns.
But there is much more to this politician’s contaminated career. Fabius’ sinister political history has previously seen him involved in other acts of state terrorism, nuclear destruction of the environment on a massive scale, and the manslaughter of thousands of people around the world through the criminal selling of poisoned blood products.
Let’s start with the latter point first. During the 1980s when Fabius was then French prime minister, his government knowingly supplied blood transfusion products to its own citizens and those of many other countries around the world – to safeguard French commercial profits. It became known as the “blood transfusion scandal” – the biggest health controversy ever to hit France. More than 4,000 French citizens were infected by blood contaminated with HIV and Hepatitis C – of which at least 40 per cent were to die. Among several countries affected by importing blood products from France was Iran. An unknown number of sick Iranian patients would also later die from these toxic
French imports.
As head of the French government between 1984-86, Fabius was subsequently charged with manslaughter relating to the scandal. He was later acquitted by a French court in 1999, along with another minister, while his former Health Minister Edmond Herve was found guilty. At least two other government officials were sent to jail for their part in the systematic crime. Angry campaigners denounced Fabius’ acquittal as an example of the French political elite being “untouchable”.
At the same time that Fabius’ government was overseeing the mass poisoning of blood patients to protect the commercial interests of French pharmaceutical companies, this same government committed one of the most audacious acts of state terrorism in recent decades.
In July 1985, French military agents carried out the bombing of a civilian ship, The Rainbow Warrior. The ship belonged to Greenpeace, the environmental campaign group, and was moored in the New Zealand port of Auckland at the time of the deadly attack, which resulted in the death of one Greenpeace activist and several others injured. French divers had mined the vessel with two explosives.
The incident brought an outpouring of international condemnation, and initially Fabius’ government denied any involvement. However, New Zealand police later arrested two French agents belonging to the foreign intelligence service, the DGSE. The pair were convicted and jailed. Fabius was then forced to come clean, in September 1985, when he made the shocking admission to world media that the French government had indeed ordered the murderous attack on a civilian vessel in a sovereign foreign territory. He famously said at the time: “The truth is cruel.”
But the background to this French act of state terrorism on the Rainbow Warrior is even more criminal. The Greenpeace ship was in New Zealand at that time to lead international protests against rampant French testing of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. Ever since 1962, France unilaterally declared its colonial territories of Polynesia and surrounding seas to be nuclear test sites. Between 1966 and 1996, successive French governments, including that of Laurent Fabius, carried out nearly 200 test explosions on the Pacific coral reef islands of Mururoa and Fangataufa.
The nuclear explosions were carried out with air, sea and underground devices and have been responsible for radioactive pollution spreading to New Zealand, Australia and even as far away as Peru in South America. The French weapons of mass destruction have also destroyed countless natural habitats in the South Pacific.
A year before the Rainbow Warrior terror attack, the New Zealand government introduced a law designating its territorial waters a nuclear-free zone. But that legal restriction did not stop Fabius’ government from committing an act of murder against civilians – civilians who were protesting against French acts of mass extermination in the South Pacific.
This is the criminal quality of former French Prime Minister and now Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius – who has the audacity to lecture the people of Iran about their legally entitled use of peaceful nuclear technology.
Officials from Iran and the US will meet in Geneva next week ahead of the next round of talks between the Islamic Republic and the six world powers over Tehran’s nuclear energy program.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry says the meeting between the Iranian and US delegations will be held in Geneva on the 9th and 10th of June. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi will be heading the Iranian delegation in the talks. Other reports say the US delegation will be headed by US Under-Secretary for State Wendy Sherman.
The talks will come ahead of the next round of negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear energy program scheduled for June 16-20 in the Austrian city of Vienna, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.
Iranian officials will later sit down with Russian diplomats in the Italian capital, Rome, on June 11-12.
Representatives from Iran will probably hold further meetings with other delegations from the six powers – the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany.
On Saturday, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Iran has already held bilateral deputy-level meetings with some delegations from the six world powers.
Iran and the six countries have been holding talks to iron out their differences and reach a final deal to end the standoff over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear energy program.
The two sides held the latest round of nuclear negotiations in Vienna in May.
With everyone’s attention focused on the European elections or President Barack Obama’s speech at West Point or the Ukraine, a story by Eric Schmitt in The New York Times on Tuesday may not have caught your attention. I believe, however, that it provides an insight into some of the major problems of American foreign policy.
What Mr. Schmitt reports is that the U.S. has set up covert programs to train and equip native teams patterned on their instructors, the U.S. Army Delta Force, in several African countries. The program was advocated by Michael A. Sheehan who formerly was in charge of special operations planning in the Department of Defense and is now, according to Mr. Schmitt, holder of the “distinguished chair at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.”
Mr. Schmitt quotes him as saying, “Training indigenous forces to go after threats in their own country is what we need to be doing.” So far allocated to this effort, Mr. Schmitt writes, is $70 million, and the initial efforts will be in Libya, Niger, Mali and Mauritania.
How to do this, according to the senior U.S. officer in Africa, Major General Patrick J. Donahue II, is complex: “You have to make sure of who you’re training. It can’t be the standard, ‘Has the guy been a terrorist or some sort of criminal?’ but also, what are his allegiances? Is he true to the country or is he still bound to his militia?”
So let me comment on these remarks, on the ideas behind the program, its justification and the history of such efforts. I begin with a few bits of history. (Disclosure: I am in the final stages of a book that aims to tell the whole history, but the whole history is of course much too long for this note.)
Without much of the rhetoric of Mr. Sheehan and General Donahue and on a broader scale, we have undertaken similar programs in a number of countries over the last half century. Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, Guatemala, Egypt, Iraq, Thailand, Chad, Angola to name just a few. The results do not add up to a success almost anywhere.
Perhaps the worst (at least for America’s reputation) were Chad where the man we trained, equipped and supported, Hissène Habré, is reported to have killed about 40,000 of his fellow citizens. In Indonesia, General Suharto, with our blessing and with the special forces we also had trained and equipped, initially killed about 60,000 and ultimately caused the deaths of perhaps 200,000. In Mexico, the casualties have been smaller, but the graduates of our Special Forces program have become the most powerful drug cartel. They virtually hold the country at ransom.
Even when casualties were not the result, the military forces we helped to create and usually paid for carried out the more subtle mission of destroying public institutions. If our intention is to create stability, the promotion of a powerful military force is often not the way to do it. This is because the result of such emphasis on the military often renders it the only mobile, coherent and centrally directed organization in societies lacking in the balancing forces of an independent judiciary, reasonably open elections, a tradition of civil government and a more or less free press.
Our program in pre-1958 Iraq and in pre-1979 Iran certainly played a crucial role in the extension of authoritarian rule in those countries and in their violent reactions against us.
General Donahue suggests that we need to distinguish among the native soldiers we train and empower those who are “true to the country.” But how? We supported Hissène Habré so long that we must have known every detail of his life. He is now on trial as war criminal. General Suharto has never been charged (nor have those Americans who gave him a “green light”) for his brutal invasion of East Timor. Both probably believed that they met General Donahue’s definition of patriotism.
And in Mali, our carefully trained officers of the Special Forces answered what they thought was both patriotic and religious duty by joining the insurgency against the government we (and we thought they) supported. We have a poor record of defining other peoples’ patriotism.
And, in the interest of more urgent objectives, we have been willing to support and fund almost anyone as long as we think he might be of value. General Manuel Noriega, our man in Panama, went on to spend 22 years in an American prison after we invaded his country and fought the soldiers we had trained.
Indeed, we have a poor record of even knowing who the people we train are. After the Turkish army carried out one of its coups in the 1960s, when I was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East, I asked the appropriate branch of the Defense Department who were the new leaders, all of whom had been trained in America, often several times during the years. The answer was that no one knew. Even in army records, they were just Americanized nicknames.
And, more generally, our sensitivity to the aspirations, hopes and fears of other people is notoriously crude or totally lacking. Growing out of the Cold War, we thought of many of them as simply our proxies or our enemies.
Thus, we found Chad not as a place with a certain population but just as a piece of the Libyan puzzle, and today we think of Mali in the same way. Now we are talking of training “carefully selected” Syrian insurgents to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Do we have any sense of what they will overthrow him for?
Beyond these, what might be considered “tactical” issues are “strategic,” legal and even moral considerations. I leave aside the legal and moral issues — such as what justification we have to determine the fate of other peoples — as they do not seem very persuasive among our leaders.
But just focus on the long-term or even middle-term results of the new policy: the most obvious is that we meddle in and take some responsibility for the politics of an array of countries in which we have little direct interest. And often with the obvious danger of a deeper, more expensive and more painful result. We are close to this commitment in Syria.
Less obvious is that our activities, no matter how carefully differentiated, will be seen to add up to an overall policy of militarism, support of oppressive dictatorships, and opposition to popular forces. They also meld into a policy of opposition to the religion of over a billion people, Islam. And they do so at great expense to our expressed desires to enable people everywhere, including at home, to live healthier, safer and decent lives.
I end with a prediction: in practically every country where Mr. Sheehan’s and General Donahue’s program is employed, it will later be seen to have led to a military coup d’etat.
~
William R. Polk is a veteran foreign policy consultant, author and professor who taught Middle Eastern studies at Harvard. President John F. Kennedy appointed Polk to the State Department’s Policy Planning Council where he served during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His books include: Violent Politics: Insurgency and Terrorism; Understanding Iraq; Understanding Iran; Personal History: Living in Interesting Times;Distant Thunder: Reflections on the Dangers of Our Times; and Humpty Dumpty: The Fate of Regime Change.
Iran has rejected as unfounded a report by The Wall Street Journal on its nuclear energy program.
On Tuesday, the US newspaper cited a report by the terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) as saying that Iran “has kept active and intact its core team of weaponization researchers.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Iran’s diplomatic mission at the United Nations condemned the report as a fabrication.
It said The Wall Street Journal is repeating the claims of a terrorist group whose previous allegations proved untrue.
The MKO is listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community and is notorious for committing numerous terrorist acts against Iranians and Iraqis.
The statement also said that Tehran has lived up to its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It added that Tehran expects the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the United States, China, Russia, France and Britain — plus Germany to abide by their commitments concerning Iran’s nuclear rights, regardless of the “uproar” by anti-Iran lobby groups.
Iran and the six world powers have been discussing ways to iron out differences and start drafting a final nuclear deal that would end the West’s dispute with Iran over the country’s nuclear energy program.
Iran and the world powers reached an interim accord in the Swiss city of Geneva on November 24 last year that took effect on January 20 this year.
Under the deal, the six countries undertook to provide Iran with some sanctions relief in exchange for Iran agreeing to limit certain aspects of its nuclear activities during a six-month period. It was also agreed that no nuclear-related sanctions will be imposed on Iran within the same time-frame.
An Iranian judicial official has categorically denied reports that Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been summoned over complaints of privacy violation.
“News published by certain virtual sites suggesting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been summoned by [the Iranian ]Justice Ministry’s Fars [Province] Branch is rejected altogether,” said Public Prosecutor of the provincial capital of Shiraz Ali Alqasimehr on Tuesday.
Of course, certain individuals have filed complaints against Facebook for publishing certain images and videos, he further told IRNA.
He also dismissed reports that Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram services have been filtered in Shiraz, saying, “We have had no filtering in that regard so far.”
There are also complaints against the two websites for alleged internet fraud and the release of obscene photos, said the public prosecutor.
Certain media reports on Tuesday claimed that an Iranian judge had summoned the Facebook chief executive to answer allegations that his company’s apps had breached people’s privacy.
Iranian Defense Minister hit back at his US counterpart Chuck Hagel’s demand that Iran’s missile program should come under negotiation in talks between Tehran and the world powers, stressing that the Islamic Republic’s missile program is not for negotiations.
“Iran’s missile capability is defensive, conventional and deterrent and not negotiable,” Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said.
He noted that if any issue is due to be discussed after the nuclear talks, it should be the full annihilation of the Zionist regime’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons to create a Middle-East free from the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) followed by the destruction of the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of the United States as the first country which has used these “dreadful weapons”.
“We ask our nuclear negotiators to focus their utmost efforts on the complete annihilation of the Zionist regime’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as the biggest danger posed to the region and world security as well as the US nuclear disarmament based on paragraph 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) alongside their negotiations with the Group 5+1 (the US, Russia, China, Britain and France plus Germany),” Dehqan said, according to Fars news agency.
Moreover, the Iranian DM expressed pleasure that the Zionist regime is concerned about Iran’s deterrent power, and said if such deterrence didn’t exist, the usurper regime would seize control of the Middle-East through war and bloodshed.
Dehqan underlined that it is a shame for the US which claims to be a superpower that its defense secretary announces “Israelis have allowed us to find a way to exit from (the deadlock over) Iran’s nuclear issue”.
Earlier, Hagel said that the negotiations between Iran and the world powers should focus on the country’s missile program after the settlement of the disputes over Tehran’s nuclear program.
Iran confirms its program is for peaceful ends only insisting that is its right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) while Israel, which is believed to be the sole nuclear power in the Middle East with more than 200 nuclear heads, is not a signatory for this treaty.
There is a widespread Western fallacy that “sanctions brought Iran to the table,” which serves to legitimize the unjust regime of sanctions imposed by the Western governments, who rationalize their action by claiming to be the “injured parties” under international law, with respect to Iran’s alleged “non-compliance” with its international obligations.
The problem with this perspective that has acquired the status of a self-evident truth in the Western media is that it adopts the rhetoric of Western governments at face value, without the slightest inquiry on what caused the US and other Western governments involved in the nuclear negotiations with Iran to also ‘come to the table,’ that is, make reciprocal concessions?
The answer to the above question is three-fold. First, the idea that the Iran sanctions have caused little or no pressure on the Western countries is, of course, suspect and can be easily debunked. On the contrary, it can be shown that the whole edifice of sanctions regime was experiencing growing pressures and the Geneva agreement reflected a break not only for Iran but also the very sanctioning regimes, above all the US and European Union (EU).
To elaborate, given the fact that Iran’s nuclear progress had continued unabated despite the escalation of sanctions since 2006, the US was poised to pass new sanction laws targeting Iran’s oil sector, which if passed would have adversely affected US’s relations with some of its own trade partners such as India and China. In the absence of a deal in Geneva last November, the US lawmakers would have for sure enacted the new legislation, which would have instantly introduced new distortions in global trade, further violating the WTO norms on free trade. In other words, the Geneva agreement was a timely rescuer for the Western sanctioning states, avoiding a deterioration of their relations with Iran’s energy partners.
Second, by the time of Geneva agreement the unilateral European sanctions had come under increasing scrutiny by various courts in Europe, which had struck down a growing number of banks, trading companies, and individuals from the sanctions list. The significance of these adverse rulings, dreaded by the US officials who lobbied unsuccessfully to prevent them, was that it questioned the legality of some aspects of the EU sanctions that went far beyond the scope of UN sanctions on Iran, thus reflecting the irrefutable legal gap between UN and unilateral sanctions.
Third, in addition to the pressure of ‘market-distorting’ Western sanctions on the sanctioning powers, who deprived their own corporations from conducting profitable business with Iran, much to the delight of their Asian competitors, another important factor that ‘brought the West to the table’ was indeed the impressive pace of Iran’s nuclear progress. As a result of this steady progress, reflected in Iran’s ability to manufacture fuel rods for its medical reactor by enriching uranium up to 19.75%, i.e., the upper limit of low-enrichment, the West was suddenly jolted into the realization that Iran had reached a new nuclear milestone warranting serious negotiation.
Connected to this at the same time was the lessening value of the “military card” in West’s hands, in light of Iran’s construction of the underground facility known as Fordo, which is relatively immune from aerial bombardment, compared to the above-ground Natanz facility. This instantly jettisoned the “Osirak option,” that is the Israeli scenario of knocking down Iran’s facilities the way they did with ease against Iraq in 1981, thus adding to the futility of military threats against Iran. Needless to say, Iran’s counter-threat of closing the Hormuz and retaliating against any attacks throughout the region and beyond, i.e., the doctrine of extended deterrence, was an effective response that raised the potential cost of any military adventures against Iran. A good deal of this successful Iranian counter-strategy hinged on Iran’s extensive preparations for “asymmetrical warfare” and reliance on missile defense, given the impressive Iranian advances in missile technology.
Notwithstanding the above-said, it is hardly surprising that faced with Iran’s steady nuclear progress despite the sanctions that had harmful effects on the Western economy and entailed exorbitant monitoring costs, the West agreed to climb down its maximalist demands on “zero centrifuges” and to tacitly recognize Iran’s right to a civilian fuel cycle.
Of course, this explanation does not preclude the argument that the escalation of sanctions adversely affected Iran’s economy and spurred the new government of Hassan Rouhani to prioritize the lifting of sanctions through good-faith and principled negotiations. As an “injured party” whose inalienable nuclear rights have been abridged by Western discrimination and punitive actions, Iran’s anti-sanctions quest is in line with the nation’s national interests. But, while so much attention has been paid to Iran’s motivation to ‘make a deal’ unfortunately so far little attention has been paid to the underlying reasons for the West to reciprocate Iran’s action and thus explore the feasibility of a “win-win” scenario.
In terms of the regional and global geostrategic context, there are undeniably a host of relevant factors such as the withdrawal of US and NATO forces from the region after a decade of costly intervention and the related concerns for stability ‘the day after’ their planned departure, i.e., issues of direct link to Iran’s role in regional stability. Altogether, the net of Western interest to deal with Iran and search for ‘common grounds’ has been expanding and, naturally, one must probe the various economic, political, and geostrategic interests and concerns of the Western governments led by the US in determining why these powers consented to an interim deal with Iran, which has triggered the current negotiations for a long-term agreement? Suffice to say that the Western media’s failure to pay attention to this side of equation fuels a Western misperception that focuses on Iran’s purported weaknesses due to the sanctions, without bothering to present a comprehensive picture that, as outlined above, presents a vastly different, and more complex, picture before us, with clear policy connotations.
Iran is fulfilling its obligations under the nuclear deal with the six-world powers, having curbed its stockpile of higher-grade enriched uranium gas by more than 80 percent, a quarterly report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said.
Most of the 209 kilograms of Tehran’s enriched uranium were either converted or diluted to less proliferation-prone forms, the document said.
It leaves Iran with just 39 kilograms of the material, which is miles away from the 250 kilograms which, the experts say, are needed to create a single nuclear bomb.
The report also revealed that Iran managed to provide the IAEA with information proving that it tested the so-called Exploding Bridge Wire (EBW) detonators, commonly used in nuclear arms, for civilian purposes.
“The agency’s assessment of the information provided by Iran is ongoing,” the report by the UN’s nuclear watchdog is cited by Reuters.
The moves came under the interim deal that the Iranian authorities signed with the six world powers on January 20.
They agreed to halt some aspects of its controversial nuclear program in exchange for a limited relief of international sanctions against the country.
Under new president Hassan Rouhani, who was elected last year, Iran is making steps to counter Western concerns that it’s trying to develop the capability to produce nuclear weapons.
The IAEA report also outlined Tehran’s willingness to cooperate with the investigation into its nuclear related work.
“This is the first time that Iran has engaged in a technical exchange with the agency on this or any other of the outstanding issues related to possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program since 2008,” the document stressed.
However, the IAEA remains concerned that Iran may possibly have undeclared military activities in the nuclear sphere.
The agency continues to insist on the opportunity to visit Parchin military complex, located about 30 kilometers southeast of Tehran.
According to the report, satellite surveillance has revealed that there’s been construction underway at the facility for the last three months.
During talks in Tehran this week, Iran has promised the IAEA to comply with five new transparency measures concerning its nuclear program.
Despite having the same aim, Iran’s talks with the IAEA go on separately from its negotiations with the six world powers.
It’s planned that Tehran will reach a final deal with the UK, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the US by July 20.
However, there are doubts that the deadline would be met after the latest round of talks last week proved fruitless.
WASHINGTON – In the stalemated talks between the six powers and Iran over the future of the latter’s nuclear programme, the central issue is not so much the technical aspects of the problem but the history of the Middle Eastern country’s relations with foreign suppliers – and especially with the Russians.
The Barack Obama administration has dismissed Iran’s claim that it can’t rely on the Russians or other past suppliers of enriched uranium for its future needs. But the U.S. position ignores a great deal of historical evidence that bolsters the Iranian case that it would be naïve to rely on promises by Russia and others on which it has depended in the past for nuclear fuel.
Both Iran and the P5+1 are citing the phrase “practical needs”, which was used in the Joint Plan of Action agreed to last November, in support of their conflicting positions on the issue of how much enrichment capability Iran should have. Limits on the Iranian programme are supposed to be consistent with such “practical needs”, according to the agreement.
Iran has argued that its “practical needs” include the capability to enrich uranium to make reactor fuel for the Bushehr nuclear power plant as well as future nuclear reactors. Iranian officials have indicated that Iran must be self-sufficient in the future with regard to nuclear fuel for Bushehr, which Russia now provides. It announced in 2008 that another reactor at Darkhovin, which is to be indigenously constructed, had entered the design stage.
Former senior State Department official on proliferation issues Robert Einhorn has transmitted the thinking of the Obama administration about the negotiations in recent months. In a long paper published in late March, he wrote that Iran had “sometimes made the argument that they need to produce enriched uranium indigenously because foreign suppliers could cut off supplies for political or other reasons.”
The Iranians had “even suggested,” Einhorn wrote, “that they could not depend on Russia to be a reliable supplier of enriched fuel.” This Iranian assertion ignores Russia’s defiance of the U.S. and is allies in having built Bushehr and insisting on exempting its completion and fuelling from U.N. Security Council sanctions, according to Einhorn.
Einhorn omits, however, the well-documented history of blatant Russian violations of its contract with Iran on Bushehr – including the provision of nuclear fuel – and its effort to use Iranian dependence on Russian reactor fuel to squeeze Iran on its nuclear policy as well as to obtain political-military concessions from the United States.
Rose Gottemoeller, now Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, described the dynamics of that Russian policy when she was director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from early 2006 through late 2008. She recounted in a 2008 paper how the Russians began working intensively in 2002 to get Iran to end its uranium enrichment programme.
That brought Russia’s policy aim in regard to Iran’s nuclear programme into line with that of the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009).
Russia negotiated an agreement with Iran in February 2005 to supply enriched uranium fuel for the reactor and to take back all spent fuel. Later in 2005, Moscow offered Iran a joint uranium enrichment venture in Russia under which Iran would send uranium to Russia for enrichment and conversion into fuel elements for future reactors.
But Iran would not gain access to the fuel fabrication technology, which made it unacceptable to Tehran but was strongly supported by the Bush administration.
Bush administration officials then began to dangle the prospect of a bilateral agreement on nuclear cooperation – a “123 Agreement” – before Russia as a means of leveraging a shift in Russian policy toward cutting off nuclear fuel for Bushehr. The Russians agreed to negotiate such a deal, which was understood to be conditional on Russia’s cooperation on the Iran nuclear issue, with particular emphasis on fuel supplies for Bushehr.
The Russians were already using their leverage over Iran’s nuclear programme by slowing down the work as the project approached completion.
A U.S. diplomatic cable dated Jul. 6, 2006 and released by WikiLeaks reported that Russ Clark, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear safety official who had spent time studying the Bushehr project, said in a conversation with a U.S. diplomat, “[H]e almost feels sorry for the Iranians because of the way the Russians are ‘jerking them around’.”
Clark said the Russians were “dragging their feet” about completing work on Bushehr and suggested it was for political reasons.
The IAEA official said it was obvious that the Russians were delaying the fuel shipments to Bushehr because of “political considerations,” calculating that, once they delivered the fuel, Russia would lose much of its leverage over Iran.
In late September 2006, the Russians changed the date on which they pledged to provide the reactor fuel to March 2007, in anticipation of completion of the reactor in September, in an agreement between the head of Russia’s state-run company Atomstroyexport, and the vice-president of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation.
But in March 2007, the Russians announced that the fuel delivery would be delayed again, claiming Iran had fallen behind on its payments. Iran, however, heatedly denied that claim and accused Moscow of “politicising” the issue.
In fact, Russia, with U.S. encouragement, was “slow rolling out the supply of enriched uranium fuel,” according to Gottemoeller. Moscow was making clear privately, she wrote, that it was holding back on the fuel to pressure Iran on its enrichment policy.
Moscow finally began delivering reactor fuel to Bushehr in December 2007, apparently in response to the Bush administration’s plan to put anti-missile systems into the Czech Republic and Poland. That decision crossed what Moscow had established as a “red line”.
Obama’s election in November 2008, however, opened a new dynamic in U.S.-Russia cooperation on squeezing Iran’s nuclear programme. Within days of Obama’s cancellation of the Bush administration decision to establish anti-missile sites in Central Europe in September 2009, Russian officials leaked to the Moscow newspaper Kommersant that it was withholding its delivery of S-300 surface-to-air missile systems for which it had already contracted with Iran.
Iran needed the missiles to deter U.S. and Israeli air attacks, so the threat to renege on the deal was again aimed at enhancing Russian leverage on Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment programme, while giving Moscow additional influence on U.S. Russian policy as well.
The Russian attempt to exploit Iran’s dependence on Moscow for its reactor fuel for political purposes was not the first time that Iran had learned the lesson that it could not rely on foreign sources of enriched uranium – even when they had legal commitments to provide the fuel for Iran’s nuclear reactor.
After the Islamic revolution against the Shah in 1979, all of the foreign suppliers on which Iran had expected to rely for nuclear fuel for Bushehr and its Tehran Research Reactor reneged on their commitments.
Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, sent an official communication to IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano on Mar. 1, 2010, stating that specific contracts with U.S., German, French and multinational companies for supply of nuclear fuel had been abruptly terminated under pressure from the U.S. government and its allies.
Soltanieh said they were “examples [of] the root cause of confidence deficit vis-à-vis some Western countries regarding the assurance of nuclear supply.”
The earlier experiences led Iran to decide around 1985 to seek its own indigenous enrichment capability, according to Iranian officials.
The experience with Russia, especially after 2002, hardened Iran’s determination to be self-reliant in nuclear fuel fabrication. The IAEA’s Clark told the U.S. diplomat in mid-2006 that, if the Russians did cut off their supply of fuel for Bushehr, the Iranians were prepared to make the fuel themselves.
It is not clear whether the Obama administration actually believes the official line that Iran should and must rely on Russia for nuclear fuel. But the history surrounding the issue suggests that Iran will not accept the solution on which the U.S. and its allies are now insisting.
~~~
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, was published Feb. 14.
Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | April 4, 2024
A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II (1941-1945) lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression.
This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to reach $1 trillion a year in 2026, inviting financial catastrophe. … continue
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