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Iran is offering a $1 billion loan to Iraq for projects to be handled by Iranian companies, an Iranian deputy foreign minister said Friday. The announcement came two days before a landmark visit by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Baghdad, the first by an Iranian president since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war in the 1980s that left about one million people dead, but relations between the countries have warmed substantially since the United States-led invasion in 2003 that toppled the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Mr. Ahmadinejad is scheduled to arrive Sunday for a two-day trip to build on business and political ties with Iraq. “Iran’s $1 billion loan to Iraq has been one of the main issues of discussion with the Iraqi side,” the deputy foreign minister, Alireza Sheikh-Attar, told the official Iranian news agency IRNA in Baghdad.

The loan would cover basic projects by Iranian contractors using Iranian goods and equipment, he said. The United States has accused Iran of financing, training and equipping Iraqi militias to destabilize Iraq, a charge Iran has denied, blaming the American presence for instability. Iran says it wants a stable neighbor and American troops to leave.

Source: The New York Times

President Bush’s last trip to Iraq was kept secret until he arrived at a U.S. military base. Eight hours later he left, after Iraq’s leaders traveled to meet him there. In sharp contrast, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit — the first ever by an Iranian leader to Iraq — was announced in advanced.

He plans to spend the night here, and Iranian TV will broadcast his departure ceremony live. Once considered Iraq’s archenemy, Iran is now cozy with Baghdad’s Shiite-led government and eager to show off Tehran’s rising influence as debate rages in the U.S. over how quickly to leave. Ahmadinejad was to arrive Sunday morning at Baghdad’s airport and head to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s headquarters, located right across the Tigris River from the mammoth new U.S. Embassy in the fortified Green Zone. Ahmadinejad sought to reassure Iraqis ahead of the trip by disputing U.S. accusations that Iran is meddling in Iraqi affairs and fueling violence among Shiite militias.

“Iran has no need to intervene in Iraq. It is friendly to all groups in Iraq. Isn’t it ridiculous that those who have deployed 160,000 troops in Iraq accuse us of intervening there?” the Iranian state-run news agency, IRNA, quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. During the two-day visit, Ahmadinejad is scheduled to meet with Talabani and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — both whom have made official visits to Iran since taking office. The trip symbolically serves several purposes for Iran. Ahmadinejad wants to highlight Shiite-dominated Iran’s influence but at the same time show that Iran is not a bully, analysts say. He also may be trying to bolster his support back home ahead of parliamentary elections later this month that are seen as referendum on the Iranian president. Ahmadinejad has come under criticism from all sides in Iran for spending too much time on anti-Western rhetoric and not enough on economic problems plaguing the country. Jon Alterman, head of the Middle East program at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the visit sends a “clear message to Iraqis that the Iranian influence in the country is significant and enduring.” But at the same time, “he doesn’t want to threaten the Iraqis. He doesn’t want to threaten Gulf states who fear that Iraq will be an Iranian satellite. He has a thin line to walk,” he said.

The U.S. has tried to downplay Ahmadinejad’s visit, saying it welcomed Iran’s stated policy of promoting stability but had not seen any evidence. U.S. officials would not discuss any possible interaction with him, and Talabani’s personal guards were reportedly going to provide security for Ahmadinejad and his delegation. But the visit comes as U.S. officials have sharpened their rhetoric against Iran in recent weeks. Last month, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, who was the No. 2 U.S. military chief in Iraq, warned that Tehran wants to keep Iraq’s government weak to block any challenges to Iranian influence. There is concern in the United States and in Sunni-dominated Arab countries about a growing Iranian dominance in Iraq. The United States has accused Iran of training and supplying Shiite militia fighters in Iraq with weapons and sophisticated explosives designed specifically to kill American tanks and armored vehicles. Iran denies the accusations. Washington and Tehran have not had diplomatic relations since the 1979 Islamic Revolution led to the taking of hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Since Ahmadinejad was elected president in fall 2005, the hostility has only grown over Iran’s controversial nuclear program. Envoys from the two countries have met three times in Baghdad over the past year to discuss Iraq’s security, although Iran postponed a fourth round last month without giving a reason. Ahmadinejad stressed Saturday that the talks were useful. “The outcome of (Iran-U.S.) talks have helped stabilize conditions in Iraq a lot,” IRNA quoted Ahmadinejad as telling Iraqi journalists in Tehran. Falah Shanshal, an Iraqi Shiite lawmaker allied with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, said he was hopeful Ahmadinejad’s visit will help solve some of Iraq’s security problems. “Iran is a neighboring country and opening a new page of dialogue with it is a step in the right direction.” Shanshal said. Despite the hopeful talk, Iran and Iraq have not always had rosy relations. The two countries were hostile to each other throughout Saddam Hussein’s regime and fought a destructive eight-year war after Saddam invaded Iran in 1980.

About 1 million people died in the conflict. But when Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime fell and Iraq’s Shiite majority took power after the U.S.-led invasion, long-standing ties between the Shiites of both countries flourished again, though the two neighbors have yet to sign a peace treaty. Many of Iran’s Shiite leaders lived in exile in Iran during Saddam’s rule, including al-Maliki. Talabani, a Kurd who speaks fluent Farsi. Iranian ruling clerics also have a history of seeking help here, and Shiite Islam’s most revered sites are in Iraq. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sought refuge for years in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf before he returned to Iran and founded the Islamic Republic in the 1979 revolution. Not everyone is in Iraq is pleased that Ahmadinejad is coming. Some worry that Iraq had become the battleground between the U.S. and Iran and Tehran’s growing influence undermines Baghdad’s sovereignty.

On Friday, hundreds of demonstrators marched the streets of Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, chanting anti-Ahmadinejad slogans. Many held banners including one that read: “We condemn visit of terrorist and butcher Ahmadinejad to Iraq.” “We wish that there would be a commitment from the Iranian president personally to cease all kind of interventions in Iraq’s security and political affairs,” Abdul-Karim al-Samaraie, a lawmaker with the main Sunni parliamentary bloc, the Iraqi Accordance Front, told the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera.

Source: AP

Iran’s supreme leader spoke not with the thunder of a man regarded in his country as God’s representative on Earth, but with the exasperated tone of a corporate manager chastising his employees. 

Ali Khamenei had ordered his deputies to start privatizing state-owned businesses: the telephone company, three banks and dozens of small oil and petrochemical enterprises.

Jealously guarding their own sources of power and patronage, however, his underlings all but ignored him.

Months passed. Then Khamenei gathered the country’s elite for an extraordinary meeting. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Cabinet ministers were there, as were important clerics, the leader of parliament and provincial governors, and the heads of state broadcasting and the Iranian chamber of commerce.

With television cameras rolling, Khamenei told them to pass some laws, sell off some businesses — and be quick about it. “Those who are hostile to these policies are the ones who are going to lose their interests and influence,” he declared.

The system shrugged. By November, nine months after his public scolding and almost a year and a half after Khamenei had first issued his order, almost nothing had happened. According to the Middle East Economic Digest, only two out of 240 state-owned businesses Khamenei targeted had been sold off.

For years, Western analysts have struggled to understand the inner workings of Iran’s leadership. To many, it is a government tightly controlled by the Shiite Muslim clergy. But the power of the clerics has steadily eroded. Increasingly, power is distributed among combative elites within a delicate system of checks and balances defined by religious as well as civil law, personal relations and the rhythm of bureaucracy.

Iran analysts struggle to discern which officials have authority and how much. And when Iranian officials make public pronouncements, it often is unclear whether they are expressing established policy or fighting among themselves — speaking for their own faction or just themselves.

Concentric circles of influence and power that emanate from the supreme leader include the clergy, government and military officials — and at their farthest fringes, militiamen and well-connected bazaar merchants — altogether perhaps 15% of Iran’s 70 million people.

Even the man regarded in Iran as the highest-ranking cleric in Shiite Islam finds himself constrained and challenged.

Those inside Iran’s circle of power, says Ali Afshari, an analyst and former student activist now living in Washington, operate according to unique rules.

“It is not a democracy or an absolute totalitarian regime,” he said. “Nor is it a communist system or monarchy or dictatorship. It is a mixture.”

Those who matter

In the parlance of Iran’s ruling elite, those who truly matter are referred to as khodi, Persian for “one of us.”

Khodi accept that Khamenei has a God-given right to rule. At least outwardly, they adopt the values of the senior clerics. They even adhere to a dress code: The men wear white shirts buttoned up to the collar; gray, brown or black suits; and neatly trimmed beards — the garb of the traditional merchant class. The women wear the single-piece black chadors covering all but their hands and faces.

“In our society there is a red line between khodi and non-khodi,” said one political activist. “If you’ve never been on the right side of that divide, you’re considered guilty until proven otherwise. If you’re not khodi, you don’t have the right to criticize.”

Khamenei and his closest advisors are at the center of that power structure, overseeing grave matters of state, including the country’s nuclear program and domestic policy, from a huge tree-shrouded compound in downtown Tehran. Each day, the Supreme National Security Council, Khamenei’s main think tank, faxes his orders to newspapers, television stations and government officials. Clergy spread the word at homes and Friday prayer sessions.

Surrounding the supreme leader are several powerful committees consisting of dozens of clerics, each established to cement the central role of religion in Iranian politics. The Council of Experts chooses the supreme leader. The Guardian Council vets laws and candidates for public office. The Expediency Council mediates legal disputes.

Next are the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard and armed forces, who are appointed by Khamenei; the elected president; the Cabinet; parliament; senior military commanders selected by the supreme leader; and the senior clerics in the holy city Qom.

Beyond that are governors and other provincial officials, all approved by the president. At the outer rim of khodi are well-connected merchants, militia members and millions of volunteers who make up the government’s shock troops.

Included in the system are people with different ideologies and agendas, including the offspring of Western universities and onetime operatives in the shah’s intelligence service whom Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini needed to help bring down the shah in the 1970s, defend his revolution and withstand attack from Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.

From the beginning, Iran’s leaders fought over how wide to expand the circles of power, and how much room there would be to challenge the leadership.

Even those on the outer fringes of power can buck authority, especially if they retain a rank within the religious hierarchy. Despite a moratorium on stoning those convicted of morality crimes, a judge this year in the western village of Takistan ordered the stoning of a man for adultery.

Instead of firing the official, judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi decided the judge had a point: Stoning was, after all, part of Islamic law.

Though ordinary people have limited freedom to criticize the power structure, analysts and officials in Tehran say that the heads of government agencies eagerly devour results of polls about their leaders’ performance and Iranians’ attitudes toward everything from women’s dress to making peace with the U.S. Many of Iran’s leaders fear a popular uprising like the one that toppled the shah or the communist governments of Eastern Europe.

One after another over the past decades, Iranian leaders have tried to control this convoluted system — and failed.

‘Many centers of power’

“There are so many centers of power,” said a Western diplomat in Tehran, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The system was designed to not let anyone be in total control.”

In 1997, Khamenei watched helplessly as the reformer Mohammad Khatami crushed the supreme leader’s candidate for president.

Despite his political mandate, the new president subsequently ran up against the power of the military and clerical elite. After his government signed a contract with Turkey to run Tehran’s new airport, the Revolutionary Guard swooped in during the ribbon-cutting, shutting the airport and nullifying the deal in a blow to Khatami’s attempts to open the country to foreign investment.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, a senior cleric who heads the Expediency Council, seemed a shoo-in to replace Khatami in 2005. But he was outmaneuvered by Ahmadinejad and lost the election.

Ahmadinejad found himself hemmed in by opposition to his appointees, including the key post of chief negotiator with the international community over Iran’s nuclear program. Parliament has rejected many of his choices.

When Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005, the urbane cleric Hassan Rowhani was fired as nuclear negotiator and disappeared from the spotlight. But after getting rid of Rowhani, Ahmadinejad was forced to give the job to a detested and well-connected rival, Ali Larijani.

In the meantime, Rowhani has made a political comeback.

Analysts said that despite his reputation as a relative moderate, Rowhani probably managed to get Khamenei’s ear by exploiting the president’s reputation as a populist rabble-rouser who could pose a threat to the supreme leader’s power. He delivered a speech criticizing Ahmadinejad’s authoritarian style and began appearing regularly on the front pages of state-run newspapers.

“The country is no one’s property,” he said. “The notion that someone owns the country and its people is our biggest problem and incurable disease.”

That same week, Khamenei made a speech saying that no one in the government was above criticism, in effect barring Ahmadinejad from attacking Rowhani and blessing his return to Iran’s innermost circle of power.

When Larijani quit this year, the president appointed his own man, Saeed Jalili, as nuclear negotiator — at least until an advisor to Khamenei complained. Both Jalili and Larijani attended the next round of negotiations with European officials.

Ahmadinejad even has had to rescind some orders on relatively minor issues.

Last year, he extended Eid al-Fitr holidays and eliminated daylight saving time. But people complained loudly of missed international flights and too many days off. The man who challenged Iran’s most powerful clerics bowed to public pressure. This year the calendar went back to normal.

No mandate on economy

Khamenei has found that even if the power structure believes he has a mandate from heaven, he can’t make it move on economic reforms.

Iran needs to free up billions of dollars from its budget to invest in its ailing oil industry, the source of half of the government’s income. However, hundreds of money-losing state-owned enterprises drain the budget. Despite the high cost of oil, the World Bank predicts that Iran will be running a deficit in two years.

Privatization would help raise funds, but it would mean wresting lucrative patronage from the hands of religious foundations, military institutions and well-connected bazaar khodi.

“Khamenei is currently surrounded by intelligence forces, the Revolutionary Guards and the hard-line media,” said Mohsen Sazegara, a former Iranian official and onetime khodi who is now a vehement critic and lives in Washington. “They pretend to listen to Khamenei’s orders, but they do whatever they want.”

Since the 1979 revolution, state-owned factories have been used as recruiting and fundraising centers for Basiji militiamen, who answer to the Revolutionary Guard. They provide jobs for the relatives of government loyalists. One aluminum factory in central Iran provides jobs for relatives of local officials of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, said a Tehran economist who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The businesses Khamenei wants to sell on the stock market also are expected to kick in millions of dollars each year for political and religious events that are part of the Islamic Republic’s ideological machinery.

“They ask you politely, ‘How much will you donate for the revolution festivities?’ or, ‘How many workers will you release to participate in the rallies?’ ” said one executive at an Iranian company.

Managers have found other ways to thwart the privatization plan. After shares of a state-owned aluminum company failed to sell this year, executives removed the offering rather than lower the price.

“There’s a very large group of managers who don’t want this to happen,” said Moussa Ghaninejad, an economist and journalist at Donya Eghtesad, a business newspaper. “They create so many problems that it doesn’t get done.”

Sometimes, senior officials intervene to halt a sale. Ahmadinejad stopped a recent effort by an Iranian industrialist to buy a state-owned carmaker’s share in a private bank.

In a lead editorial, Kayhan, a newspaper representing the views of the conservative leadership, demanded that non-khodi be cut off from the public wealth.Khamenei’s own mouthpiece was subverting his goals.

“If you ask me, ‘Who is running Iran?’ ” said one Tehran trial lawyer, “I would say, ‘Everyone — and no one.’ “

Source: The Los Angeles Times

It has been accused of playing a role in arming Shia militia in Iraq and threatened with being labelled a “terrorist organisation” by the US, but Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – the country’s elite military force – believes that domestic security threats represent a much greater danger to the country than the international crisis surrounding its nuclear programme. 

Mohammad-Ali Jafari, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, said shortly after he took his new job in September: “The main mission of the guards is currently fighting domestic threats and in case there is a foreign threat we will join the [conventional] army.”

To that end he has embarked on a so-called “structural reform” in the guards, part of which is to integrate the Basij Resistance Force – the 12.5m-strong volunteer force which had operated as a separate arm of the Guards – more closely into its operations.

Located in 70,000 bases in government organisations, mosques and universities, Basij members, the eyes and ears of the Islamic republic, act as custodians of the 1979 revolution. Their influence in the recruitment into the organisations where they are based means they are viewed by some as intimidating forces.

Mr Jafari has taken overall responsibility for the Basij, having removed the former head of the force. He hopes it will almost double in strength to 20m members in the next decade although analysts say that at the moment just 3m are military-trained.

The 125,000-strong IRGC consist of land, naval and air forces and two separate arms – the Basij unit and Quds Brigade. The latter is comprised of a few thousand well-trained forces involved in overseas operations. But the backbone of the IRGC is its land force.

Supporting a stronger role for the Basij, Kayhan newspaper, a mouthpiece for fundamentalists, last month said: “The biggest threats against the future of the regime from now on have a soft nature in which domestic players have a key role.” Hosein Taeb, a deputy head of Basij, lists the threats as “a ‘velvet revolution’, political invasion and penetration into the ruling system [a clear reference to reformists]”.

This year, the regime has arrested hundreds of students, feminists, NGO activists, academics, teachers and labourers for taking part in rallies or for allegedly having links with opponents of the regime outside the country. Many have been released but the arrests have created an intimidating atmosphere.

A greater role for the Revolutionary Guard in the Basij has led some to fear a fresh clampdown on internal dissent. Going under the direct command of Mr Jafari will probably include more training on how to monitor and curb domestic unrest.

Iran also faces separatist moves by Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis and to a lesser extent Azeris in border provinces.

Iran has accused the US of being behind some ethnic unrest.

Warning that threats against the Islamic regime have become “more complicated and extensive than before”, Mr Jafari has said that the change in the Basij is backed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is chief commander of armed forces and has the last say in state affairs.

“[The] supreme leader has concerns for the future of this country, while he doesn’t trust urban forces [groups seeking social change], intellectuals and technocrats,” said one analyst.

“He has pinned his hopes on two forces: the masses for who he has prescribed social justice and the revolutionary guards who are his means to carry out his policies and foil threats.”

Fundamentalists believe some reformists behave as the fifth column for the enemy inside the country and have to be banned from any political activity, including forthcoming parliamentary elections in March.

Although the constitution bans armed forces from involvement in politics, many reformists allege Basij forces were mobilised to support President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad when he won the 2005 election, encouraging people to vote for him.

“The meaningful involvement of the IRGC in politics started as of 1997 when [former reformist president Mohammad] Khatami was elected, something [political involvement] didn’t exist before or was very weak,” said another analyst.

Source: FT

While Washington debates whether it should talk to Iran, one Maryland congressman has already struck up a conversation, according to the U.S. newspaper, Baltimore Sun.

For the past year, Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest has been meeting with Iranian officials and business leaders to talk about ways to improve relations between the United States and the Islamic republic that President Bush put in his Axis of Evil.

With the recent release of a U.S. intelligence report concluding that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program four years ago, he now sees an opportunity.

“You get this kind of momentum, we will begin a dialogue with Iran,” the Eastern Shore Republican said. “If it’s not in this administration - although I think it’s possible - you will see a change in policy so that the next administration will have a better opportunity to openly discuss issues with the Iranians.”

That’s been Gilchrest’s goal since a private meeting last autumn with Iran’s envoy to the United Nations. The three-hour session with Ambassador Mohammad Javad Zarif was the start of a continuing effort by Gilchrest, a former Marine who had come to regret his 2002 vote to authorize the use of military force in Iraq, to develop relations with the country that some believed the White House planned to attack next.

He has followed up with other Iranians, exchanged letters with the speaker of the Iranian parliament and organized a group of Republicans and Democrats focused on improving relations.

Called the Dialogue Caucus, the group is looking to spark broader communication between U.S. and Iranian lawmakers. To the 61-year-old Gilchrest, wounded as a platoon leader in Vietnam, it’s a matter of “sending old men to talk before we send young men to die.”

“What I’ve seen in Congress,” he said, “is when you have two people talking, exchanging information, the potential for solutions is infinite. When they don’t talk, there’s no potential at all.”

Still, he says, he has no illusions about the difficulty of finding common ground.

“These guys are not sprouting halos,” he said. “We’re not talking about a poor, misunderstood country. But, you know, this is politics. I’d rather have them talking than shooting at us.”

Gilchrest says Iran has legitimate interests in the security of neighboring Iraq, where it has strong ties to the Shiite majority. He says that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not speak for the whole country, any more than Bush speaks for all Americans.

The largely behind-the-scenes effort is not without political risk. Bush says the recent release of the National Intelligence Estimate will not change the administration policy of mostly shunning Iran, which the United States accuses of arming Shiite insurgents in Iraq.

The moderate Gilchrest, who has split with his party over Iraq, is facing a strong primary challenge from the right from state Sen. Andrew P. Harris in the conservative 1st Congressional District, which voted twice for Bush. State Sen. E.J. Pipkin and three other Republicans are also vying for the nomination.

“He joined [Democratic House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi in wanting to try to run the war, and now I guess it seems that he wants to make an end run around the State Department in handling these foreign affairs as well,” Harris said. “Freelancing on the part of Foreign Service wannabes … is probably not the best thing for this country.”

Efforts by lawmakers to reach out to nations with whom the United States has troubled relations have a long and not very productive history.

But former Democratic Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, whose Iraq Study Group urged the administration to open talks with Iran, says that outreach of the sort that Gilchrest is attempting is “exactly what is needed.”

Gilchrest says he has told Bush of the effort and has kept the administration apprised of his contacts. A State Department spokeswoman said members of Congress are free to speak with whomever they choose - but added that “we would hope that if they did engage in discussions with members of the Iranian government, they would reiterate our policy and explain to them the clearly outlined steps that they need to take in order to come to the negotiating table with the United States.”

The United States and Iran recently agreed to a fourth round of talks between their ambassadors in Baghdad to discuss security in Iraq. But U.S. officials say they will not hold higher-level meetings or broaden the discussion to other topics unless Iran stops processing the uranium that they say still could be used for nuclear weapons.

The focus on foreign affairs is something of a departure for Gilchrest. The former high school social studies teacher has been better known for his interest in the environment as a member of the House Natural Resources and Transportation committees.

Then came the Iraq war, on which he says he was “sold a bill of goods,” and what he sees as an increasingly and unnecessarily confrontational approach to the world by both the White House and Congress. He has visited Iraq three times since the 2003 invasion, and has also traveled to Syria, Israel, Jordan and other countries in the region.

“I just couldn’t sit on the side any longer and watch all this stuff unfold,” he said. “I hear my colleagues. I see resolution after resolution coming to the floor condemning this one and condemning that one. Isolating the Palestinians, not talking to the Iranians, calling people evil empires. They’re trying to put out fires by throwing on more dry logs.”

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq praised Iran on Sunday for helping to curb Shi’ite militia violence in Iraq on Sunday, using some of the warmest language Washington has employed toward its arch foe over Iraq.

Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Washington believed Iran may be behind a ceasefire announced by Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and that it had helped to ensure the ceasefire stuck in areas where it wielded influence. But he also indicated that U.S. authorities still see Iran’s role as unpredictable and its motives opaque.

“I’m very cautious about predicting or analyzing what the Iranians are doing, because we’re not there,” Crocker told journalists in Baghdad. “But we have seen a reduction in violent action on the part of extremist militias — not an elimination, but a reduction. “We have seen Moqtada al-Sadr’s call for a freeze, and then his call for a renewal of that freeze. The Iranians have indicated — not to us but to others — that they have had a role in all of this. If that’s the case, then it’s good.

SPECIAL GROUPS

Asked who had provided the information that Iran was behind Sadr’s freeze, he said it had come from Iraqi authorities. The United States has blamed Iran for providing training and weapons — especially missiles and sophisticated roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) — to Iraqi Shi’ite militia.

It uses the term “special groups” to refer to militia units it says use such Iranian weapons. Crocker said such attacks had become less frequent, although he said an EFP was used earlier this month to kill the police chief of Babil province, a mainly Shi’ite area south of Baghdad where security forces have clashed with Sadr’s militia. “If Sadr has started the policy and the Iranians have used their influence to make it stick in areas where there are ’special groups’ and they’ve got far more influence then he does — then that’s a positive development,” he said.

Earlier this year, the United States and Iran set up a committee to discuss security in Iraq, a development seen as a diplomatic breakthrough for two countries that have had only limited contacts for 30 years. The committee last met in August at a time when Washington was loudly accusing Iran of fomenting violence and helping Shi’ite militia kill U.S.
troops.

But Sadr declared a six-month ceasefire by his Mehdi Army militia later that month, and U.S. forces say Shi’ite militia attacks quickly declined. Sadr’s spokesman said last week that he was considering extending the ceasefire when it expired in February. The next meeting of the Iran-U.S. security committee was due to take place on December 18 but was postponed because of a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Crocker said U.S. and Iranian officials were still negotiating a new date, but he expected the meeting to take place within the next few weeks.

Source: Reuters

The former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has attacked President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over high inflation, the latest conservative to criticise his economic policies, media reported on Sunday. 

The complaints by Mohsen Rezaie were echoed by the conservative deputy speaker of parliament and a top lawmaker amid an intensifying public debate in Iran over the wisdom of the government’s economic policies. Rezaie said the government’s policy of injecting huge amounts of liquidity to fund local infrastructure projects was the main cause of price rises. Inflation reached 19.1 percent year-on-year in November. “Every year, the government injects a huge amount of money into society without supplying goods and services in return for this money,” Rezaie, who led the Guards from 1981-1997, was quoted as saying by the Sarmayeh newspaper. “Financial discipline in the state bureaucracy is also weak.

Therefore the source of inflation is the government itself. “The government should rectify its economic behaviour. That is the most important plan to control inflation.” Rezaie, who commanded the Guards for almost all of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq, now serves as secretary of Iran’s top political arbitration body the Expediency Council which also advises supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He rarely makes comments on day-to-day policy, although his status as the longest serving commander in the history of the Revolutionary Guards gives him considerable influence. Reformists and conservatives alike have intensified their criticism of Ahmadinejad after the president in a December 14 televised interview blamed his political opponents and external factors for high prices. Rezaie described Ahamadinejad’s explanation as “correct to a great extent but not transparent.”
 
Deputy parliament speaker Mohammad Reza Bahonar, another leading conservative, also hit out at the president who in the past had quipped that his cabinet members had to match his speed of 160 kilometres per hour. “Someone who drives at such a speed should be more careful about his performance,” Bahonar was quoted as saying by Sarmayeh. “If he does not foresee the obstacles in the way, the accidents will be even more terrible.” Bahonar also warned that Iran would face “tough times” if drastic measures were not taken to combat inflation in the next few months, according to the state television website.

Former Iranian presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and ex-nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani have all publicly criticised Ahmadinejad over the economy. The criticism of Khatami, Rafsanjani and Rowhani is no surprise at a time when their allies have formed a moderate front to challenge Ahmadinejad on March 14 parliamentary elections.

But the attacks by Bahonar, Qalibaf, Rezaie show that frustration is building in conservative ranks. Qalibaf and Rezaie allies have not joined the main pro-Ahmadinejad conservative election front. Prominent conservative MP Mohammad Khoshchehreh complained over the “tripling of the government’s share in budget law of the year 1385 (2006-2007) to 40 billion dollars from the 14.2 billion dollars of the last government.” “It’s like the case of an aneamic patient whose doctor prescribes only one package of blood,” Khoshchehreh was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency. “The patient asks for three packages because they have heard that blood is a good thing. But the three packages are fatal indeed.”

Source: AFP

Diplomats of the five permanent U.N. Security Council member countries and Germany are to confer by telephone Thursday in another try at agreeing on further sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. U.S. officials say chances for a third sanctions resolution by year’s end are nil.  

VOA’s David Gollust reports from the State Department. A general view shows reactor building of Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran (file) The State Department says Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns will hold a conference call with counterparts from Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany Thursday in another effort to finalize terms of a third sanctions resolution against Iran.

The United States has been in negotiations with the other veto-wielding Security Council members and Germany, the so-called P5-plus-1, on new sanctions since Iran ignored the 60-day deadline to halt uranium enrichment contained in the last sanctions measure, adopted in late March. The P5-plus-1 political directors held an inconclusive 90-minute conference call on Tuesday last week. Officials here concede that even if remaining issues are resolved in Thursday’s conference, there is no chance of submitting a new resolution to the council before January. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week the United States has tactical differences with Russia and China over a new resolution, but she also said the need for further sanctions has not been obviated by the December 3 U.S. intelligence report which said Iran stopped a covert nuclear weapons program in 2003.

State Department Deputy Spokesman Tom Casey said Tuesday the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate should in some ways raise the level of concern about Iran, which has denied ever seeking a nuclear weapons capability. “It is clear by the assessment that’s been made that there has been or was an active nuclear weapons program that Iran was engaged in,” he said. “The fact that it has been set aside in terms of the effort to make a warhead or make a specific nuclear device, does nothing to take away from the fact that they continue to work full-tilt towards two of the other key components necessary for having a weapon. That’s its very active and continuing missile program, and efforts to master the fuel cycle.” The Bush administration supports a two-track strategy of increased sanctions against Iran if it refuses to halt enrichment, but diplomatic and other benefits if it complies with the Security Council, including aid for its nominally-peaceful nuclear power program.

Russia this week began delivering fuel to the nuclear power plant it has completed for Iran at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf under terms mandating the return of all spent fuel to Russia. The Bush administration this week reaffirmed support for the arrangement, which Casey said shows Iran doesn’t really need a complete nuclear fuel cycle: “The fact that Iran has a guaranteed source of fuel that’s economically-viable, that would allow it to achieve its supposed objectives through its civilian nuclear program makes it pretty clear to most of us that there really isn’t a need for them to be moving forward with these kinds of activities, again, unless their ultimate intention is to use it to build a nuclear weapon,” he added. The Russian Foreign Ministry Monday expressed a similar view, saying the Bushehr deliveries mean Iran has “no objective need” for its own uranium enrichment program. Tehran however said it would not stop its enrichment drive and that it has begun construction of a second power reactor in southwestern Iran.

News reports say the new sanctions measure being discussed by the P5-plus-1 would be much broader in scope than the resolutions of March and December 2006. The Washington Post said last week the new measures under discussion would call for asset freezes and travel bans against Iranian individuals and entities believed engaged in nuclear proliferation, including the Quds Force, the foreign operations branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Source: Voice of America

It is no secret in Iran: Authorities have gone out of their way to publicize a crackdown against thugs and smugglers that has also enveloped academics and women whose dress is deemed “un-Islamic.” 

Masked police dressed like black-clad storm-troopers have been arresting, humiliating, and parading criminals. Cameras follow cops on nighttime raids against drug dealers that net hundreds in a single night.

But analysts say that what appeared to be just another cleanup when it began last spring is proving to be a strategic effort to protect the regime from “vulnerabilities” that could be exploited by archenemies such as the United States. Picking up criminals and intimidating all potential opponents of clerical rule, they say, aims to prevent a repeat of history by preempting violence that could spin out of control.

“The girls are not the target,” says an Iranian journalist, noting that many women still deliberately flout the rules. “The core reason is dealing harshly with thugs. Now they are preempting – they are keeping a potential threat from growing,” says the journalist. “They are looking at modern history [and] going onto the Internet.”

That history shows how the CIA in 1953 staged a coup against Iran’s popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. A crucial factor in its success were mobs organized by CIA-paid agents to rampage and take over the streets; others soon joined the rioters.

And on the Internet, Iran’s security services have become familiar with American regime-change neoconservatives such as Michael Ledeen, who has argued that with US support, “we could liberate Iran in less than a year.”

The Iranian journalist paraphrases those ideas – and the threat perceived from them – this way: “In the war with Iran, the US will not be the foot soldiers,” but will “just provide the trigger” for Iranians to rise and topple the government.

In Iran, anticriminal measures against those called “knife-pullers” in Farsi are widely lauded. Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, has told police that they “must strongly continue with the ’social security plan’ … so that its goals are institutionalized in society.”

But in one of the most far-reaching drives since the 1979 Islamic revolution, enforcement has spread far beyond criminal offenders to young women showing too much hair and Western-educated academics accused of being “agents” for US-inspired regime change.

This past weekend, 24 Internet cafes and coffeehouses were shut down in a sweep of 435 such locales, Reuters reported. Police said they were shut for “using immoral computer games [and] storing obscene photos.” A fresh “winter” crackdown was announced last week on un-Islamic dress, which includes women’s high boots.

“Their vulnerable spot is these ‘Westoxicated’ Iranians – the threat is not military attack, but Iranians who ‘live differently from us,’ who listen to the West,” says a veteran analyst who asked not to be named. “Many would follow those [thugs] who are willing to attack.”

Iran’s new Revolutionary Guard commander, Mohammad Ali Jafari, said in late September that the “main responsibility” of his forces is to counter “internal threats.” One vigilante newspaper has railed against the risks of “freedom.”

The morality enforcement is a reversal in some ways. For years, conventional wisdom held that conservatives would not risk a serious social crackdown, fearing a popular backlash that could threaten their grip on power. But women and labor activists have been arrested as well as students who have staged protests against the president and government policies in the past year. Three who have been in prison for eight months – their fate sparking a number of demonstrations – are to be released Saturday, acquitted of “insulting religious values” and other charges.

Amnesty International notes that the number of executions has risen from 177 in 2006 to more than 210 so far this year. The UN General Assembly Tuesday approved a draft resolution noting “very serious concern” with human rights violations in Iran, including cases of “torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including flogging and amputations.”

The steps being taken hark back to the earliest years of the revolution, when “securing the system” was deemed the highest obligation, like prayer. Experts note, however, that unlike in both 1979 and 1953, the regime now has many loyal security forces and vigilante groups whose job is to protect the system and ensure, in the words of one Farsi slogan often applied by critics, “victory through creating fear.”

“The US planned two wars against us, a hard war and a soft war,” says Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Abolhasan Navvab, an influential cleric. “The hard war, it is only intimidation and slogans. But the soft war, it goes more toward reality [by provoking] social, cultural, ethnic, and religious conflicts.”

“It is not a flood, but this is a very slight rain that is continuous, and when it washes away it has a ruinous effect,” says Mr. Navvab. “If you take it seriously, the level of danger drops. If you don’t take it seriously, the danger is there and it is firm.”

Noting the months-long arrests of several dual US-Iran citizens earlier this year, Navvab charged that some academics “turned out to be agents of foreigners.” The impact of such beliefs has been widely felt.

“I have never seen Iran like this in 28 years,” says one political analyst, who has been warned about contact with Westerners. “Early in the revolution, there was mass jubilation, and repression was very targeted against [armed opposition]. If you were not a member, you had no reason to fear. Now it’s a systematic intimidation, and they are very good at it.”

US expenditures of $75 million on “pro-democracy” efforts, most of it on broadcasts into Iran from outside, has helped provide a pretext. “The whole security environment is intended to really suffocate or torpedo any possible change from within. They believe this mass conspiracy [of regime change],” says the analyst. The result is a “sense of fear, and making engagement in politics at any level a high-risk endeavor.”
 

Last week, parliamentarians angry about the book crackdown called for moderation. “A Muslim woman wearing high boots with a coat and other coverings does not contradict Islam,” said Mohammad Taghi Rahbar, a member of parliament and cleric who was quoted in the Iranian press, according to Agence France-Presse.

One focus has been “Westoxicated” youths, and women showing too much hair or wearing tight manteaus that by law must hide the shape of the body. Morality police park at malls and take photos for criminal files of “bad hijab” violators. Some women have been warned that a third infraction will cause banishment from Tehran.

Presidential aide Mehdi Kalhor, who famously called for much greater social openness in 2005, has also asked for limits on police zeal. “I wrote a letter to the head of law enforcement and asked him to refrain from extremism, [to] execute the [minimum] level of the law,” he said in an interview. “It’s the right of each citizen to have an ordinary life, without being disturbed and agitated.”

Iranian academics have received directives to halt all contacts with foreigners. Civil society efforts – even cultural events hosted by Western embassies in Tehran have dried up, since attendees were harassed, sometimes physically. “There is a genuine concern in the regime that we in the West would like the regime to change, and they are right, for some people,” says a European diplomat. “Some think we are not going to do it with bombs and missiles, but through a velvet revolution.”

That means special attention paid to civil-society activists. At a recent meeting to express solidarity with Emadedin Baghi, the founder of Society for Protecting Prisoners’ Rights who was arrested in October, some spoke out. “A regime that can’t respect such a soft-spoken, moderate person is a cause for concern,” says Ezatollah Sahabi, a reformist editor who has done prison time. “No reformist wants to go beyond [limits] – just respect the rights of the citizens. We don’t want to push the regime into a critical situation.”

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

White House officials have now admitted that President George W Bush was told that the intelligence assessment on a covert Iranian nuclear program might change in August, but they have avoided answering the question of when the president was first informed about the new intelligence that led to that revised assessment.

That evasion is necessary, it now appears, to conceal the fact that Bush likely knew about that intelligence as early as February or March 2007.

The White House evasions began on the day the “key judgments” in the Iran National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) were released. At his December 3 press conference, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was asked, “So was it recent weeks that this intelligence came in?” Hadley answered, “What the intelligence community has said is in the last few months.”

In fact, no intelligence official had commented on when the crucial intelligence had first been obtained.

Then a journalist asked, “Steve, when was the first time the president was given the inkling of something? … Was this months ago, when the first information started to become available to intelligence agencies?” This time Hadley responded, “You ought to go back to the intelligence community.”

The evidence now available strongly suggests, however, that Hadley dodged the question not because he did not know the answer, but because he did not wish to reveal that Bush had been informed about the new intelligence months before the August meeting with Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.

The key development that altered the course of the NIE on Iran, according to intelligence sources, was the defection of a senior official of the Iranian Ministry of Defense, Ali Reza Asgari, on a visit to Turkey last February, as widely reported in international news media in subsequent weeks. The Washington Post’s Dafna Linzer, citing a “senior US official”, reported on March 8 that Asgari, who had been deputy minister of defense for eight years under the reformist president Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005, was already providing information to US intelligence.

The senior official told Linzer, however, that Asgari was not being questioned about Iran’s nuclear program, despite the fact that Asgari certainly had significant knowledge of policy decisions, if not technical details, of the program. That incongruous denial that Asgari had anything to say about Iran’s nuclear program suggested that the information being provided by Asgari on that subject was considered extraordinarily sensitive.

Intelligence officials have kept any reference to Asgari out of the discussion of the NIE. Former Central Intelligence Agency officer Philip Giraldi has told Inter Press Service (IPS), however, that, according to intelligence sources, information provided by Asgari was indeed a “key component” of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003, although it was corroborated by other sources.

Giraldi says Asgari had been recruited by Turkish intelligence in 2003, and defected to Turkey after he had picked up indications that Iranian intelligence had become suspicious of him. Giraldi said his sources confirm press reports that Asgari came out with “bags of documents”. Intelligence officials have confirmed that papers on military discussions of the nuclear program were part of the evidence that led the analysts to the new conclusion about the Iranian nuclear program.

Equally important to the NIE’s conclusion, according to Giraldi, was the information provided by Asgari about the Iranian defense communications system that allowed US intelligence to gain new access to sensitive communications within the Iranian military. That was crucial to the intercepted electronic communications which also played a role in the analysis that led to the estimate’s conclusion.

Gary Sick, who was the principal White House aide on Iran during the Jimmy Carter administration and is now a senior research scholar at the Middle East Institute of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, says he believes Asgari’s knowledge of the debate in Tehran’s defense establishment also may have allowed the intelligence community to identify which intercepted communications were most important.

“There are zillions of pieces of evidence, and what you look for is defined by what you know,” says Sick. “What Asgari gave them was a new way of looking at the evidence.”

There are other indications that, by April 2007, the intelligence community was already intensively reviewing new evidence provided by Asgari and old evidence that the new information suggested could corroborate it. Thomas Fingar, chair of the National Intelligence Council, who was directing the whole NIE process, gave an exclusive interview to National Public Radio’s Mary Louis Kelly on April 27 in which he dropped hints of the new phase of the NIE process.

Fingar referred to “some new information we have” and declared, “We are serious about reexamining old evidence …” Fingar even said that the estimated time frame for Iran’s obtaining a nuclear weapon “might change”, because “we are being completely openminded and taking a fresh look at the subject.”

It now seems clear that these were references to the search for corroboration of the basic intelligence obtained from Asgari about the Iranian nuclear program. But Fingar misled listeners about the direction of the intelligence community’s investigation by seeming to suggest that advances in Iranian uranium enrichment announced earlier that month might cause analysts to shorten the minimum time frame within which Iran might have sufficient fissile material for a bomb.

Fingar said the evidence that Iran was beginning to enrich on an “industrial scale” was “one of the questions we have got to weigh the new information to see what it does to our judgment”. He also referred to International Atomic Energy Agency reports on the Iranian program, allowing listeners to infer that the delay in the NIE was due to new evidence that would lead to a more alarmist estimate on Iran’s nuclear program.

The Fingar interview suggests that the process of seeking corroboration of the 2003 change in nuclear policy in Iran was already well underway in April.

The intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program obtained as a result of the US debriefing of Asgari, however, would have been made available to Bush as soon as it was evaluated as important by intelligence officials. The debriefing of a high-ranking defector represents very important intelligence, and summaries of the most important information from such a debriefing would normally go into the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), the summary of key intelligence developments that is prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)each night and given to the White House the first thing the next morning.

“It is inconceivable to me that the PDB did not included whatever information Asgari gave us on the nuclear program,” says Ray McGovern, a 26-year veteran of the CIA who once presented the daily briefing to Richard Nixon. Furthermore, every major new development in the collection of intelligence obtained as a result of Asgari’s debriefings would have been included in the PDB, according to McGovern.

Contrary to Hadley’s suggestion that he didn’t know when Bush had first received the new intelligence, moreover, McGovern points out that the national security adviser has received the same PDB as the president for decades. The former CIA analyst told IPS that Hadley certainly would have known when the new intelligence regarding the covert Iranian nuclear weapons program was presented to the president.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.