Rooyesh

U.S. presidential candidates agree Iran should not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons but at this point in the 2008 campaign, their prescriptions for preventing such an outcome are vague. Dealing with Iran — its nuclear ambitions, its involvement in Iraq and its opposition to Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts — commands a lot of President George W. Bush’s attention.

But he is not likely to resolve the conflicts before leaving office in January 2009, so Iran is expected to be among the more difficult foreign policy challenges inherited by his successor, U.S. officials and experts say.

“Allowing Iran, a radical theocracy that supports terrorism and openly threatens its neighbors, to acquire nuclear weapons is a risk we cannot take,” Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois said in a letter to the Israel Project, a pro-Israel group that educates the public about Israel and advocates an end to investment in Iran.

Obama’s tough line on Iran was largely echoed in other letters from seven other candidates, including Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, both Democrats.

Two Republican candidates — former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas — stressed, as Bush has done, that the military option must remain on the table.

All were asked by the Israel Project to discuss their views and endorse a petition signed on-line by more than 75,000 people telling the United Nations Security Council “Iran must be stopped now — before it develops a nuclear bomb.”

Tehran, which insists its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, has defied a Security Council demand to halt its uranium enrichment program, resulting in two sets of sanctions. A third sanctions resolution is under consideration.

DIVESTMENT

Only three candidates — Obama, Brownback and Romney — at this point supported the project’s effort to persuade state pension funds and others to withdraw investments from companies invested in Iran’s oil and gas industry.

Obama praised Florida, Illinois and California for taking the lead on divestment and said he would work to pass this year a new law he is sponsoring to make divestment easier.

Romney outlined a five-point strategy including tightening sanctions, denying Iran access to the international financial system and indicting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for “incitement to genocide” against Israel.

The United States should “isolate Iran diplomatically” but also “keep communication channels open,” Romney advised.

Edwards offered to negotiate directly with Iranian leaders who meet criteria like recognition of Israel, but also promised “new” targeted sanctions for U.S. and foreign companies against Tehran, which he did not define.

He also proposed enticing Iran into compliance with U.N. demands through incentives like offering increased refinery capacity, modification of the U.S. trade embargo, membership in multinational organizations and creation of a fuel bank.

Clinton urged enforcement of “meaningful, tough economic sanctions” on Iran and noted her sponsorship of legislation that would prevent international corporations from evading sanctions through foreign subsidiaries.

During a televised debate on Monday, Obama stressed the need to engage the leaders of Iran, North Korea and other states Bush has kept at arms’ length. He said he would meet them without preconditions during his first year as president.

Clinton promised to pursue diplomacy vigorously but rejected meeting these leaders until the way had been cleared by high-level envoys. “I don’t want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don’t want to make a situation even worse,” she said. Edwards endorsed her comments.

In the Israel Project responses, another Democrat, Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, said U.S. sanctions are not enough, so the international community must enforce U.N. sanctions, including a resolution calling for disarming Hezbollah, an Islamic militant group Washington says is armed and financed by Iran.

Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions “demands urgent and decisive action,” but gave no details. Neither did former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican who called Iran an “unacceptable threat” and urged it to halt enrichment and support for terrorism.

By: Carol Giacomo, Reuters

Moscow has delayed the start-up of Iran’s first nuclear power station to 2008 because Tehran has fallen behind with payments for the Bushehr plant, a top Russian official said on Thursday. The timing of the plant’s start-up is significant as it is viewed by Israel and the United States as an important element in a nuclear drive which they suspect is a front for developing nuclear weapons. Iran says the program is entirely peaceful.

Russia has repeatedly delayed the plant which under the latest schedule was due to be started up in September 2007. A Russian sub-contractor said on Wednesday the plant, in southwest Iran, had no chance of being launched before autumn 2008.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak said in Baku that Tehran was still behind in payments for the plant and that the delay was not political.

“It will clearly not be possible to start-up the atomic station this year so it will be moved to the next year,” Kislyak told reporters, citing the payment problems.

“We are fully determined to take Bushehr to its logical conclusion and launch the atomic power station,” he said.

The Itar-Tass news agency earlier reported Kislyak had said Bushehr would be inaugurated in early 2008.

PAYMENT PROBLEMS?

Moscow says there is no evidence that Tehran has the capability to make nuclear weapons, but ties have been strained by what Russian officials say are millions of dollars in missed payments for the station.

Iranian officials say they have made the proper payments and that Moscow is delaying due to pressure from the West.

Kislyak said payment delays had forced Russian firms to work on credit although he declined to say how much Iran owed Russian companies for the station.

Iran should pay Russian firms about $25 million a month for the $1 billion, 1-GW plant, the first of what Iran has said will be a network of reactors generating 20-GW of electricity.

Russian nuclear officials say that nuclear fuel would have to be sent to Bushehr, a project initiated by Iran in the 1970s, at least six months before the reactors start.

Russia has traditionally been seen as Tehran’s closest big-power ally but the delays to Bushehr have chilled relations.

Analysts have speculated that Moscow could be tweaking its policy towards Tehran or that the Kremlin is using Bushehr as a bargaining chip in a wider diplomatic game.

By: Afet Mahtiyeva, Reuters

The Bush administration has so far been careful to ensure that any formal American-Iranian dialogue is restricted to the question of security in Iraq and does not spill over into the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme. However, US policy makers have been considering both subjects simultaneously before reaching important decisions.

It is worth noting that during the run-up to the second Iranian-American dialogue in Baghdad on July 24, Washington notched up its list of Iranian acts aimed at undermining the presence of the American and British troops in Iraq. It alleged that the previous pattern of Iranian military and other aid to the Shia militias was being extended to Sunni jihadists of different hues, including individual cells of al-Qaida. The claim was based on the evidence that some caches discovered in Sunni-majority areas contained Iranian-made weapons, ignoring the fact that these caches also included arms manufactured in Bulgaria.

This is part of the Bush administration’s psychological warfare against Tehran. Rejecting a recommendation by the Iraq Study Group (ISG), appointed by Congress, for talks with Iran and Syria regarding security in Iraq, President Bush fired the first salvo against Tehran in his speech on January 10 by threatening cross-border action against the Iranians aiding Iraqi insurgents.

A month later came the “surge” by American troops to secure Baghdad, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. When the promised peace for the Iraqi capital failed to materialise, and pressure from the Democrat-majority Congress for a draw-down of the US forces mounted, Bush began referring to the ISG report in favourable terms.

He authorised an official meeting with the Iranians. In late May the American delegation, led by Ambassador Ryan Crocker, held talks with the Iranian delegation, headed by Ambassador Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, under the chairmanship of the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, in Baghdad.

Kazemi-Qomi called the mutual agreement to strengthen the Maliki government as positive, and announced that a second Iran-US dialogue would take place soon. Crocker, on the other hand, remarked that America’s acceptance of an invitation by Maliki for a second round was conditional on whether it noticed any change in the behaviour of Iran, which he claimed was assisting the insurgents and Shia militias in Iraq.

Despite this caveat, Crocker had a meeting with his Iranian counterpart, Kazemi-Qomi, in Baghdad on Tuesday, chaired by the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zabari. Crocker complained that since the first US-Iran meeting in Baghdad, there had been an escalation in the Iranian-supported militia attacks on the US and British forces in Iraq. On his part, Qazemi-Qomi asserted as before that Iran had nothing to do with such assaults.

He repeated his earlier proposal for a trilateral security committee - consisting of Iraq, America and Iran - to meet regularly to address issues relating to militias, al-Qaida and border security in Iraq. It was discussed but no decision was taken.

Lately, well-briefed journalists have reported that in the ongoing debate on Iran in Washington, the balance has shifted from the dovish secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice (backed by defence secretary Robert Gates and the Central Intelligence Agency’s director, Michael Hayden) in favour of super-hawk vice-president Dick Cheney, intent on exercising the military option.

Part of the reason for this shift is that the two sets of United Nations sanctions on Iran for defying the UN security council’s resolution to cease enriching uranium have not hurt Iran’s economy although they have cooled the interest of western petroleum corporations and banks in Iran’s hydrocarbon projects. Nor has the CIA’s programme of covert actions to destabilise the mullahs’ regime yielded any tangible result.

So the American policy-makers’ attention has now turned on the third set of UN sanctions on Iran. This move is being resisted by Russia and China who are opposed to any further punitive action against Tehran. Their hands are being strengthened by the moderating of Iran’s stance on the nuclear issue.

On July 9 Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the agency’s 35-strong board of governors that Iran had “slowed down” its uranium enrichment programme. And, following a meeting between Iranian and IAEA officials in Tehran, Iran agreed to let agency inspectors visit the site of the heavy water research reactor being built near Arak - a request it had rejected before. This will take place on July 30-31.

Furthermore, Iran has agreed to answer the IAEA questions it had not done before. On Tuesday July 24, Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, confirmed this to the Guardian. “All the areas, all the questions will be answered,” he said. “We have no problem with that.”

Little wonder that any discussion of sanctions on Iran at the security council has been postponed until September.

Mirroring the behaviour of Washington’s policy-makers, their counterparts in Tehran have combined their concessions with the warning that if, goaded by the US, the security council imposes another set of sanctions, then Iran would seriously consider opting out of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Source: Guardian