Rooyesh

British forces in southern Iraq have been fighting a “proxy war” against Iran, the commander of the troops who withdrew from Basra Palace has said.  While the Army has frequently accused Iran of stirring violence across southern Iraq by arming Shia militias, no officer has been as blunt as Lt Col Patrick Sanders, commander of 4th Battalion The Rifles.

He told the BBC that 5,500 British soldiers still based at Basra Airport could return to the city if called upon by Iraq’s newly trained security forces. This may happen if Iraq’s army needs help against Basra’s Shia militias – who Britain accuses Iran of arming and training. “We are engaged, or we have been engaged, effectively in a proxy war with Iran and if that resumes then they (Iraq’s security forces) will need us to help,” Lt Col Sanders said. He added that Basra was benefiting from a “lull in violence” and his troops had carried out a smooth and bloodless withdrawal from the palace in the city’s centre. This took place in cooperation with Iraq’s British-trained forces and after talks with the Shia militias. “There was a lot of potential for some quite serious violence and attacks on us. I’m delighted that it passed off without incident,” Lt Col Sanders said. In July alone, Shia militias fired 750 mortar bombs at the British base in Basra palace. Of all the armed groups faced by British forces in southern Iraq, the Jaish al-Mahdi, or Army of the Mahdi, led by the radical cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, was judged to be the most dangerous. But Lt Col Sanders said it was “complete nonsense” to suggest that his troops had been defeated.

“The militias, and the Jaish al-Mahdi in particular, have thrown just about everything they have got at us. They have been unable to engage us in open fighting. We have been able to patrol around the city at will, on foot and in vehicles, any place or time of our choosing,” he said. “It’s been dangerous, and the level of violence that we have been engaged in and the casualties we have suffered are testament to that. But the notion that this is a defeat is nonsense.” British forces still hold overall responsibility for security in Basra province. But their primary task is now “overwatch”, not combat. They will stand ready to assist local security forces, continue training Iraqi soldiers and protect the essential supply route linking American forces in the centre of the country with their depots in Kuwait. Lt Col Sanders said their base at Basra Airport was not nearly as vulnerable as their old positions in the Palace. “Basra is quiet and stable at the moment and it augurs well for the future. The militias are talking to each other and they are talking to the Iraqi security force leadership. That is all encouraging,” he said. Lt Col Sanders’s troops are due to leave Iraq in late November and early December. He said they would be replaced, indicating that Britain’s military presence would continue into 2008.

Source: Telegraph, UK

This week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was thoroughly trashed by the Western media over its recent agreement with Iran, an agreement that, ironically, was warmly embraced by the majority of nations that are members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The North-South gap has turned ballistic, and there is no bridge over this troubled water.

“NAM respects the recent report by the IAEA’s director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, on Iran,” the Cuban foreign minister and current head of NAM, Felipe Perez Roque, told the press after the conclusion of a two-day NAM summit in Tehran.

The ministerial meeting was a timely shot in the arm for Tehran, which hopes to avoid a new round of United Nations sanctions come this autumn, even though British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has warned that new sanctions are inevitable if Iran continues to defy UN Security Council resolutions on its nuclear program.

Not surprisingly, little if any of the praise for the IAEA heard at the NAM summit has been echoed in the United States, which is keen on maintaining the delicate coalition at the UN that brought the first two anti-Tehran resolutions and yet is concerned that the IAEA’s agreement with Iran could, in the words of a Washington Post editorial, give China and Russia “a pretext to resist another UN sanctions resolution”.

Iran and the IAEA agreed last month on a plan of action that is supposed to remove all technical ambiguities surrounding Iran’s nuclear projects and serve as the basis for a political settlement between Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani and European Union foreign-policy chief Javier Solana.

The Post editorial places the blame squarely on the IAEA’s “rogue regulator”, ElBaradei, currently vilified as “self-serving” and feeling free to “use his agency to thwart their [ie, Security Council and IAEA] leading members, above all the United States.”

Another editorial, in the Chicago Tribune, has parroted the criticisms of a nuclear expert, David Albright, calling the Iran-IAEA agreement a “bad deal”. According to Albright, the “most glaring flaws” of the agreement are as follows: there doesn’t seem to be any way to verify Iran’s claims because under the agreement, the IAEA isn’t given access to “key people, facilities and documents”, unless Iran volunteers them. And the agency potentially loses its right to reopen issues or ask follow-up questions, even if significant new information emerges.

We can safely assume that the IAEA officials, particularly those who brokered the agreement, such as deputy director Olli Heinonen, would take strong exception to Albright’s criticisms. There is absolutely nothing in the agreement that would make the IAEA lose its right to ask “follow-up questions”.

Nor is it true that the IAEA has not had access to the key Iranian nuclear facilities and the people running them. Albright has gone to the extreme of claiming that the IAEA has no method of verifying Iran’s claims, again an unsubstantiated claim that is bound to be objected to by the IAEA inspectors who have chalked up more than 2,200 days inspecting Iran’s facilities.

But as the Washington Post editorial makes abundantly clear, Washington has developed a serious grudge against the IAEA’s chief and is by now fully determined to undermine his authority and, perhaps, to defang him, since it cannot simply remove him from office. Similar attacks on ElBaradei and the IAEA have transpired in other major US newspapers, raising the question of what exactly is behind them.

The answer is, in fact, straightforward: the IAEA-Iran agreement, providing a timetable for Iran to answer all of the IAEA’s lingering questions, leaves Iran’s uranium-enrichment program intact, and that is one concession too many from the perspective of Washington hawks and warmongers, who would much prefer to ignore any signs of an Iran-IAEA thaw that might culminate in Iran’s file slipping back into the IAEA and away from the Security Council.

Concerning the latter, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson has stated that Iran may be inclined to readopt the intrusive Additional Protocol if the US consents to returning the Iran file to the IAEA.

Despite serious objections by the US, the IAEA has mapped out a plan of action that appears to be working in Iran’s favor (for now) but which can be terminated at the United States’ whim. The US is, after all, the lone superpower that can dictate and persuade (by using coercion). Or, it can think beyond hegemony and stay on the right path, by knocking on Iran’s door for further dialogue.

Source: Kaveh Afrasiabi, The Asian Times Online