Rooyesh

Suppose that the Bush administration abandons its campaign for economic sanctions, tones down talk of war and opens direct negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program. Suppose also that it drops its insistence on the suspension of uranium enrichment as a precondition for dialogue.

Would Iran accept the terms for denuclearization accepted by North Korea in the direct negotiations that led to the Feb. 13 agreement with Pyongyang and that are now being implemented in fits and starts: a no-attack pledge, normalized economic and diplomatic relations, economic aid, and removal from the U.S. list of terrorist states? Based on a week of high-level discussions in Tehran recently and on previous visits during earlier stages of the nuclear program, my assessment is that Iran would demand much tougher terms, including a freeze of Israel’s Dimona reactor and a ban on the U.S. use of nuclear weapons in the Persian Gulf. Both supporters and opponents of Iran’s clerical regime favor developing a civilian nuclear program, not only for electricity generation but also because it can be upgraded to produce nuclear weapons. But Tehran is not in a hurry to invoke its nuclear option, I was told, and is prepared for a verifiable ceiling on its uranium program that would bar weapons-grade enrichment in return for U.S. security concessions. Such concessions, several officials suggested, would have to go beyond pledges not to attack or to seek “regime change” through covert operations.

Alireza Akbari, an adviser to Iran’s National Security Council and a former deputy defense minister, was one of those who proposed a freeze of Israel’s Dimona reactor and some form of bilateral or multilateral U.S. commitment not to use or deploy nuclear weapons in the Persian Gulf. “How do we know that your four aircraft carriers stationed off our coasts are not equipped with tactical nuclear weapons?” he asked. Significantly, no one I met demanded the elimination of the approximately 200 nuclear weapons that Israel is believed to have already produced at Dimona or called for a U.S. pledge not to use or deploy nuclear weapons that would extend beyond the Gulf and would nullify the U.S. security commitment to Israel. There are three major reasons why preventing an Iranian nuclear weapons capability would be much more difficult than getting North Korea to dismantle its nuclear arsenal. First, Iran has petroleum riches. Unlike Pyongyang, it doesn’t need a deal for economic reasons. Second, the Iran-Iraq war, in which an estimated 200,000 Iranians were killed, is still a searing memory in Tehran. “If we had possessed nuclear weapons then, Saddam would not have dared to attack us,” says Amir Mohabian, editor of the influential conservative daily Reselaat. Third, Iran has a strong sense of historically based national identity and wants nuclear weapons primarily to assert major-power status.

Kim Jong Il presides over an insecure regime struggling for short-term survival. He has developed nuclear weapons to deter U.S. military and financial pressures that threaten his immediate power and perquisites. The two Koreas would have to confederate and later reunify before Korea could achieve major-power status. The drive for recognition as a major power has motivated Iran’s nuclear ambitions from the start. The late Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi initiated the weapons program 34 years ago, with the help of U.S. and European companies, as part of an effort to establish himself as a nationalist modernizer who would restore the regional preeminence Tehran had intermittently enjoyed in earlier centuries. To be sure, concern about what was then a nascent Israeli nuclear weapons program and the desire for civilian nuclear energy to supplement petroleum made the acquisition of nuclear technology attractive. But the shah wanted visible progress in nuclear development primarily to enhance his domestic political stature, I was told by Jafar Nadim, then undersecretary of foreign affairs, during a 1978 visit to Tehran. It would be a symbol of Persian technological superiority over Arabs, Nadim said, and would “help us to get the respect we feel we deserve from you people. You should understand, we Persians have a very ancient, very advanced culture, yet we have been a victim of so many insults and invasions, and now we have to stand up.”

After winning the presidency in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recognized that nuclear weapons could be used as an emotive symbol of sovereignty. He has systematically exploited nationalist resentment of U.S. pressure on the nuclear issue to strengthen his position in dealing with the United States and to counter domestic political rivals. The drive for sanctions will only strengthen Ahmadinejad. In place of economic and military pressure, the United States should seek to defuse the Iranian nuclear danger through bilateral and multilateral dialogue that addresses Iranian and U.S. security concerns from Dimona to the Strait of Hormuz and, eventually, includes all of Iran’s key regional neighbors, including Israel.

Selig S. Harrison has written extensively about Iran and North Korea for The Post. He directs the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy and is the author of “Korean Endgame.”

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) on Monday signed on to a bill barring funding for military action against Iran without approval from Congress, offering a counterweight to an Iran measure she took heat from fellow Democrats for backing last week.

Clinton co-sponsored a measure from Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) prohibiting spending on military operations in Iran that have not received congressional authorization. Anti-war activists have hailed the Webb plan for restraining President Bush’s ability to act unilaterally against Iran, which the administration has linked to attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.

“I continue to support and advocate for a policy of entering into talks with Iran, because robust diplomacy is a prerequisite to achieving our aims,” Clinton said in a statement. “I also support strong economic sanctions against Iran, including designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization, to improve our leverage with the Iranian regime.”

Endorsing the Webb bill allows Clinton to balance her vote for an anti-Iran amendment added by Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to the defense authorization bill last week. Among other provisions, that measure encouraged Bush to classify the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group, alarming many Democratic base voters who viewed it as a veiled push for war against Iran.

Clinton was the only Democratic presidential candidate to endorse Kyl and Lieberman’s language, earning her a rebuke from some rivals during last week’s debate in New Hampshire.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) missed the vote, but his aides said afterward that he would have opposed the amendment. Obama has not signed on to Webb’s bill or publicly commented on it in recent months.

Webb’s measure could be offered as an amendment to this week’s defense appropriations bill or called up as a free-standing measure. A Senate aide familiar with the bill said discussions are continuing on its next move but that interest in finding a vehicle for it has grown since last week’s U.S. visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Source: the Hill

A plan by the Bush administration to launch surgical strikes on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps has won the support of Gordon Brown, according to a US report, although a presidential “execute order” required for such an operation has yet to be issued.

The report in The New Yorker magazine by the journalist Seymour Hersh states that the White House has concluded that many of its problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran. But rather than conduct an unpopular all-out assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the US is planning limited air strikes, arguing that they are needed to defend soldiers in Iraq.

The article stated that, “The bombing plan has had its most positive reception from … Gordon Brown”, but this was denied yesterday by some with close ties to the US military.

“It is quite the opposite,” said Phillip Giraldi a former CIA counterterrorism officer. “In fact Robert Gates [the US Defence Secretary] was rebuffed during his recent visit to London when the idea was floated.

“Because British mine-sweepers based in the Gulf of Hormuz will be essential to any US action against Iran, US war planners need to have Britain on board,” he said. “So far that is not forthcoming.”

The US has changed its emphasis to counter-terrorism, supported by Pentagon planners wary of earlier plans for an all-out attack on Iran, Hersh writes. The strategy calls for the use of sea-launched cruise missiles and more precisely targeted ground attacks and bombing strikes, “including plans to destroy the most important Revolutionary Guard training camps, supply depots and command-and-control facilities”.

Hersh quotes an unnamed senior European as saying that there were four possible responses to Iran-ian activity in Iraq: to do nothing (this would be sending “the wrong signal”); to publicise Iranian actions (“There is one great difficulty with this option – the widespread lack of faith in American intelligence assessments”); to attack the Iranians inside Iraq (“We’ve been taking action since last December, and it does have an effect.”); or, finally, to attack inside Iran.

“The British perception is that the Iranians are not making the progress they want to see in their nuclear-enrichment processing,” said the European official.

“All the intelligence community agree that Iran is providing critical assistance, training, and technology to a surprising number of terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, through Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine, too.”

Earlier this summer, according to Mr Giraldi, the Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice-President Dick Cheney, tasked Strategic Command to draw up a response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the US. “The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons,” said Mr Giraldi.

That may now have changed, in part because of opposition within the military. “A number of senior air force officers involved were appalled at the implications of what they were doing … that Iran was being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack,” said Mr Giraldi. None were prepared to object and damage their career, he added.

Hersh maintains that the Bush administration’s emphasis on “surgical” strikes reflects a failure to persuade the US public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat.

The White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the US intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. There is also a growing recognition in Washington that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Source: The Independent

They own car factories and construction firms, operate newspaper groups and oil fields and increasingly, serve in parliament or become provincial governors. To supporters, the Revolutionary Guards are the cream of Iran’s talent. To the United States, they are simply terrorists.

Either way, the group formed to safeguard Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution has pushed well beyond its military roots: Current and former members now hold a growing role across the country’s government and economy, sometimes openly and other times in shadow. The election of a hard-line president two years ago sharply accelerated that influence, recent interviews here suggest.

Supporters of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his protege, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have sought to consolidate power by putting allies in key positions, potentially shaping Iran for years to come. “We don’t support it,” Mohsen Mirdamadi, who leads Iran’s largest pro-reform party, said of the guards’ spreading influence. “It can be reversed with a change of government — but slowly.” Publicly, the guards now own or control numerous companies that receive lucrative, often no-bid government contracts in the oil and gas industry, farming, and road and dam construction. Their winning of deals is often announced outright in Tehran newspapers. Other times, the group’s business deals are shrouded in mystery and merely whispered about. In one example, the guards are thought to run a network of unauthorized docks and trading firms importing consumer goods, tariff-free, into Iran, said Mehdi Khalaji, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. That would be a lucrative business in Iran, where Western goods are harder to obtain.

In addition, an Iranian company that manufactures Japanese cars inside Iran is also thought to be owned by the guards, said Khalaji. The guards have gained a particularly big role in the country’s oil and gas industry in recent years, as the national oil company has signed several contracts with a guards-operated construction company. Some have been announced publicly, including a $2 billion deal in 2006 to develop part of the important Pars gas field. Often, firms owned by Revolutionary Guards will get noncompetitive bids for major oil or construction projects and then outsource the project to others, operating essentially as a “private mafia,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian-American who works at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said the guards also have gained lucrative telecommunications contracts, and have known links with university labs, weapons makers and firms linked to Iran’s nuclear program. All are industries with clear dual-use — civilian and military — potential, giving the guards firm links to many vital military-related industries. The business deals also make the guards less reliant on Iran’s more democratic and transparent institutions, such as parliament, for their funding. The no-bid government contracts often lack any independent oversight such as from parliament’s budget process, meaning money from them can be diverted into overseas operations with little notice, other analysts said. At least 80 former guards also are in parliament out of a total of 290 seats. Others serve as mayors and provincial governors. Former commanders also make up about two-thirds of the current Cabinet, according to some estimates, and Ahmadinejad himself is a former guards commander who went on to Tehran’s mayor before being elected president. That influence is a far cry from the group’s original roots: It was founded in 1979 in the revolution’s wake to provide a counterbalance to the U.S.-trained military at a time when Iran’s new Islamic leaders feared the army might remain loyal to the deposed shah. The Revolutionary Guards won widespread admiration and even public reverence in the 1980s when they defended Iran from Saddam Hussein’s regime during the long, devastating Iran-Iraq war.

Now numbering about 125,000 members, they report directly to the supreme leader and officially handle internal security. The small Quds Force wing is thought to operate overseas, having helped to create the militant Hezbollah group in 1982 in Lebanon and to arm Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan wars. The Bush administration accuses the Quds Force of sending fighters and deadly roadside bombs, mortars and rockets to kill American troops in Iraq in recent years — allegations that Iran denies. The United States pressures U.S. and European banks to do no business with Iranian banks, such as Bank Sedarat that the Bush administration believes help finance guards’ business operations. But the United States is also considering naming the entire group as a foreign terrorist organization, presumably allowing wider financial crackdowns. Hard-liners within Iran generally both downplay and defend the guards’ role. Hossein Shariatmadari, a former guard member himself who is close to Khamenei, now runs the large Kayhan group of newspapers and magazines in Tehran. He said the prominence of former guards in business and politics is understandable because they often have the engineering training and management skills to run many industries. The group’s primary focus remains safeguarding the country from outside threats, especially from the West, he said. Even some outsiders wonder how much a terrorist designation would really do.

Takeyh called the guards’ business enterprises “murky and ambiguous” and said it would thus be difficult to target them precisely. In addition, not all former guards are hard-liners. Many members of the country’s reform movement and democratic opposition are also former guards, Takeyh noted, “making a terrorist label even more problematic.”

Source: The Associated Press