Replies to post #6833 on Foreign Correspondence

[StephanieVanbryce]

Big powers creep toward elusive deal on Iran at UN

Mon Mar 27, 2006 8:07 PM ET



By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Security Council powers held out hope on Monday for agreement this week on a statement to rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions, but a deal still appeared elusive before a forthcoming ministerial meeting.

"It is now three weeks since the International Atomic Energy Agency board took this matter up and we are going to try and resolve it in the next day or so," U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said, referring to the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog.

He spoke after another meeting with the other four permanent council members -- Britain, France, Russia and China -- and after a briefing to the full 15-member council.

Russia, backed by China, opposes heavy Security Council involvement on Iran, fearing it would lead to punitive measures. Moscow last week proposed gutting a large part of the draft that asks Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment efforts, which could produce weapons-grade fuel.

Tehran says its nuclear research is for peaceful purposes, while the West believes it is a cover for bomb making.

On Thursday, the foreign ministers of the five council powers and Germany are due to meet in Berlin to hammer out strategy and try to break any remaining impasse on the statement.

"We are dealing with nervousness from some of the parties on what will happen next and uncertainties. Russia has particular concerns, including very high equities in Iran," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said in London.

Britain's U.N. ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry, told reporters: "We need to agree on the text and if possible to have it ready for adoption. If we can finish it before Thursday, we will."

But he cautioned that the five were only "edging forward."

"We're looking now at a mix of different comments on basic texts," Jones Parry said. "We've made a bit of progress but we have quite a lot more progress to make."

RIVAL DRAFTS

Russia, diplomats said, had now submitted a draft statement to counter one from Britain and France and all proposals are to be sent to governments of the five overnight.

"There are all kinds of drafts and all kinds of amendments," Bolton said, adding that he, too, "proposed some compromises that will be reported back to the capitals and we are going to continue to see if we can't reach agreement."

The last version from the Europeans arrived on Saturday morning, said China's U.N. Ambassador, Wang Guangya.

In Berlin, IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei urged Iran to halt all uranium enrichment work and help revive collapsed nuclear talks between Tehran and the European Union.

"We are not in a position today to say that (Iran's nuclear) program is exclusively for peaceful purposes," ElBaradei said.

More than two years of talks between Iran and Germany, France and Britain reached an impasse earlier this year after Iran resumed uranium enrichment research.

At a conference in Berlin, security experts and officials discussed Iran, including the possibility of U.S. military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities.

Tehran's ambassador to the IAEA said airstrikes would not destroy Iran's uranium enrichment activities.

"We can enrich uranium anywhere in Iran, with a vast country," Aliasghar Soltaniyeh said, citing Iran's more than 600,000 square mile area.

A report made public on Monday by David Albright and Corey Hinderstein of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security estimates that Iran would need at least three more years, and perhaps much longer, to make nuclear arms, depending on how many problems it runs into on the way.

The report accused anonymous U.S. officials of distorting a briefing given the major powers this month by the IAEA in claiming Iran had made significant gains in mastering the process of enriching uranium to the point it can be used to make bombs.

"Looking at a timeline of at least three years before Iran could have a nuclear weapons capability means that there is still time to pursue aggressive diplomatic options, and time for measures such as sanctions to have an effect, if they become necessary," the report concluded.

(Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau and Markus Krahin Berlin, and Madeline Chambers in London)

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-03-28T010735Z_01_L27116...

[Ace Hanlon]

Iran and Israel big Iraq War Winners:

The Final Say

by Eric Margolis


        

U.S. President George Bush again reassured Americans last week they were winning the war in Iraq.

Please, Mr. President, no more "mission accomplished," no more victories. Your debacle in Iraq recalls King Phyrrus' famous lament, "One more such victory and we are ruined."

The Bush administration invaded Iraq for two key reasons: 1) To seize Iraq's vast oil reserves and turn Iraq into a base to dominate the Mideast; 2) To destroy one of Israel's two main enemies (Iran being the other).

Three years later, the first goal remains elusive while the second was achieved. Large parts of Iraq – once the Arab world's most developed nation – are in ruins, anarchy, or approaching civil war.

Operation Swarmer

U.S. forces in Iraq struggle just to defend their bases and vulnerable supply lines. Their fruitless, Vietnam-style search-and-destroy missions, like this week's Operation Swarmer, are a sure sign of strategic failure and senior officers too stupid or arrogant to draw obvious lessons from recent guerilla wars.

More than 2,300 American soldiers have died; 16,300 wounded. Some 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died. The U.S. holds 15,000 to 18,000 Iraqi prisoners – more than did Saddam Hussein.

The stalemated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost Washington a staggering $9.8 billion (all figures US) monthly as the U.S. Treasury borrows billions from China and Japan just to keep the government running. That figure excludes hundreds of millions in secret CIA bribes to rent co-operation from tribal chiefs and politicians, or hire mercenaries called "contractors."

What was to have been a jolly little war to "liberate" Iraq's oil has cost over $500 billion so far. That's $50 billion more than the Vietnam War's total cost in 2006 dollars. Clearly, the U.S. armed forces are too expensive to send to a war lasting longer than a few months.

While a debacle for the U.S. and Iraq, the war has greatly benefited Iran and Israel. Iran's influence in Iraq grows daily. The recent remarkable public agreement by Washington to open talks over Iraq with Great Satan Iran shows even the Bush people see the writing on the wall in Babylon. Besides, occupying Iraq has left the U.S. too weak to invade Iran.

After getting Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, and funding the ensuing eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the U.S. now watches helplessly as Iran slowly ingests large portions of Iraq. The U.S. invasion of Iraq handed power to pro-Iranian Shia religious parties. Shia spiritual leader Ali al Sistani warned followers they would go straight to hell – and lose their wives – if they did not vote for Shia religious candidates. Some democracy.

Israel has been the second beneficiary of the Iraq war. The long-term strategic goal of Israel's rightists – shattering unstable Arab states to leave Israel dominant in the region – has been half attained by Iraq's fragmentation into three parts. Syria is destabilized and faces possible civil war. Any future challenge by Iraq to Israel's Mideast nuclear monopoly has vanished.

Meanwhile, Israel has been able to cut defence spending, intensify pressure on the Palestinians, and is quietly extending its influence into the semi-independent, oil-rich Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

$10B a month

Ironically, the third major beneficiary of Bush's war has been his nemesis, Osama bin Laden. The only way to drive U.S. influence out of the Muslim world, bin Laden has long maintained, is to tie it down in a series of small wars that bleed it financially. The nearly $10-billion-a-month wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are doing just that. Iraq, as even Bush admits, has become an incubator, magnet, and call to arms for anti-American jihadists across the Muslim world.

Worse, the United States has lost its honour in this brutal little neo-colonial war. The neoconservatives' ambition to plunder Iraq's oil has become a mirage, and the Bush-Cheney diumverate presidency is quickly sinking into the quick-sands of Iraq.

March 28, 2006

Eric Margolis [send him mail], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World. See his website.

[Amaunet]

Tentative agreement with Iran supposedly already reached


Yet, they have no say in what happens on its territory and the biggest slap came when the US, the occupying country, decided to strike a deal with Iran to divide the loots and the areas of power, knowing that Iran did not fire one bullet and not one American soldier came out of its territory.
#msg-10383592

Stepping out of the press conference in Baghdad, one of the senators told Asia Times Online that talks with Iran "have been ongoing for some time and I feel that they've reached some tentative agreement". This confirms an earlier comment by a European diplomat in Tehran who told Asia Times Online that the "talks have been going on for some time through the Iranian and US embassies in Kabul".




Talking to the enemy
By Iason Athanasiadis


Mar 29, 2006

BAGHDAD - The press conference room inside Baghdad's Green Zone is an improvised tangle of television wires snaking along the floor of the trailer. At the far end of the room, nine US senators led by Vietnam War veteran and presidential hopeful John McCain stand in front of the made-for-TV background featuring American and Iraqi flags abutting a State Department logo.

"We have conveyed to them [Iraqi politicians] a sense of urgency," McCain announces. McCain is alluding to the underlying concerns bedeviling negotiations between the American occupying authority and Iraq's politicians to form a government, that a stable national unity government must be put in place if the country is not to fall further apart.

The US's position has been complicated by the killing of at least 40 worshipers in a Shi'ite community hall near a mosque in Sadr City, a large Shi'ite ghetto in Baghdad and support base for powerful Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army. The US has repeatedly urged the government to disband militias linked to political parties. The victims are believed to have been killed in an operation involving combined US and Iraqi forces.

The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the Shi'ite bloc with the largest number of seats in parliament, promptly called for the US occupation to turn over control of all security operations to the Iraqi government. Some UIA politicians also indicated that they now wanted to pull out of the protracted talks to form a government that have dragged on since elections in January.

Increasingly, it is dawning on Washington that the US must leave Iraq sooner rather than later. "I think they want us out, but not now," McCain says. "And we want out."

And to do this, the US has had to turn to Iran, with which it has had no diplomatic relations since 1979, which it accuses of developing a nuclear weapons program and which it consistently accuses of meddling in Iraqi affairs.

Stepping out of the press conference in Baghdad, one of the senators told Asia Times Online that talks with Iran "have been ongoing for some time and I feel that they've reached some tentative agreement". This confirms an earlier comment by a European diplomat in Tehran who told Asia Times Online that the "talks have been going on for some time through the Iranian and US embassies in Kabul".

The US Embassy in Baghdad, however, denies that the talks have begun.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi was quoted on Monday by the official IRNA news agency as saying that Iran would talk with the US to pave the way for the withdrawal of US forces from the country.

"Although Tehran does not trust Washington, it is seriously concerned about the repercussions of wrong US policies in Iraq, which is the main reason it has accepted Iraqi officials' request that it hold negotiations with the US," Asefi said.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has confirmed that the US will talk to Iran about Washington's accusations of Iranian destabilization of Iraq.

The political deadlock and rising violence that prompted the Bush administration to open talks with Tehran have also deepened the rift between Shi'ite prime minister-elect Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

Talabani, a Kurd, was angered by a trip by Jaafari to Ankara to meet arch-rival Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey's diplomats have increasingly sought to build an alliance with Iraq's Shi'ite community as they have seen traditional allies such as the Turkmens failing to project their power at the ballot box.

"I hope the US and Iran will start their meetings and talks as soon as possible and the knot in relations between the two countries would be untied through the negotiations," Jaafari was reported by IRNA as saying.

But on Sunday, Talabani demanded that no negotiations take place over his head, according to American officials in Baghdad. His objection centered on the absence of an Iraqi government. Talabani's Kurdish constituency has increasingly accused Tehran of hiding behind attempts to destabilize the north, such as the recent riots in a small town called Halabjah that was the target of a gas-attack by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

These allegations mirror similar charges made by Iranian officials in the aftermath of the rumbling ethnic violence that has plagued Iran's western Kurdistan and Khuzestan regions, along the long border with Iraq.

Despite being Iranian citizens, the Arab and Kurdish inhabitants of these provinces have been accused by Tehran of receiving aid from the British Army occupying southern Iraq. Halabjah could be an example of Iran demonstrating that it can hit back, not only in Shi'ite southern Iraq, but also in the till now peaceful north. On Monday, more than 40 people were killed by a bomb explosion set of by a suicide attacker inside a joint US-Iraqi military base in the northern city of Mosul.

An emerging alliance between Iraq's Kurdish political elite and Sunni politicians has not gone unnoticed in Tehran, which - other than supporting Iraq's majority Shi'ite community - has also cultivated both sides of the Kurdish leadership.

The Kurdish "defection" and Iran's search for new strategic partners may have been part of the reason why Tehran is now talking with US Ambassador to Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad. These follow negotiations conducted between Tehran and Washington in the run-up and aftermath of the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that were kept secret at the time.

"Informally they are cooperating with each other," an Iranian academic told Asia Times Online. "It's better for Iran to see a balanced government than a Shi'ite state which could cause instability in the region. Even Iran is happy to see some important Sunnis taking key posts. It's not good that we put all our eggs into one basket."

While Tehran publicly complains about the US presence in Iraq, the Bush administration-led war against Saddam toppled Iran's bitterest adversary, against which it fought a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s that claimed the lives of an estimated million soldiers on both sides.

Historically, Iran has never managed to expand its influence in the region without the support of foreign powers. The Shah's closest ally was the US. Before that, the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas allowed the British Empire into his sphere of influence so they could expel the Portuguese from the strategic Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. As current allies Russia and China become decreasingly supportive of Tehran, it appears to be turning towards Washington.

Speaking to the Asia Times Online last year, a former deputy foreign minister said that it is "neither in Iran's interest to have a stable Iraq, nor do we want a fragmented Iraq. Ambiguity is the cornerstone of the policy."

Iason Athanasiadis is an Iran-based correspondent.


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC29Ak01.html