Iran

[DougMacG]

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/08/29/is-obama-rethinking-his-trust-the-mullahs-strategy/

[ccp]

What I really don't understand is why does Obama think he is the only who can and does lie?

Bottom line.  He knows this.  He just doesn't care.  He plays "American" just enough to prevent a liberal slaughter at the next election.

[Crafty_Dog]

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Iran Prepares for a Leadership Transition
Analysis
September 15, 2014 | 0436 Print Text Size
Summary

Though Iran has been broadcasting pictures and videos of top state officials and noted foreign dignitaries visiting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the hospital, the health of the man who has held the most powerful post in the Islamic Republic remains unclear. The unusual public relations management of what has been described as a prostrate surgery suggests Tehran may be preparing the nation and the world for a transition to a third supreme leader. Iranian efforts to project an atmosphere of normalcy conceal concerns among players in the Iranian political system that a power vacuum will emerge just as the Islamic republic has reached a geopolitical crossroads.

Analysis

Any transition comes at the most crucial time in the 35-year history of the Islamic Republic due to unprecedented domestic political shifts underway and, more importantly, due to international events.

Pragmatic conservative President Hassan Rouhani's election in June 2013 elections led to a social, political and economic reform program facing considerable resistance from within the hard-right factions within the clerical and security establishments. The biggest issue between the presidential camp and its opponents is the ongoing process of negotiations with the United States over the Iranian nuclear program.

Nuclear Talks and Syria

After an unprecedented breakthrough in November 2013 that saw an interim agreement, the negotiation process has hit a major snag, with a final agreement not reached by a July 20, 2014, deadline, though the deadline for negotiations was extended to Nov. 24, 2014. Some form of partial agreement had been expected, with talks kicking into high gear ahead of the opening session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York on Sept. 18.

A mood of pessimism in Tehran has since been reported, however, with senior Foreign Ministry officials prepping the media for the eventuality that the talks might fail. The risk of failure comes from the fact that Rouhani can only go so far in accepting caps on Iran's ability to pursue a civilian nuclear program before his hawkish opponents will gain the upper hand in Iran's domestic political struggle. Stratfor sources say Rouhani did not want to attend this year's General Assembly, but Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif reportedly convinced the president that his visit might help the negotiating process.

As if the negotiation itself was not enough of a problem for Rouhani, the U.S. move to support rebel forces in Syria that would fight both the Islamic State and Iran's ally, the Assad regime, is a major problem for Tehran. U.S. and Iranian interests overlapped with regard to the IS threat in Iraq. But in Syria, the United States must rely on anti-Iranian actors to fight IS and the Obama administration seeks to topple the Assad regime. Accordingly, less than a year after the two sides embarked upon a rapprochement, tensions seem to be returning.

A New Supreme Leader

On top of this stressor, uncertainties surrounding Khamenei's health have shifted Iran's priorities to the search for a new supreme leader. The unusual manner in which Tehran continues to telegraph Khamenei's hospitalization to show that all is well -- while at the same time psychologically preparing the country and the outside world for the inevitable change -- coupled with the (albeit unverified) 2010 release by WikiLeaks of a U.S. diplomatic cable reporting that the supreme leader was suffering from terminal cancer suggests the political establishment in Tehran is preparing for a succession. Khamenei himself would want to prepare a succession before he can no longer carry out his official responsibilities.

Before Khamenei was elected supreme leader in 1989, the idea of a collective clerical body was in vogue among many clerics. The country's second-most influential cleric, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, on several occasions has proposed a "jurisprudential council" consisting of several top clerics as an alternative to the supreme leader's post. His proposal has not gained much traction, but with succession imminent, it might seem more attractive as a compromise should the competing factions prove unable to reach a consensus.

Constitutionally, an interim leadership council takes over should the incumbent supreme leader no longer be able to carry out his duties until the Assembly of Experts elects a successor. Considering the factionalized nature of the Iranian political elite, it is only normal to assume that the process to replace Khamenei will be marred by a major struggle between the various camps that make up the conservative establishment. After all, this is an extremely rare opportunity for those seeking change and for those seeking continuity to shape the future of the republic.

For the hardliners, already deeply unnerved by what they see as an extremely troubling moderate path adopted by Rouhani, it is imperative that the next supreme leader not be sympathetic to the president. From their point of view, Khamenei has given the government far too much leeway. For his part, Rouhani knows that if his opponents get their way in the transition, his troubles promoting his domestic and foreign policy agenda could increase exponentially.

Possible Successors

The country's elite ideological military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, will no doubt play a key role in who gets to be supreme leader. Likewise, the religious establishment in Qom will definitely have a say in the matter. The revolutionary-era clerics who have long dominated the political establishment are a dying breed, and the Assembly of Experts would not want to appoint someone of advanced age, since this would quickly lead to another succession.

Stratfor has learned that potential replacements for Khamenei include former judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, a cleric close to Khamenei and known for his relative moderate stances. They also include Hassan Khomeini, the oldest grandson of the founder of the republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He is close to the president's pragmatic conservative camp and the reformists, but pedigree may not compensate for his relatively left-wing leanings and his relatively young age of 42. Finally, they include current judiciary chief Mohammed-Sadegh Larijani, the younger brother of Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani who some believe is the preferred candidate of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The key problem that has surrounded the post of the supreme leader since the death of the founder of the republic is the very small pool of potential candidates to choose a replacement from: Most clerics either lack political skills, while those that do have political savvy lack requisite religious credentials. Khamenei was a lesser cleric to the status of ayatollah shortly before assuming the role of supreme leader, though he has demonstrated great political acumen since then. Khomeini was unique in that he had solid credentials as a noted religious scholar, but also had solid political credentials given his longtime leadership of the movement that culminated in the overthrow of shah in 1979. Since Khomeini fell out with his designated successor, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, in 1987, no one has had both qualities. Whoever takes over from Khamenei will be no exception to this, even though he will need to be able to manage factional rivalries at one of the most critical junctures in the evolution of the Islamic Republic.

Read more: Iran Prepares for a Leadership Transition | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook

[Crafty_Dog]

http://pamelageller.com/2014/10/irans-supreme-leader-khamenei-calls-for-muslim-unity-for-israels-annihilation.html/

[Crafty_Dog]

Did Iran's Crackdown on Dissidents Include Nuclear Scientists?
by Paul Alster
Special to IPT News
October 2, 2014
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4598/did-iran-crackdown-on-dissidents-include-nuclear
 
 A four-month extension granted by the P5+1 to the Islamic Republic of Iran to comply with the nuclear arms deal brokered in late-2013 and negotiate a final deal ends Nov. 24. Iran has been required to fully account for its nuclear development activities and offer all assistance to international inspectors, in return for the lifting of crippling international sanctions.

Iran welcomed the easing of financial and other sanctions, but many in the international community believe that Iran has failed to keep its end of the bargain.
"No deal is better than a bad deal," President Obama is on record as saying, but with the not-insignificant distraction of the ISIS terror sweep into Syria and Iraq, there are fears that the notoriously smooth-tongued Iranian negotiators will pull another fast one and wriggle out of their commitments.

"In order to understand what could go wrong, all one has to do is to carefully reflect upon the past decade and note everything that actually has gone wrong: how Iran was able to progress from having several hundred centrifuges to 19,000 of these machines, and to accumulate a stockpile of LEU [Low Enriched Uranium] in an amount that if enriched to higher levels could produce fissile material for 6 or 7 nuclear devices," Emily B. Landau, senior research fellow and head of the Arms Control and Regional Security Program at the Tel-Aviv-based Institute of National Strategic Studies (INSS) points out in a recently published study, 'Principles and Guidelines for a Comprehensive Nuclear Deal with Iran.'

Against this background this week came renewed allegations from Iranian dissidents that the high-profile slaying of a senior Iranian nuclear scientist in January 2007 may have been carried out by the regime itself, and not by Israel's Mossad intelligence service, as has been widely assumed.

The allegation has been made by Mahboobeh Hosseinpour, the sister of the late Ardeshir Hosseinpour, who died in suspicious circumstances after apparently expressing deep concern at the direction of the Iranian nuclear program.

Hosseinpour was contacted in 2004 by government agents with "a direct message" from Iran's supreme leader, a statement from the opposition group The New Iran said, summarizing the sister's story.

The agents "sought to enlist Dr. Hosseinpour to work on increasing the IRI's capabilities in uranium enrichment for the purpose of building atomic weapons with a secondary goal of teaching and supervising Russian and North Korean scientists in order to accelerate this project. In order to incentivize Dr. Hosseinpour, he was offered the rank of a two-star general in the IRI's Revolutionary Guard apparatus along with ownership of three factories related to manufacturing of parts for the nuclear projects. This offer received a harsh and negative reaction from Dr. Hosseinpour who promptly ridiculed and rejected it."

Mahboobeh Hosseinpour believes her brother's "persistent resistance against the IRI regime and its nuclear intentions that led Ali Khamenei to order his assassination on January 15, 2007."

It's a powerful claim, but one without evidence. On its own, it would be hard to accept that – like a classic James Bond villain – Iran killed one of its leading nuclear scientists. But similar allegations in recent years appear to reflect the Iran's zero tolerance view of any internal dissent.

In 2012, Britain's Daily Mail reported claims by London-based dissident Potkin Azarmeh that Iranian intelligence agents, and not a man paraded by the regime as an Israeli spy and apparently executed 50-year-old Masoud Ali Mohammadi, another senior Iranian scientist allegedly working on the nuclear development project.

"Some Iranian dissidents believe that [Iran] has used the cover of its war with Israel to crack down on internal opponents, with some saying that Mr Mohammadi was killed because he was a supporter of reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi," the Daily Mail reported. "Ali-Mohammadi died in January 2010 when a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle outside his home in Tehran went off."

This week's allegations are clearly designed by Iranian dissidents to plant questions in the mind of the public and of international politicians prepared to accept the benign smile of President Hassan Rouhani as a genuinely moderate new face in Iran. The potential double-bluff of killing its own sharpest nuclear brains, they intimate, is not far removed from the ruse being performed under the noses of the international community who have failed to understand the extent to which Iran's nuclear program continues to develop, even with IAEA inspectors in the country at the behest of the P5+1.

Any potential extension to negotiations, argue regional experts such as Ephraim Asculai, who worked 40 years with Israel's Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), could be a fatal mistake. "Iran is... interested in buying time," Asculai believes, "because the window of opportunity for breaking out – making an explosive nuclear device – narrows with each passing day."

International negotiators seem to have given up on dismantling Iran's nuclear program, Landau warns. "Rather, at this point they seek only to slow it down, with the hope that they will be able to prevent in time an Iranian rush to concretize its military nuclear capability."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear at the United Nations General Assembly earlier this week that Iran remains the biggest threat to world peace. The international community should not be distracted by the ISIS issue, Netanyahu warned. Iran remains the major supporter of Syrian President Assad's disgraced regime, bankrolls Hizballah in south Lebanon and now inside Syria, and continues to do all it can to support the terror regime of Hamas in Gaza.

A glance at Iran's brutal repression of internal dissent and its endemic corruption appears to add weight to the view that Tehran will indeed go to any lengths to silence questioning voices and should not be trusted.

Ranked a dismal 144th of 177 nations in the 2013 Transparency International corruption index, Iran has long found ways of getting around international sanctions, flagrantly violating human rights, and ruling through fear.

"The new administration has not made any significant improvement in the promotion and protection of freedom of expression and opinion, despite pledges made by the president during his campaign and after his swearing in," U.N Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon observed as recently as March.

Leaders in the opposition Green Movement, which attempted to bring about reforms in Iran and still argues that they were robbed of election victory in 2009 due to widespread government orchestrated fraud, have long since been rounded up. Former Prime Minister Mir Houssein Musavi has been confined to house arrest. Critics of the Iranian regime suggest that many of those arrested and summarily tried for offences such as drug dealing are in fact Green Movement supporters and supporters of other opposition groups. Some have been executed.

Amnesty International's 2013 report on Iran pointedly included the following statements:

1) The [Iranian] authorities maintained severe restrictions on freedoms of expression, association and assembly. Dissidents and human rights defenders... were arbitrarily arrested, detained incommunicado, imprisoned after unfair trials and banned from travelling abroad. Torture and other ill-treatment were common and committed with impunity ... They took steps to create a controlled, national internet, routinely monitored telephone calls, blocked websites, jammed foreign broadcasts and took harsh action against those who spoke out.

2) Government critics and opponents were arbitrarily arrested and detained by security forces. Tens were sentenced to prison terms after unfair trials. Dozens of peaceful government critics detained in connection with mass protests in 2009-2011 remained in prison or under house arrest throughout the year. Many were prisoners of conscience.

3) Political and other suspects continued to face grossly unfair trials before Revolutionary and Criminal Courts. They often faced vaguely worded charges that did not amount to recognizably criminal offences and were convicted, sometimes in the absence of defence lawyers, on the basis of "confessions" or other information allegedly obtained under torture. Courts accepted such "confessions" as evidence without investigating how they were obtained.

4) Hundreds of people were sentenced to death. Official sources acknowledged 314 executions. Credible unofficial sources suggested that at least 230 other executions were also carried out, many of them in secret, totaling 544. The true figure may have been far higher, exceeding 600. There were at least 63 public executions.

The Mujahedeen el-Khalq (MEK) is one of a number of Iranian opposition movements that have attempted to challenge the rule of the Ayatollah's since 1981. These movements have been under sustained assault from the regime and have been forced out of the country, even though Iran publicly scoffs at them and insists they are of no consequence. The MEK was granted sanctuary by the U.S. at Camp Ashraf in neighboring Iraq in 2004, even though it was at that time still officially a designated terrorist organization. It was de-listed in 2012, despite furious protests from the Iranian government.

Why, then, did the U.S., EU, and UK designate a pro-democracy Iranian group?

"The MEK was put on the terrorist list solely because the mullahs insisted on such action if there was to be any dialogue between Washington and Tehran," Lord Alex Carlile, former independent reviewer of British anti-terrorism laws, explained in The Guardian in October 12, 2012. "This was all part of a misguided effort to reach out to 'moderates' in the regime, an effort that accomplished nothing but gave Iran the time it needed to commence and advance its nuclear development."

Carlile accurately predicted what would happen next at Camp Ashraf. By September 2013 the Shi'ite government of former Iraqi Prime Minster Nouri Al-Malaki had grown increasingly close to the Iranian leadership. Al-Malaki constantly called for the Iranian dissidents at Camp Ashraf to be removed. In an apparent show of loyalty to Iran it is alleged that on September 1, Iraqi forces entered the camp and murdered not less than 52 members of the MEK, a massacre that drew furious responses from the international community, including the U.S.

"In reality," Carlile observed, "far too much attention has been paid to disinformation disseminated by Tehran and its lobbyists in an effort to make the western countries conclude that there is no viable opposition and no chance of change from within – leaving the west to choose between making concessions to Iran or going to war, both very unpleasant choices."

Given all of the above, just a taste of the huge number of dossiers on Iran's scheming, murderous regime that consistently seeks to mislead and misinform, surely the P5+1 will not allow the Islamic Republic another opportunity to buy time for its nuclear program and potentially further de-stabilize an already toxic situation in the region. Or will it?

Paul Alster is an Israel-based contributor to FoxNews.com and The Jerusalem Report and blogs at paulalster.com. He can be followed on Twitter: @paul_alster

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/10/16/when_the_ayatollah_said_no_to_nukes_iran_khomeini

[G M]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/10/16/when_the_ayatollah_said_no_to_nukes_iran_khomeini

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/iranian-nuclear-fatwa-cited-obama-may-not-exist

[Crafty_Dog]

Oy , , , 

[Crafty_Dog]

Click here to watch: How to prevent a nuclear Iran

On November 4, American voters will be facing a monumental and high stakes moment in which they will decide whether control of the US Senate will continue to be in Democratic Party hands or be turned over to the Republicans. American voters should be warned that the continuance of a Democratic-controlled Senate led by Harry Reid will guarantee that Iran will end up being the first Islamist jihadist state with a nuclear weapon. Only a Republican-controlled Senate and House of Representatives will be able to stop President Barack Obama from capitulating to the Iranians and signing a bad deal which will allow the country to become a nuclear threshold state. A bill proposed by fellow Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and Republican Mark Kirk, which threatens additional harsher sanctions than those originally imposed on Iran in 2011 if no final agreement to dismantle their nuclear enrichment program is reached by the November 24 deadline, failed to even come to a vote on the Senate floor this last winter. The resolution, which at the time had the votes to pass with 43 Republicans and 16 Democrats cosponsoring it, was blocked from coming to a vote by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at the request of the White House. While only two Republicans did not support the bill, many of the Senators from the Democratic Party were against it including many Jewish Senators. Only if the Republicans take control of the Senate, it is likely that Obama will find himself presented with a new sanctions bill whether or not he signs a final agreement with Iran.

Watch Here

The blocking of this legislation by the White House is flabbergasting when one remembers that Iran only came to the negotiating table in large measure because of the original crippling economic sanctions drafted by Senators Mark Kirk and Robert Menendez in 2011 which was reluctantly signed into law by Barack Obama. Those sanctions reduced Iran’s oil exports and cut it off from the global, dollar dominated financial system. Consequently, Iran’s currency lost three quarters of its value and inflation and unemployment rose greatly. As senior Treasury Department officials told Reuters in an interview, "Iran’s economy today is about 25% smaller than it would have been if we had not imposed the oil and financial sanctions." On October 19, the New York Times reported that Obama was planning on bypassing the Congress by not bringing a future final agreement to a Congressional’ vote which will include suspending the enforcement of the sanctions passed in 2011. Such a plan is worrisome because it implies that the agreement the US is pushing so hard for, is a bad one. Otherwise, why not bring it to the Congress which could then simply vote to rescind the sanctions or ratify the treaty after a full congressional hearing, disclosure and debate. The Los Angeles Times on October 20 reported that conservative Iranian lawmaker Javad Qoddoushi said that he was briefed by Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister and a nuclear negotiator, who stated that the Obama Administration has sweetened its offer again in the ongoing negotiations, saying that it might accept Iran operating 4000 centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, up from the previous 1300. This news came a week after we learned that the Obama administration has agreed to let the Iranians disconnect their remaining operating centrifuges, rather than dismantle or destroy them as Obama originally promised. These US concessions are the latest in a long line of concessions. In November 2013, the US and five other world powers signed the Geneva Interim Agreement in which they tacitly endorsed the Iranians "right" to enrich and gave them sanctions relief worth more than $7 billion just for willing to engage in talks. Then, after six months of negotiations in which the Iranians conceded nothing, the US extended the negotiations another six months despite the fact that Iran has still not implemented all the nuclear transparency measures it had agreed to carry out in the interim agreement. The only way now to pressure Iran to agree to dismantle their nuclear program is if the Iranians fear that the new elected Congress will be determined to override any possible Obama veto and shut down their economy again with much worse crippling sanctions. Voting for a Republican Senate majority this November will give a message to Iran that the American public does not support Obama’s agenda of appeasement and that the Republicans with the support of few righteous Democrats have the public mandate to take the fight to Obama and undermine any possible weak or bad final agreement. As the leading Republican critic of the negotiations, Senator Mark Kirk, said: "Congress will not permit the president to unilaterally unravel Iran sanctions that passed the Senate in a 99 to 0 vote."
Source: Ynet

[ccp]

Crafty,

I tried to look up more information concerning this bill.  Different takes come up with MUCH confusing reports of political jockeying involved.  Interesting to note that Senator Bob Menendez D NJ co-sponsored this since he is normally a big liberal.  One site implies that this is because he accepts  political donations  from "Jewish" donors.  Another site points out the AIPAC completely changed course in first backing the bill than being against it.  As for the 13 Jewish Senators it sounds around  four (?) were against the bill including Levin and Feinstein.   Others like Bennett and Schumer and Blumenthal were supporters.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d113:SN01881:@@@P

I am really not clear what the rush by Obama is to get some sort of "deal" with Iran is all about if the deal means caving in to most of Iran's demands.

The thought of a sponsor of Terror being able to make nuclear weapons.

[Crafty_Dog]

Midterms Killed Iran Deal
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on December 2, 2014

The first fruit of the Republican victory in the midterm elections is the failure of President Obama's efforts to give away everything to Iran in the nuclear negotiations. If Democrats had kept their Senate majority on Nov. 4, we would all be wincing as Obama triumphantly announced a "peace" deal with Iran that would have all but invited the terrorist regime to acquire nuclear weapons.

It is only because of the certainty that a Republican Congress would pass legislation condemning and possibly blocking the nonproliferation deal that his efforts at appeasement fell short. Neither the U.S. nor Britain, France nor Germany, not even the European Union (the negotiating partners) wanted to sign a deal that the U.S. Congress would condemn as a giveaway.

Behind this victory is the hand of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). While I have condemned him from this space in previous columns, it is time his singular accomplishments in fighting the Iranian nuclear project be recognized. Along with Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), he has achieved a broad bipartisan consensus that the Iranian nuclear program must be dismantled and destroyed.
 
With Menendez's backing, it might even be possible to override an Obama veto of sanctions legislation once the new Congress meets. Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) and, perhaps, the two California Democrats -- Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein -- will be under heavy constituent pressure to back a sanctions bill. Add in what remains of the conservative Democratic bloc in the Senate, like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), and you begin to approach the necessary 67 votes.

The key point as the new year dawns is that it is not enough to let the current situation freeze. The sanctions relief, granted in anticipation of a final deal one year ago, must be rolled back to punish Iran for failing to move ahead and for cheating on the sanctions that remain. Iranian oil sales have averaged 1.34 million barrels per day, about half of the pre-sanctions level. Without progress in the negotiations, it is imperative that Iran be denied the almost $40 billion it stands to reap from even its current level of oil output and sales.

Iran retains and operates all of its 10,000 nuclear centrifuges and refuses to dismantle any. The most it will offer is to operate them more slowly and to hold down enrichment to below-bomb levels. With a stockpile of 3 percent to 5 percent enriched uranium, to say nothing of 20 percent enrichment, a bomb is just a short time away whenever the ayatollah flips the switch.

Iran also refuses to stop construction of its heavy water reactor at Arak or even to convert it to a light water reactor -- steps necessary to stop the development of a plutonium nuclear weapon. Nor has Iran agreed to a long-term deal or to adequate inspections to assure that any arrangement is, in fact, enforced.

Iran would not be required to moderate its pursuit of ballistic missile capability nor to halt research and development on nuclear weaponry.

As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told his people last month: "The centrifuges are spinning and will never stop." His foreign minister echoed his confidence, saying: "I'm confident that any final deal will have a serious and not a token Iranian enrichment program coupled with removal of sanctions."

Until the Republicans won the midterms, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) could be counted upon to kill any Iran sanctions bill and to not allow it to come up for a potentially politically embarrassing vote. Were it to pass, it would put former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a tough spot. If she were to back a congressional sanctions bill, she would split with Obama and legitimize opposition to his diplomacy. But were she to back the president, defying many Democrats, she would ensure that whether  we could trust Iran would be a central issue in the elections. And we know how that would come out.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/world/middleeast/irans-president-pledges-to-face-down-forces-opposing-a-nuclear-deal.html?emc=edit_th_20141216&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193

[Crafty_Dog]

Looks like Iran bought off the Argentine president to cover up its bombing of a synagogue in Buenos Aries in 1994.  See today's post at
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2417.new#new

[Crafty_Dog]

 Obama’s Pivot to Iran

With President Barack Obama’s welcome and warmly received trip to India this week, commentators have dusted off the well-worn platitudes associated with the administration’s once-vaunted “pivot to Asia.” The week’s other events, however — from the president’s decision to cut his stay in Delhi short to attend King Abdullah’s funeral in Riyadh to the chaos in Yemen, from ongoing nuclear diplomacy with Iran to Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to ensure his relationship with Obama will be seen as the most toxic in the history of Israel and the United States — suggest this administration’s foreign-policy legacy may ultimately center on a different “strategic rebalancing.” This one will benefit, however, in ways once unimaginable in U.S. foreign-policy circles, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is quite possible that, by the time Obama leaves office, no other country on Earth will have gained quite so much as Iran. Not all of this will be the doing of the United States, of course, and in fact some of it may prove to be the undoing of our interests in the long run. But there is no doubting that some of the remarkable gains that seem to be on the near horizon for Tehran will have come as a result of a policy impulse that was far closer to the heart of the president than is the on-again, off-again Asia initiative (which was really much more the product of the ideas and efforts of a bunch of his first-term aides and cabinet members than it was of his own impulses or those of his innermost circle).

Consider the gains. First, there’s the issue of legacy. With negotiations continuing at a high simmer behind the scenes, the Obama foreign-policy team sees a nuclear deal with Iran as the one remaining brass ring that is there for them to claim. Elsewhere, there is the possibility of some progress on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, but promotional rhetoric surrounding it aside, it’s just not as big a game-changer as its proponents suggest. It’d certainly be a welcome development, but it’s incremental and, of course, doesn’t really improve our relations with Asia’s biggest long-term players, China and India. And beyond that, there’s not much else in the pipeline.

A deal with Iran, if it could be translated into action, would in theory produce a freeze on Iran’s nuclear program. That would certainly be a good thing. But it provides no guarantee that Tehran could not reverse course in the future, break its terms, or do as it has done for the past 30 years — namely, stir up mayhem in the region without the benefit of nuclear weapons. What it would provide — even in the midst of a congressional tug of war over Iran policy, with new sanctions coming from the Hill and presidential vetoes pinging and ponging up and down Pennsylvania Avenue — would be some White House-directed relief for Tehran. Presumably, a nuclear deal would further the thaw in the relations between the United States and Iran, while providing a great incentive for other countries to resume normal trading relations (to the extent they don’t have them already).

    Iran would gain stature. Iran would have a better seat in the councils of nations. Iran would gain economic benefits. And Iran’s enemies would be furious.

Iran would gain stature. Iran would have a better seat in the councils of nations. Iran would gain economic benefits. And Iran’s enemies would be furious.

If the president thinks a brief drop-by in Saudi Arabia is going to somehow offset the House of Saud’s fury at an Iran deal, he’s not paying attention. Obama can’t charm them into overlooking the chasm between their cultures that has developed over 1,000 years. It will be seen by Sunni allies in the Gulf as a betrayal. They’re pragmatic. Some are already preparing to deal with what they see as the inevitable rapprochement. And they do, in the near term, see Iran as a potential counterweight to their more immediately threatening enemies — extremist Sunnis. (After all, this is the land of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.) But happy they are not. Millennium-long antagonisms endure for a reason.

One reason they are so unhappy is not only that the United States is changing the terms of its relations with Iran and triggering a strengthening of that country economically and politically, but that Washington’s policies — inaction and action, both — have helped contribute to other ways Tehran has gained ground in recent years. Some of this is not Obama’s fault, but his predecessor’s: In case you missed it, blowing up Iraq was a bad thing. It unleashed forces like the Islamic State, but it also replaced a Baathist government in Baghdad with one that is openly dependent on Iranian forces for support and protection. What’s more, the United States is now providing the air power that is enabling Iranian forces to gain and hold ground for their client, effectively putting a big chunk of Iraq even deeper in Iran’s pocket. (It is an especially peculiar development of the past weeks that when America’s historic allies, the Israelis, launched an attack that killed an Iranian general in Syria, they were in fact eliminating a member of a military organization that is currently fighting alongside, and in coordination with, the United States next door in Iraq.)

Iran is the one country in the Middle East that seems to be racking up material gains as a result of the unrest that has beset the region. The Houthi coup in Yemen has brought an Iranian-backed Shiite group to power — at least, in a large part of that country. Baghdad is now more directly dependent on Tehran than ever before; Iran is providing a substantial number of the ground troops fighting the Islamic State and protecting Shiite Iraq from the terrorist fighters. Even in Syria, Iran’s ally Bashar al-Assad has been receiving a steady stream of signals that Washington is increasingly willing to let him remain in place. Meanwhile, Hezbollah remains strong in Lebanon and has carved out gains in southern Syria.

Even with congressional efforts to scuttle the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks by putting in place new sanctions, it seems clear that Iran will someday look back on the Obama years as ones that may have started painfully — with tightening sanctions — but ended considerably better.

That won’t be the view of the two countries the United States fought in to help stabilize, Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which are certain to end up by 2016 riven with divisions and beset by brutal and destabilizing fighting. It won’t be Washington’s Gulf allies, which are feeling the squeeze of increasing global oil and gas production (led by the United States) amplified by the development of renewables and new breakthroughs in energy efficiency. Virtually every Gulf nation is threatened by the spread of extremism and has been harmed by the tepid nature of U.S. support for our traditional alliances with these states. The fact is: They just don’t trust America to be there for them as it once was. Egypt and Turkey, the other two regional powers with historical influence comparable to Iran, have been rocked by internal upheaval.

And Israel? Well, one senior former top Obama administration official confirmed my assertion that the Obama-Netanyahu relationship had deteriorated to the point that it was now the worst relationship in the history of ties between the leaders of the two countries. “It’s not even close,” he said, “Carter and Begin was bad. But this is worse.” That seems about right to me. While Obama has done plenty to damage the relationship (and his staff hasn’t helped with descriptions of the Israeli prime minister as “chickenshit”), the most recent downturn is all Bibi’s fault (with a profoundly unconstructive assist from House Speaker John Boehner). Netanyahu’s decision to accept Boehner’s invitation to address the U.S. Congress on the dangers of the Iran nuclear deal is a case of sending the wrong man at the wrong time to give the wrong speech in the wrong place.

If Bibi really wanted to assure Israel’s security, as he asserts, he would wait and hope — and quietly pressure the administration to make sure — that it’s a good one and a peaceful way to stop Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. If it turns out to be lousy or unenforceable, he can always oppose it. But for a foreign leader to come before Congress to seek to play U.S. politics and derail an ongoing negotiation is unprecedented and inappropriate. Moreover, it’s likely to backfire on many levels — not the least of which is cementing the inclination among many of Obama’s closest advisors that if they’re doing something that really pisses off Bibi, they must be doing something right. This, of course, is deeply unhealthy for a key relationship and only highlights the extent of shared blame and the need for, well, a reset.

When the reset comes (and whoever is the next U.S. president will certainly work to engineer one … and if they are lucky, it will be with someone other than Netanyahu) it will be in the context of a very different Middle East.

It will be a region upon which the world is less dependent. It will be a region in which more countries are less stable and local unrest is a global threat. It will be a region in which the vast majority of the problems that loomed large back in 2008 will be seen as having deteriorated, in which new ones have emerged, and in which U.S. initiatives have largely either exacerbated the problems or kicked the can down the road. And it will be a region in which traditional U.S. alliances are largely weakened.

The changed Iran relationship will be at the center of all this. If an Iran deal helps forestall development of a nuclear weapon, that has to be seen as a benefit. If it has produced a partner in helping to contain Sunni extremism, that will also be seen as a net good. If it forms the foundation for a new U.S. regional policy that is based on enlightened management of the balance of power between key regional actors to maintain stability and contain threats, that is to the net good. If it finds a way to work with traditional allies from Israel to the Gulf, restore stability and promote progress in Egypt, foster reforms in Turkey, fight support for extremists among some of our so-called allies in the Middle East, and move toward the establishment of a Palestinian state that respects Israel’s right to exist, then that is to the net great. Then the Obama vision will be seen as a breakthrough — and he’ll deserve all the credit he gets.

    Remember, it was during the 2008 campaign that Obama asserted that one of the ways that his foreign policy would be different would be that he would engage with Iran.

Remember, it was during the 2008 campaign that Obama asserted that one of the ways that his foreign policy would be different would be that he would engage with Iran. If he can make that happen through careful, strategic management of U.S. relations in the region and follow through on all the steps required to make this work, it’ll be quite an accomplishment.

But if Iran receives much-needed economic relief and yet still continues to make mischief in the region, if it cheats on a deal, if it further institutionalizes the spread of Iranian influence threatening the Saudis and other important Gulf allies, if Washington’s empowerment of Shiite Iran becomes a recruiting tool for groups like the Islamic State or al Qaeda, if Israel so distrusts U.S. diplomacy that it triggers conflict with Iran, if key U.S. relationships in the Gulf continue to deteriorate, if American disengagement (or desultory, strategically impaired engagement) stimulates rather than contains the rise of new strongholds of terror, then this pivot to Iran is going to seem like a great blunder. And America is going to feel like its 44th president got played.

I will leave it to you, dear reader, to determine which is more likely given the lessons of recent history. One thing seems certain, though. When you look up Barack Obama’s foreign policy in the history books, far more attention will almost certainly be devoted to his outreach to Iran and his actions and inaction in the volatile Middle East than to his efforts at strategic rebalancing to Asia — or his now poignantly unsuccessful efforts to declare an end to America’s war on terror.

[ccp]

First question:   Who is "FP"


Second is he or she kidding me:

"If an Iran deal helps forestall development of a nuclear weapon, that has to be seen as a benefit. If it has produced a partner in helping to contain Sunni extremism, that will also be seen as a net good. If it forms the foundation for a new U.S. regional policy that is based on enlightened management of the balance of power between key regional actors to maintain stability and contain threats, that is to the net good. If it finds a way to work with traditional allies from Israel to the Gulf, restore stability and promote progress in Egypt, foster reforms in Turkey, fight support for extremists among some of our so-called allies in the Middle East, and move toward the establishment of a Palestinian state that respects Israel’s right to exist, then that is to the net great. Then the Obama vision will be seen as a breakthrough — and he’ll deserve all the credit he gets.

    Remember, it was during the 2008 campaign that Obama asserted that one of the ways that his foreign policy would be different would be that he would engage with Iran.

Remember, it was during the 2008 campaign that Obama asserted that one of the ways that his foreign policy would be different would be that he would engage with Iran. If he can make that happen through careful, strategic management of U.S. relations in the region and follow through on all the steps required to make this work, it’ll be quite an accomplishment.

But if Iran receives much-needed economic relief and yet still continues to make mischief in the region, if it cheats on a deal, if it further institutionalizes the spread of Iranian influence threatening the Saudis and other important Gulf allies, if Washington’s empowerment of Shiite Iran becomes a recruiting tool for groups like the Islamic State or al Qaeda, if Israel so distrusts U.S. diplomacy that it triggers conflict with Iran, if key U.S. relationships in the Gulf continue to deteriorate, if American disengagement (or desultory, strategically impaired engagement) stimulates rather than contains the rise of new strongholds of terror, then this pivot to Iran is going to seem like a great blunder. And America is going to feel like its 44th president got played.

I will leave it to you, dear reader, to determine which is more likely given the lessons of recent history

[Crafty_Dog]

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/iran-the-americans-are-begging-us-for-a-deal/

[G M]

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/iran-the-americans-are-begging-us-for-a-deal/

More of that bowing and groveling our way to world peace.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2015/02/obamas-secret-iran-strategy/

[ccp]

 A lot to think about.

Seems like a good summary of Obama's Iran folly.  Even Fareed Zakaria is worried, the parties are "miles apart".

If American liberal Jews are anxious about Obama's Iran deal plans they sure are keeping it quiet.   I guess they only have to wait a few more months assuming Hillary will save them and to convince us, Israel, from a nuclear Iran.

They share responsibility for the guy in office now though.

I didn't realize the strategy evolved from a group during Bush's term. 
Ex SoS James Baker who was part of the group is no lover of Israel that is for sure.   I always felt he had a deep dislike of Jews to tell you the truth.



   

[G M]

A lot to think about.

Seems like a good summary of Obama's Iran folly.  Even Fareed Zakaria is worried, the parties are "miles apart".

If American liberal Jews are anxious about Obama's Iran deal plans they sure are keeping it quiet.   I guess they only have to wait a few more months assuming Hillary will save them and to convince us, Israel, from a nuclear Iran.

They share responsibility for the guy in office now though.

I didn't realize the strategy evolved from a group during Bush's term. 
Ex SoS James Baker who was part of the group is no lover of Israel that is for sure.   I always felt he had a deep dislike of Jews to tell you the truth.



   

Obama voters are still deluded that Obama doesn't hate the U.S. or Israel.

[Crafty_Dog]

Agreed on Baker's antipathy to Israel.

Somethings to remember here:

1)  Having Iran as the bulwark of our geopolitical interests in the Middle East was a key building block of Sec. State and Director of the National Security Council Henry Kissinger.  Not a few belief that Kissinger aided and abetted the creation of OPEC as a way for the Shah of Iran to have the money to buy the necessary arms.   James Baker was around at the time and it is plausible that he picked up this thought at that time.

2) The fall of the Shah to the Khomeni Revolution under Carter changed all of this.   Obama appears not to have noticed!

3) It is worth noting that what Obama is pursuing here is quite similar to what Stratfor has predicted i.e. that the same geopolitical considerations that led Kissinger to his strategy remain and that Iran's nuke program was a bargaining chip for a deal with the US to establish Iran as regional hegemon.  I posted here a Strafor piece about all of this either in the US foreign policy thread, this thread, or the FUBAR thread, about all of this several months/one year ago.  I'm in a busy morning-- perhaps someone can find it and post its URL and post # here?

[ccp]

Thanks for some clarification Crafty.   I am not yet hearing on the right radio programs or on Fox this theory about Obama's push to make/allow Iran the regional power broker in the Middle East.  But this theory to me fills in the pieces of the puzzle of what Obama is doing in the Middle East quite nicely.  

I don't have time now but will see if I can find Baker et al panel's consensus and post.

The front runner for winning big on the "war" with Isis is most likely Iran.   Isis will be defeated.  If not with the President then with the next.  Who is ready to fill the void?

First contender:

Iran commander Suleimani says IS 'nearing end'AFP 1 hour ago

 . Tehran (AFP) - An influential Iranian general who has reportedly been near the front line against the Islamic State group was quoted Thursday saying the jihadists are "nearing the end of their lives".

No end to Middle East strife without Iran: Rouhani AFP Rights group blasts IS for atrocities Associated Press The Enemy of My Enemy: Islamic State and the Internationalization of the Syrian and Iraqi Civil Wars Part 3 Huffington Post AP Interview: Iraq 'sleeper cells' fight Islamic State group Associated Press Iraq forces 'liberate' Diyala province from IS AFP General Qassem Suleimani, the once rarely seen commander of the powerful Quds Force, has become the public face of Iran's support for the Iraqi and Syrian governments against jihadists.

He has frequently been pictured on social media in Iraq with pro-government forces, including Kurdish fighters and Shiite militia units in battle areas.

"Considering the heavy defeats suffered by Daesh and other terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria, we are certain these groups are nearing the end of their lives," Suleimani was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars news agency, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

His extremely rare published remarks came in a speech made Wednesday in his home province Kerman to mark the 36th anniversary of Iran's Islamic revolution.

Suleimani also said Tehran's regional influence was growing.

"The arrogants and Zionists have admitted, more than before, to their own weakness and to the Islamic republic's power, following their successive defeats," he said.

Iranian officials often use the term "arrogants" to refer to the United States and other Western powers, while Zionists is used in Tehran to refer to Israel without acknowledging its existence as a state.

IS has seized control of large parts of Syria and Iraq, declaring an Islamic "caliphate" and committing widespread atrocities.

Suleimani reportedly landed in Baghdad hours after IS overran Mosul in June and led the anti-jihadist counter-attack at the head of Iran's deep military involvement in Iraq.

The Quds Force -- the foreign wing of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards -- conducts sensitive security functions abroad, including intelligence, special operations and political action deemed necessary to protect the Islamic republic.***********


PS:  and they will get nuclear weapons thanks to Obama.  My oft repeated quote from Bolten:  "if you think Iran is a problem now just imagine what they will be like with nuclear weapons."

[Crafty_Dog]

Though US media, including FOX, have not really covered it, Iran HAS been busy ingratiating itself with the Kurds -- which is a distinct change from previous policy-- and of course the Govt. of Baghdad which underlines what Iran's Suleimani says in CCP's post.  If/when ISIS falls, who is going to get the credit?  Iran is playing for it to get the credit.

I sure hope someone will be able to find that Stratfor post on the geopolitical logic of a pivot to Iran.

[ccp]

I post here because a main feature of the report was to encourage engagement with Assad in Syria and Iran which may have been the inspiration for Barack's Middle East policy.   If this is his policy than he has not been forthcoming to Americans as such (the most transparent WH guy we ever had), but it would easily explain what he IS doing in the Middle East.  Rather than not having a policy in the Middle East as some claim, it makes more sense that Obama has a policy and is simply not forthcoming about it.

http://www.usip.org/publications/iraq-study-group

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-asks-un-to-condemn-iran-holocaust-cartoon-contest/

[DougMacG]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-benjamin-netanyahu-urges-congress-to-block-iran-nuclear-deal-1425392094?tesla=y
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/congress/israeli-leader-deal-doesnt-block-irans-path-to-nuclear-bomb-it-paves-path-to-bomb/2015/03/03/3ce91b52-c1c4-11e4-a188-8e4971d37a8d_story.html

[ccp]

Obamster "warns" Benjamin not to release details of the deal he is pushing for .

Yet Obamster had  no problem leaking Israel's plans to attack Iran such as releasing the deal to use Khazakastan ( I think) as a base to launch a strike.

It is never a problem what Obamster does but how dare anyone cross him when he does the exact same to anyone else.

Yet the MSM surrounds the sleeze ball in chief.

[Crafty_Dog]

The deal that Obama blew up by divulging it was with Azerbaijan IIRC.

[Crafty_Dog]

As the US and its allies continue to discuss limiting Iran's nuclear program with Tehran, the Iranian military on Sunday announced that it had developed a new long-range cruise missile with a range of some 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) – putting Israel well within its reach, Israeli sources said. The missile, called the “Soumar,” features “different characteristics in terms of range and pinpoint accuracy in comparison with the previous products,” Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehqan said at the unveiling of the missile Sunday. The missile, Dehqan said, was developed based on the needs of the Iranian Armed Forces, and is “a crucial step towards increasing the country’s defense and deterrence might.” On Saturday, an Iranian military official said that the country would be unveiling yet another missile system will be unveiled on April 18, when the country marks National Army Day. That system, called the Talaash-3, is based on the Russian S-200 missile system, the official said. In his speech in Washington last week, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said that while the world is capitulating to Iranian demands to allow it to continue with its nuclear development program, the issue of its delivery systems – the advanced missiles it is developing – has not even been placed on the agenda yet, because Iran refuses to discuss it at all. Commenting Sunday, Iran's Aerospace Division head Amirali Hajizadeh said that Tehran “will never negotiated the country's defense capabilities, including the development of its ballistic missiles.”
Watch Here
In a statement, Iran's state-controlled Press TV quoted government sources as saying that “Iran has repeatedly assured other countries that its military might poses no threat to other states, insisting that the country’s defense doctrine is entirely based on deterrence” The new Soumar missile is named for a city on the Iraqi border whose inhabitants were nearly all wiped out by an Iraqi chemical attack during the Iran-Iraq war.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/03/08/john-kerry-wraps-up-latest-round-of-nuclear-talks-with-iran-a-few-days-later-iran-unveils-brand-new-missiles/

[ccp]

http://www.breitbart.com/

Cotton stands firm.   There is something strange about Fox News which is doing all it can to make this stand seem to be "misguided".   Well, IMO somebody has to make a stand.

Do we just spend the rest of the next 2 yrs watching our country unravel and be given away?

To the contrary of the MSM would have us believe, a couple of hundred thousand signatures means nothing.  No question we can find just as many who will sign in support of the 47 Senators who sent the letter to the Iranians.

[ccp]

I just sent Sen Cotton an email of support.  Anyone else interested here is his webpage:

http://www.cotton.senate.gov/content/contact-tom

[Crafty_Dog]

Done.

[ya]

This has been known on many pak discussion forums for years,,,

Saudi Arabia prepares for Iran nuclear deal
Saudi Arabia is quietly preparing for an international nuclear agreement with Iran that it fears will rehabilitate its Shiite Persian rival. King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud's approach eschews the public spectacle of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress (indeed, the Saudis don't want any association with Israel) and instead focuses on regional alliances to contain an emergent Iran.

Author Bruce RiedelPosted March 8, 2015

The Saudis publicly welcomed US Secretary of State John Kerry's assurances in Riyadh last week that Washington will not accept a bad nuclear deal with Iran, and that a deal will not inaugurate a grand rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. They remain deeply skeptical about the negotiations, however, and are preparing for any outcome in the P5+1 process.

The Saudis recognize that a successful deal between Iran, the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany will enjoy broad international backing and United Nations endorsement. Riyadh has no interest in being isolated in a dissenting minority with Netanyahu against a deal backed by a global majority. The royal family despises Israel, and Netanyahu is regarded as a war criminal by most Saudis. Any hint of mutual interest with Israel is unpalatable in the kingdom.

So the Saudi approach is to strengthen its regional alliances for long-term confrontation with Tehran. Most immediately, this means strengthening the unity of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). It has strong allies in Abu Dhabi and Manama. In Riyadh's eyes, there are two weak links in GCC collusion against Iran: Oman and Qatar. Neither is likely to give up their bilateral lucrative ties to Iran, but Salman is pressing both to adhere to GCC unity and not facilitate Iranian subversion.

Yemen is the key GCC battlefield. The victory of the Iranian-backed Zaydi Shiite Houthis in seizing control of most of north Yemen, including Sanaa, has led the Saudis and the GCC to move their embassies to Aden, where they are trying to back the tattered remnant of the Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi regime in south Yemen. The inauguration of Sanaa-Tehran air flights last month, a first, only underscores the extent of Iran's success in achieving a key goal in the kingdom's backyard and in its historically weak underbelly. The Saudis are on the defense in Yemen.

Egypt is Riyadh's key Arab partner. The kingdom played an important role in bringing Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to power, and Salman met him a week ago to coordinate closely on regional issues, especially Iran. Cairo is too preoccupied with its own domestic terror threat from the Islamic State (IS) and spillover from Libya's disintegration to be very helpful against Iranian machinations elsewhere, however, and is more of a liability (especially financially) than an asset, albeit one Saudi Arabia is determined to keep afloat.

The Shiite government in Baghdad is regarded as a long-lost Arab partner. The Saudis expect Iran to emerge as the big winner in the war with IS, no matter how long it takes and how bloody it is. The Saudis know history, geography, demography and sectarian affiliation favor Iran in Iraq. They believe that President George W. Bush made a colossal error in 2003 and that President Barack Obama has made an "unholy alliance" today with Iran in Iraq. The only option now is to contain the Shiite breakthrough here, too.

Syria has been lost to Iran as well, but Riyadh still hopes to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Saudis are pouring money into the Lebanese army, as a potential brake on Hezbollah, along with the French. Salman also recently met with Jordan's King Abdullah to coordinate with Amman on Syria and with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as well.

Riyadh's most crucial ally is Pakistan, the only Muslim nuclear weapons state. Last year, for the first time, the Saudis publicly displayed their vintage Chinese-made intermediate-range ballistic missiles — the only ones they have that can reach Tehran — at a military parade. In the reviewing stands was Pakistani Chief of Army Staff Gen. Rahul Sharif, the man who controls Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. It is the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world, and the Saudis have been helping to pay for its development since the 1970s. It was a very calculated signal.

Salman, in late February, summoned the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to Riyadh. The highly unusual and urgent public invitation was linked in the Pakistani press to "strategic cooperation" against Iran. Salman visited Islamabad a year ago as crown prince and gave Sharif a $1.5 billion grant to reaffirm the Saudi-Pakistani strategic accord. Sharif spent three days in the kingdom last week in response to the king's invitation. He received a royal reception.

One immediate result of the talks is a plan for Pakistan to move its embassy in Yemen to Aden.

The speculation in Islamabad is that the king sought assurances from Sharif that, if the Iran negotiations produce either a bad deal or no deal, Pakistan will live up to its longstanding commitment to Saudi security. That is understood in Riyadh and Islamabad to include a nuclear dimension.

Sharif also visited the kingdom in January of this year. He was apparently told that then-King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was at death's door, and Sharif came to pay his respects and meet with Salman before the king died. No other leader was given this advance notice — another sign of the critical importance of the Saudi-Pakistani axis.

​The exact details of what the Pakistani nuclear commitment to the kingdom includes is, of course, among the most closely held secrets of our world. Both Riyadh and Islamabad prefer to maintain ambiguity and deniability.

The Saudis have not given up on Obama; the United States is still their oldest ally. Washington is too important to irritate with speeches. The Saudis prefer a more subtle approach.



Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/03/saudi-arabia-prepares-for-iran-nuclear-deal.html##ixzz3UN27uGzE

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.jewsnews.co.il/2015/03/27/u-s-to-award-iran-11-9-billion-through-end-of-nuke-talks-another-490-million-released-on-tuesday-under-deal/

[objectivist1]

Iran, the Nuclear Deal and ‘The Gathering Storm’

Posted By Francis P. Sempa On April 10, 2015

Historical analogies should always be used with care. Events of many years ago involving different statesmen and countries contending with different issues and circumstances can, at best, shed some light on current events. That being said, the current push for a Nuclear Deal with Iran bears an eerie and troubling resemblance to the Western powers’ efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to ignore and then to accommodate German rearmament. What better place to shed some light on this circumstance than volume one of Winston Churchill’s history of the Second World War, The Gathering Storm.

The theme of The Gathering Storm was “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm.” Churchill recounted how well-meaning statesmen, with a genuine and understandable fear of war and its destructiveness, pursued popular arms control policies designed to maintain peace, but which instead helped create the conditions that led to war.

A key component of the Versailles peace agreement that ended the First World War was German disarmament. Churchill called this the “one solid security for peace.” The arms control regime in place after the First World War involved the Inter-Allied Control Commission and the League of Nations. Churchill wrote that to effectively enforce German disarmament it would be necessary for the Western powers to remain sufficiently armed themselves and “to enforce with tireless vigilance and authority” the disarmament provisions of the Versailles Treaty.

German evasions of the disarmament provisions imposed by the allied powers began in the early 1920s, long before Hitler and the Nazis came to power. An expanded officer corps was created under the guise of staffing civilian departments in Berlin. Soldiers were secretly trained in numbers that exceeded treaty limits. The nucleus of an air corps was hidden in various civilian agencies, and large numbers of German citizens were encouraged to participate in “commercial” flying. Naval restrictions were similarly evaded.  “U-boats were illicitly built and their officers and men trained in other countries.” Civilian factories were designed for “speedy conversion to war.” Churchill noted that “every form of deception” was used by the Germans to circumvent treaty rules and restrictions, all under the watchful eye of allied arms control agencies. Meanwhile, Churchill noted, “the virtues of disarmament were extolled in the House of Commons by all parties.”

When the Nazis came to power they continued this subterfuge until Hitler felt confident enough in German strength and Western timidity to openly violate key provisions of the treaty. All the while, Churchill in speech after speech in the House of Commons revealed grave facts about German rearmament that British leaders and most of the world chose to ignore.

Today, the Western powers, led by the United States, are pinning their hopes for peace on an arms control deal with Iran, a regime every bit as aggressive and evil as Hitler’s. Hitler’s racial ideology led him to pursue policies—the extermination of the Jews and the murder or enslavement of Slavic peoples—that were inexplicable to Western minds despite the fact that Hitler had announced his plans in Mein Kampf.  The Iranian Mullahs have likewise been open about their goals of destroying the Jewish state, converting or killing infidels, and establishing a worldwide caliphate based on a religious-political ideology that is also seemingly inexplicable to Western minds. Arms control did not work with Hitler and it will not work with Iran.

But the arms control delusion persists. It is based on, in Churchill’s words, “[d]elight in smooth-sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the State, [and] genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundations . . .”

The much-touted Nuclear Deal with Iran is in reality only a “framework” for a deal. The devil will be in the details. But even the Western interpretation of the framework would leave in place the foundations of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and as Churchill noted about the arms control arrangements in the 1920s and 1930s, “[t]he opportunities for concealment, camouflage, and . . . evasion are numerous and varied.”

Our desire for a deal with Iran—any deal—is of a piece with our pullout from Iraq, lessening influence in Afghanistan, miscalculations in Libya and Yemen, fumbling response to events in Egypt, and our unwillingness to recognize the religious and ideological roots of our enemies in the Middle East. Churchill’s unforgettable description of British leaders in the 1930s rings all too true today: “So they go on in strange paradox . . . resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years . . . for the locusts to eat.”

Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. He is a contributor to Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics. He has written on historical and foreign policy topics for Strategic Review, The National Interest, The Diplomat, the Claremont Review of Books, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman, the Washington Times and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.

[ccp]

Anyone else see this?:

*****Saturday April 11, 2015

The United States has bunker-busting bombs that can "shut down, set back and destroy" Iran's nuclear program, and the military option has not been taken off the table when it comes to the ongoing negotiations with that country, according to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

 "I believe the Iranians know that and understand that," Carter told CNN Friday, stressing that the Obama administration prefers handling the issue of Iran's nuclear weapons potential diplomatically, rather than through military means, "because military action is reversible over time."

 The technical name for the powerful weapons Carter referenced is the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), which can explode 20 feet underground and destroy deeply buried and fortified targets, and those weapons are ready for use, he said.

Carter's reference to MOPS is the first made about specific military planning against Iran's fortified underground facilities, reports The Jerusalem Post.

 At one of the facilities, Fordow, 20 percent enriched medium-grade uranium is produced, and Iran's government insists it will only be used for civilian purposes. However, other countries fear that the uranium could be further enriched to 90 percent, The Post reports, which would be the amount needed to make material that can be weaponized.

 Meanwhile, Carter also told CNN on Friday that any deal the United States and its allies make with Iran will include direct inspection of the country's nuclear facilities, as it must be based on verification and not trust.

 On Thursday, though, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni said through Twitter that "unconventional inspection" would not be an acceptable part of the deal:

He also tweeted that he is "neither for nor against the deal."

 Carter also indicated in Friday's interview that Iran and North Korea could be working together, as they have collaborated in the past.

 "In fact, North Korea worked with Syria, helped it build a reactor... North Korea is a welcome all-comers kind of proliferator," Carter said.

 However, he said that Iran doesn't need North Korea "to teach them nuclear physics. They know plenty of it in Iran."

 Carter also discussed another U.S. priority in the Middle East: the ongoing fight to contain and control the Islamic State, and said he "would not hesitate" to advise putting putting boots on the ground, but "we are not at that point yet."

 President Barack Obama is open to advice and analysis, Carter said, but that does not mean "when any of us makes a recommendation, he will accept."

 But ISIS and al-Qaida are still threats to the United States, said Carter.

 "If al-Qaida was the Internet terrorists, these guys (ISIS) are the social media terrorists," he said.

 Al-Qaida has been weakened through the past decade of "pounding" by U.S. forces, said Carter, but "they still have a serious preoccupation with direct attacks on the United States."

[Crafty_Dog]

Russia Lifts Its Ban on Delivery of S-300 Missiles to Iran
The Kremlin removes ban implemented by Dmitry Medvedev in 2010
By Paul Sonne
Updated April 13, 2015 12:13 p.m. ET
256 COMMENTS

MOSCOW—The Kremlin has lifted its ban on deliveries of S-300 surface-to-air missiles to Iran, setting the legal groundwork for Russia to resume its plans to sell a powerful air-defense system to Tehran.

A decree by President Vladimir Putin posted on the Kremlin website Monday formally removed the Russian ban which has been in place since 2010. The move comes ahead of a June 30 deadline for world powers including the U.S. and Russia to strike a final deal with Iran over the dismantlement of its nuclear program.

Russia signed a contract worth about $800 million to deliver S-300s to Iran in 2007. But the U.S. and Israel pushed the Kremlin to drop the deal, expressing concern that Tehran could use the sophisticated air-defense system to protect its nuclear facilities from an attack.

Russia relented three years later when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev issued a Kremlin decree prohibiting the delivery of any Russian S-300 missiles to Iran. The 2010 order brought Russia in line with United Nations Security Council sanctions passed that year, which established an arms embargo on Iran in an attempt to further impede its nuclear progress.

“At this stage, we believe the need for this kind of embargo, and a separate voluntary Russian embargo, has completely disappeared,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday. “I note that the S-300 air-defense missile system, which is exclusively of a defensive nature, is not suited for the purposes of attack and doesn’t threaten the security of any governments in the region, including, of course, Israel.”

U.N. sanctions don’t restrict the supply of air-defense weapons to Iran, Mr. Lavrov said. Russia applied the S-300 ban in September 2010 as a goodwill gesture to stimulate progress in nuclear talks with Tehran and form a united front with other world powers taking part in negotiations, he said. The recent framework agreed with Iran to eliminate its nuclear program has now removed the need for the ban, Mr. Lavrov argued.

“Taking into account the very tense situation in the surrounding area, modern air defense systems are very important to Iran,” Mr. Lavrov added.

Moscow’s decision comes nearly two months after Russia’s top Russian defense industry executive told reporters that Russia had offered to sell Iran a powerful air-defense system in the S-300 family, but had yet to strike a deal.

Sergei Chemezov, chief executive of the Russian state defense conglomerate Rostec, said in February Iran was still considering Russia’s offer to supply Antey-2500 anti-ballistic missile systems but had not yet made a decision, according to Russian state news agency TASS. Rostec didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I don’t hide it, and everyone understands that the more conflicts there are, the more weapons are bought from us,” Mr. Chemezov said at the time, noting that Russia’s foreign weapons sales had totaled $13 billion in 2014. “Our volumes continue to grow, despite sanctions. In particular it is Latin America and the Middle East.”

Mr. Chemezov, a friend of Mr. Putin, is among those sanctioned by the U.S. over the crisis in Ukraine.

Write to Paul Sonne at paul.sonne@wsj.com

[Crafty_Dog]

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been in the hostage-taking business since its earliest days, so nobody should be surprised by Tuesday’s news that Iranian warships seized a cargo ship and her crew of 34 in the Strait of Hormuz. But it’s a useful reminder of the kind of regime with which the West is now seeking to strike a nuclear bargain.

The M/V Maersk Tigris, a Marshall Islands-flagged container ship, was transiting the Strait along an internationally recognized maritime route when it was surrounded by gunships of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Iranians ordered the ship to divert into Iranian waters and fired warning shots when the skipper of the Tigris refused, sending out a distress call that was picked up by the destroyer USS Farragut. The Iranians then boarded the ship and steered her toward the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

We’ll see how long this “diversion” lasts, and what price Iran will demand for releasing the ship and its crew. The incident comes less than a week after a convoy of Iranian cargo and warships destined for Tehran’s Houthi allies in Yemen were shadowed by U.S. Navy ships, eventually turning away. It also follows an incident on Friday when Iranian warships surrounded, but did not board, another large Maersk ship, the U.S.-flagged Kensington.

Perhaps that means the Iranians are merely trying to score political points by playing a game of payback. But the U.S. effort to turn the Iranian convoy away from Yemen was in the service of a U.N. arms embargo on the Houthis. The Iranian action is effectively identical to the ship-seizing by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean’s Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea.

It’s also a reminder that Iran has not moderated its rogue behavior during the presidency of Hasan Rouhani, whose own alleged moderation is one of the Obama Administration’s justifications for seeking a nuclear deal.

On the contrary, Mr. Rouhani has presided over renewed domestic repression and redoubled regional aggression. A nuclear deal is supposed to ease Iran’s return to the community of civilized nations, but so far Western concessions seem to have emboldened it into thinking it can do as it pleases. The habit of seizing unarmed ships on the high seas—or innocent foreign reporters working in Iran—is barbarism.

Apologists for Iran will no doubt ascribe the seizure of the Tigris to “hardline factions” within the regime. That might be true, but it only underscores the futility of striking a nuclear deal with a regime in which the hardliners can operate with impunity. What happens when Tehran decides to imprison pesky U.N. inspectors trying to verify Iran’s nuclear promises?

Iran’s disdain for basic maritime conventions is a good indicator of how it will treat any agreement it signs, which is why the Obama Administration is deluding itself that it can draw a line between Iran’s everyday behavior and its nuclear commitments. Pirates don’t keep their word, and it’s dangerous to bargain as if they will.
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[Crafty_Dog]

Editor's Note: In light of the April 28 boarding of a Maersk Line ship in the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian naval forces belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Stratfor is republishing its detailed October 2012 report on the elite corps. Although details are still emerging, what is known is that the Maersk Tigris was stopped in Iranian waters and boarded, before being redirected to the port of Bandar Abbas under escort. The Maersk Tigris was sailing under a Marshall Islands flag and is managed by Rickmers Ship Management, the Singapore-based arm of Hamburg's Rickmers Group. U.S.-based company Oaktree Capital originally had the ship constructed in the Philippines and retains ownership rights. The crew of 34 is believed to be multinational.

A Pentagon spokesman said that the Maersk Tigris ignored warnings from Iranian vessels to move deeper into Iran's territorial waters but complied after warning shots were fired. The USS Farragut was dispatched on an intercept course as the Maersk Tigris was ordered to steam toward Bandar Abbas. An Iranian source reported that the vessel was boarded after Iran's Ports and Maritime Organization issued a court order to confiscate the vessel. Unconfirmed reports indicate that the vessel has been released to continue on its way, but Stratfor will continue to monitor the situation.

The timing of the incident is far from ideal, coming at a juncture when talks between the United States and Iran over Tehran's controversial nuclear program have reached a critical stage ahead of the July 1 deadline for a final deal. The reasons for the seizure of the vessel remain unclear but it is well known that the IRGC and other hardline clerical elements in Iran are unhappy with the nuclear negotiations.

Part 1 of this special report lays out the origins of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and explains how it has become Iran's most powerful institution. Part 2 discusses the external pressures facing the IRGC, how that pressure is affecting the group, and what a weakened IRGC would mean for Iran.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, commonly referred to as the IRGC, is the most influential institution in the Iranian political system. To a large extent, Iran's ability to project power internationally and maintain domestic stability rests with this elite military institution. Of course, the IRGC functions somewhat like other conventional militaries; it is not completely immune to political infighting or institutional rivalry. While the disproportionate amount of power it wields will help the group overcome any factionalization to retain its pre-eminence, there are early signs of problems within its ranks.
Origin and Evolution

With several powerful and often competing institutions, the Iranian political system is extremely complex. But undoubtedly the most powerful institution in that system is the IRGC, which was created by the clerical elite after the 1979 revolution to protect the newly founded regime. During the 1980s, it fought against insurgencies (most notably against the Mujahideen-e-Khalq) and took a lead role in the Iran-Iraq War. These experiences helped the IRGC become the core of the Iranian national security and foreign policy establishment.

Visit our Iran page for related analysis, videos, situation reports and maps.

Currently, the IRGC comprises some 125,000 members and continues to derive its legitimacy from the clerical elite, led by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who maintains ultimate authority in Iranian politics. In fact, IRGC generals are appointed by Khamenei, the group's commander in chief, not the civilian government. While the clerics manage important state institutions, such as the Guardians Council, the judiciary, and the Assembly of Experts, they rely on the IRGC to maintain control of those institutions. This reliance likewise has contributed to the IRGC's power.

As a result, the IRGC has gained an edge over other institutions, such as the Artesh, or the conventional armed forces; various clerical institutions; the executive branch, led by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and the main civilian intelligence service, the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security. In recent decades the IRGC has further expanded to gain influence — in some cases, control — over domestic law enforcement, foreign intelligence operations, strategic military command and the national economy. 

Iran
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In fact, the group has developed a robust economic portfolio. Many IRGC commanders retire relatively early — usually at 50 years old — and join Iran's political and economic elite. Former IRGC commanders now dominate heavy industries, including the construction industry, and civilians operating in these industries are subordinate to IRGC elements.

The group also generates revenue through illicit channels. Its mandate for border security enables the group to run massive smuggling operations. In these operations, IRGC troops move luxury goods and illegal drugs (especially Afghan heroin), charge port fees and receive bribes. The proceeds from these activities augment the funds appropriated to the IRGC by the civilian government.

Like other conventional militaries, the IRGC is susceptible to internal rivalry over budgets, turf and connections. However, professional discipline has prevented it from succumbing to outright factional infighting. Moreover, Khamenei has taken steps to avoid factionalization, including the constant rotation of senior leadership of the IRGC's various branches (except in instances where a particular branch requires specialized institutional knowledge). However, the position of overall commander has been mostly static. In fact, only three individuals have held the post since the IRGC became the protector of the regime: Maj. Gen. Mohsen Rezaie (1981-1997); Maj. Gen Yahya Rahim Safavi (1997-2007); and Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari (2007-present).
An Inevitable Political Entity

As a political entity, the IRGC has become more than what its founders intended. The Iranian Constitution prohibits the IRGC from engaging in politics. More important, the group has avoided political activity so as not to be construed as seditious. But given its ubiquity in political, economic and security affairs, its evolution as a political entity probably was inevitable.

IRGC commanders and officers naturally have differing political leanings. Some IRGC members openly support or sympathize with various political causes and individuals. Others do so more discreetly. But to varying degrees, all politicians have followings in the officer corps, whose support is far from uniform.

In theory, the commanders and officers pay fealty to Khamenei and the wider clerical establishment. But in practice, the IRGC is not really beholden to any entity or faction. The IRGC regards itself as the rightful heir to the revolution and the savior of the republic. It considers itself uniquely capable and worthy of ruling the country. That belief may be well-founded. As the most well-organized and efficient institution in the state, the IRGC has long supplied experienced administrators to the civilian sector. Some notable example include:

    Former overall commander Rezaie, now the secretary of the Expediency Council.
    Former IRGC air force commander Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, the current mayor of Tehran.
    Brig. Gen. Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, the current interior minister, through whom the IRGC has gained greater leverage over internal security affairs.
    Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, the current defense minister. His position benefits the IRGC even though the corps and the Artesh are under the purview of the Joint Staff Command, led by IRGC Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi.
    Gen. Rostam Qasemi, the current oil minister. Formerly in charge of the IRGC's engineering and construction arm, Qasemi has seen to the IRGC's domination of the oil and natural gas sector.

Even though these former commanders and officers belong to the wider IRGC community, they form their own factions upon retirement. As an institution, the IRGC mostly has a unified stance on political issues. But individuals belonging to different institutions after retirement may dissent somewhat. The process resembles that of Israel; former members of Israel Defense Forces often emerge as key political leaders.

Consequently, any reference to the IRGC's stance on a particular issue represents the majority, not the entirety, of the group. And any reference to IRGC institutional interests represents the majority of commanders and officers with similar values. Differences of opinion certainly exist, but so far these differences have not manifested as fundamental divisions within the elite military institution. While its cohesion may be challenged in the future, the IRGC appears to be uniquely intact, at least for now. 

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/05/08/iranian-general-talks-hypothetical-war-with-u-s-uses-these-three-words-to-describe-it/

[Crafty_Dog]

As always, Stratfor is quite intelligent but my mind boggles at the absence of consideration of the nuclear issue, world-wide Islamic Fascism, etc.

 Iranian Power Is Not Inevitable
Global Affairs
May 27, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
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By Ian Morris

Of all the upheavals in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran's growing regional power might turn out to be the one with the greatest geopolitical effects.

Some governments see Iranian preeminence as inevitable, leading them to react by leaning toward Tehran. Others are doing just the opposite, talking darkly of preemptive strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities or plunging into a Middle Eastern arms race. "Whatever the Iranians have, we will have, too," former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal said just a few weeks ago. But in some ways the most radical move of all has been the willingness of the Great Satan to consider partially normalizing relations with a founder member of the Axis of Evil. "If it evolves into something solid," George Friedman observed of the diplomatic efforts in his Geopolitical Diary on April 2, "then we can look at this as the day the United States kicked over the table and started a new game."

Everything seems to be up in the air, but — as is so often the case — taking a long-term perspective can help us make sense of the shifting strategic landscape.

Iran's Historical Role

Those who see Iranian regional hegemony as inevitable often appeal to history. Iran, they argue, has always held such a position unless prevented by exceptional circumstances. Such circumstances prevailed in the 20th century, they suggest, but are now passing away, and so Iran is bound to regain its dominance the Middle East.

This argument, however, is not entirely correct. In the 5,500 years since cities and organized governments first appeared, Iran has been a major Middle Eastern power for less than one-third of that time. Although Susa, located in the modern Khuzestan province of southwestern Iran, arose as one of the first proper states in the region around 3500 B.C., Iran still remained peripheral for many centuries. That began to change in 2004 B.C., when Elamites, whose capital city was at Susa, raided Mesopotamia and sacked Ur, then the greatest city in the world. By the 12th century B.C., Elam had become a significant player in regional politics, but it was not until the 7th century B.C. that Iran really took center stage.

In 612 B.C., the Medes of northwestern Iran helped overthrow the Assyrian Empire; less than 70 years later, another group from the Khuzestan region, the Achaemenid Persians, overthrew the Medes in turn. The Persians went on to create an empire that stretched from India to Greece, the largest the world had yet seen. Iran remained a major power for the next 1,200 years, until the Arabs destroyed the Sassanid Persian Empire in A.D. 651. After that, a fragmented Iran was subordinate to Egyptian, Iraqi and Turkic powers for nearly a millennium, until the Shiite Safavid dynasty — which reigned from the 16th to the mid-18th century — challenged the Sunni Ottoman Turks for supremacy. By the end of the 18th century, however, Iran had once again been eclipsed. The 19th and 20th centuries were times of retreat and humiliation for Iran's rulers, with at best a partial revival under the Pahlavis in the 1960s and 70s.

There is nothing inevitable about Iranian dominance. Even if we look at Middle Eastern history in the most pro-Iranian manner, starting the story with the rise of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in 550 B.C., Iran has only been one of the Middle East's dominant powers 60 percent of the time. The other 40 percent observed hegemons based farther West, or no regional hegemon at all. This calendrical arithmetic suggests that, while it is perfectly plausible that Iran might re-emerge as a regional power in the 21st century, Iranian dominance is by no means the default setting of the Middle East.

Long-term history, then, shows that there are no timeless geostrategic forces that locked Iranian power into place thousands of years ago. But it can do more: It can also explain what conditions brought the last great era of Iranian hegemony to an end in the 18th century and whether these conditions will continue to apply in the 21st century.

In 1904, when Iran was at its weakest, the geographer and explorer Halford Mackinder argued in an address to London's Royal Geographical Society that the key to global strategy lay in the interactions between three broad regions of Eurasia. Mackinder, I think, was largely right, and thanks to another century of archaeological and historical study, we can now expand his insights into a general theory of geopolitics that says much about Iran's situation.
Inner vs. Outer Rims

In the last 10,000 years, the world's most developed societies have almost always been in the band of latitudes that Mackinder called Eurasia's "inner rim," running from the Mediterranean to China. Farming was invented in this area, with the Middle East leading the way around 9500 B.C. and the rest of the inner rim following its example over the next several thousand years. Along with farming came cities and governments, which most parts of the inner rim had developed by 500 B.C.  Two hundred and fifty years later, the world's first multiethnic empires comprising tens of millions of subjects controlled most of the inner rim.

Because ancient empires could not project their power very far, at any one time the inner rim tended to have four or five regional hegemons, jostling with each other but rarely extending their power into what Mackinder called Eurasia's "outer rim," facing toward the oceans, or its "heartland," far from the seas. However, because Eurasia's inner rim held 75 percent of the world's population and 90 percent of its wealth, its imperial rivalries became the most significant issues in global geopolitics.

The planet's balance of power began to change around 1000 B.C., when pastoral nomads on the steppes — the arid, treeless grasslands running from Manchuria to Hungary — first bred horses able to carry riders for long distances. These horsemen in the Eurasian heartland, far more mobile than the armies of the inner rim empires, were able to plunder almost at will and then gallop away before the imperial infantry could respond.

For the next 2,500 years, Eurasian history was dominated by a struggle between predators from the heartland — Scythians, Huns, Turks and Mongols, to name just a few — and the empires of the inner rim. China and Iran, which had relatively open frontiers along the steppes, were the regions most exposed to devastation, and their ruling dynasties were regularly overthrown by invaders. India and Europe, shielded by mountains and forests, generally suffered less.

The contest between the inner rim and the heartland was eventually overtaken by a new strategic struggle, which pitted the inner rim against the outer, after A.D. 1500. Mackinder labeled this new situation, which still prevailed in his own day, "the Columbian epoch." The great shift was driven by two inventions, both of them pioneered in China but quickly adopted and adapted all along the inner rim. When the new inventions reached Europe, they merged to form a world-conquering package.

The first invention was the gun, which military men gradually improved upon until muskets could be fired fast enough to counter nomadic archers on horseback. In 1500, steppe cavalry could still normally defeat volleying infantry; in 1600, they could sometimes win the same victories. But by 1700, they hardly ever could. After that, riders from the heartland no longer seriously threatened the inner rim.

The second invention was the oceangoing ship, which could fairly reliably sail for thousands of miles. These ships transformed the balance between the inner and outer rims just as decisively as the gun had altered the dynamic between the inner rim and the heartland. Armed with the new ships and guns, outer rim states could now project power farther and strike harder than any civilization before. The Columbian epoch had arrived.

Thanks to their long coastlines, India and the western parts of the Ottoman Empire were the most exposed to outer rim sailors and their guns, while distance and difficulty of access made China and Iran less vulnerable. By 1600, Western Europeans had overrun much of the Americas, built dozens of fortresses around the shores of the Indian Ocean and penetrated the Pacific. This, however, was just the beginning. In the 1750s, they began conquering India, and by the 1850s, Western Europeans and their former colonists in North America directly or indirectly controlled almost all territory from Turkey to Japan. The outer rim had overwhelmed the inner rim, turning the 19th century into an age of catastrophe for these ancient lands. By 1900 British troops had even pushed right through the inner rim and were playing a "Great Game" against Russia for control of the heartland.

But during these very years, right around the time Mackinder was lecturing in London, the pendulum began swinging back. The outer rim's financial, military and technological advantages over the inner rim remained enormous, but not enormous enough to sustain 19th-century levels of inequality. As the 20th century went on, inner rim nations slowly caught up with the outer rim as they underwent their own industrial revolutions. In 1916, when he was leading Turkish troops to defend Iraq against a largely Indian army fighting for Britain, the German general Wilhelm Leopold Colmar von der Goltz (known to the Turks as Goltz Pasha) could already prophesy that "the hallmark of the 20th century must be the revolution of the colored races against the colonial imperialism of Europe."
Iran in a Post-Columbian World

By 1950, outer rim power, now wielded more by Americans than by Europeans, was already being challenged in much of the inner rim, and since the beginning of the new millennium, this trend has only become clearer. Many forecasters suspect that by 2050 the Columbian epoch will be over: China and India will be the world's greatest powers, and the global strategic balance will once again look like it did before Columbus.

This story seems to point toward two conclusions. First, the Columbian epoch will prove to have been a brief phase that is already drawing to a close. Outer rim societies already relate to China, India, and Japan as peers, and they will very probably have to cultivate a similar relationship with Iran within the next few decades.

Second, despite all the local variations, the Columbian epoch unfolded in broadly similar ways all along the inner rim. Everywhere, the core problem in the 18th and 19th centuries was the inability of the inner rim's pre-modern imperial structures to respond to the energies of the modern societies that had taken shape in Europe and America. Only after going through a painful transition to modernity, liberalizing their economies and engaging with the outer rim's markets could inner rim societies re-establish themselves as regional powers.

India represents one extreme on the spectrum of experiences. Europeans exploited India's open coasts to establish numerous beachheads in the 16th and 17th centuries, and when dynastic chaos weakened the Mughal Empire in the 18th century, Britain's East India Company established financial dominance and, later, military control. In 1951, four years after winning independence, India's literacy rate was still just 16 percent, and the average person's life expectancy at birth was just 32 years. Only in the 1990s did India begin liberalizing its economy, integrating its markets with those of the outer rim and emerging as a true regional power.

Japan falls at the other end of the spectrum. Although distance made it one of the last Asian states to crumble under the outer rim's power, in the first few years after the arrival of U.S. Naval Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 and the opening of Japan to the West, the country seemed to be following the Indian path. Tokugawa rule collapsed into civil war, and European and American financiers and military advisers began moving in. However, as early as the 1870s, a new Japanese elite had seized control of its own affairs, using indigenous rather than outer rim capital to finance industrialization, strongly resisting territorial partition and liberalizing its economy. It emerged as a regional power in the 1890s.

Iran does not fall at either of these extremes, and in fact, its experience of the Columbian epoch more closely resembles that of China. Less exposed to the outer rim than India, but more exposed than Japan, China suffered devastating defeats at British hands in the 1840s. Qing dynasty governance disintegrated amid civil wars, and corrupt rulers squandered huge Western loans. Westerners reacted by partitioning the country and taking over parts of its government's functions. Mao's victory in 1949 ushered in a revolutionary era in which China pulled sharply away from the outer rim, only to begin leaning back toward the United States in 1972. Economic liberalization took off in the 1980s, and by 2000 China was once again a regional power.

Iran's sheltered coastline meant that it, too, enjoyed more protection from the outer rim than India, but less than Japan. It had its own military disaster at British hands in 1857, and, following the Chinese path, its Qajar dynasty dissolved into weak and ineffective rule, squandering its own huge European loans and granting monopolistic concessions over much of its economy. In 1901, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah signed away most of the country's oil for 20,000 pounds in cash and one-sixth of the country's future oil revenues. Britain occupied parts of Iran from 1915 to 1921, returned again in 1941 for five more years and then helped the United States overthrow an elected government in 1953. The strongly pro-Western Pahlavi regime subsequently began limited economic liberalization, only to fall in the Islamist revolution of 1979. As in China, the revolutionary government then pulled sharply away from the outer rim; but unlike China, it has not yet reversed course to liberalize its economy.

The recipe for success in the inner rim has been to replace premodern dynastic rulers with economic liberalizers who lean toward the outer rim, not with revolutionaries who turn inward, blame the outer rim for their problems and seek solutions in extreme ideologies. Iran's revival as a regional power, we should conclude, is likely but not inevitable. It will depend on the choices its leaders and people make and on the willingness of the outer rim to trust them.

This analysis has optimistic short-term implications. The more that Iran remains a revisionist power, challenging the status quo, the less likely it is to revive as a regional power. And the more it wants to revive as a regional power, the less likely Iran is to pose a continuing threat to the stability of the region.

In the longer run, however, the picture may darken. During the 20th century, the outer rim worked out an implicit deal with the inner rim's reviving regional powers, effectively exchanging direct or indirect rule for cooperation and commitment to peaceful engagement with the outer rim's markets. However, as regional powers waxed stronger, they regularly found themselves chafing under these terms. In the 1930s, Japanese leaders decided war was the only solution; in the 2010s, many analysts worry that Chinese leaders may come to a similar conclusion. If Iran does liberalize and take its place as a regional power in the 2020s, after a decade or so it too might strain against the limits of the new dynamic between inner and outer rim. And, Iran's rivalries with Turkey or Saudi Arabia over influence in the Arab world — or with India over control of the Arabian Sea — might well be making strategic forecasters long for the simpler days of the ayatollahs.

That, however, will be a problem for a new generation of statesmen to resolve.

[Crafty_Dog]

The Iranian Nuclear Paradox
Once an agreement is reached, a U.S.-Iran confrontation becomes more likely, more quickly.
By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz
July 8, 2015 7:25 p.m. ET


The lines are clearly drawn in Washington on President Obama’s plan for a nuclear deal with Iran. As negotiations for a final agreement continue well past their June 30 deadline, most Republicans oppose the deal and Democrats will not block it.

Many critics claim to believe that a “good deal,” which would permanently dismantle the clerical regime’s capacity to construct nuclear weapons, is still possible if Mr. Obama would augment diplomacy with the threat of more sanctions and the use of force. Although these critics accurately highlight the framework’s serious faults, they also make a mistake: More sanctions and threats of military raids now are unlikely to thwart the mullahs’ nuclear designs. We will never know whether more crippling sanctions and force could have cracked the clerical regime. We do know that the president sought the opposite path even before American and Iranian diplomats began negotiating in Europe.

But hawks who believe that airstrikes are the only possible option for stopping an Iranian nuke should welcome a deal perhaps more than anyone. This is because the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is tailor-made to set Washington on a collision course with Tehran. The plan leaves the Islamic Republic as a threshold nuclear-weapons state and in the short-term insulates the mullahs’ regional behavior from serious American reproach.

To imagine such a deal working is to imagine the Islamic Republic without its revolutionary faith. So Mr. Obama’s deal-making is in effect establishing the necessary conditions for military action after January 2017, when a new president takes office.

No American president would destroy Iranian nuclear sites without first exhausting diplomacy. The efforts by Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to compromise with Tehran—on uranium enrichment, verification and sanctions relief, among other concerns—are comprehensive, if nothing else. If the next president chose to strike after the Iranians stonewalled or repeatedly violated Mr. Obama’s agreement, however, the newcomer would be on much firmer political ground, at home and abroad, than if he tried without this failed accord.

Without a deal the past will probably repeat itself: Washington will incrementally increase sanctions while the Iranians incrementally advance their nuclear capabilities. Without a deal, diplomacy won’t die. Episodically it has continued since an Iranian opposition group revealed in 2002 the then-clandestine nuclear program. Via this meandering diplomatic route, Tehran has gotten the West to accept its nuclear progress.

Critics of the president who suggest that a much better agreement is within reach with more sanctions are making the same analytical error as Mr. Obama: They both assume that the Iranian regime will give priority to economics over religious ideology. The president wants to believe that Iran’s “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hasan Rouhani can be weaned from the bomb through commerce; equally war-weary sanctions enthusiasts fervently hope that economic pain alone can force the mullahs to set aside their faith. In their minds Iran is a nation that the U.S., or even Israel, can intimidate and contain.

The problem is that the Islamic Republic remains, as Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif proudly acknowledges in his memoirs, a revolutionary Islamic movement. Such a regime by definition would never bend to America’s economic coercion and never gut the nuclear centerpiece of its military planning for 30 years and allow Westerners full and transparent access to its nuclear secrets and personnel. This is the revolutionary Islamic state that is replicating versions of the militant Lebanese Hezbollah among the Arab Shiites, ever fearful at home of seditious Western culture and prepared to use terrorism abroad.

Above all, the clerical regime cannot be understood without appreciating the centrality of anti-Americanism to its religious identity. The election of a Republican administration might reinvigorate Iranian fear of American military power, as the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 did for a year or two. But it did not stop Iran’s nuclear march, and there is no reason to believe now that Mr. Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards, who oversee the nuclear program, will betray all that they hold holy.

But a nuclear deal is not going to prevent conflict either. The presidency of the so-called pragmatic mullah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from 1989 to 1997 was an aggressive period of Iranian terrorism. If President Rouhani, Mr. Rafsanjani’s former right-hand man, can pull off a nuclear agreement, we are likely to see a variation of the 1990s Iranian aggression.

Such aggression has already begun. Revolutionary Guards are fighting in Syria and Iraq, and Iranian aid flows to the Shiite Houthis in Yemen. Wherever the Islamic Republic’s influence grows among Arab Shiites, Sunni-Shiite conflict grows worse. With greater internecine Muslim hostility, the clerical regime inevitably intensifies its anti-American propaganda and actions in an effort to compete with radical Sunnis and their competing claims to lead an anti-Western Muslim world.

Iranian adventurism, especially if it includes anti-American terrorism, will eventually provoke a more muscular U.S. response. The odds of Tehran respecting any nuclear deal while it pushes to increase its regional influence—unchecked by Washington—aren’t good.Mr. Obama may think he can snap back sanctions and a united Western front to counter nefarious Iranian nuclear behavior, but the odds aren’t good once European businesses start returning to the Islamic Republic. Washington has a weak track record of using extraterritorial sanctions against our richest and closest allies and trading partners. The French alone may join the Americans again to curtail Iran and European profits.

With a failed deal, no plausible peaceful alternatives, and Mr. Obama no longer in office, Republicans and Democrats can then debate, more seriously than before, whether military force remains an option. Odds are it will not be. When contemplating the possibility that preventive military strikes against the clerical regime won’t be a one-time affair, even a hawkish Republican president may well default to containment. But if Washington does strike, it will be because Mr. Obama showed that peaceful means don’t work against the clerics’ nuclear and regional ambitions.

Mr. Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Dubowitz is the foundation’s executive director and heads its Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance.

[G M]

Iran will be a nuclear power and nothing will be done.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/07/13/iranian-newspaper-says-iran-could-destroy-the-white-house-in-under-10-minutes/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%207-13-15%20Build-MON

[Crafty_Dog]

second post

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/07/13/iranian-official-we-will-take-1000-americans-hostage-if-us-considers-military-action/

[ccp]

And the Republicans let him:

http://time.com/3956853/iran-michael-oren-israel/

[G M]

And the Republicans let him:

http://time.com/3956853/iran-michael-oren-israel/

Yup. We, and Israel are fcuked.

[objectivist1]

Today is a very dark day.  Mark your calendars, boys and girls.  Today Obama successfully pushed through a "deal" with Iran that will guarantee - actually expedite - its acquisition of nuclear weapons.  It follows that today marks the day on which it has been assured that both Israel and the U.S. will face nuclear attacks on their soil at the hands of the Iranians.  1938 - Chamberlain - death pact with Hitler.  Today we witness a similar act of insanity.  Prepare yourselves.

[G M]

If you live on either coast, it would be advisable to relocate.