Update on Iran War
Saturday, March 7, 2026
Friday, June 29, 2018
Roiling Markets, U.S. Insists World Must Stop Buying Iranian Oil
By Gardiner Harris and Stanley Reed, NY Times, June 26, 2018
The United States said on Tuesday that it will impose sanctions against all importers of Iranian oil by Nov. 4, a surprisingly tough position that roiled oil markets and is likely to further alienate allies and adversaries alike.
The policy shook financial markets that had become accustomed to waivers for American sanctions that in years past had been granted to companies in countries like India and China as long as they showed steady reductions in their imports of Iranian oil.
But a senior State Department official said Tuesday morning that such routine waivers were not likely to be issued by the Trump administration.
Sanctions experts expressed a mixture of bafflement and scorn at Tuesday’s announcement. They noted that countries like India and China never entirely ended their imports of Iranian crude even before Tehran agreed to the 2015 nuclear accord.
Following Washington’s withdrawal from the deal, European allies vowed to resist reimposing of sanctions. And in the midst of an increasingly bitter trade war with China, the likelihood that Beijing will entirely end its imports of Iranian oil is dubious, analysts said.
“They’re going to go after the Central Bank of China just before the midterms?” said Daniel Fried, a top White House and State Department official in the administration of President George W. Bush. “The next day’s headline will be: ‘Dow Drops 5,000 Points.’”
Peter Harrell, a former sanctions official in the State Department, dismissed the idea outright. “I don’t see China and India going to zero,” he said.
This month, European leaders applied for waivers to the renewed American sanctions against Iran, saying that preserving the agreement was vital to the security of their respective nations. Few expected the waivers to be granted, but Tuesday’s abrupt announcement, which largely ruled them out, could cause further strains.
European diplomats spent months negotiating a side agreement to the Iran deal with Brian Hook, a top State Department official, hoping such an agreement would persuade Mr. Trump to stay in the accord. In April, President Emmanuel Macron of France told Mr. Trump in the Oval Office that negotiations with Mr. Hook were about to yield a strong agreement. “Who’s Brian Hook?” Mr. Trump responded, according to a person with knowledge of the exchange.
The failure of the nuclear negotiations, Mr. Trump’s unusually combative posture at the recent Group of 7 meeting in Canada and his recent imposition of trade tariffs have left European allies weighing how far they can and should go to defy the United States. A growing number of large European companies have announced, however, that they intend to abandon Iran.
Robert A. Pape, director of the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats, said that sanctions only work when a country’s military suppliers participate in the effort. With Russia and China likely to continue to supply Iran with sophisticated hardware despite the sanctions, the Trump administration’s efforts are not likely to succeed, he said.
“This is big stick diplomacy, and that has a long history of failure,” Mr. Pape said.
Katherine Bauer, a former Treasury Department official, said that countries are likely to balk at the Trump administration’s maximalist posture.
“The risk is that you push countries to look for ways around sanctions,” she said.
Dennis Edwards: Is Donald Trump isolating America even from its former allies and in so doing preparing for the fulfillment of Bible Prophecy?
In Revelation chapter 17 we see the 10 nations, which come out of the former Roman Empire, join for a short period with the "Beast" or Antichrist to destroy the great Commercial Prostitute's city in one hour by fire.
Many Bible Eschatalogy students believe New York City could be the present day fulfillment of Babylon the Whore of Revelation chapters 17 and 18. Donald Trump's policies of isolation, "America First," could very well lead to the ten nations of former Roman Empire aligning themselves with Russia.
In Revelation chapter 17 we see the 10 nations, which come out of the former Roman Empire, join for a short period with the "Beast" or Antichrist to destroy the great Commercial Prostitute's city in one hour by fire.
Many Bible Eschatalogy students believe New York City could be the present day fulfillment of Babylon the Whore of Revelation chapters 17 and 18. Donald Trump's policies of isolation, "America First," could very well lead to the ten nations of former Roman Empire aligning themselves with Russia.
Many believe the Antichrist will have something to do with Russia. Some say he will come out of from Russia, others say he will have a close alliance with Russia. In any case, Trump's actions are only isolating America further from the rest of the world. America is closely aligned with Israel. Will the desruction of Babylon the Whore, which could very well be America, occur at the time of the invasion of Israel from the north?
Is Trump pushing us further along the road to eventual confrontation and world destruction as predicted by Jesus and the book of Revelation? Will it happen in our life time, or that of our children or grandchildren? Be attentive. It may be later than you think.
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Russia and Iran in Talks Over $10 Billion Arms Deal
Dennis Edwards: Here we could very well be seeing Russia and Iran preparing for the eventual invasion of Israel predicted in the Bible in Ezekiel 38 and 39. Here are some speculations on the significance of Ezekiel's prophecy.
Ezekiel 38 King James Version
1 And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
2 Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog (Russia), the chief prince of Meshech (Moscow) and Tubal (Tobolsk), and prophesy against him,
3 And say, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal:
4 And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords:
5 Persia (Iran), Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:
6 Gomer (Turkey or Europe), and all his bands; the house of Togarmah (Turkey) of the north quarters, and all his bands: and many people with thee.
7 Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them.
8 After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains of Israel, which have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations, and they shall dwell safely all of them. (Present day Israel)
9 Thou shalt ascend and come like a storm, thou shalt be like a cloud to cover the land, thou, and all thy bands, and many people with thee.
10 Thus saith the Lord God; It shall also come to pass, that at the same time shall things come into thy mind, and thou shalt think an evil thought:
11 And thou shalt say, I will go up to the land of unwalled villages; I will go to them that are at rest, that dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates,
12 To take a spoil, and to take a prey; to turn thine hand upon the desolate places that are now inhabited, and upon the people that are gathered out of the nations, which have gotten cattle and goods, that dwell in the midst of the land.
13 Sheba, and Dedan, (Saudi Arabia, American ally) and the merchants of Tarshish (Great Britain is an American and an Israeli ally), with all the young lions thereof (The off-shuts of Great Britain including USA, Canada, Australia and possibly India), shall say unto thee (Russia and the invading forces), Art thou come to take a spoil? hast thou gathered thy company to take a prey? to carry away silver and gold, to take away cattle and goods, to take a great spoil?
14 Therefore, son of man, prophesy and say unto Gog, Thus saith the Lord God; In that day when my people of Israel dwell safely, shalt thou not know it?
15 And thou shalt come from thy place out of the north parts, thou, and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company, and a mighty army:
16 And thou shalt come up against my people of Israel, as a cloud to cover the land; it shall be in the latter days, and I will bring thee against my land, that the heathen may know me, when I shall be sanctified in thee, O Gog, before their eyes. (God is going to judge Israel and America for their sins. In chapter 39 we see Russia and her allies also get it at the Battle of Armageddon. Revelation 19.)
17 Thus saith the Lord God; Art thou he of whom I have spoken in old time by my servants the prophets of Israel, which prophesied in those days many years that I would bring thee against them?
18 And it shall come to pass at the same time when Gog shall come against the land of Israel, saith the Lord God, that my fury shall come up in my face.
19 For in my jealousy and in the fire of my wrath have I spoken, Surely in that day there shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel;
20 So that the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the field, and all creeping things that creep upon the earth, and all the men that are upon the face of the earth, shall shake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground.
21 And I will call for a sword against him throughout all my mountains, saith the Lord God: every man's sword shall be against his brother.
22 And I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood; and I will rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many people that are with him, an overflowing rain, and great hailstones, fire, and brimstone. (These hailstones are mentioned in the book of Revelation. The "fire and brimstone" could be referring to nuclear engagement.)
23 Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the Lord.
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Iran's secret giveaway?
The Associated Press reports that the unpublished side deal is even more disastrous than the rest of the accord. It relaxes key restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in just over a decade, rather than the 15 years Team Obama has been touting.
As of January 2027, Iran can start replacing its mainstay centrifuges with thousands of advanced machines up to five times as efficient as what it now has.
Bottom line: The time Iran needs to produce a nuclear bomb would be cut in half, or worse. If Obama’s correct that the current rules leave Tehran a year from sprinting to the bomb, it’ll become at most six months.
And because the secret deal doesn’t spell out what happens after year 13, it could mean an end to all restrictions on centrifuges.
The head of the Institute for Science and International Security, a go-to agency on Iran’s nuclear program, says the side deal “will create a great deal of instability and possibly even lead to war.”
Yet just last week, the president boasted that his deal — which provides the mullahs with tens of billions in sanctions relief for use on terrorism — is “avoiding further conflict and making us safer.” Really?
All this proves that Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu, whom Obama openly mocked as a scare-monger for warning that Iran’s “breakout time” was six months or less, was anything but.
Since agreeing to the deal, Iran has kept on testing ballistic missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads. It’s also been caught in clandestine efforts to illicitly acquire high-level nuclear technology and equipment.
It’s becoming alarmingly clear that Team Obama played the American people — and the congressional Democrats who supported the deal— for fools.
Monday, April 6, 2015
Nuclear deal: From Iran's pulpits, a sign Rouhani has support from on high
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2015/0403/Nuclear-deal-From-Iran-s-pulpits-a-sign-Rouhani-has-support-from-on-high?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium
Iran's foreign minister returned home Friday to a hero's welcome. More importantly, perhaps, prayer leaders signaled support from the supreme leader for the deal.
By Scott Peterson, Staff writer APRIL 3, 2015
Ebrahim Noroozi/APView Caption
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND — Returning to a hero’s welcome in Tehran after clinching a framework nuclear deal with world powers, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif stood up through the sunroof of his car upon arrival Friday at the airport, waving as supporters chanted “Long Live Zarif!”
While some Iranians took to the streets to wave flags and celebrate as the agreement was announced Thursday night – jubilant at the prospect of sanctions being lifted, and of Iran’s isolation easing – it was the message from Friday prayer pulpits that should give Mr. Zarif particular satisfaction.
They indicated that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei supported Zarif and his team, even though many hardliners – and at times, apparently Mr. Khamenei himself – have been critical of the nuclear talks.
Recommended: How much do you know about Iran? Take our quiz to find out.
The Tehran Friday prayer leader, Ayatollah Emami Kashani, said the nuclear deal – which lays out the parameters for curbing Iran’s nuclear program, in exchange for sanctions relief – was a “victory for the Islamic Republic.”
“To be fair, the negotiating team is modest and wise and have followed the supreme leader’s advice on heroic flexibility,” said Mr. Kashani. “We much congratulate the president and Mr. Zarif.”
That was rare praise indeed, for the negotiating team and for relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani, who have come under constant attack from conservative political opponents.
New era of cooperation
On Friday Mr. Rouhani, in a national address, hailed the framework agreement as heralding a new era of “cooperation with the world.” He said Iran would continue to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, while vowing that Iran would stand by its commitments made in the negotiations.
"Some think we have no option except to fight the world or to surrender. But there is a third way, too. We have to have cooperation with the world," he said, according to the Associated Press.
The messages from the Friday prayer leaders are coordinated nationwide with Khamenei’s office.
“This shows the pressure coming from the top to disarm these hardliners who come up with strong words [against a deal],” says a veteran analyst in Tehran who asked not to be named.
“Friday prayers are a strong bastion of conservatives and hardliners – and all these nice words coming from there, of course it’s not unrelated to the leader’s views,” says the analyst. “Nobody dares to go against what he endorses. Hardliners of course keep saying what they say, but they’ll have a harder time to oppose what’s happening.”
Hardliners say Iran caved to West
Indeed, some Iranians oppose making any compromise with Western powers, especially on the nuclear issue, which they see as Iran caving into Western demands.
“We gave up a saddled horse, and in return we just received one with torn pieces of a bridle,” said the editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, Hossein Shariatmadari.
Esmail Kowsari, a conservative member of parliament from Tehran and member of the national security committee, complained that “the negotiating team has showed slackness in the negotiations, and what was supposed to be achieved has not been achieved, and the results are not acceptable.”
Despite those complaints, some Iranians have rejoiced in the fact that Prime Minister of Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel – a regional foe for decades – has opposed the deal so vehemently. Mr. Netanyahu said Friday the deal would threaten Israel’s existence.
“Many supporters of the deal point to this fact,” says the analyst. “They say we should be congratulating Zarif for causing such an unprecedented division between Israel and America, and the reactions coming from Israel – all the fury and anger – just shows we are on the right track.”
Relief on social media
Iranians took widely to social media to express relief and support for the deal.
One cartoon circulating showed President Barack Obama and Rouhani in a warm embrace, both holding their fingers in victory signs and encircled by white doves of peace. Another showed Zarif leap-frogging over Obama.
Someone joked on Viber, the phone messaging app, that the deal would not yet effect Iran’s strict dress code: “Ladies! The agreement was about nuclear issues … do not leave the house with shorts and sleeveless tops!”
Sobhan Hassanvand, a journalist with the reformist Shargh newspaper, used a Persian proverb to describe the sense of a miracle having been performed in Lausanne: “An idiot throws a stone into a well, a thousand sages cannot bring it out,” he tweeted. “But Zarif did it…”
Iran's foreign minister returned home Friday to a hero's welcome. More importantly, perhaps, prayer leaders signaled support from the supreme leader for the deal.
By Scott Peterson, Staff writer APRIL 3, 2015
Ebrahim Noroozi/APView Caption
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND — Returning to a hero’s welcome in Tehran after clinching a framework nuclear deal with world powers, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif stood up through the sunroof of his car upon arrival Friday at the airport, waving as supporters chanted “Long Live Zarif!”
While some Iranians took to the streets to wave flags and celebrate as the agreement was announced Thursday night – jubilant at the prospect of sanctions being lifted, and of Iran’s isolation easing – it was the message from Friday prayer pulpits that should give Mr. Zarif particular satisfaction.
They indicated that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei supported Zarif and his team, even though many hardliners – and at times, apparently Mr. Khamenei himself – have been critical of the nuclear talks.
Recommended: How much do you know about Iran? Take our quiz to find out.
The Tehran Friday prayer leader, Ayatollah Emami Kashani, said the nuclear deal – which lays out the parameters for curbing Iran’s nuclear program, in exchange for sanctions relief – was a “victory for the Islamic Republic.”
“To be fair, the negotiating team is modest and wise and have followed the supreme leader’s advice on heroic flexibility,” said Mr. Kashani. “We much congratulate the president and Mr. Zarif.”
That was rare praise indeed, for the negotiating team and for relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani, who have come under constant attack from conservative political opponents.
New era of cooperation
On Friday Mr. Rouhani, in a national address, hailed the framework agreement as heralding a new era of “cooperation with the world.” He said Iran would continue to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, while vowing that Iran would stand by its commitments made in the negotiations.
"Some think we have no option except to fight the world or to surrender. But there is a third way, too. We have to have cooperation with the world," he said, according to the Associated Press.
The messages from the Friday prayer leaders are coordinated nationwide with Khamenei’s office.
“This shows the pressure coming from the top to disarm these hardliners who come up with strong words [against a deal],” says a veteran analyst in Tehran who asked not to be named.
“Friday prayers are a strong bastion of conservatives and hardliners – and all these nice words coming from there, of course it’s not unrelated to the leader’s views,” says the analyst. “Nobody dares to go against what he endorses. Hardliners of course keep saying what they say, but they’ll have a harder time to oppose what’s happening.”
Hardliners say Iran caved to West
Indeed, some Iranians oppose making any compromise with Western powers, especially on the nuclear issue, which they see as Iran caving into Western demands.
“We gave up a saddled horse, and in return we just received one with torn pieces of a bridle,” said the editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, Hossein Shariatmadari.
Esmail Kowsari, a conservative member of parliament from Tehran and member of the national security committee, complained that “the negotiating team has showed slackness in the negotiations, and what was supposed to be achieved has not been achieved, and the results are not acceptable.”
Despite those complaints, some Iranians have rejoiced in the fact that Prime Minister of Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel – a regional foe for decades – has opposed the deal so vehemently. Mr. Netanyahu said Friday the deal would threaten Israel’s existence.
“Many supporters of the deal point to this fact,” says the analyst. “They say we should be congratulating Zarif for causing such an unprecedented division between Israel and America, and the reactions coming from Israel – all the fury and anger – just shows we are on the right track.”
Relief on social media
Iranians took widely to social media to express relief and support for the deal.
One cartoon circulating showed President Barack Obama and Rouhani in a warm embrace, both holding their fingers in victory signs and encircled by white doves of peace. Another showed Zarif leap-frogging over Obama.
Someone joked on Viber, the phone messaging app, that the deal would not yet effect Iran’s strict dress code: “Ladies! The agreement was about nuclear issues … do not leave the house with shorts and sleeveless tops!”
Sobhan Hassanvand, a journalist with the reformist Shargh newspaper, used a Persian proverb to describe the sense of a miracle having been performed in Lausanne: “An idiot throws a stone into a well, a thousand sages cannot bring it out,” he tweeted. “But Zarif did it…”
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Jewish Hospital a Fixture in Tehran
By Thomas Erdbrink, NY Times, Feb. 9, 2014
TEHRAN—Sitting in his office at Tehran’s only Jewish hospital, Ciamak Morsadegh lit another cigarette and reminisced about how his wife left Iran for the United States after he insisted on staying.
Dr. Morsadegh, the director of the Dr. Sapir Hospital and Charity Center here, said that unlike thousands of other Jews he has never thought about leaving the Islamic Republic, for the simple reason that Iran is his home.
“I speak English, I pray in Hebrew, but I think in Persian,” said Dr. Morsadegh, a surgeon who is also a member of Parliament. “I am Iranian. Iranian-Jewish.”
Many were surprised last week when the government of President Hassan Rouhani donated $400,000 to the Dr. Sapir Hospital, but Dr. Morsadegh was not among them.
“We Jews are a part of Iran’s history,” he said. “What is important is that Mr. Rouhani makes big news out of supporting us. He is showing that we, as a religious minority, are part of this country, too.”
Situated on Mostafa Khomeini Street—named for the son of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—the hospital sits across from the Imam Reza Seminary school, one of the oldest Shiite seminaries in Tehran. White-turbaned clerics pass by, talking in hushed tones with their students. Though the hospital might seem out of place, local people do not seem to think so.
“When I am sick I go across the street,” Mohammad Mirghanin, a seminary student, said as he rushed to class. “They might have a different religion, but they are fellow Iranians. I do not see why I should not go to the Jewish hospital.”
On Saturday, a woman in a traditional black chador approached Khoddad Asnashahri, the hospital’s managing director and a Muslim, and asked for help.
“I went to the Iman Khomeini hospital with my daughter who needs a sonogram, but over there it costs 500,000 to man,” or roughly $200, said the woman, Zahra Hajabdolmaleki.
“We will help you here for half that amount,” Mr. Asnashahri pledged.
Named after a Jewish doctor who died in 1921 while trying to cure patients during a typhus epidemic raging through Tehran, the hospital started out as a clinic where all Iranians could come for medical care at vastly reduced rates. For more than 50 years it has been a meeting point for Iranian Jews and Muslims and the most prominent Jewish charity in the capital.
Mr. Asnashahri, who has worked at the hospital for nearly 48 years, praised the “good atmosphere” while also noting that only five Jewish physicians remained. “Many have migrated and others have bought shares in more modern hospitals,” he said.
About 96 percent of patients are Muslim, like most of the hospital’s employees. But what mattered most, he said, was the message that “here all people can come, no matter what religion, color or race.”
Though the Jewish population of Iran is dwindling—now at about 9,000, according to an official census by the Statistical Center of Iran, though other estimates range to 20,000—the country has the largest number of Jews in the Middle East after Israel.
Dr. Morsadegh, the surgeon, has devoted his life to that diminishing community. He was a leader of the Tehran Jewish Committee, a group that supports synagogues, schools and other facets of Jewish life in Iran, and in 2008 was elected as the Jewish representative in Parliament, where five official religious minorities have a permanent seat.
He will not say that the situation for Jews and the other official religious minorities—Christian Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Zoroastrians—is perfect in Iran. The five minorities would like to see an Islamic law changed that allows one of their faith who converts to Islam to get the entire inheritance of his or her non-Muslim family, for example. Yet things are worse for evangelical Christians and Bahais, who can face prison sentences and in many cases exclusion from higher education.
Dr. Morsadegh said former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated Holocaust denials left psychological scars, as well. “Look, all Jews believe in the Holocaust,” he said. “It would have been much better if the former president had not raised that issue.”
President Rouhani has remained silent on the Holocaust, and in September his social media team wished Jews around the world a happy Rosh Hashana.
“It has gotten a lot better,” Dr. Morsadegh said, recalling how thousands of Jews left the country after the 1979 revolution. Many more have emigrated since then, often because of Iran’s bad economy.
In September, Dr. Morsadegh joined President Rouhani on his trip to the United Nations in New York. Some in Iran have hinted at a connection between the president’s financial donation to the hospital and Dr. Morsadegh’s enthusiastic defense of Iran and the position of Jews in the country.
But the doctor is not bothered by those questions. “I helped out in the war with Iraq for this country, as a first aid doctor,” he said. “And I’d do it again tomorrow.”
TEHRAN—Sitting in his office at Tehran’s only Jewish hospital, Ciamak Morsadegh lit another cigarette and reminisced about how his wife left Iran for the United States after he insisted on staying.
Dr. Morsadegh, the director of the Dr. Sapir Hospital and Charity Center here, said that unlike thousands of other Jews he has never thought about leaving the Islamic Republic, for the simple reason that Iran is his home.
“I speak English, I pray in Hebrew, but I think in Persian,” said Dr. Morsadegh, a surgeon who is also a member of Parliament. “I am Iranian. Iranian-Jewish.”
Many were surprised last week when the government of President Hassan Rouhani donated $400,000 to the Dr. Sapir Hospital, but Dr. Morsadegh was not among them.
“We Jews are a part of Iran’s history,” he said. “What is important is that Mr. Rouhani makes big news out of supporting us. He is showing that we, as a religious minority, are part of this country, too.”
Situated on Mostafa Khomeini Street—named for the son of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—the hospital sits across from the Imam Reza Seminary school, one of the oldest Shiite seminaries in Tehran. White-turbaned clerics pass by, talking in hushed tones with their students. Though the hospital might seem out of place, local people do not seem to think so.
“When I am sick I go across the street,” Mohammad Mirghanin, a seminary student, said as he rushed to class. “They might have a different religion, but they are fellow Iranians. I do not see why I should not go to the Jewish hospital.”
On Saturday, a woman in a traditional black chador approached Khoddad Asnashahri, the hospital’s managing director and a Muslim, and asked for help.
“I went to the Iman Khomeini hospital with my daughter who needs a sonogram, but over there it costs 500,000 to man,” or roughly $200, said the woman, Zahra Hajabdolmaleki.
“We will help you here for half that amount,” Mr. Asnashahri pledged.
Named after a Jewish doctor who died in 1921 while trying to cure patients during a typhus epidemic raging through Tehran, the hospital started out as a clinic where all Iranians could come for medical care at vastly reduced rates. For more than 50 years it has been a meeting point for Iranian Jews and Muslims and the most prominent Jewish charity in the capital.
Mr. Asnashahri, who has worked at the hospital for nearly 48 years, praised the “good atmosphere” while also noting that only five Jewish physicians remained. “Many have migrated and others have bought shares in more modern hospitals,” he said.
About 96 percent of patients are Muslim, like most of the hospital’s employees. But what mattered most, he said, was the message that “here all people can come, no matter what religion, color or race.”
Though the Jewish population of Iran is dwindling—now at about 9,000, according to an official census by the Statistical Center of Iran, though other estimates range to 20,000—the country has the largest number of Jews in the Middle East after Israel.
Dr. Morsadegh, the surgeon, has devoted his life to that diminishing community. He was a leader of the Tehran Jewish Committee, a group that supports synagogues, schools and other facets of Jewish life in Iran, and in 2008 was elected as the Jewish representative in Parliament, where five official religious minorities have a permanent seat.
He will not say that the situation for Jews and the other official religious minorities—Christian Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Zoroastrians—is perfect in Iran. The five minorities would like to see an Islamic law changed that allows one of their faith who converts to Islam to get the entire inheritance of his or her non-Muslim family, for example. Yet things are worse for evangelical Christians and Bahais, who can face prison sentences and in many cases exclusion from higher education.
Dr. Morsadegh said former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated Holocaust denials left psychological scars, as well. “Look, all Jews believe in the Holocaust,” he said. “It would have been much better if the former president had not raised that issue.”
President Rouhani has remained silent on the Holocaust, and in September his social media team wished Jews around the world a happy Rosh Hashana.
“It has gotten a lot better,” Dr. Morsadegh said, recalling how thousands of Jews left the country after the 1979 revolution. Many more have emigrated since then, often because of Iran’s bad economy.
In September, Dr. Morsadegh joined President Rouhani on his trip to the United Nations in New York. Some in Iran have hinted at a connection between the president’s financial donation to the hospital and Dr. Morsadegh’s enthusiastic defense of Iran and the position of Jews in the country.
But the doctor is not bothered by those questions. “I helped out in the war with Iraq for this country, as a first aid doctor,” he said. “And I’d do it again tomorrow.”
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Iran's military nuclear bid 'will be stopped': Israel
By John Davison
.
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Iran's atomic drive "will be stopped", a day after an interim agreement bringing sanctions relief for Tehran took effect.
Related Stories
Geneva deal doesn't stop Iran's bid for a bomb: Israel AFP
Canada sanctions on Iran to stay 'fully in place': Harper AFP
Biden assures Israel about core sanctions on Iran: U.S. official Reuters
Iran curbs enrichment as nuclear deal takes effectAFP
West, Iran activate landmark nuclear deal Reuters
"Iran's military nuclear programme must be stopped, and Iran's military nuclear programme will be stopped," Netanyahu said at a joint news conference with his Canadian counterpart Stephen Harper, without saying how.
Israel has long warned that a nuclear Iran would pose an existential threat to the Jewish state, and has refused to rule out a military strike to prevent that from happening.
Netanyahu fought a major diplomatic campaign against the so-called Geneva Agreement which was hammered out in November between world powers and Iran, and on Monday he said the agreement would not succeed in stopping Tehran.
"The interim agreement which went into force today does not prevent Iran from realising its intention to develop nuclear weapons," he told the Israeli parliament.
His remarks came just hours after the UN nuclear watchdog confirmed Iran had halted production of 20 percent enriched uranium, marking the entry into force of the landmark deal with the P5+1 group of world powers.
Unidentified IAEA inspectors and Iranian technicians disconnect the connections between the twin cas …
The international community also kept its part of the deal, with both the European Union and United States separately announcing they were easing crippling sanctions on Iran.
The deal, which was signed in Geneva, came about after nearly a decade of failed negotiations over its disputed nuclear programme, which the West believes is a front for building a military capability.
Tehran has denied the charge.
"A nuclear armed Iran would not just endanger Israel -- it would threaten the peace and security of our region," Netanyahu said on Tuesday.
"It would give Iran's terrorist proxies a nuclear umbrella.
"It would launch a multilateral nuclear arms race in the Middle East, it could turn the Middle East into a nuclear tinderbox," he said.
Netanyahu said the Iran nuclear issue, and the rise of Islamism across the Middle East, had united Israel and many Arab countries in their efforts to face these "twin challenges".
"Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and the aggressive designs of the Muslim Brotherhood is what shapes many of the Arab world's leading countries today," he said.
"In meeting those twin challenges, these countries do not see Israel as their enemy but as being on the same side of a difficult conflict," he said.
Commentators say the diplomatic effect of direct talks between Israel's sworn enemy Iran and Western powers could see the Jewish state finding more in common with traditional Arab allies of the US, particularly Sunni Gulf kingdom Saudi Arabia.
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Smother 'Em With Love
By Rosa Brooks, Foreign Policy, November 21, 2013
"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," said Sun Tzu—or maybe it was Petrarch, or Machiavelli, or Michael Corleone. Whatever: As U.S. negotiators resume talks with Iran in Geneva this week, we would do well to embrace this philosophy.
For more than three decades, the United States has done everything possible to marginalize, contain, and generally mess with Iran, yet Iran’s nuclear capabilities have only advanced—and its ability to throw up roadblocks against U.S. aspirations in the Middle East has continued unabated. It’s time to accept that further efforts to marginalize and contain Iran are unlikely to improve the situation. At this point, we don’t need fewer military, economic, and cultural ties to Iran—we need more. It’s time to bring Iran closer.
Consider some realities.
First Reality: Iran already has nuclear weapons capabilities. As Harvard’s Graham Allison put it in an August article, “Iran has overcome the most significant obstacle to making a bomb: it has mastered the technologies to enrich uranium indigenously. It has operated production lines to produce a stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU) that, after further enrichment, would provide the cores for more than six nuclear bombs. Since 2010 it has been enriching uranium to a level of 20 percent (medium enriched uranium or MEU). As a technical fact, that means it has done 90 percent of the work required to produce the highly enriched uranium (HEU) needed for an explodable nuclear bomb.”
Implication: If Iran is absolutely determined to build a nuclear weapon, it already has the ability to do so. The only real question is how long the process would take: Some experts believe it would be a matter of weeks, while others think it might be closer to a year. Opinions also vary as to the likelihood that such a bomb-making operation would be detected by the United States prior to successful completion.
This isn’t good news—there’s nothing “good” about further nuclear weapons proliferation. But it’s not the end of the world, either.
The cold logic of nuclear deterrence still operates, and Iran’s leaders show every sign of being rational actors: The country has powerful regional enemies, which gives it a similarly powerful incentive to develop indigenous nuclear weapons capabilities. At the same time, Iran’s leaders know it would be extraordinarily risky to cross that final bridge and create a nuclear bomb (Israel has an itchy trigger finger). Still more important, they know that to use a nuclear weapon would be to court national obliteration. Finally, they have zero incentive to supply nuclear technologies to terrorists: As Stephen Walt asks, “Why would any country devote millions of dollars and decades of effort to get a few bombs, and then blithely give them away to people over whom they had little control?”
Second Reality: At this point, piling on more sanctions is likely to damage U.S. objectives. Clearly, years of sanctions have not prevented Iran from advancing its nuclear program: On the contrary, Iran has crossed red line after red line over the last two decades.
Recent, more aggressive U.S. and international sanctions have undeniably weakened Iran’s economy, but here, too, the impact of sanctions has been mixed at best. On the one hand, the economic woes brought about by tougher sanctions undeniably have played a role in bringing Iran back to the bargaining table. On the other hand, as Joy Gordon noted in an Oct. 18 Foreign Policy article, some analysts think that by “limiting Iran’s ability to buy and produce oil, gasoline, and natural gas,” sanctions may have convinced Iran’s leaders that it’s now “much more imperative to develop nuclear energy to meet the needs of the population.”
Sanctions—“smart” or not—also hurt ordinary Iranians far more than they hurt regime leaders. That’s a humanitarian problem, but it also has implications for U.S. security. Data from a Gallup poll released in early November suggests that sanctions have increased anti-U.S. sentiment in Iran: While 85 percent of Iranians now say that sanctions have affected their own economic well-being, 47 percent blame the United States, and only 13 percent blame the Iranian government.
Worse, sanctions seem to have led to greater popular support for Iran’s nuclear program: 68 percent of Iranians—an uptick from the last Gallup poll—now support continuing the program despite the painful impact of economic sanctions. Even Iranian Jews recently rallied in support of Iran’s nuclear program. Unsurprisingly, many Iranians view their nation’s nuclear program through the lens of national pride: Why should a small number of states get to close the nuclear club? If the world can accept that Israel, Pakistan, and India have nuclear weapons, why not Iran?
At this point, tightening sanctions still further would be either ineffective or dangerous, particularly while negotiations are ongoing. It could have the unintended consequence of shoring up hard-line anti-U.S. actors inside Iran, which could drive Iran away from the negotiating table. This, in turn, could increase, rather than decrease, the prospects for catastrophic military confrontation between Iran and Western powers.
Third Reality: A military confrontation with Iran would be similarly ineffective and dangerous. Iran knows it, the U.S. military knows it, the White House knows it, Israeli intelligence knows it. The only ones who seem not to know it are Benjamin Netanyahu and certain congressional Republicans.
Iran’s nuclear facilities aren’t soft targets: The Fordow enrichment facility is under a mountain. Most analysts believe that U.S. or Israeli strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities would delay Iranian weapons production capabilities for a few years, but not destroy it, and such strikes could easily harden Iran’s determination to build nuclear bombs. As a nonpartisan Wilson Center report—produced by former top U.S. diplomats and military officials—concluded in 2012, it’s likely that “a U.S. attack on Iran would increase Iran’s motivation to build a bomb, because 1) the Iranian leadership would become more convinced than ever that regime change is the goal of U.S. policy, and 2) building a bomb would be seen as a way to inhibit future attacks and redress the humiliation of being attacked.”
All this might also increase the temptation for the United States or Israel to escalate any initially limited military action, going after a broader range of Iranian military targets as well as nuclear facilities—or even seeking regime change. But that’s not a smart path to take either. Military action is expensive and unpredictable, and strikes against Iran could trigger anything from direct Iranian retaliation to a dramatic increase in anti-U.S. or anti-Israel terror attacks and spreading regional conflict. As Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it late in 2012, “The results of an American or Israeli military strike on Iran could, in my view, prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the world.” (Or as former CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni memorably quipped, “I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.”)
To sum up: Iran already has the ability to create nuclear weapons, additional sanctions won’t help, and military action against Iran would be foolhardy in the extreme.
What’s left to do?
Smother ‘em with love.
I’m not kidding. Iran seems—finally—genuinely interested in seeking ways out of the current impasse. Maybe that’s due to the bite of recent sanctions, maybe it’s due to Iranian fears of a military strike, or maybe the Iranians are just plain tired of being international pariahs. But right now, Iran is looking for face-saving ways to reach a deal.
Let’s help them. We should seek to enmesh Iran so tightly in economic and cultural partnerships with the United States and international community that future hostilities become unthinkable.
At the moment, Iran is an adversary, not a friend, and there’s no guarantee that such measures will lead to a harmonious friendship between the United States and Iran. After all, the nuclear issue isn’t the only barrier to good relations: Iran’s support for Hezbollah is another, and its dismal human rights practices also stand in the way.
But even if we never become friends, there are purely pragmatic reasons for staying close to our enemies: Increasing connections reduces incentives for conflict and augments incentives for collaboration. Enhancing connections and transparency also gives each nation a clearer understanding of the other’s capabilities and motivations, which makes misunderstandings and inadvertent slights and challenges less likely.
Will we all someday sing “Kumbayah” together in Tehran? I don’t know, I don’t care, and actually I hope not, since I don’t remember the words (and I doubt they sound better in Farsi). Bringing Iran closer isn’t something we should do out of sheer loving-kindness. It’s a path dictated by pure, hard-headed self-interest.
Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department.
"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," said Sun Tzu—or maybe it was Petrarch, or Machiavelli, or Michael Corleone. Whatever: As U.S. negotiators resume talks with Iran in Geneva this week, we would do well to embrace this philosophy.
For more than three decades, the United States has done everything possible to marginalize, contain, and generally mess with Iran, yet Iran’s nuclear capabilities have only advanced—and its ability to throw up roadblocks against U.S. aspirations in the Middle East has continued unabated. It’s time to accept that further efforts to marginalize and contain Iran are unlikely to improve the situation. At this point, we don’t need fewer military, economic, and cultural ties to Iran—we need more. It’s time to bring Iran closer.
Consider some realities.
First Reality: Iran already has nuclear weapons capabilities. As Harvard’s Graham Allison put it in an August article, “Iran has overcome the most significant obstacle to making a bomb: it has mastered the technologies to enrich uranium indigenously. It has operated production lines to produce a stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU) that, after further enrichment, would provide the cores for more than six nuclear bombs. Since 2010 it has been enriching uranium to a level of 20 percent (medium enriched uranium or MEU). As a technical fact, that means it has done 90 percent of the work required to produce the highly enriched uranium (HEU) needed for an explodable nuclear bomb.”
Implication: If Iran is absolutely determined to build a nuclear weapon, it already has the ability to do so. The only real question is how long the process would take: Some experts believe it would be a matter of weeks, while others think it might be closer to a year. Opinions also vary as to the likelihood that such a bomb-making operation would be detected by the United States prior to successful completion.
This isn’t good news—there’s nothing “good” about further nuclear weapons proliferation. But it’s not the end of the world, either.
The cold logic of nuclear deterrence still operates, and Iran’s leaders show every sign of being rational actors: The country has powerful regional enemies, which gives it a similarly powerful incentive to develop indigenous nuclear weapons capabilities. At the same time, Iran’s leaders know it would be extraordinarily risky to cross that final bridge and create a nuclear bomb (Israel has an itchy trigger finger). Still more important, they know that to use a nuclear weapon would be to court national obliteration. Finally, they have zero incentive to supply nuclear technologies to terrorists: As Stephen Walt asks, “Why would any country devote millions of dollars and decades of effort to get a few bombs, and then blithely give them away to people over whom they had little control?”
Second Reality: At this point, piling on more sanctions is likely to damage U.S. objectives. Clearly, years of sanctions have not prevented Iran from advancing its nuclear program: On the contrary, Iran has crossed red line after red line over the last two decades.
Recent, more aggressive U.S. and international sanctions have undeniably weakened Iran’s economy, but here, too, the impact of sanctions has been mixed at best. On the one hand, the economic woes brought about by tougher sanctions undeniably have played a role in bringing Iran back to the bargaining table. On the other hand, as Joy Gordon noted in an Oct. 18 Foreign Policy article, some analysts think that by “limiting Iran’s ability to buy and produce oil, gasoline, and natural gas,” sanctions may have convinced Iran’s leaders that it’s now “much more imperative to develop nuclear energy to meet the needs of the population.”
Sanctions—“smart” or not—also hurt ordinary Iranians far more than they hurt regime leaders. That’s a humanitarian problem, but it also has implications for U.S. security. Data from a Gallup poll released in early November suggests that sanctions have increased anti-U.S. sentiment in Iran: While 85 percent of Iranians now say that sanctions have affected their own economic well-being, 47 percent blame the United States, and only 13 percent blame the Iranian government.
Worse, sanctions seem to have led to greater popular support for Iran’s nuclear program: 68 percent of Iranians—an uptick from the last Gallup poll—now support continuing the program despite the painful impact of economic sanctions. Even Iranian Jews recently rallied in support of Iran’s nuclear program. Unsurprisingly, many Iranians view their nation’s nuclear program through the lens of national pride: Why should a small number of states get to close the nuclear club? If the world can accept that Israel, Pakistan, and India have nuclear weapons, why not Iran?
At this point, tightening sanctions still further would be either ineffective or dangerous, particularly while negotiations are ongoing. It could have the unintended consequence of shoring up hard-line anti-U.S. actors inside Iran, which could drive Iran away from the negotiating table. This, in turn, could increase, rather than decrease, the prospects for catastrophic military confrontation between Iran and Western powers.
Third Reality: A military confrontation with Iran would be similarly ineffective and dangerous. Iran knows it, the U.S. military knows it, the White House knows it, Israeli intelligence knows it. The only ones who seem not to know it are Benjamin Netanyahu and certain congressional Republicans.
Iran’s nuclear facilities aren’t soft targets: The Fordow enrichment facility is under a mountain. Most analysts believe that U.S. or Israeli strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities would delay Iranian weapons production capabilities for a few years, but not destroy it, and such strikes could easily harden Iran’s determination to build nuclear bombs. As a nonpartisan Wilson Center report—produced by former top U.S. diplomats and military officials—concluded in 2012, it’s likely that “a U.S. attack on Iran would increase Iran’s motivation to build a bomb, because 1) the Iranian leadership would become more convinced than ever that regime change is the goal of U.S. policy, and 2) building a bomb would be seen as a way to inhibit future attacks and redress the humiliation of being attacked.”
All this might also increase the temptation for the United States or Israel to escalate any initially limited military action, going after a broader range of Iranian military targets as well as nuclear facilities—or even seeking regime change. But that’s not a smart path to take either. Military action is expensive and unpredictable, and strikes against Iran could trigger anything from direct Iranian retaliation to a dramatic increase in anti-U.S. or anti-Israel terror attacks and spreading regional conflict. As Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it late in 2012, “The results of an American or Israeli military strike on Iran could, in my view, prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the world.” (Or as former CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni memorably quipped, “I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.”)
To sum up: Iran already has the ability to create nuclear weapons, additional sanctions won’t help, and military action against Iran would be foolhardy in the extreme.
What’s left to do?
Smother ‘em with love.
I’m not kidding. Iran seems—finally—genuinely interested in seeking ways out of the current impasse. Maybe that’s due to the bite of recent sanctions, maybe it’s due to Iranian fears of a military strike, or maybe the Iranians are just plain tired of being international pariahs. But right now, Iran is looking for face-saving ways to reach a deal.
Let’s help them. We should seek to enmesh Iran so tightly in economic and cultural partnerships with the United States and international community that future hostilities become unthinkable.
At the moment, Iran is an adversary, not a friend, and there’s no guarantee that such measures will lead to a harmonious friendship between the United States and Iran. After all, the nuclear issue isn’t the only barrier to good relations: Iran’s support for Hezbollah is another, and its dismal human rights practices also stand in the way.
But even if we never become friends, there are purely pragmatic reasons for staying close to our enemies: Increasing connections reduces incentives for conflict and augments incentives for collaboration. Enhancing connections and transparency also gives each nation a clearer understanding of the other’s capabilities and motivations, which makes misunderstandings and inadvertent slights and challenges less likely.
Will we all someday sing “Kumbayah” together in Tehran? I don’t know, I don’t care, and actually I hope not, since I don’t remember the words (and I doubt they sound better in Farsi). Bringing Iran closer isn’t something we should do out of sheer loving-kindness. It’s a path dictated by pure, hard-headed self-interest.
Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
US Struggle With Iran's Peace Offensive
By Eric Margolis, September 21, 2013
Iran’s newly elected president, Hassan Rouhani, has lost no time in trying to end the 34-year old political and economic siege imposed on his nation by the United States and its allies.
President Barack Obama, having just been wrong-footed over Syria, now faces a surprise Iranian diplomatic and public relations offensive that will be hard to resist. America’s war party is furious: its dreams of seeing US power crush Syria, then Iran are in jeopardy.
Ever since a popular revolution ousted the US-installed regime of Shah Pahlavi in 1979, Washington has sought to overthrow Iran’s Islamic republic.
Iran has been isolated, put under intense economic and diplomatic siege, become the target of subversion and the US-backed invasion by Iraq in 1980 that killed up to 500,000 Iranians.
The US challenge to Iran is always depicted for public consumption as an effort to stop Tehran getting nuclear weapons. Iran is routinely accused of supporting “terrorism” and subversion.
In reality, US hostility towards Iran is mostly about old-fashioned power politics. In 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell let the cat out of the bag by admitting that Iran’s acquisition of a few nuclear weapons would “limit” US ability to use force in the region.
Control of the Mideast is one of the pillars of US world power. The US has dominated the Mideast since 1945, as I detail in my book “American Raj—How America Rules the Mideast.” Islamic Iran emerged after 1979 as the most potent challenge to US regional domination and control of its energy.
Iran and US ally Saudi Arabia have waged a bitter proxy war in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and East Africa by arming and funding extremist groups. Syria is the latest example.
Washington and Israel have used the nuclear arms issue to isolate Iran and make it an outcast state, much as was done with Cuba in the 20th Century.
It’s easy to forget that nearly all of Iran’s nuclear energy industry is under very tight UN supervision, not to mention incessant monitoring by western intelligence agencies and Israel. By contrast, Israel refuses UN inspection and maintains a sizeable nuclear and chemical arsenal.
It’s also easy to forget that the original signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—the US, Russia, Britain, France (and later China)—have all violated the pact’s pledge to swiftly reduce, then eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
Iran is now making a major push to convince the world it has no nuclear weapons ambitions, starting with its spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomenei who has issued a fatwa condemning all nuclear weapons.
So far, the US, strongly pressed by Israel, is responding cautiously but positively.
Israel has made it clear it wants the US to attack Iran and crush its nuclear and non-nuclear military capabilities. Equally important, says Israel, is the need to liquidate Iran’s scientific nuclear cadre of scientists.
My sources in Iraq report that since the US invasion in 2003, over 200 Iraqi nuclear scientists and technicians have been mysteriously assassinated. A number of Iranian nuclear personnel have also been assassinated by bombs, widely believed to be the work of Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
The logical course for the United States to follow is to welcome Iran’s overtures and restore normal relations between the two powers. An Iran aligned to the outside world is less likely to be troublesome than the angry, frightened, besieged Iran of today.
Furthermore, Washington has at some point got to accept that Iran is an influential regional power with its own legitimate interests. If Iran truly has no nuclear weapons ambitions, then the only reason for Tehran to suffer punishing sanctions is national pride. Iran needs economic growth, not pride.
If Washington really wants stability rather than just obedience, then it should welcome Iran’s overtures.
As for the near-war state between Iran and Israel, the crux of this confrontation is the lack of a Palestinian state. If Israel ever agrees to such a viable state, hostility with Tehran will sharply lessen. Recall that amidst mutual threats in the 1980’s, Israel quietly sold Iran $5 billion of US arms.
Iran’s newly elected president, Hassan Rouhani, has lost no time in trying to end the 34-year old political and economic siege imposed on his nation by the United States and its allies.
President Barack Obama, having just been wrong-footed over Syria, now faces a surprise Iranian diplomatic and public relations offensive that will be hard to resist. America’s war party is furious: its dreams of seeing US power crush Syria, then Iran are in jeopardy.
Ever since a popular revolution ousted the US-installed regime of Shah Pahlavi in 1979, Washington has sought to overthrow Iran’s Islamic republic.
Iran has been isolated, put under intense economic and diplomatic siege, become the target of subversion and the US-backed invasion by Iraq in 1980 that killed up to 500,000 Iranians.
The US challenge to Iran is always depicted for public consumption as an effort to stop Tehran getting nuclear weapons. Iran is routinely accused of supporting “terrorism” and subversion.
In reality, US hostility towards Iran is mostly about old-fashioned power politics. In 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell let the cat out of the bag by admitting that Iran’s acquisition of a few nuclear weapons would “limit” US ability to use force in the region.
Control of the Mideast is one of the pillars of US world power. The US has dominated the Mideast since 1945, as I detail in my book “American Raj—How America Rules the Mideast.” Islamic Iran emerged after 1979 as the most potent challenge to US regional domination and control of its energy.
Iran and US ally Saudi Arabia have waged a bitter proxy war in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and East Africa by arming and funding extremist groups. Syria is the latest example.
Washington and Israel have used the nuclear arms issue to isolate Iran and make it an outcast state, much as was done with Cuba in the 20th Century.
It’s easy to forget that nearly all of Iran’s nuclear energy industry is under very tight UN supervision, not to mention incessant monitoring by western intelligence agencies and Israel. By contrast, Israel refuses UN inspection and maintains a sizeable nuclear and chemical arsenal.
It’s also easy to forget that the original signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—the US, Russia, Britain, France (and later China)—have all violated the pact’s pledge to swiftly reduce, then eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
Iran is now making a major push to convince the world it has no nuclear weapons ambitions, starting with its spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomenei who has issued a fatwa condemning all nuclear weapons.
So far, the US, strongly pressed by Israel, is responding cautiously but positively.
Israel has made it clear it wants the US to attack Iran and crush its nuclear and non-nuclear military capabilities. Equally important, says Israel, is the need to liquidate Iran’s scientific nuclear cadre of scientists.
My sources in Iraq report that since the US invasion in 2003, over 200 Iraqi nuclear scientists and technicians have been mysteriously assassinated. A number of Iranian nuclear personnel have also been assassinated by bombs, widely believed to be the work of Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
The logical course for the United States to follow is to welcome Iran’s overtures and restore normal relations between the two powers. An Iran aligned to the outside world is less likely to be troublesome than the angry, frightened, besieged Iran of today.
Furthermore, Washington has at some point got to accept that Iran is an influential regional power with its own legitimate interests. If Iran truly has no nuclear weapons ambitions, then the only reason for Tehran to suffer punishing sanctions is national pride. Iran needs economic growth, not pride.
If Washington really wants stability rather than just obedience, then it should welcome Iran’s overtures.
As for the near-war state between Iran and Israel, the crux of this confrontation is the lack of a Palestinian state. If Israel ever agrees to such a viable state, hostility with Tehran will sharply lessen. Recall that amidst mutual threats in the 1980’s, Israel quietly sold Iran $5 billion of US arms.
Monday, October 1, 2012
The Entebbe Option
By Mark Perry, Foreign Policy, September 27, 2012
While no one in the Barack Obama administration knows whether Israel will strike Iran’s nuclear program, America’s war planners are preparing for a wide array of potential Israeli military options—while also trying to limit the chances of the United States being drawn into a potentially bloody conflict in the Persian Gulf.
“U.S.-Israeli intelligence sharing on Iran has been extraordinary and unprecedented,” a senior Pentagon war planner told me. “But when it comes to actually attacking Iran, what Israel won’t tell us is what they plan to do, or how they plan to do it. It’s their most closely guarded secret.” Israel’s refusal to share its plans has persisted despite repeated requests from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a senior Pentagon civilian said.
The result is that, at a time of escalating public debate in both the United States and Israel around the possibility of an armed strike on Iran, high-level Pentagon war planners have had to “fly blind” in sketching out what Israel might do—and the challenges its actions will pose for the U.S. military. “What we do is a kind of reverse engineering,” the senior planner said. “We take a look at their [Israeli] assets and capabilities, put ourselves in their shoes and ask how we would act if we had what they have. So while we’re guessing, we have a pretty good idea of what they can and can’t do.”
According to several high-level U.S. military and civilian intelligence sources, U.S. Central Command and Pentagon war planners have concluded that there are at least three possible Israeli attack options, including a daring and extremely risky special operations raid on Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordow—an “Iranian Entebbe” they call it, after Israel’s 1976 commando rescue of Israeli hostages held in Uganda. In that scenario, Israeli commandos would storm the complex, which houses many of Iran’s centrifuges; remove as much enriched uranium as they found or could carry; and plant explosives to destroy the facility on their way out.
Centcom, which oversees U.S. military assets in the Middle East, has been given the lead U.S. role in studying the possible Israeli strike. Over the past year its officers have met several times at Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and with Fifth Fleet naval officers in Bahrain to discuss their conclusions, the sources say.
The military analysis of Israeli war plans has been taking place separate from—but concurrent with—the controversy surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that the United States present Tehran with a “red line,” which, if crossed by Iran’s nuclear program, would trigger a U.S. military strike. “That’s a political question, not a war question,” the senior Pentagon war planner said. “It’s not in our lane. We’re assuming that an Israeli attack could come at any time.”
But it’s not clear that Israel, even with its vaunted military, can pull off a successful strike: Netanyahu may not simply want the United States on board politically; he may need the United States to join militarily. “All this stuff about ‘red lines’ and deadlines is just Israel’s way of trying to get us to say that when they start shooting, we’ll start shooting,” retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman told me. “Bottom line? We can do this and they can’t, because we have what the Israelis don’t have,” retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner said.
One thing is clear: the U.S. military, according to my sources, currently has no interest in a preventive strike. “The idea that we’ll attack with Israel is remote, so you can take that off your list of options,” former Centcom commander Joe Hoar told me. Nor will the United States join an Israeli attack once it starts, the senior U.S. planner said. “We know there are senior Iranians egging for a fight with us, particularly in their Navy,” a retired Centcom officer added. “And we’ll give them one if they want one, but we’re not going to go piling in simply because the Israelis want us to.”
That puts the military shoulder to shoulder with the president. Obama and the military may have clashed on other issues, like the Afghan surge, but when it comes to Iran, they are speaking with one voice: They don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon, they don’t want Israel to start a war over it, and they don’t believe an Israeli attack should automatically trigger U.S. intervention. But, if they are to avoid becoming part of Israel’s plans, they first need to know what those plans are.
Three high-level U.S. military and intelligence sources have told me that Centcom has identified three options for Israel should it decide to take preventive military action against Iran.
The first and most predictable option calls for a massed Israeli Air Force bombing campaign targeting key Iranian nuclear sites. Such an assault would be coupled with strikes from submarine-launched cruise missiles and Israeli-based medium-range Jericho II and long-range Jericho III missiles, according to a highly placed U.S. military officer. The attack may well be preceded by—or coupled with—a coordinated cyber and electronic warfare attack.
But planners for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Centcom have concluded that, because of limits to Israel’s military capabilities, such an aerial campaign could not be sustained. “They’ll have one shot, one time,” the U.S. military officer said. “That’s one time out and one time back. And that’s it.”
While Israel has 125 sophisticated F15I and F16I fighter-bombers, only the roughly 25 F15Is are capable of carrying the bunker-busting GBU-28 guided missile, which has the best chance of destroying Iran’s heavily fortified nuclear installations. And even then, each F15I can only carry a single munition.
This force, while lethal, is also modest. The Israeli Air Force would likely have to carefully pick and choose its targets, settling most probably on four: the heavy-water production plant at Arak, the uranium-enrichment centers at Fordow and Natanz, and the uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan, while leaving out the military site at Parchin and the nuclear reactor at Bushehr, which houses Russian technical experts.
The Israeli attack would also likely include the F16Is to knock down Iran’s air defense network, or perhaps drop other, less effective, bunker-busting munitions to reinforce the F15I sortie. Some of these F16Is, but not all of them, would be able to refuel from Israel’s seven to ten KC-707 tankers.
Even with that, and even with the best of luck (good weather, accurate targeting, sophisticated refueling, near total surprise, precise air-to-air interdiction, a minimum of accidents, and the successful destruction of Iran’s anti-aircraft capabilities), senior U.S. military officers say that Israel would only set back Iran’s nuclear capability by one to two years at best—not end it.
Which could be why Netanyahu is so anxious for the Obama administration to say when or if it would join an attack. As Hoar, the former Centcom commander, bluntly put it: “Compared to the United States, Israel doesn’t have a military.”
Included in the U.S. arsenal is the recently developed Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the GBU-57, which can punch through 200 feet of hardened concrete before detonating its 5,300-pound warhead. The United States, which recently developed the GBU-57, is rumored to have only about 20 in its inventory—but the Israelis have zero. “There’s a good reason for that,” Gardiner said. “Only a B-2 bomber can carry the 57.” He paused for effect: “You might know this, but it’s worth mentioning,” he said. “Israel doesn’t have any B-2s.”
Israel’s likely inability to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity in a single stroke, even in a best-case scenario, has led U.S. war planners to speculate about a second, out-of-the-box, and extremely dangerous military option: what they’re calling an “Iranian Entebbe.”
In this scenario, the Israelis would forego a massed air attack and instead mount a high-risk but high-payoff commando raid that would land an elite Sayeret Matkal (special forces) unit outside of Iran’s enrichment facility at Fordow, near Qom. The unit—or other elite units like it—consisting of perhaps as many as 400 soldiers, would seize Iran’s enriched uranium for transport to Israel.
The operation’s success would depend on speed, secrecy, simplicity, and the credibility of Israeli intelligence. According to the Pentagon war planner, Israel’s access to intelligence on Iranian military and policy planning is unprecedented, as is their willingness to share it with U.S. intelligence officials.
The Israeli unit would be transported on as few as three and perhaps as many as six C-130 aircraft (which can carry a maximum of 70 troops) that would be protected by a “swarm” of well-armed F16Is, according to the scenario being considered by U.S. military officers. The C-130s would land in the desert near Fordow. The Israeli commandos would then defeat the heavily armed security personnel at the complex, penetrate its barriers and interdict any enemy units nearby, and seize the complex’s uranium for transport back to Israel. Prior to its departure, the commando unit would destroy the complex, obviating the need for any high-level bombing attack. (Senior U.S. military officers say that there are reports that some of the uranium at Fordow is stored as uranium hexafluoride gas, a chemical form used during the enrichment process. In that case, the material may be left in place when the commandos destroy the complex.)
“It’s doable, and they have to be thinking along these lines,” the highly placed U.S. military officer said. “The IDF’s special forces are the best asset Israel has.” That said, “In some scenarios,” the U.S. military planner who told me of the potential operation said, “there would be very high Israeli casualties because of nearby Republican Guard divisions. This operation could be quite bloody.”
Bloody or not, the Israeli leadership may not be quick to dismiss such an operation, given Israel’s history of using such units. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are former Sayeret Matkal officers, and recently Israeli Defense Forces head Benny Gantz (himself a Sayeret Matkal veteran) said the IDF had formed an elite special operations “Deep Corps” to strike far inside hostile territory. And, of course, it bears remembering that Netanyahu’s brother Yonatan was the sole casualty in Israel’s Entebbe operation.
The difficulty with the Entebbe-style option is that Israel would be forced to mount “a robust CSAR [combat search and rescue] capability” to support it, a senior JCS planner noted. That would mean landing other C-130s carrying helicopters that could pick up endangered commandos or retrieve downed aircraft crews. Such CSAR units would have to be deployed to nearby countries, “or even land in the Iraqi desert,” this senior officer said. This CSAR component complicates what might otherwise be a straightforward operation, as it involves other vulnerabilities—an “escalatory ladder” that Israel may not want to climb.
Skeptics of this option include Admiral Inman. “The Israelis could get to Entebbe,” he said, “but they can’t get to Iran. My sense is that the fact that the Israelis are even thinking about this operation shows that they realize that their first, bombing option won’t work. They’re desperately grasping for a military solution, and they know they don’t have one.”
But Colonel Gardiner believes this Entebbe-style operation is possible. “It’s a non-escalatory option, it’s entirely doable, and it’s not as dangerous as it seems,” he said. “We have to understand what Israel’s goal is in any attack on Iran. The whole point for Israel is to show that they can project power anywhere in the region. So let’s take a look at this from their perspective. There aren’t three divisions near Fordow, there’s one, and it’s dug in. It wouldn’t take the Iranians three hours to respond, it would take them three days. This reminds me of Osirak [the Iraqi nuclear reactor that Israel destroyed in a 1981 airstrike]. The last ones who wanted to admit that the Israelis did that were the Iraqis. That’ll be the case here. The Iranians will be embarrassed. It has appeal. It makes sense. If it’s simple, if it’s done fast, if it’s in and out. It could work.”
A third operation is less exotic, but perhaps most dangerous of all: regime decapitation. “The Israelis could just take out the Iranian leadership,” the senior Pentagon war planner said. “But they would only do that as a part of an air strike or a commando raid.” The downside of a decapitation strike is that it would not end Iran’s nuclear program; the upside is that it would almost certainly trigger an Iranian response targeting U.S. military assets in the region, as it would leave the Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces in charge of the country. It would be the one sure way, U.S. officers with whom I spoke believe, for Israel to get the United States involved in its anti-Iran offensive, with the U.S. mounting operations in a conflict it didn’t start.
How would the U.S. military respond to an Iranian attack? “It depends,” the Pentagon planner said. “If the Iranians harass us, we can deal with it, but if they go after one of our capital ships, then all bets are off.” Even so, a U.S. response would not involve a full-scale, costly land war against the Tehran regime, but rather a long-term air interdiction campaign to erode Iranian military capabilities, including its nuclear program, the planner said.
But a decapitation campaign would deepen the rift between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government. The war talk in Jerusalem has already eroded the views of many senior U.S. military officers who were once strongly committed to Israel, but who now quietly resent Netanyahu’s attempt to pressure the United States into a war that it doesn’t want. “Our commitment to Israel has been as solid as with any ally we’ve ever had, and a lot of officers are proud of that,” Lt. General Robert Gard, a retired Army officer, said. “But we’ve done it so that they can defend themselves. Not so they can start World War III.”
This U.S. distaste for involvement in an Israeli strike has been percolating for some time. In March, the New York Times detailed a Centcom war game dubbed “Internal Look,” in which the United States was “pulled into” a regional conflict in the wake of an Israeli attack. The results “were particularly troubling” to Gen. James Mattis, the Centcom commander. Among its other conclusions, “Internal Look” found that Iranian retaliation against U.S. military assets could result in “hundreds of U.S. deaths,” probably as the result of an Iranian missile attack on a U.S. naval vessel. The simulation, as well as Iranian threats to close the Straits of Hormuz, suggest why Mattis requested that the White House approve the deployment of a third aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf.
But while Mattis was worried about the Iranians, he was also worried about Israel, whose saber-rattling he views with discomfort, his closest colleagues say. “Internal Look” not only showed that the results of an Israeli attack were unpredictable, as the Times reported, but, according to a Pentagon official, it also showed that the less warning the United States has of an Israeli attack, the greater the number of casualties the United States will suffer. “The more warning we have, the fewer American lives we’ll lose,” a Pentagon civilian familiar with U.S. thinking on the issue told me. “The less warning, the more deaths.”
According to another senior Pentagon official, Obama and Gen. Martin Dempsey “have discussed in detail” the likelihood of an Israeli attack. As early as the autumn of 2011, when Dempsey became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Obama told him that the United States would “neither help nor hinder” an Israeli strike, this official said. While Obama’s closely guarded formulation hasn’t made it into the American press, his words are common knowledge among Israeli officials and had appeared just six months after Obama took office, in July 2009, in a prominent editorial in the pro-Netanyahu daily Israel Hayom.
Obama, the editorial stated, “will try to have a dialogue with Iran” while knowing that such an effort will probably not succeed. Obama “would prefer that there be no Israeli attack but is unprepared to accept responsibility for Israel’s security if he fails [in a diplomatic dialogue] and the U.S. prevents Israel from attacking,” the editorial added. “Thus it arises that while Israel has no green light to attack Iran, it does not have a red light either. The decision is Israel’s. The U.S. will neither help nor hinder.”
Nevertheless, the U.S. military fears that Iran will assume the United States has approved an Israeli strike, even if it hasn’t—and will target U.S. military assets in the Persian Gulf. That may be why Dempsey told a roundtable of London reporters in August that he did not want to appear “complicit” in an Israeli attack. The remark touched off speculation that the United States was softening its stance toward Tehran or pressuring Israel to back away from using military force. In fact, nothing had changed: Dempsey was explicitly telling Iran that any Israeli attack would not have the approval or the help of the United States. So while Israel waited for Obama to explain or correct Dempsey’s statement, no clarification was forthcoming. “Dempsey knew exactly what he was saying,” the highly placed military officer said, “and he wouldn’t have said it without White House approval.” After a moment, he added: “Everything the military says has to be cleared, and I mean everything.”
Those outside the U.S. government who follow these issues closely agree. “The administration’s message has been remarkably consistent,” U.S.-Iran expert and author Trita Parsi said. “We always hear about how America believes war is ‘the last resort,’ but in this case, President Obama really means it.”
Gard, the retired Army officer, agreed: “It’s clear to me that President Obama will do everything he can to stop Iran from getting a bomb,” he said. “But no president will allow another country to decide when to shed American blood. Not even Israel.” Gard has a reputation as a military intellectual, has led several initiatives of retired military officers on defense issues, and is a useful barometer of serving officers’ views on sensitive political controversies. “There is a general disdain in our military for the idea of a preventive war,” he said, “which is what the Israelis call their proposed war on Iran.”
George Little, the Pentagon spokesperson, provided this statement: “The United States is prepared to address the full range of contingencies related to potential security threats in the Middle East. But it’s flatly untrue—and pure speculation—to suggest that we have definitively ruled anything in or out for scenarios that have not taken place. Meanwhile, the United States and Israel are in complete agreement about the necessity of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
Still, according to a respected retired military officer who consults with the Pentagon—and who speaks regularly with senior Israeli military officers—Israel’s political elite is likely to be surprised by Obama and the U.S. military’s response should Israel launch a preventive attack on Iranian nuclear sites. “If Israel starts a war,” this retired officer said, “America’s first option will be to stop it. To call for a ceasefire. And, by the way, that’s also our second and third option. We’ll do everything we can to keep the war from escalating. We’ll have 72 hours to do that. After that, all bets are off.”
