June 2010
Almanar
On May 18, the Obama Administration introduced a draft into the UN Security Council to impose new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programs.
This was the US official answer to an agreement brokered by Brazil and Turkey on May 17 to revive last year’s arrangement for Iran to exchange much of its low-enriched uranium for fuel rods for its research reactor in Tehran.
With this decision, the US has shown its contempt not only to Iran, Brazil and Turkey but also to the whole world that has welcomed the Tehran Declaration and supports a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue.
Significantly, the agreement itself had been proposed by the US administration last october. It involved Russia and France, which would be the countries that would supply Iran with the fuel rods for the Tehran reactor. However, Iran asked for guarantees and recalled that France has a history of non-compliance of nuclear agreements with Iran. Moreover, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, have maintained the most hardline stance towards Iranian nuclear program. The West did want to offer Iran this reassurance.
Things changed with Turkey and Brazil, two South emerging powers, took a step and offered Iran these guarantees. Both countries have opposed US-sponsored santions against Iran and recognize Iran´s right to have a peaceful nuclear program and to enrich uranium, rights being included in the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of which Iran is a signatory member. Therefore, they were in a good position to act as intermediaries and they fulfilled that mission successfully.
Shortly after it knew this news from Tehran. the US Administration acted angrily and immediately to try to undermine the agreement. US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 18 that the agreement was “not acceptable to us and to our partners” and promised to proceed with “a strong sanctions resolution” that would send “an unmistakable message” to Iran. According to a statement by the US State Department, the US administration was not willing to hold talks with Iran unless this country agreed to a complete halt in uranium enrichment. That announcement was accompanied by the revelation that the objective of the original swap proposal last autumn was to get Iran to agree to eventually to suspend its enrichment program. The Obama administration had not previously declared publicly that it was demanding an end to all enrichment by Iran.
The draft resolution, obtained by The Associated Press, would ban Iran from pursuing “any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons," freeze assets of nuclear-related companies linked to the Revolutionary Guard, bar Iranian investment in activities such as uranium mining, and prohibit Iran from buying several categories of heavy weapons including attack helicopters and missiles. It would also call on all countries to cooperate in cargo inspections -which must receive the consent of the ship's flag state- if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe these activities could contribute to Iranian nuclear activities.”
On the financial side, the draft calls on -but does not require- countries to block financial transactions, including insurance and reinsurance, and ban the licensing of Iranian banks if they have information that provides “reasonable grounds” to believe these activities could contribute to Iranian nuclear activities.
Therefore, everybody now knows that from the beginning, the Obama administration’s offer of talks with Iran was only a ploy designed to gain the support of the other major powers, particularly Russia and China, for greater pressure and harsher sanctions against Iran. The proposed nuclear exchange was only ever a temporary measure to remove most of Iran´s stockpile of low-enriched uranium.
Brazil and Turkey reacted angrily to what was an obvious slap in their face. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been to the Iranian capital for the official signing and both countries knew that they had showed that they can play greater roles in the international sphere and that the South can solve its own problem without the interference of declining Western powers that have controlled the world up to now.
The head of the Turkish parliament´s foreign relations committee, Murat Mercan, predicted that the UN sanctions resolution would not be voted on. A vote would “create tensions” and would be “dangerous,” he said. Marco Aurelio Garcia, a special adviser to the Brazilian president, declared that sanctions would be “totally ineffective”. As a protest, Brazil did not take part in UN Security Council discussions on May 18 on the new sanctions.
US dishonesty
There is now compelling evidence that US President Barack Obama has showed dishonesty in his policy towards Iran. Shortly after he took over his post, he appointed an anti-Iranian Zionist, Dennis Ross, as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the “Central Region”, which includes the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia in the National Security Council. From his post, he was in charge of leading US efforts to promote some type of engagement with Iran. However, Ross failed. Later, he founded, with another Democratic Jew, Richard Holbrooke, “United Against Nuclear Iran”, which has been pushing for sanctions in the Congress against companies having commercial links with Tehran.
Another clear evidence of dishonesty comes is a letter from President Obama to his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva dated April 20, 2010. (The full text of the letter is available at http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/10195)
“In the letter, Washington supported mediation by Brazil and Turkey when it did not expect them to succeed and turned its back when they accomplished exactly what the Obama administration said it sought from Iran", wrote campaigniran.org.
In the letter, the White House strongly encouraged the intermediaries to negotiate with Iran for a single purpose, namely to persuade the Islamic Republic to send 1200 kg of its low enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor, added campaigniran.org. Brazil's respected daily O Estado de S. Paulo also quoted Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as revealing that he, too, had received a (presumably similar) letter from Obama.
As the website reports, this initial US stance completely contradicted Washington's hostile response three weeks later to the Tehran Declaration, in which Iran agreed to precisely such an exchange. On May 18, a day after the declaration was issued, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton dismissed the Brazil-Iran-Turkey offer and announced instead a draft UN Security Council resolution to impose a new round of sanctions on Iran.
US hostility to the Tehran Declaration contradicts also what Washington insisted it wanted last October, when the White House supported a UN-sponsored nuclear fuel swap that was essentially identical to what Iran is now offering. Even if one disregards that background, the main point in the May 17 Tehran Declaration is precisely what Obama had asked for in his letter as a satisfactory step forward for Iran to prove its goodwill.
To quote from Obama's letter, “For us, Iran's agreement to transfer 1,200 kg of Iran's low enriched uranium (LEU) out of the country would build confidence and reduce regional tensions by substantially reducing Iran's LEU stockpile. I want to underscore that this element is of fundamental importance for the United States. For Iran, it would receive the nuclear fuel requested to ensure continued operation of the TRR to produce needed medical isotopes and, by using its own material, Iran would begin to demonstrate peaceful nuclear intent.”
The contradiction between President Obama's letter to President Lula and the US response to the Brazil-Iran-Turkey offer is the latest evidence that the US does not intend to negotiate with Iran in good faith and has hidden motives.
One motive is mentioned by the website campaigniran.org. “Washington grew visibly nervous as signs emerged that Brazil and Turkey might achieve peacefully what threats and sanctions from major powers had not accomplished in Iran", added the website.”
However, there is a second and more powerful reason: the pressure by Israel and US Zionist organizations. As they did previously before the Iraq war, these Zionist circles want to pass crippling sanctions and then to launch a war against Iran.
Recently, for example, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said that Iran might “soon gain a nuclear weapon” and said that “the world cannot afford to wait too long.” He warned that if the international community waits too long, Iran could acquire a nuclear weapon that would “change the landscape” of the entire world, not just of the Middle East. Israeli leaders who visit the US always pressure the American Administration to take a bellicose stance towards Iran.
The Obama administration and US Congress also under pressure from the Zionist-controlled organizations and think tanks, which have encouraged the US government to take much tougher action, including a ban on the sale of gasoline and diesel to Iran. They spread outright lies about Iran’s nuclear program, plant anti-Iran articles in the mainstream media and pressure the Congress to pass tough resolutions for sanctions against Iran.
Powerful pro-Israel US lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee also pressed (AIPAC) in a rare letter to every member of the US Congress, called for “crippling new sanctions on Iran.” The Zionist group´s letter claimed that “Iran has pursued a nuclear weapons capability, flouting its international obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and presenting the international community with a growing, and now urgent, threat.” “As Iran continues to reject US-European engagement efforts and to defy UN Security Council resolutions requiring that it halt its illicit uranium enrichment efforts, the United States must take action now,” it said.
The letter is a compendium of flagrant lies and falsehoods that Zionist media spreads about the Iranian nuclear program. Firstly, US intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have claimed that there is no evidence showing that the Iranian nuclear program has military goals. In 2007, the US intelligence community released a National Intelligence Estimate that suggested that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
Secondly, Iran has violated none of its obligations under de TNP. The Treaty gives Iran, like the rest of signatory countries, the right to enrich uranium. Therefore, it is the US who is violating the international law by trying to force Iran to renounce a legitimate right under pressure. Iran's Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency Ali Asghar Soltanieh said the UNSC demands for a suspension of enrichment have no legal backing. “Nowhere in the IAEA statute and the inspection systems of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is there a clause for the suspension of nuclear programs. In spite of this, Western countries have used this concept exclusively for Iran,” Soltanieh told the Beirut-based An-Nahar daily.
Thirdly, it is Israel, and not Iran, who is violating dozens of UN resolutions which force it to withdraw from the Palestinian and Arab lands that has been occupying since 1967, including East Jerusalem. A Zionist organization demanding respect for UN resolutions is just a bad joke.
Knowing that China and Russia won´t allow the UN Security Council to pass crippling sanctions damaging their important interests in Iran, the AIPAC also calls on the US to pass more unilateral sanctions. “In addition to these actions, we hope you will join with us in urging the administration to impose tough new multilateral sanctions with like-minded states without delay while continuing to pursue the widest possible sanctions through the UN Security Council,” the letter said.
This campaign is being supported by Zionist-controlled media in the US. The neocon Wall Street Journal recently published an article by former Senators Charles Robb and Daniel Coats and retired four-star Air Force General Chuck Wald claimimg that Iran “will be able to manufacture enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 2010”. The authors urged Obama “to begin preparations for the use of military options” against Iran. A Wall Street Journal editorial painting the tripartite agreement in Tehran as a “debacle” for US President Barack Obama's diplomacy.
Other corporate media outlets followed the same tone. The New York Times -a newspaper which repeated all US official lies that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq- criticized Lula for his mission in Iran (“Iran Deal Seen as Spot on Brazilian Leader's Legacy”). The newspaper promptly claimed the deal reached by Iran, Turkey and Brazil was “complicating the sanctions talk”. For its part, The Washington Post published an analysis with the headline, “Iran creates illusion of progress in nuclear negotiations.”
This media repeated the usual anti-Iran propaganda with the same arrogance that they once showed in declaring that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. After the US invaded Iraq and found no WMD caches, the Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt acknowledged that if there indeed were no WMD, “it would have been better not to say it.” No word about hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of US soldiers who lost their lives because of those lies. The articles by the Washington Post and the New York Times have also left out the relevant fact that Israel, which has been aggressively pushing for sanctions from Iran over its suspected interest in nukes, is the only country in the Middle East having nuclear weapons and refuses to sign the NPT.
Bill Kristol, a neocon working in Fox News and is editor of The Weekly Standard, a leading neocon magazine, said that it would be better for the US to attack Iran before Israel. “I think we have to have a credible threat of force and the preparation to use force against Iran,” Kristol told Fox News' Chris Wallace. Israel and its neocon agents in the US want to push the United States into a war against Iran because they know that Israel, despite all its threats, is incapable of attacking Iranian military facilities successfully.
A recent article by Israeli analyst Yossi Melman in Haaretz quoted Brigadier General Relik Shafir, who until recently occupied the third-most important post in the Israeli Air Force hierarchy, as saying: “The Iranians have learned the lessons from the attack on the Iraqi reactor (by Israel in 1981),” Shafir said. “In Iraq, the entire nuclear program was concentrated in the reactor. The Iranians on the other hand have built a number of nuclear facilities in different areas around the country. Some of them are located in eastern Iran. They have “hardened” their facilities by building them underground or by placing them in bunkers. In all honesty, the IAF lacks a real strategic capability to bomb distant targets over a prolonged period of time while using the necessary level of firepower.” That is, Israel lacks a real capacity to attack Iran. Even worse, an Israeli attack on Iran would lead to massive attacks with missiles on Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities and military and economic centers. That would mean a severe blow to Israeli economy. For these extremists, the desirable solution would be to push the US into a huge disastrous conflict against Iran and the Muslim masses of the world who support the Islamic Republic.
Recently, the New York Times published a report that said the US military high command in the Middle East was expanding clandestine activities to prepare the ground for "possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate”, as laid out in a “secret” directive by the chief of America's Central Command, General David Petraeus. This another proof that the US Administration wants to provoke another catastrophic conflict in the Middle East. However, there are evidences that the real international community appears to be determined to stop US aggressors this time.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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