Mohammad Khatami, who would get the credit for the breakthrough. ), why the unexplained ties to Iran’s military and missile programs, etc. The biggest challenge to the legitimacy of the Indian vote in September 2005 was the official Explanation of Vote provided by the Indian ambassador to the IAEA. Both Russian and Chinese oil companies had enormous development and supply contracts with Baghdad under Saddam Hussein, deals that are worthless in an Iraq controlled by the United States. Written by Alessandria Masi. Surely this reduces the gravity of the issue. Indeed, prominent Iranian dissidents have rejected U.S. assistance, and have argued that the U.S. policy of confrontation hurts the democracy movement in Iran. … Meanwhile, U.S. relations with both China and Russia are edging toward outright hostility. Under the Shah, Israel enjoyed a good relationship with Iran. Tehran is rated as one of the world's most polluted cities. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. Press US policy in the Middle East is faltering, with Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns currently appearing to go out of control. He further noted that. If the IAEA’s inability to make such a declaration were to become grounds for reporting a country to the Security Council and threatening it with sanctions, Varadarajan also adds, no less than 106 countries—as emphasized by the European Union last year—would have to be put in the dock because they have either not signed or not yet ratified or implemented the Additional Protocol. The Washington Post reported that the IAEA sent the panel a letter decrying its recent report on Iran as “outrageous and dishonest” and that it contained at least five major errors. “Iran.” Global Issues. Parry notes that at that time Israel, although detesting Iran, thought that being a non-Arab country might be a potential ally. Well, he was really stating the obvious … at a time when he believed the Indian debate had moved on. However, one autocratic regime was replaced by another. The key thing in Iraq is that the very measures the US is taking to make it possible to “redeploy” (a euphemism for inglorious departure) serve to reinforce Tehran’s power: elections, which confirm the pro-Iranian Shi’a parties in power, and “institution-building” whereby Iran’s influence in the armed forces, policy, intelligence and administration is strengthened. What may be of surprise to many readers is that not only is Ahmadinejad’s view a distraction, but the real leadership of Iran actually offered peace talks with Israel back in 2003. Privately, these officials, who deal with Iran, were skeptical about the current US approach but said their government was unable to resist Washington’s pressure. - Voice of America. Why didn’t the Bush administration embrace this [peace offer]? Yet, recognizing the new geopolitical realities and because Ahmadinejad is not the real source of power in Iran, as discussed further below, the ruling clergy had actually offered peace and normalized relations with Israel and to put pressure on Hezbollah to become a fully political unit, which the US refused. After Iran’s revolution, the clergy emerged as major political players, changing their role as well a central tenet of the “quietist” Shiite faith. Under pressure from the US, in September 2005, the UN nuclear body responsible for monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found Iran to be non-compliant in its NPT obligations and most member states voted to threaten Iran with referral to the UN Security Council in November. Having “lost” their prime jewel, India, a few years earlier, their world status was unofficially reduced and no longer were they the great empire. The Middle East Policy Council is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to contribute to American understanding of the political, economic and cultural issues … President Ronald Reagan, who won the White House in 1980, wasn’t able to maintain the political momentum for his Republican colleagues, and the GOP was swept from the majority in both the Senate and House of Representativesin the 1982 mid-term elections. That there has been no diversion of declared nuclear material for prohibited purposes. Instead, the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah, does. do they have something to hide? Points of contention have included control over Iran’s oil reserves, US political interference in Tehran, Iran’s desire for nuclear power and both countries’ growing influence in … Both concerns have figured prominently in the latest round of protests. Where possible, alternative links are provided to backups or reposted versions here. The media, together with the Bush Administration repeatedly point to Ahmadinejad’s outrageous statements as proof that Iran is an out of control state, but always fail to mention that he holds no power or influence on such decisions. Call it zero-sum geopolitics: Their loss is our gain. However, as early as May 2003, the same Washington Post article also noted that. (This was at the same time a CIA report found no evidence of a secret nuclear weapons program, as mentioned earlier.). Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter, ‘Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran’, The Sunday Times, January 7, 2007, Josh Meyer, 'Illegal Nuclear Deals Alleged', Los Angeles Times, March 26, 2005, Siddharth Varadarajan, ‘India, Iran and the nuclear challenge’, The Hindu, January 16, 2006, Siddharth Varadarajan, ‘When bullying is not enough, try disinformation’, The Hindu, November 21, 2005, Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter, ‘Israel Plans for War With Iran and Syria’, Sunday Times, September 3, 2006, Gareth Porter, 'U.S. First published in 2010 and updated in 2015, the unprecedented project acts as a comprehensive guide to Iran’s politics, economy, military, foreign policy, and nuclear program. Following his election as IAEA chief, a US cable reported on a meeting with him: This meeting, Amano’s first bilateral review since his election, illustrates the very high degree of convergence between his priorities and our own agenda at the IAEA. Washington reimposed sanctions as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign to change Tehran’s behavior. But there was another reason—he was trying to tell the Indian audience that the U.S. would make further demands on India. However, ironically perhaps, it was the US that gave Iran the nuclear know-how in the 1960s and 1970s when the Shah dictator was installed by the CIA, and was seen as an ally for the US in the region (until the Shah was overthrown by an Islamic Revolution, when the USA supported Saddam Hussein against Iran). Any intelligence that suggested there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was dismissed out of hand, as was this CIA Assessment. The United States has blocked enforcement of a previous UN Security Council resolution calling on Israel to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA trusteeship. (ElBaradei position as Director General for the IAEA ended on November 30, 2009, after some 12 years heading the nuclear watchdog. Unfortunately, as noted earlier, US policies did not help either. Iran, with Russian assistance, has been developing a nuclear program. That being said, the British media, for example, has not really pressured the government to provide more information as to why it is so certain that the troops were in Iraqi waters, and not Iranian. (One can see how some wars since have reflected these “sides”. For Iraqi leaders, the Soleimani strike exacerbated an already challenging balancing act in maintaining Baghdad’s relationships with the United States and Iran, with whom it shares a long border and religious and social ties. Iran said it would not back down from its decision to scale back some of its commitments under 2015 nuclear deal with major powers, state TV quoted Iran… And they have been hearing about the threat of attacks over the past four or five years.…. However, as Varadarajan argues. It would be hard to know for sure, because under international law, Iran has the right to pursue nuclear enrichment for peaceful purposes, such as nuclear energy. It is not clear therefore, if “democracy” is being used as a euphemism for continued authoritarian rule, but this time, favored by the US, as was the case with Pahlavi’s father. The US and the Reagan regime supported Iraq and then ruler, Saddam Hussein, because Iran’s Islamic Revolution had seen their favored “puppet regime” in Iran overthrown. While he supported women’s rights, extending suffrage to them, he also supported royalists in Yemen’s civil war. If you read the Iranian constitution, you’ll see that the president of Iran is almost a figurehead. Why would Iran do this if it can’t get anything in return? By the end of Operation Ajax, some 300 people had died in firefights in the streets of Tehran. As award-winning Indian journalist, Siddharth Varadarajan, has written in the Indian daily, The Hindu (where he is deputy editor), there was a lot of spin and diplomatic manipulation behind the scenes to get the vote against Iran. In the past it has bombed an Iraqi facility suspected of being part of a nuclear weapons program. Israel has also considered using tactical nuclear weapons to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Sunday Times reveals. The day Ahmadinejad proclaimed that Israel will one day be wiped off the map, shortly after he was sworn in as President of Iran, journalist Lindsey Hilsum, for the British mainstream outlet, Channel 4 News, noted that Ahmadinejad holds no power; it is the mullahs that call the shots, and he may have said all this just to show to them that he is a hardliner, and that it should not be taken seriously, for others have said it in the past. It is because of this increasing influence, and the fear of extending this to the wider region—afforded by the possibility of nuclear weapons—that US fears Iran. Smith and the Institute for Economic Democracy. For example, he openly said the US wanted India to join its unilateral sanctions against Iran in the likely event that Russia and China did not back tough UN sanctions. Indeed, the very focus on a Sunni insurgent-US confrontation—a real enough war—tends to overlay something that is much more important and long-term: the rivalry across “west Asia” (the entire region from Afghanistan to Lebanon) between Iran and the United States. Stephen Zunes, in the same above-mentioned article also notes the US’s role in helping Iran in the past: Lost in Bush’s current obsession with Iran’s nuclear intentions is the fact that the United States—from the Eisenhower administration through the Carter years—played a major role in the development of Iran’s nuclear program. It is the first language for Persians, and ethnic minorities use it as a second language. There is one area where critics of Iran’s nuclear program have a point: their lack of cooperation with the IAEA. Furthermore, an Iranian-Jewish described as an active hawk says that “support for Pahlavi among Iranian Americans may have less to do with deep pro-monarchist feelings than with his status as the most recognizable opposition figure among immigrants.”, Pahlavi has, according to Perelman, “expressed support for democracy while calling for a referendum restoring the monarchy.”. Unfortunately, this certainly seems to have been the case, as hardliners in Iran have responded to US aggressive policy by getting rid of the reformist president, Khatami, in favor of the hardliner, Ahmadinejad. Varadarajan was asked in an interview why he thought Rademaker was so boastful about this coercion, to which the editor responded. But the Indian ambassador began his explanation by noting: The Indian delegation has studied the draft resolution tabled by the EU-3 yesterday.