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Iran's Manhattan Project Nearing Completion?
Disturbing developments in Iran, where president Ahmadinejad has purged reformers from his government, including the ambassadors who have been negotiating with Europe over Irans nuclear scheming: Iran sacks diplomats in purge of reformers. (Hat tip: rantwraith.)
THE President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has ordered an unprecedented purge of senior ambassadors who are regarded as too liberal for the policies of his administration, The Times can disclose.
At least 20 heads of mission and other top diplomats have been sacked or reassigned in the biggest shake-up since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The majority were appointed during the decade of rapprochement with the West that Mr Ahmadinejad has abruptly reversed.
Four of the envoys, the ambassadors to London, Paris, Berlin and the representative to the United Nations in Geneva, were involved in months of delicate mediation between Iran and Europe over Tehrans nuclear programme.
This news of a purge comes as Iran prepares to process more uranium.
BERLIN (Reuters) - Iran will process a new batch of uranium at its Isfahan nuclear plant beginning next week, despite pressure from the United States and European Union to halt all sensitive nuclear work, diplomats said on Wednesday.
Beginning next week, the Iranians will start a new phase of uranium conversion at Isfahan. They will begin feeding a new batch of uranium into the plant, a European diplomat familiar with the result of inspections by the U.N. nuclear watchdog told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
8:15 AM PST
ThomasPaine said:Khomeni's agenda even further. Ongoing evidence that the United States should seriously consider a military strike against any known Iranian nuclear facilities involved with enrichment of uranium. We owe a major ass-kicking to our former friends and I say it's time to deliver. Me thinks if we balk too long the Israelis will do it themselves for national survival. Iran has made it clear to anyone with a functioning mind (note this, of course, excludes most of Europe and the American left) that they intend to nuke Israel as soon as technologically possible.
dilloduck said:And the problem with Israel defending itself is ?
Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Nov. 05 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed on Friday to support Syria against hostile threats.
Holding a telephone conversation with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, Ahmadinejad said that the two states had to come together in the face of the common enemy, a reference to the United States.
Ahmadinejad promised the Syrian leader aid and support against foreign threats, the state-run news agency ILNA reported.
He also called for further dialogue among Muslim states.
Al-Assad said that despite international pressure Damascus would not abandon its rights.
Both leaders called for further strengthening of bilateral relations.
Iran Focus
London, Nov. 05 The decision by Irans hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to nominate a brigadier general of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) with virtually no experience in the oil and financial sectors as the countrys new Oil Minister will give the IRGC unlimited access to an unrivalled source of revenues, boosting its already significant clout.
Like President Ahmadinejad, the 46-year-old Oil Minister-designate, Seyed Sadegh Mahsouli, has spent much of his career in the Islamic Republics military and security apparatus. He was for some time the chief of staff of Mohsen Rezai, when the latter was the Commandant of the IRGC.
In a government where many senior officials are in-laws, Mahsouli is the brother-in-law of Ali-Akbar Velayati, the former Foreign Minister who is now the chief foreign policy advisor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In the 1980s, Mahsouli commanded the IRGCs Fifth Military District, which covered Irans densely-populated northwest, and the strategically-located provinces of East and West Azerbaijan. Under his command, the Revolutionary Guards put down many anti-government protests in the two provinces, which have a history of strong political activism.
Mahsouli was for some time the commander of the IRGCs Sixth Special Division, an elite force whose units were ferried to trouble spots to deal with unrest and anti-government protests.
He has also served as a Deputy Defence Minister for military planning.
The hard-line-dominated Majlis is widely expected to approve Mahsouli, a close ally of President Ahmadinejad, who was himself a senior commander in the IRGC. The elite military force is loyal and answerable only to the Islamic Republics Supreme Leader.
Despite his impeccable revolutionary credentials, Mahsoulis experience in the oil sector is virtually non-existent.
This appointment is about one thing, and nothing else, Morteza Amjadi, an Iranian financial expert based in the Persian Gulf city of Dubai, said in a telephone interview. The Revolutionary Guards are taking control of the Oil Ministry and the so-called Oil Mafia. Its another bad news for Rafsanjani.
Amjadi was referring to Irans former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose sons, close relatives, and political protégés have been in control of the Oil Ministry and the shadowy network of privately-owned companies working in Irans petroleum sector. Iranians widely refer to the network as the Oil Mafia.
Simon Bailey of the London-based Gulf Intelligence Monitor agreed.
With Khameneis blessing, the IRGC has been aggressively increasing its political and economic clout in Iran since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June, Bailey said. The Supreme National Security Council, the cabinet, the IRIB [Irans state-run broadcasting corporation] and many other key institutions are now dominated by the Revolutionary Guards.
The IRGC has been extending its economic empire for some time, as the dispute over the Turkcell contract showed, Bailey said, referring to the IRGCs successful fight with the Ministry of Telecommunications that eventually led to the ousting of the Turkish company from Irans mobile telephone market.
If the Guards come to dominate the Oil Ministry, this will have potentially significant consequences. There are billions of dollars at stake, the Dubai-based Amjadi said.
Ahmadinejad had vowed prior to the elections earlier this year that, when in power, he would clean up the Oil Mafia in Iran. He left little doubt that he was targeting Rafsanjanis control of the oil sector.
Iran ranks second in oil production among the OPEC states, accounting for some 80 percent of the countrys export revenues.
Iran president's moves trigger fears of isolation
Militant conduct: Ahmadinejad's actions depart from the pragmatism displayed by leaders in recent years
By Karl Vick
The Washington Post
Salt Lake Tribune
ISTANBUL - Having ignited two diplomatic confrontations in as many months, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is raising concern that he intends to steer Iran back to the isolation of the early 1980s, a period of radical absolutes that he frequently invokes as an ideal.
Such a course would reverse more than a decade of gradual engagement with the West by Iran's theocratic government. In addition, diplomats and analysts say, it would greatly complicate efforts to ease concern about the country's nuclear program through negotiations.
The diplomatic firestorm sparked by Ahmadinejad's repeated statements last week that ''Israel should be wiped off the map'' further damaged a negotiating position that he had already undermined, according to analysts. Shortly after Ahmadinejad hinted in a strident Sept. 17 speech to the United Nations that the United States was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the International Atomic Energy Agency voted to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council.
''In Iran as everywhere else in the world, radicalism seeks isolation in diplomacy,'' said Saeed Laylaz, an economist and commentator in Tehran. Ahmadinejad ''seems to be trying to push the country this way,'' Laylaz said. ''He twice mentioned Israel should be wiped off the map - twice - and he knows that 20 days later we have to face the IAEA. It's not good for the country.''
In the newly tense atmosphere, when Ahmadinejad's government announced Wednesday that it was replacing 40 ambassadors and diplomats, foreign journalists treated the development more as a sign of belligerence than as the routine prerogative of a new administration.
On the same day, Iran's Foreign Ministry, which last weekend issued assurances that the country had no intention of attacking Israel, recalled its ambassador to Rome after reports that Italian officials would join a public protest outside the Iranian Embassy.
Yet Iran also agreed to allow IAEA inspectors back into a high-security military site. A European diplomat said such quiet cooperation appears intended to keep alive the possibility of resuming negotiations suspended after Iran resumed preparations to enrich uranium, despite an agreement with three European powers.
Such overtures, however, have been overwhelmed by Ahmadinejad's confrontational rhetoric, which unsettles nations that might otherwise be inclined to support Iran on the IAEA board. The board is made up of nations that have signed the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
''He's made it far easier for those who want the hard line to push for it,'' said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ahmadinejad's rhetoric echoes the strident sloganeering that has long dominated the hard-line wing of Iranian politics from which he emerged in June, when he was elected to the office he actually assumed in August.
It stands in stark contrast to the subtlety and pragmatism displayed by a wide spectrum of Iranian officials in the past 16 years, as the government moved increasingly toward engaging the rest of the world.
''This affects everything they do,'' said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University. ''What are their chances with the WTO when the whole world's passing resolutions against them?'' Sick was a White House national security aide when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led the 1979 revolution that established the Islamic republic.
''Ahmadinejad now really represents a reversion back to the Khomeini days,'' Sick said. ''And that's a stunning, shocking surprise.''
Iran is but six months away from achieving technological independence in its quest to develop a nuclear bomb, Mossad Chief Meir Dagan told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee during his yearly briefing to the body Tuesday.
Though he refused to lay out a specific time line for when Iran could complete work on a nuclear weapon, Dagan appeared to accelerate the most recent prediction made by Israeli intelligence. On December 13, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz said Iran could begin enriching uranium by March 2006 but would not be able to develop a bomb until 2008.
The Islamic State has made a "strategic decision to reach nuclear independence," Dagan said, and once it reached that goal it would then be only a matter of "a few months" before it was able to finish building a nuclear bomb.
Dagan further warned that Iran would not be content with just one nuclear weapon. "If they continue undisturbed, and they succeed in developing fissile material, they won't be content in the amount needed for just one bomb, they will try to make more," the Mossad chief warned. "You don't need a lot of fissile material, you just need it to be enriched."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to "be wiped off the map."
Iran has already produced 40 tones of UF6, a compound used in the uranium enrichment process that produces fuel for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. That amount of UF6 could produce 40 kilograms of fissile material, Dagan said. Iran is also continuing to "build and enhance" centrifuges, which are part of its nuclear program.
Despite the mounting threat Iran's nuclear weapons program posses, Dagan implied there is still time for a peaceful solution to the dispute if the international community is willing to take action soon.
Economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council "would be very effective," Dagan said. Since Iran imported 40 percent of its refined fuel, and also relied heavily on imported spare parts for its vehicles, it was highly susceptible to coordinated and targeted sanctions from the international community, he said.
"The chances of this going to the Security Council are higher than they were in the past," he said.
The Mossad chief was careful in his presentation to the Knesset committee not to use the words "point of no return" in describing when, in his estimate, Iran would be able to complete its nuclear ambitions without any outside help. Rather, he used the phrase "technical independence". The difference could imply that even once Iran was able to make a nuclear weapon, it may still be persuaded not to by outside forces or agreements.
Dagan's briefing to the Knesset committee comes on the heels of a Saturday report by German newspaper Der Spiegel that the Mossad had marked six Iranian nuclear facilities the IAF would hit in a pre-emptive strike. Additionally, a Tuesday Ma'ariv report said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was coordinating intelligence on Iran with the United States.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday that Israel had modified American-made Harpoon cruise missiles in order to launch them from submarines as a means to further dissuade Iran from becoming a nuclear power itself.
Efforts by the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program have so far proven fruitless while a
recent offer from Russia to Iran to enrich uranium in Russia for a peaceful Iranian nuclear power program has gone unanswered.
Nevertheless, the United States and other countries have said they will give Iran until March to comply with international demands for it to halt its nuclear program before referring the Islamic State to the Security Council for possible sanctions.
In his briefing to the committee, Dagan also touched on the "global jihad" being waged by Muslim militants, saying that Israelis and Jews remain prime targets around the world.
The goal, he said, of the global jihad is to establish a "pan-Islamic entity" similar to the Caliphate which once spanned huge parts of Asia, Africa, and southern Europe. "They have independent infrastructures all over the world, there is no one central headquarters," Dagan said, describing the command structure of the global jihad.
Despite ideology which sometimes overlapped, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have, for the most part, remained outside the global jihad network due to their more focused goal of establishing a Palestinian state, Dagan said.
With assistance from Egypt and Jordan in the global war on terror, and the threat to Israel from Syria and Lebanon severely diminished,
Israel's main threat following Iran was now veterans of the Iraq War, Dagan said.
Foreign fighters who have undergone training and cut their teeth in Iraq were now returning home and "setting up their own infrastructures there," he said. "The absurd thing is that the more success the United States has in Iraq, the more dangerous it will be for Israel."
Despite reports to the contrary, Dagan also said there are "no signs at all" that there is a discernable movement to overthrow Bashar Assad in Syria. "There is unity around Assad, and he controls the old guard.
He has the last word on all matters," the Mossad chief said.
