Tag Archives: iranian

Russia, Iran Might Be Slightly Out of Sync on Syria

by BeauBlakeley Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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The latest on Syria:

A source close to the Russian delegation at the meeting told Asharq Al-Awsat there had been some disagreements between the Russian and Iranian delegations in Vienna regarding the fate of Assad.

“Russia is dealing with the question of the fate of the presidency in Syria from the point of view of the legitimacy of the regime. In that sense it is not insisting on particular people; it is more concerned that any transition in governance must follow international protocols and laws,” the source, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said.

“Iran, on the other hand, is very insistent on Assad himself . . . because it fears losing its influence in Syria if his regime is removed.”

Is this true? Does it matter? I don’t know. I do know that I probably don’t want the United States getting into the middle of this.

Also: if I were Assad, this might make me a wee bit nervous about my partner-in-arms, Vladimir Putin. I figure Putin is helping out Syria to (a) test his military in live combat, (b) give the United States a poke in the eye, and (c) keep things quiet along his southern border. None of those things really require Assad at the helm. If someone better comes along, that might be the end of a beautiful friendship.

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Russia, Iran Might Be Slightly Out of Sync on Syria

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Never Mind the Doubters: The Iran Deal Is Good Enough

by Shella17Xguiwno Posted on April 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to have Cheryl Rofer, who for 35 years worked as a chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. If you don’t follow her already, be sure to check out her writing on national security, women’s issues, science, and nuclear power and weapons at Nuclear Diner.

When I started blogging in November 2004, Kevin was already defining the field with short, topical posts and Friday Cat Blogging. The internet was a smaller place then, and most of us knew all the others, or at least knew of them. We argued. We linked to each other, hoping to boost our SEO. We shared each others’ successes and mourned when Inkblot disappeared. Kevin has been a good companion over the years. His broad coverage of topics and to-the-point style are touchstones, even as I stray into the wonkier corners of the news.

Recently, I’ve been writing a lot about the recent negotiations with Iran. A few days past a deadline that had nuclear wonks on the edge of their seats, the talks between Tehran and officials from six other nations brought forth a plan for a plan.

That’s not nothing, although it sounds vague. Some vagueness is necessary to keep all sides happy—and that means that any description of the deal will sound vague. The United States and its partners in the P5+1 would like a neatly written-down to-do list (which they have sorta provided), and Iran’s Supreme Leader has decreed that all must be written down just once—exactly when isn’t yet clear. The results of negotiations must be spun by the sides to their very different bases.

In America, two consensuses are building. Most in the arms control community and a wide swath of foreign policy experts, including some conservatives, feel that the deal as described in that fact sheet is better than expected and should keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for the next decade or more. Not bad.

The more hawkish consensus ranges from bombing Iran now to leaving the talks in hopes of a better deal, which amounts to bombing Iran later. Why not, when you’re confident it would take only a few days of air strikes? They say the deal is no good because it does not guarantee Iranian compliance for perpetuity and does not totally destroy Iran’s enrichment and other nuclear capabilities. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is apoplectic, but what else is new?

The same hawks also assured us back in 2003 that the invasion of Iraq would be a cakewalk. Their arguments this time around are just as boneheaded. According to the fact sheet, Iran would enter into agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; that would be, as much in perpetuity as any international deal can be. Under that treaty, Iran is entitled to peaceful nuclear energy, and, like any other country with smart scientists, can figure out how to make nuclear weapons. Bombs can’t change that.

The final deal remains to be negotiated. The fact sheet is only an outline, and some issues will be easier to solve than others. Still to be worked out: Sanctions, particularly the schedule on which they are to be lifted. A list of research and development activities that Iran is allowed to pursue may or may not have been drawn up in Lausanne. Details on how Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile will be reduced and the redesign of the Arak reactor are missing.

The extent of Iran’s past activity on nuclear weapons was relegated to the IAEA by the P5+1 throughout the negotiations, and is a lesser provision in the fact sheet. Do we have to know all Iran’s dirty secrets to police a future agreement? Probably not.

The Supreme Leader issued a tweet stream that seems to give his blessing for a deal to go forward, but his words were unclear enough that domestic hardliners could seize on them in an attempt to scuttle the deal. Iran’s President Rouhani has voiced his support. In Israel, even the general who bombed the Osirak reactor thinks it’s a good deal.

Stateside, President Obama is doing what he can to move the agreement along, talking to Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the author of the bill most likely to throw a wrench in the machinery. Democrats who once supported that bill are now reconsidering that stance. The President has given major interviews to Tom Friedman and NPR. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, who was part of the negotiations, is talking to the press.

Yes, if the sanctions are lifted, Iran might be able to make other sorts of trouble in the Middle East. But it’s doing that anyway. We won’t know for some time whether an agreement can mellow Iran by opening it to the world and better economic conditions.

If an agreement can be negotiated to completion, Iran can’t get the bomb for a decade or more. That’s enough for now.

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Never Mind the Doubters: The Iran Deal Is Good Enough

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The Iranian Nuclear Deal: What the Experts Are Saying

by PreciouKKNV Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Shortly after the participants in the Iranian nuclear talks announced that a double-overtime framework had been crafted, I was on television with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who is something of a celebrity rabbi, a failed congressional candidate, and an arch-neoconservative hawk who has been howling about a potential deal with Iran for months. Not surprisingly, he was not pleased by the news of the day. He declared that under these parameters, Iran would give up nothing and would “maintain their entire nuclear apparatus.” Elsewhere, a more serious critic, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who last month had organized the letter to Iran’s leaders signed by 47 GOP senators opposed to a deal, groused that the framework was “only a list of dangerous US concessions that will put Iran on the path to nuclear weapons.”

These criticisms were rhetorical bombs, not statements of fact. Under the framework, Iran would give up two-thirds of its centrifuges used to enrich uranium and would reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (which is the raw material used to develop bomb-quality highly-enriched uranium) from 10,000 kilograms to 300 kilograms. These two developments alone—and the framework has many other provisions—would diminish Tehran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon. Its nuclear apparatus would be smaller, and under these guidelines, Iran’s pathway to nuclear weapons, while certainly not impossible, would be much more difficult. Yet because politics dominates the debate over this deal—as it does so often with important policy matters—foes of the framework could hurl fact-free charges with impunity.

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The Iranian Nuclear Deal: What the Experts Are Saying

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The US Has No Clean Battle Lines in the Middle East

by DelorasMueller Posted on March 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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From The Corner:

The United States is sending mixed signals to its allies in the Middle East by simultaneously giving support to the Saudi-led Sunni coalition fighting in Yemen and negotiating with Shiite Iran on its nuclear program, according to NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel.

Engel pinpoints an apparent contradiction: Even as the U.S. is assisting Saudi Arabia and other nations in “confronting the Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen” by providing intelligence and other support, it continues to negotiate with Tehran on its nuclear program, and to collaborate with Iranian forces in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq.

As a result, Engel says, “the Saudis, and the larger Sunni Muslim world, doesn’t sic feel the U.S. can really be trusted.”

Gee, no kidding. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni ally of the US that hates Iran. Iraq is a Shiite ally who’s cozy with Iran. The US itself is hostile toward Iran, but shares a common enemy in ISIS. Syria is a total mess with no clear good guys. And, yes, a good nuclear deal with Iran would be a bonus for the safety of the entire region.

That’s it. That’s the way the world is. The United States is not allied solely with Shiite or Sunni regimes and hasn’t been since at least 9/11. It’s confusing. It’s messy. And maybe President Obama hasn’t handled it as skillfully as he could have. But who could have done any better? There just aren’t any clean battle lines here, and the sooner everyone faces up to that, the better off we’ll be.

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The US Has No Clean Battle Lines in the Middle East

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Iran Says Interim Nuclear Talks Have Been Completed

by ggkk2121333 Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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One day after Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that the current round of nuclear negotiations “showed the enmity of America against Iran, Iranians, Islam and Muslims,” relations seem to have improved dramatically:

Iran said Friday that talks in Geneva with the group of six world powers had resolved all outstanding issues on how to carry out an agreement reached in November that would temporarily halt some of Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief.

A report on Iranian state television quoted Abbas Araghchi, the deputy foreign minister….saying that “we found solutions for all the points of disagreements, but the implementation of the Geneva agreement depends on the final ratification of the capitals.” He did not specify a target date, although officials have said privately it is Jan. 20.

OK then. It sounds like progress, fitfully and slowly, is being made.

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Iran Says Interim Nuclear Talks Have Been Completed

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Nuclear Talks With Iran Not Going Very Well

by AllanThurston Posted on December 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Paul Richter of the LA Times reports that talks with Iran aren’t going very well:

Three weeks after President Obama hailed a landmark deal to suspend most of Iran’s nuclear program for the next six months, the mood among U.S. officials about the next round of negotiations has shifted from elated to somber, even gloomy.

….Problems already have emerged. Technical talks in Vienna aimed at implementing the initial deal stopped Thursday when Iranian negotiators unexpectedly flew back to Tehran, reportedly in response to the Obama administration’s decision to expand its blacklist of foreign companies and individuals who have done business with Iran in violation of sanctions.

….Even before Thursday’s interruption, experts had struggled to determine how to sequence the complex next steps involved: neutralizing a stockpile of medium-enriched uranium and freezing most other enrichment operations in exchange for granting Iran access, in installments, to $4.2 billion of its own funds held in banks overseas and easing sanctions on petrochemical and auto exports.

None of this surprises me. Even with the incentive of shucking off the sanctions that have crippled their economy, the price the Western allies is asking might just be too high for Iran to accept. In the end, ensuring that Iran can’t build a bomb requires dismantling nearly all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and putting in place extremely intrusive monitoring of what’s left. There are a hundred different ways this could run aground on both sides.

Hopefully, this is just the normal trough in negotiations after the initial bloom of goodwill from getting talks started. After all, both sides have good reason to want to make a deal. But if I had to guess, I’d put the odds of success at 50 percent or less.

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Nuclear Talks With Iran Not Going Very Well

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Will the Supreme Court Force Immigrants to Leave Their Children Behind?

by Charlie Smith Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Foreigners applying to permanently live in the United States spend years, sometimes decades, waiting to receive their green cards. But when that visa finally arrives, some law-abiding immigrants have to choose between emigrating to America and staying back with their children—all because their young sons and daughters became adults during the lengthy process. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is expected to hear a case, Mayorkas v. Cuellar de Osorio, that could have a big effect on whether some applicants who turned 21 during the US visa process are allowed to immigrate at the same time as their parents, rather than being bumped all the way to the back of the line.

“I hope the Supreme Court will show common sense and realize that if a mother applied for a visa when her children were clearly minors, she could not have predicted that it would take so long,” says Richard Alba, an immigration expert and sociology professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY. “The kind of conservative notion that undocumented immigrations are law-breakers really doesn’t apply at all here.”

One of the case’s named plaintiffs is Rosalina Cuellar de Osorio, who applied for a visa in 1998 to join her mother, who is a US citizen. At the time, Cuellar de Osorio’s son was 13. The visa application only took a month to be approved—but a visa didn’t become available until 2005, after her son, Melvin, had turned 21. (US law dictates that only a certain number of visas may be issued per country in a fiscal year.) She was able to emigrate from El Salvador, but the government would not issue an immediate visa for Melvin because he was no longer a child.

Under the 2002 Child Status Protection Act, children who turn 21 during the application process are supposed to “retain the original priority date issued upon receipt of the original petition”—which prevents kids like Melvin from being moved to the back of the visa line just because of their birth date. But in 2009, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled differently—arguing that the original law wasn’t very clear and could be interpreted to only apply to certain categories of visas—like those that are filed by a lawful permanent resident on behalf of his or her spouse and children—but not necessarily those filed by US citizens. The board maintains that if the law starts applying to everyone, it will “undermine the perception of fairness of the rules” and introduce “tensions” among immigrants.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in September 2012 that the immigration board was wrong because it failed to take into account Congress’s intent behind the law: That lawmakers never intended for the petitioner’s visa category to factor into the decision-making process. A bipartisan group of lawmakers who were serving when the original law passed in 2002—including Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—filed a brief on November 4, 2013, backing up that position: “The Solicitor General’s continuing insistence that that the law is ambiguous raises serious institutional concerns…Congress does not typically give an agency carte blanche to rewrite statutory language that is clear.”

The Supreme Court isn’t the only branch taking up this issue—the Senate’s mammoth immigration reform bill, which still hasn’t passed the House, would also fix this problem. Alba, the immigration professor, says, “This is a committee within the immigrations board that made a bad decision, so the question is now, can it be reversed?” The American Immigration Council notes that the current policy “has been heartbreaking for too many individuals,” and that countless immigrants sit in limbo until the issue is resolved. An Iranian applicant who goes by the initials K.M.K., for example, waited with his family for 12 years to get a visa before being bumped because he turned 21. He’s still in Iran, separated from his family, and waiting.

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Will the Supreme Court Force Immigrants to Leave Their Children Behind?

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