Iran Backs Away From Key Detail in Nuclear Deal

Iran Backs Away From Key Detail in Nuclear Deal
By DAVID E. SANGER and MICHAEL R. GORDON NY Times MARCH 29, 2015

Foreign ministers from other world powers joined Secretary of State John Kerry in an effort to reach the outlines of a nuclear accord with Iran by a midnight Tuesday deadline. CREDIT Pool photo by Brendan Smialowski

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — With a negotiating deadline just two days away, Iranian officials on Sunday backed away from a critical element of a proposed nuclear agreement, saying they are no longer willing to ship their atomic fuel out of the country.

For months, Iran tentatively agreed that it would send a large portion of its stockpile of uranium to Russia, where it would not be accessible for use in any future weapons PROGRAM. But on Sunday Iran’s deputy foreign minister made a surprise comment to Iranian reporters, ruling out an agreement that involved giving up a stockpile that Iran has spent years and billions of dollars to amass.

“The export of STOCKS of enriched uranium is not in our program, and we do not intend sending them abroad,” the official, Abbas Araqchi, told the Iranian media, according to Agence France-Presse. “There is no question of sending the stocks abroad.”

Depending on the technical details, that could make the process of enriching it for military use far more lengthy, or perhaps nearly impossible.

Nonetheless, the revelation that Iran is now insisting on retaining the fuel could raise a potential obstacle at a critical time in the talks. And for critics of the emerging deal in Congress, in Israel and in Sunni Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, the prospect of leaving large amounts of nuclear fuel in Iran, in any form, is bound to intensify their already substantial political opposition.

If an accord allowing Iran to retain the fuel is reached, the Obama administration is expected to argue that it would not constitute a serious risk, particularly if it is regularly inspected. So far under an interim agreement negotiated in 2013, Iran has complied fully with a rigorous inspection process for the stockpiles of its fuel, the International Atomic Energy Agency has said.

But the development could give opponents another reason to object, adding it to a list of what they call concessions made by an administration in search of an agreement. If Iran ever bars the inspectors from the country, as North Korea did a dozen years ago, the international community would have no assurance about the fate of the fuel. Nor has Iran answered longstanding questions about its suspected nuclear design and testing of components that could be used to detonate a warhead.

Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has been critical of the emerging accord, said the development raised serious questions about a possible deal.

“The viability of this agreement as a reliable arms control accord is diminished by this,” Mr. Takeyh said. “One of the core administration arguments has been that the uranium would be shipped abroad as a confidence building measure.”

On the assumption that Iran’s uranium stockpile would be small, the United States and its negotiating partners had been moving toward an agreement that would allow Iran to retain roughly 6,000 centrifuges in operation. It is not clear how much that might change if the fuel, even in diluted form, remains in the country.

If the fuel had been shipped to Russia, the plan called for MOSCOW to convert it into specialized fuel rods for the Bushehr nuclear power plant, Iran’s only commercial reactor. Once it was converted into fuel rods, it would have been extremely difficult for Iran to use the material to make a nuclear weapon.

It is not clear what form the fuel would take if it remains on Iranian territory.

The disclosure also adds a new element to the growing debate over whether the proposed agreement would meet President Obama’s oft-stated assurance that the world would have at least a year’s warning if Iran raced for a bomb — what experts call “breakout time.”

The argument over warning time, which was accelerated by a skeptical paper published over the weekend by the former chief inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency, offered a taste of the kind of arguments already taking shape in Congress.

On Sunday, Republican leaders made it clear they would press for more sanctions against Iran if no agreement is reached here by Tuesday. In an interview with CNN, Speaker John A. Boehner expressed doubts about a potential agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.

“We have got a regime that’s never quite kept their word about anything,” he said. “I just don’t understand why we would sign an agreement with a group of people who, in my opinion, have no intention of keeping their word.”

With pressure mounting to settle on the main parameters of an accord, negotiators were still divided on how fast United Nations’ and others’ sanctions on Iran might be lifted. Important differences remained on what kind of research and development Iran could carry out on new types of centrifuges during the last five years of what is intended to be a 15-year agreement.

There was a clear sense that the talks were approaching a pivotal moment as the foreign ministers from other world powers joined Secretary of State John Kerry in an effort to reach the outlines of a deal by a midnight Tuesday deadline.

“We are not there yet,” said one Western official who, like others in this article, declined to be identified because he was discussing diplomatic deliberations. “There are lots of pieces floating around.”

Yet even if a deal was reached by late Tuesday, American negotiators made clear that this was just an interim step, and that any final agreement would require months of negotiations over what were once called “technical agreements” but are now clearly the source of CONTINUING disagreement.

That calculation over “breakout time” is so complex that experts from Britain, France, Germany and Israel all have somewhat slightly different calculations than those of experts from the United States.

The debate over breakout time intensified when Olli Heinonen, who ran inspections for the I.A.E.A. before moving to Harvard several years ago, published a paper on Saturday concluding that, based on leaked estimates that Iran would operate roughly 6,500 centrifuges, “a breakout time of between seven and eight months would still be possible.”


A senior Obama administration official here said that while he did not dispute Mr. Heinonen’s figures, the former inspector had conducted a textbook calculation rather than examining the real-life conditions at Iran’s facilities.

Like other countries, Iran loses some of its nuclear material every time it is changed from a gas to a solid, and its machinery, the evidence shows, does not run at perfect efficiency. The official said that the United States had created a measure based on what American officials have called the “fastest reasonable” estimate of how long Iran would take to produce a weapon.

Some experts outside government say the American assumptions are reasonable, and perhaps even generous to the Iranians — who have taken 20 years to get to this point, far longer than it took PROGRAMS, including in North Korea and Pakistan, to produce bomb-grade material.

But the emergence of COMPETING estimates could pose a political problem for President Obama, who has made breakout time the paramount measure for a potential agreement.

Parts of the agreement have begun to leak out, and reflect the balancing act underway: An effort by the United States and the other five powers here to cripple Iran’s ability to produce enough nuclear material for a weapon for at least 10 years, while letting the Iranians preserve a narrative that they are not dismantling major facilities, or giving in to American pressure.

For example, a deep underground facility at Fordow — exposed in 2009 — would likely be converted to make medical isotopes. That means it would not be used for enriching uranium.

But several hundred centrifuges might still be spinning there — the facility now has about 3,000 — and that fact alone, American officials acknowledge, could provide fodder to opponents of the deal.

Reporting was contributed by Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran, and Andrew Siddons from Washington.

ஹூத்தி யுத்த ஆதரவுச் சுவரொட்டி

The battle for the Middle East's future begins in Yemen

The battle for the Middle East's future begins in Yemen as Saudi Arabia jumps into the abyss

As a Saudi-led coalition wades into the fight for Yemen – currently under siege from Houthi rebels who are backed by Iran - Robert Fisk examines the much wider-reaching repercussions of this escalating conflict

ROBERT FISK - Robert Fisk is The Independent’s multiple award-winning Middle East correspondent, based in Beirut-  Author Biography   Friday 27 March 2015

Saudi Arabia has jumped into the abyss.

Its air attacks on Yemen are a historic and potentially fatal blow to the Kingdom and to the Middle East.

Who decided that this extraordinary battle should take shape in the poorest of Arab nations? The Saudis, whose King is widely rumoured in the Arab world to be incapable of taking decisions of state? Or the princes within the Saudi army who fear that their own SECURITY forces may not be loyal to the monarchy?

The “story” of Yemen appears simple. Houthi rebels, who are Shia Muslims, have captured the capital of Sanaa with the help – so say the Saudis – of the Iranians. The legitimate President
– Abed Rabou Mansour Hadi – has fled to the Saudi capital of Riyadh from his bolthole in the old southern Yemeni capital of Aden. The Saudis will not permit an Iranian proxy state to be
set up on their border – always forgetting that they already have an Iranian-proxy state called Iraq on their northern border, courtesy of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The real “story” is more important. Perhaps half of the Saudi army is of Yemeni tribal origin. Saudi soldiers are intimately – through their own families – involved in Yemen, and the Yemen revolution is a stab in the GUTS of the Saudi royal family. No wonder King Salman of Saudi Arabia – if he indeed rules his nation – wishes to bring this crisis to an end.

But are his bombing raids on Sanaa going to crush a Shia Muslim rebellion?

You can understand what it looks like from Riyadh. To the north, the Shia Muslim Iranian Revolutionary Guards are assisting the Shia-dominated Iraqi government in their battle against
Sunni Muslim Isis. To the north-west, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are assisting the government of Alawite (for which read, Shia) president Bashar al-Assad against Isis and al-Nusrah and whatever is left of the so-called “Free Syrian Army”. The Shia Hezbollah from Lebanon are fighting alongside Assad’s army.  So are Shia Muslims from Afghanistan, wearing Syrian uniforms. Saudi Arabia claims the Iranians are in Yemen with the Houthis. Unlikely. But be sure their weapons are in Yemen.

Unprecedented in modern Arab history, a Sunni Muslim coalition of 10 nations – including non-Arab Pakistan – has attacked another Arab nation. The Sunnis and the Shia of the Middle East are now at war with each other in Iraq, in Syria and Yemen. Pakistan is a nuclear power. The armies of Bahrain and the Gulf states include Pakistani soldiers. Pakistanis were among the dead in the first great battle against Iraqi troops in the 1991 Gulf War.

But already, the battle for Yemen is dividing other Arab countries. In Lebanon, the former Sunni Muslim Prime Minister Saad Hariri has praised the “brave and wise” decision of King

Salman to attack. Mr Hariri is not only a Sunni – he is also a Saudi citizen. But the Shia Hezbollah, who oppose Saudi intervention, called the Saudi assault an “uncalculated adventure”.

These words were chosen with care. They are exactly the words the Saudis used against Hezbollah after it captured three Israeli soldiers in 2006, a stupid political act which STARTED the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon that year.

The Americans do not know what to do. They cannot give the Saudis direct military assistance – their nuclear talks with Iran are more important – and so their soft verbal support for King Salman is supposed to mollify their Sunni allies and avoid antagonising the Iranians. But the closer a nuclear deal comes between the US and Iran, the more forcefully their partners in the Arab world will push their cards. What provoked the Saudis into their extraordinary adventure in Yemen was not the approach of Houthis towards Aden but the approach of US-Iranian agreement at Lausanne.

Hezbollah may call the Saudi attacks a “Saudi-American conspiracy” – an overused phrase which contains some truth – but the reality, evident to every Arab, is that the Saudis, armed (or over-armed, as many might say) by the US, are clearly prepared to use their firepower against another Arab nation rather than the traditional enemy further north. Listening to the rhetoric of the Saudis, you might think that they were bombing Israel.

History may say that the attacks on Yemen are the START of a great civil war between Sunnis and Shia in the Middle East. This would satisfy the West – and Israel – in a belief that the Arabs are at war with themselves. But it may also be true that this is the last attempt by the Saudis to prove that they are a major military power. In 1990, faced with the arrival of Saddam’s legions in Kuwait, they asked infidel America to protect them (to the fury of Osama bin Laden). They are a Wahabi nation, loyal – officially, at least – to the same theology as the Taliban and Isis. Saudi provided 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11. They gave us Bin Laden, who – let us not forget – was also of Yemeni tribal origin. After Yemen supported Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, the Saudis threw tens of thousands of Yemenis out of the Kingdom. In revenge for their disloyalty. Do they expect Yemenis now to rally to their support?

The last time the Saudis involved themselves in Yemen, they fought Nasser’s Egyptian army. It was a disaster. Now they have the Egyptians on their side. Indeed, they even suggest the Egyptians may stage a landing in Yemen. But to do what? To ensure that Yemen remains a faithful Sunni nation? Will this assuage the Sunni militias battering the Egyptian army in Sinai?

More seriously, will it resolve the coming struggle within the royal family, whose princes do not all believe Yemen must be the cornerstone of Saudi power – nor that Wahabism must be the permanent sectional belief. And who gains from the new Yemen crisis? The OIL producers, of course. And that means Saudi Arabia – and Iran.

How Yemen became the front line of a Mideast-wide war

How Yemen became the front line of a Mideast-wide war
By Mohamad Bazzi March 27, 2015
March 26, 2015. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

In the early morning of Mar. 26, Saudi Arabia went to war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. In doing so, Saudi leaders opened the latest chapter in a long history of meddling and influence over their southern neighbor.

Since Saudi Arabia was founded in the 1930s, its leaders have tried to keep a friendly regime in power in Yemen and to prevent it from posing a threat to Saudi interests. That often meant meddling in Yemen’s internal politics, keeping populist movements in check, using guest workers as leverage, buying off tribal leaders and occasional military interventions.

This time, the stakes are higher for both Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Saudi leaders say that, along with a coalition of nine other countries, they launched airstrikes and are blockading the Yemeni coast to drive back the Houthis and their allies in the Yemeni military, who have taken over much of the country in recent months. The Saudis and their Gulf Arab allies want to restore Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power.

The conflict in Yemen is complex, with a shifting set of alliances. Hadi and his supporters, who are mostly Sunni Muslims, are backed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. The Houthis,

who belong to a sect of Shi’ite Islam called Zaydis, are allies of Shi’ite-led Iran, the regional rival of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states. While the Saudis are quick to label the Houthis as Iranian proxies, it’s unclear how much support they receive from Tehran.

The Houthis are allied with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a longtime dictator who was ousted from power after the Arab uprisings of 2011 spread to Yemen. Once a Saudi ally, Saleh was replaced by Hadi in 2012 under a deal BROKERED by Riyadh. But Saleh still retains support among large segments of the Yemeni security forces and those troops helped the Houthis capture the capital, Sanaa, and move south toward Hadi’s stronghold of Aden.

With direct Saudi military intervention, Yemen has now been dragged into a regional proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. This series of battles in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Bahrain have defined the Middle East since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Over the past decade, the traditional centers of power in the Arab world — Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states — grew nervous about the rising influence of Iran: its nuclear ambitions; its sway over the Iraqi government; ITS SUPPORT for the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas, and its alliance with Syria.

yemen coalition

The proxy war is drawing in more regional actors. For example, Egypt’s security interests are not directly affected by Yemen, unlike Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. But Egypt’s military rulers are now highly dependent on FUNDING from the Saudis and their Gulf allies. Hours after the start of the Saudi-led bombing campaign, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said in a statement that Egypt’s navy and air force would soon join the fight, and that its army was ready to send ground troops to Yemen “if necessary.”

Both Iran and Saudi Arabia increasingly see their rivalry as a winner-take-all conflict: If the Shi’ite Hezbollah gains an upper hand in Lebanon, then the Sunnis of Lebanon — and by extension, their Saudi patrons — lose a round to Iran. If a Shi’ite-led government solidifies its control of Iraq, then Iran will have won another round. So the House of Saud rushes to shore up its allies in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria and wherever else it fears Iran’s influence.

****

Yemen’s geography and web of tribal, regional and sectarian alliances make it a difficult and costly for foreign invaders to exploit. Both Saudi Arabia and Egypt suffered significant losses during past military adventures there.

For centuries, Yemen was an autonomous province in the Ottoman Empire. With the empire’s collapse at the end of World War I, Yemen SECURED its independence as a kingdom in 1918 and its first ruler was Imam Yahya, head of the Zaydi sect. (The Zaydis have long been a minority in Yemen. Today they comprise about a third of the 24 million total population.) In the 1920s and 1930s, Yahya extended his rule over tribal lands across northern Yemen, which was then mostly inhabited by Sunnis.

But Yahya, who kept Yemen isolated and had virtually no outside allies, faced pressure from Saudi Arabia throughout his rule. In 1934, two years after Ibn Saud established the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he fought a short war against his southern neighbor. The Saudis seized the provinces of Asir and Najran from what Yahya and other Zaydis considered “historic Yemen.” That set the roots of a territorial dispute along the coast of the Red Sea and conflicts over border demarcation that would last until 2000.

Yahya and the Zaydis also skirmished in the south with the British, who had established a colony in the port city of Aden and its hinterlands since the 1830s. After Yahya died in 1948, his son and successor, Imam Ahmad, ended the kingdom’s isolation. He established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and China, hoping to SECURE military and development aid.

This caused new tensions with the House of Saud, which feared communist influence at its southern border.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Arab world struggled to rid itself of the vestiges of colonial rule and hereditary monarchies. A group of Egyptian military officers, led by the charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser, overthrew British-backed King Farouk in 1952, and kindled the hope of Arab unity. Nasser used his populist appeal, powerful military and rousing speeches (broadcast over the newly invented transistor radio in a popular PROGRAM called Voice of the Arabs) to influence events in other Arab countries, including Yemen. But the Arab liberation movements would end in great disappointment — a politics of betrayal, exile and carnage.

When Yemen’s Ahmad died in September 1962, his son and successor, Imam Badr, was overthrown within a week in a coup led by army officers. Inspired by Egypt’s Nasser, the officers declared the Yemen Arab Republic. The royal family resisted the coup and sought support from the House of Saud, which did not want a successful military-led republican regime next door.

The Yemeni revolution quickly devolved into a civil war, and Yemen became the scene of a proxy battle between Egypt and Saudi Arabia — viewed by many as a struggle for the future of the Arab world, between the so-called “progressive” republican regimes and the “conservative” monarchies. Nasser decided to throw his weight behind the new military regime and flooded Yemen with Egyptian troops. At the end of 1963, there were 30,000 Egyptian soldiers in Yemen. By 1965, that number rose to nearly half of the Egyptian army — 70,000 troops.

The Egyptian army was bogged down fighting tribal guerrillas on their home terrain. Over the five-year war, more than 10,000 Egyptian troops were killed and the Egyptians failed to advance far beyond the capital city, Sanaa. Blinded by his fervor to promote revolution in the Arab world, the Yemen war became Nasser’s Vietnam.

At the same time, the Saudis were FUNDING the royalist opposition, providing arms and hiring foreign mercenaries. But the Saudis did not make the same mistake as Nasser of committing thousands of their own troops to the fight. Nasser finally withdrew the last Egyptian forces from Yemen after the humiliating Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel.

When the civil war ended, northern Yemen remained a republic. The Saudis were not able to restore the monarchy, but Egypt had suffered such a defeat that it no longer had much sway over Yemeni politics. Around the same time, in the southern provinces that had been COLONIZED by the British, a Marxist-ruled state was established in late 1967 with Aden as its capital.

South Yemen — officially known as the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen — soon became a Soviet satellite state.

In May 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, South Yemen united with northern Yemen (which had been ruled by Ali Abdullah Saleh since 1978) to form a single state, the Republic of Yemen. By that point, northern Yemen was heavily dependent on Saudi aid — which was intended to balance Soviet assistance to South Yemen — and remittances from several hundred thousand Yemenis WORKING in the kingdom.

Saleh became president of the newly unified state, and he soon faced a severe test that would strain his relationship with the Saudis. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, prompting the United States to send hundreds of thousands of troops to protect Saudi Arabia. Saleh was allied with Hussein, who had the support of most Arab countries and Western powers during his eight-year war against Iran.

Saleh was reluctant to tow the Saudi line and cut off all relations with Iraq, which was an important TRADING partner and oil supplier for Yemen. At the time of the Kuwait crisis, Yemen

also held the rotating Arab League seat on the United Nations Security Council. After Yemen voted against the Security Council resolution that authorized the use of force against Iraq, the

United States and Saudi Arabia cut off all aid. The Saudis also expelled nearly 750,000 people — Yemeni workers and their families, some of whom had lived in the kingdom for decades.

The expulsions cut off the majority of remittances and devastated Yemen’s economy.

The expulsions and their aftermath OFFER an instructive lesson for Saudi leaders who today are waging war against the Houthis, hoping to turn Yemenis against them. In 1991, Saudis hoped that Yemenis would blame Saleh’s government for instigating the expulsions and the subsequent economic collapse. But instead, Yemenis rallied around their leader, disdained the Saudis and expressed open admiration for Hussein.

In 1994, leaders of southern Yemen tried to secede after years of frustration with the north. A war broke out between the north and south, but Saleh’s forces defeated the southern rebels within a few weeks. The Saudis, still angry at Saleh for his no vote at the United Nations, had supported the southern rebels with arms and FUNDING. But once again the Saudis backed the wrong side, and the Sanaa government reimposed unity by force.

Saleh’s relationship with the Saudis remained tense until the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. At that point, Saleh maneuvered himself as an ally of both the Saudis and Washington in fighting al Qaeda. From 2004 until late 2009, Saleh’s government waged a series of six wars against the Houthi rebels based in the northern provinces of Yemen, near the Saudi border. The Saudis supported Saleh through all of these wars, and the Saudi military was directly drawn into the last of these conflicts in 2009. Saudi forces suffered about 200 casualties over several months of fighting.

Today, Saudi Arabia has intervened more directly in Yemen than in the past. In light of this history, the Saudis are reluctant to send ground troops to fight the Houthis on Yemeni soil. But recent conflicts — in Iraq, Syria and Libya — show that air power alone is not enough TO WIN a decisive victory. And the longer this conflict drags on, the more likely that the Houthis will gain wide popular support as the defenders of Yemen’s independence against an aggressive and meddling neighbor.