Iran

It seems crass to talk about "winners" and "losers" after Israel's deadly attack on the flotilla of ships bound for Gaza last month. Nine people were killed, after all; dozens of others were wounded.

Still: It's worth stepping back and thinking about how the flotilla incident has reshaped the politics of the region. My initial take -- bearing in mind that it's too early to predict long-term consequences -- is that the Israeli attack has mostly accelerated existing political trends, rather than creating new ones.

It has accelerated Israel's isolation from several of its neighbors and allies; it has sharpened divisions within Turkish domestic politics; it has deepened perceptions that the Obama administration as too close to Israel. And it seems to have had a remarkably minor impact on Palestinian domestic politics.

My personal take on the new package of Iran sanctions approved this week is that they won't accomplish anything -- anything good, at least.

The Iranian regime has already warned that the sanctions will preclude further negotiations over its nuclear program. Officials have also warned that the sanctions might scrap last month's so-called "Tehran declaration," the tripartite deal negotiated by Turkey and Brazil. (That might be a bluff -- it would sour relations with both countries, and Iran does need at least a few allies.)

The predicted Security Council vote on new sanctions against Iran came Tuesday, with predictable results: Slight additions to previous sanctions, opposition from Brazil and Turkey and an abstention from Lebanon, and an outburst from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Some commentators, including the Leveretts, lack faith that this fourth round of sanctions will have any serious effect on Iran's behavior, but the White House, armed with a list of 14 "new" measures imposed by Tuesday's resolution, argues otherwise.

The United Nations Security Council says it could vote on a new package of Iran sanctions this week.

Claude Heller, Mexico's ambassador to the UN (and the current Security Council president), said the vote could come as early as tomorrow. UN envoys are scheduled to meet on Tuesday morning to discuss the latest sanctions package, which bars Iran from "any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons," and prohibits Iran from buying several types of heavy weapons (these types of sanctions have been quite difficult to enforce).

After an uncharacteristically restrained response to Israel's attack on the Gaza flotilla, Iran seems intent on stealing some of Turkey's thunder.

The headline is sarcastic, of course. But Amitai Etzioni, an Israeli-American professor at George Washington University, is quite serious: He wants the U.S. to threaten a massive bombing campaign (pdf) against Iran in order to derail its nuclear weapons program.

Etzioni's article was published in the U.S. Army journal Military Review (and it's already getting favorable reviews in the Israeli press). To call it a superficial and deeply flawed piece of analysis would be charitable.

Update: Here's a link to last week's interview.

Original post: Charlie Rose interviewed Bashar al-Assad last night -- his second conversation with the Syrian president, if I'm not mistaken.

PBS hasn't posted a video of the interview yet -- we'll update when they do -- but BusinessWeek posted a few excerpts. Most are predictable -- Assad denied that his government shipped Scuds to Hizballah, for example -- but two lines jumped out at me.

For basically as long as Lebanon has existed as a modern nation, foreign forces have found the country a useful proxy to assert their regional interests in the Middle East, so it's not exactly breaking from script for the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress to assert an extremely self-interested agenda during Prime Minister Saad Hariri's first visit to Washington since coming to power last summer. (Nor is it strange for America to be self-interested, but I digress.)

Hariri met with Obama on Monday; he spent Tuesday with Vice President Joe Biden and members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Looking at the reporting that has emerged in the past two days, those meetings have been dominated by topics of American concern: the alleged transfer of Scud missiles from Syria to Hizballah, the disarming of Hizballah, and Lebanon's role in the U.S.-led effort to sanction Iran. Shelved, for the most part: Discussion of America's mired attempt to kick-start Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Tuesday's big announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- that the United States had reached agreement with the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to table a new Iran sanctions resolution -- was clearly meant to upstage what had already begun to be perceived as the previous day's diplomatic coup by Iran: a nuclear fuel swap deal brokered by Brazil and Turkey.

Washington's immediate pushback has left international diplomats and American pundits confused and angry. Brazilian and Turkish officials are reportedly "outraged"; Gary Sick called the U.S. announcement a "gratuitous insult"; and Marc Lynch tweeted that "trashing the Turkish deal was a mistake."

But let's take a clear-eyed look at what's really happening.

Update 5/18/10 4:07 p.m.: In opening remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the United States, Russia and China had agreed on a draft United Nations Security Council resolution that would impose sanctions on Iran. Clinton said that the United States and the rest of the P5+1 would "rally the international community on behalf of a strong sanctions resolution that will, in our view, send an unmistakable message about what is expected from Iran."

Original post: In the wake of Monday's announcement that Turkey and Brazil have convinced Iran to ship around half or more of its low-enriched uranium out of the country, the media has been quick to proclaim winners and losers.

The Israeli tabloid daily Maariv carried a story on Thursday exposing what the newspaper purported to be a "secret" plan hatched by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to "pester" Saudi Arabia with a global information campaign that could involve lobbying the U.S. Congress and European parliament, and perhaps even filing lawsuits, all with the intent of exposing the kingdom's "involvement in financing terrorism, the state of human rights ... the status of women and numerous other issues." (Original article in Hebrew here.)

The White House just e-mailed reporters a statement on the Iranian-Brazilian-Turkish nuclear fuel swap agreement announced earlier today. We've posted a full copy of the statement after the jump. It calls the agreement a positive step, but highlights a number of concerns, including the question of whether Iran will continue to enrich its uranium up to 20 percent.

The leaders of Iran, Turkey and Brazil announced an agreement this morning for a nuclear fuel swap, reviving a long-stalled plan from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The agreement now heads to the Vienna Group -- the U.S., Russia, France, and the IAEA -- for approval. If those parties sign off, Iran will be obligated to ship 1,200kg of low-enriched uranium (at 3.5 percent enrichment) to Turkey within one month. In return, Iran will receive 120kg of enriched uranium (at 20 percent enrichment) -- to be delivered within one year -- for use in the Tehran Research Reactor.

Brazilian diplomats say Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's last-minute diplomacy paid off: They've told reporters that Iran agreed to a nuclear fuel swap, and that final details of the agreement will be announced on Monday morning.

The Turkish foreign ministry confirms those reports, too. Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan postponed a trip to Azerbaijan to fly to Iran to join in the fun.

Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is in Tehran today (along with a 300-man Brazilian delegation) to meet with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Lula is trying to convince Ahmadinejad to accept a Brazilian plan for a nuclear fuel swap, a plan Ahmadinejad seemed to embrace (in theory) last week. The exact details of the plan haven't been released, but presumably it would involve Iran sending its low-enriched uranium to a third country -- perhaps to Brazil? -- for further enrichment.

The Iranian government, no doubt aware of the growing push for economic sanctions in Washington and New York, has embarked on something of a diplomatic charm offensive over the last few days.

Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, held a dinner in New York last night for the members of the United Nations Security Council. Most countries sent their highest-ranking ambassadors, though the United States, United Kingdom, France and Russia all sent lower-level officials.

As the NPT conference opens today in New York City, a number of states and international actors arrive at the table with competing interests. The United States, United Nations and European Union would like to avoid a repeat of the last conference, five years ago, which collapsed over disagreements on disarmament and squabbles regarding Iran and North Korea. The Obama Administration, by signing a mutual arms reduction agreement with Russia last month, hopes it has laid the groundwork for some good will.

Iran, meanwhile, will push back against an apparently growing consensus among the P5+1 to sanction the country for its lack of transparency and alleged violations of the NPT. China and Russia, which tend to give Iran a long leash in Security Council affairs, have -- at least in according to White House spin -- come closer in recent weeks to accepting such sanctions.

Rounding out the agenda are the traditional issues: the meat and potatoes of disarmament, nonproliferation and access to peaceful nuclear energy. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Yukiya Amano, the new chief of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, would both like more countries to sign up for additional inspections, while the Egyptian-led bloc of non-aligned nations will push again for its 15-year-old plan for a nuke-free Middle East.

David Ignatius has a column in today's Washington Post about the Obama administration's slowly-escalating economic sanctions against Iran, particularly against the banking and shipping sectors. It's pretty complimentary of the administration's efforts -- this is Ignatius, after all -- and so he buries the lede in the third-to-last-paragraph:

Yet for all this aggressive pressure, Iran continues to conduct both banking and shipping -- which illustrates the difficulty of using sanctions to force a change in policy. The track record is spotty, from Cuba to Iraq.

I was traveling this weekend so I didn't have a chance to write about the "Gates memo," the alleged warning from defense secretary Robert Gates that the U.S. doesn't have a long-term plan for dealing with Iran's nuclear program.

I missed this earlier in the week, but if Press TV is to be believed, it would seem Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad backed down from his subsidy reform battle with parliament.

"In a meeting with a group of Iranian MPs, the President has agreed to facilitate the implementation of the subsidy bill without introducing a complementary bill," said Mohammad Hossein Abu Torabi at the beginning of the parliament's Tuesday session.

The subsidy bill in question was approved last month by parliament; it calls for $20 billion in cuts to Iran's roughly-$100 billion subsidy program, instead of the $40 billion sought by Ahmadinejad.

Sorry for the slow blogging over the last few days; both of us were traveling (Evan still is, in fact) and not online much.

I'm back in Washington now, parts of which are locked down because of President Obama's nuclear security summit. A few storylines have emerged from the summit, but the one of interest to this blog's readers is China's apparent pledge to work with the rest of the P5+1 countries on an economic sanctions package against Iran.