Friday, January 13, 2017

Eye on Iran: Iran's Revolutionary Guards Position for Power


   EYE ON IRAN
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Iran's Revolutionary Guards look set to entrench their power and shift the country to more hardline, isolationist policies for years to come following the death of influential powerbroker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Former president Rafsanjani long had a contentious relationship with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is both the strongest military force in Iran and also has vast economic interests worth billions of dollars. With a presidential election in May and a question mark over the health of Iran's most powerful figure, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, analysts say the Guards will soon have opportunities to tighten their grip on the levers of power. Rafsanjani, who died on Sunday aged 82, had criticized the Guards' expanding economic interests, which range from oil and gas to telecommunications and construction, their role in the crackdown on protests after disputed 2009 presidential elections and the country's missile program which the Guards oversee.

Iran has received authorisation from world powers to import 130 tonnes of natural uranium, Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi said Thursday. He said the green light was given by the joint commission overseeing the nuclear deal which Iran struck in 2015 with Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. "They have accepted our request to purchase 130 tonnes of (natural) uranium," Kamalvandi told state television, without naming the supplier. According to Kamalvandi, Iran has already imported 220 tonnes of uranium since the nuclear deal went into effect in January 2016. This and the additional 130 tonnes would provide Iran with "good reserves" for its nuclear programme. But Iran will need bigger stockpiles of uranium to raise its nuclear programme to "industrial" levels and exploration for new uranium mines is underway across the country, he said.

In addition to his remarks skeptical of Russia and supportive of NATO, General Mattis tacked to the left of President-elect Trump and most of the Republicans in Congress on whether to keep the agreement constraining Iran's nuclear program. Mr. Trump has said that his top priority is to "dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran." But General Mattis urged the United States to take steps to rigorously enforce it. "I think it is an imperfect arms control agreement - it's not a friendship treaty," he said. "But when America gives her word, we have to live up to it and work with our allies." ... But it was also clear that General Mattis favors a more assertive response to Iran, which he described in a written submission to the Senate committee as the "biggest destabilizing force in the Middle East." General Mattis did not say how many American troops should be kept in Iraq, but he asserted that the United States needed to maintain its influence there long after Mosul is retaken from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to ensure that Iraq "does not become a rump state of the regime in Tehran."

SANCTIONS RELIEF

Iranian authorities, keen to roll out the red carpet to foreign investors, are taking steps to help local firms sell bonds abroad and Western fund managers are eager to buy... Investors are eager but more than a year after international sanctions against Iran were removed in exchange for curbs on its disputed nuclear program, compliance risks may remain. "We would be very interested," said Lutz Roehmeyer, director at Landesbank Berlin Invest. "We have no exposure, and that would be a great first step, but eventually we would actually like to be invested in local currency." ... Iran's capital marker regulator, the Securities and Exchange Organisation (SEO), is nonetheless encouraging local firms to explore alternatives to domestic lending, where rates remain above 20 percent. "There is a big project to help big listed companies or even the government itself to issue bonds in other countries, the first of which is Korea," said Bahador Bijani, Vice Chairman for International and Foreign Investment Affairs at the SEO. "Additionally, SEO is facilitating the process of listed companies issuing bonds in international markets like London."

A delegation, comprising senior officials of Poland's largest oil company, is scheduled to visit Tehran in coming days aiming to ink a contract for developmental of Iranian oilfields. Poland has begun new cooperation with Iran in the post-JCPOA era over development of oil trade as well as collaborations for investment in upstream sector of Iranian oil and gas industry. So far, National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) has signed spot contracts for crude sales to Lotos S.A. and PKN Orlen while negotiations have also begun with another Polish oil giant for investment in Iranian oil and gas industry.

KraussMaffei has a new agency in Iran and thus wants to further strengthen its market position in injection molding and reaction process machinery in this region. KaranSimaFam, a family-run company in the Iranian plastics industry with over 50 years of experience, represents KraussMaffei with the new company Krasifam (KSF).

India's annual oil imports from Iran surged to a record high in 2016 as some refiners resumed purchases after the lifting of sanctions against Tehran, according to ship tracking data and a report compiled by Thomson Reuters Oil Research and Forecasts. The sharp increase propelled Iran into fourth place among India's suppliers in 2016, up from seventh position in 2015. It used to be India's second-biggest supplier before sanctions. For the year, the world's third biggest oil consumer bought about 473,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil from Iran to feed expanding refining capacity, up from 208,300 bpd in 2015, the data showed... Indian refiners Reliance Industries, Hindustan Petroleum, Bharat Petroleum and HPCL-Mittal Energy Ltd (HMEL) last year resumed imports from Tehran, attracted by the discount offered by Iran.

SYRIA CONFLICT

In the valleys between Damascus and Lebanon, where whole communities had abandoned their lives to war, a change is taking place. For the first time since the conflict broke out, people are starting to return. But the people settling in are not the same as those who fled during the past six years. The new arrivals have a different allegiance and faith to the predominantly Sunni Muslim families who once lived there. They are, according to those who have sent them, the vanguard of a move to repopulate the area with Shia Muslims not just from elsewhere in Syria, but also from Lebanon and Iraq. The population swaps are central to a plan to make demographic changes to parts of Syria, realigning the country into zones of influence that backers of Bashar al-Assad, led by Iran, can directly control and use to advance broader interests.

HUMAN RIGHTS

Iran should immediately halt the execution of 12 men convicted of drug offenses, scheduled for January 14, 2017, in Karaj Central Prison, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said today. The human rights organizations expressed concern that, despite repeated government promises, Iran has not made any tangible progress in reducing its alarming execution rate.

Two prisoners were hanged in public in the city of Sarpol-e Zahab (Kermanshah province, western Iran) on Moharebeh charges (enmity against God). According to a report by the Iranian state-run media IRIB, the executions were carried out in public on the morning of Sunday January 8.

DOMESTIC POLITICS

At the shrine of Imam Reza, Iran's holiest site, Ibrahim Raeisi tells thousands of pilgrims about their responsibilities to society. The conservative cleric then takes a swipe at Iran's arch enemy, the US. "The bullying system [of the US] is arrogant, overconfident and evil ... and tramples upon the rights of people as it has done with Palestinians for 70 years," Mr Raeisi, clad in a black turban and brown robe, tells worshippers. "The right will prevail." His sermon reflects the sentiments espoused by hardline sections of the Iranian regime, including clerics, the judiciary and the elite Revolutionary Guards. And it hints at how Mashhad, Iran's second city, is increasingly finding itself used as a base for hardliners to promote their brand of Shia radicalism. And it comes as Iran gears up for May elections at which Hassan Rouhani, the centrist president, will attempt to ward off the challenge of such hardline opponents and secure a second term in office.

OPINION & ANALYSIS

"The horrible Iran deal," President-elect Donald Trump tweeted just before the New Year. These words have been largely ignored. They should not be. They indicate that his pledge during the campaign to tear up and renegotiate the nuclear deal with Iran remains viable. To be sure, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as it is formally called, is highly flawed. But it would be foolhardy and risky for America to scuttle it now. First of all, it is improbable that Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany - the other five parties to the deal - would agree to jeopardize it. Pulling out would isolate the U.S. from the coalition it successfully created and leave no credible means for stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the objective of the deal. A second reason to keep the deal in place is that during its first seven years it delivers a period of significant constraints over Iran's nuclear program along with tight inspections and monitoring. But in the eighth year, 2023, as President Obama has acknowledged, the agreement will gradually allow Iran to build enough nuclear capability to reach almost zero "breakout time" (the time needed to produce enough fissile material to make a bomb). That makes those first seven years an opportune time to address the deal's flaws. The United States should put into place partnerships and plans to deter any Iranian effort to race toward nuclear weaponry once the constraints on its nuclear program start waning. Third, tearing up the deal would create a dangerous void: Washington would be provoking Tehran at a moment when it has no credible leverage to restrain Iran on its own. Since this is an international rather than bilateral deal, so long as Iran complies with it, international sanctions would not be restored and international legitimacy for military action would be weak or withheld entirely.

On January 10, officials from Iran and the P5+1 countries met in Vienna under the auspices of the Joint Commission, a body established by the 2015 nuclear deal and coordinated by Frederica Mogherini, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. Numerous media reports indicate that the commission was set to approve Tehran's request to import 130 tons of natural uranium from Russia and possibly more from Kazakhstan. Yet Iran has no civil need for that uranium -- it already possesses ample supplies for its research reactors, and Russia was previously contracted to provide sufficient fuel for the nuclear power plant at Bushehr. Aside from concerns about the implications of these potential uranium imports, the reported decision highlights a deeper, ongoing issue with implementation of the nuclear deal -- thus far, information about what the Joint Commission allows Iran to do has come largely from news leaks. Outside experts have not been able to make informed opinions about how well the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is working because they lack sufficient information from the Joint Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The scheduled January 18 UN Security Council (UNSC) discussion of Resolution 2231, which embodies the JCPOA as well as the ban on Iranian arms exports, is a good opportunity to provide greater transparency that allows for better-informed judgments about the deal. Consequently, the incoming Trump administration should revive the two main levers that brought Iran to the negotiations, but were partially abandoned by the Obama administration: a credible threat of sanctions that could severely damage the Iranian energy and financial sectors, and a credible surgical military option.

The process outlined in a new Joint Commission decision dated January 10, 2017 is in theory going to downblend the reportedly 100 kilograms (kg) of low enriched uranium (LEU) held up in Iran's Enriched UO2 Powder Plant (EUPP) into natural uranium or even depleted uranium. However, the devil is in the details, and understanding the actual situation requires more information. On the surface, the process appears to describe mixing depleted uranium and enriched uranium inside the plant, ideally resulting in a mixture that would not be enriched uranium. However, the wording implies that the mixing is not ideal and thus the downblending may be incomplete and reversible, e.g. the LEU would be recoverable if Iran built a facility to do so.






Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please email press@uani.com.

United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons.  UANI is an issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of nuclear weapons.

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