Iranian Alert -- August 5, 2004 [EST]-- IRAN LIVE THREAD -- "Americans for Regime Change in Iran"

Iraq Asks Iran to Return Planes

August 05, 2004
AFP
The Peninsula

KUWAIT -- Iraqi Defence Minister Hazem Al Shaalan, engaged in a war of words with Iran, demanded in remarks published yesterday that Tehran immediately return Iraqi planes entrusted to Iran ahead of the 1991 Gulf War.

“The 130 planes should be given back to Iraq now,” Shaalan said in an interview with the Kuwaiti daily newspaper Al Anbaa.

The figure is less than what Iraqi officials had previously asked Iran to return, namely 113 military and 33 civilian planes entrusted to Tehran by the former regime of Saddam Hussein on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War.

Tehran has insisted that it was holding only 22 Iraqi planes and that it was ready to return them if asked by the United Nations.

In 1991, Iraq also sent four planes to Tunisia and six to Jordan.

Shaalan also accused Iran of “attempting to sabotage the demographic structure of Iraq and to denaturalise its national identity.”

In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Shaalan said he had seen “clear interference in Iraqi issues by Iran” and accused Tehran of taking over some Iraqi border posts and sending spies and saboteurs into Iraq.

He said former fighters in Afghanistan had been helped by Iran to get into Iraq and that Iran was supporting “terrorism and bringing enemies into Iraq”.

Iran has consistently denied charges it has supported anti-US insurgents in Iraq, against which it fought a 1980-1988 war that killed an estimated one million people.

Tehran rejected Shaalan’s allegations on Tuesday, describing his statements as “contrary to the official message we get from Baghdad”.

Despite lingering suspicions on both sides of the Iran-Iraq frontier, the interim government in Baghdad has talked of the possibility of establishing diplomatic ties with its neighbour.

http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=World_News&subsection=Gulf%2C+Middle+East+%26+Africa&month=August2004&file=World_News20040805122325.xml

Saudi Cash Joins Forces with Nuclear Pakistan

August 04, 2004
The Financial Times
Roula Khalaf, Farhan Bokhari and Stephen Fidler

A week before Pakistan's maiden nuclear tests in May 1998, then prime minister Nawaz Sharif received a late night telephone call from a Saudi prince. India, Pakistan's arch-rival, had conducted nuclear tests that month and Mr Sharif was weighing the consequences of following suit.

As Mr Sharif told a hurriedly organised meeting of senior officials, the Saudi prince had offered to provide up to 50,000 barrels of oil a day to Pakistan for an indefinite period and on deferred payment terms. This would allow Pakistan to overcome the impact of punitive western sanctions expected to follow the tests.

According to a former aide to Mr Sharif, the message from Saudi Arabia, delivered on behalf of Crown Prince Abdullah, the de-facto ruler, had once again bailed out Pakistan at one of the most difficult moments in its history.

“It is possible that Pakistan may still have conducted its nuclear tests without the Saudi oil. But the tests would have been done with the knowledge that the economic fallout was going to be far more severe,” says the former aide to Mr Sharif.

The telephone call illustrated the intimacy between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, a relationship that receives little international attention but has so far proved, for both sides, probably more profound and secure than any other.

A year after the tests, Prince Sultan, the Saudi defence minister, visited the uranium enrichment and missile assembly plant at Kahuta, then run by the now disgraced Pakistani scientist Abdul-Qadeer Khan. He thus became the first foreign official known to have visited a Pakistani nuclear research facility.

Saudi financial support has fuelled suspicions of nuclear co-operation between the two countries. A senior US official says Saudi finance helped fund Pakistan's nuclear programme, allowing it among other things to buy nuclear technology from China.

Officials discount the possibility of Pakistani help to build an indigenous Saudi nuclear weapon: Saudi Arabia does not appear to have the necessary technical infrastructure. But they say there could be a sort of “lend-lease arrangement” that would allow weapons from Pakistan to be made available to Saudi Arabia. “The argument that they have options on Pakistan's arsenal are more likely,” the US official says.

Both Saudi and Pakistani officials vehemently deny the existence of any such deal. “We've never given money aimed at nuclear research and development and so we never asked or received privileges to nuclear weapons programmes,” insists Prince Turki al-Feisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief who worked closely with Pakistan in the 1980s to channel Arab militants to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Nawaf Obeid, a Saudi security consultant close to the government, however, suggests the kingdom enjoys Pakistan's security umbrella without any formal agreement. “We gave money and they dealt with it as they saw fit,” he says of the Pakistanis. “There's no documentation but there is an implicit understanding that on everything, in particular on security and military issues, Pakistan would be there for Saudi Arabia.”

Though some security analysts doubt Pakistan would jeopardise its own security by jumping to Saudi Arabia's defence, the relationship has been thrown into sharp focus again in recent months with the uncovering of a clandestine nuclear network led by Mr Khan. This sent investigators in search of the so-called “fourth customer” beyond the three to which Mr Khan confessed: Libya, Iran and North Korea.

Diplomats close to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency say Mr Khan had tried to find customers all over the Middle East but they have yet to find evidence to implicate a fourth country.

So far, there is no suggestion that Saudi Arabia purchased nuclear equipment or expertise from the Khan network. But the network's ability to outsource important elements of a nuclear weapons programme would make it easier for any country even one without much technical infrastructure to start weapons development.

To be sure Saudi Arabia has plenty of reasons and the financial muscle to seek nuclear weapons. Saudis live in a dangerous environment, surrounded by rivals. They include Israel, whose undeclared nuclear arsenal Saudi Arabia criticises as the main block to a nuclear-free Middle East, and Iran, Saudi Arabia's strategic competitor suspected by western governments of developing nuclear weapons.

In the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was considered a close friend of Saudi Arabia, Iraq's military strength was seen as protection for the Sunni Muslim monarchies of the Gulf against the ambitions of a revolutionary Shia regime in Iran.

After Mr Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, however, Iraq became the main threat in the Gulf and the Saudis called on the US for protection. Relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, gradually improved over the past decade, though remain beset by suspicion.

Nearly all US troops stationed in the country since then were withdrawn last year following the removal of Mr Hussein's regime, leaving a few advisory and support units. Political ties with the US also became strained in the backlash from the September 11 attacks, carried out by mostly Saudi militants.

“Saudi Arabia is in strategic limbo with the US security commitment being called into question or being redefined and with Iran's nuclear programme,” said Wyn Bowen, a lecturer in war studies at Kings College, London.

Against this troubled background, the link with Pakistan has become all the more important. “It's probably one of the closest relationships in the world between any two countries without any official treaty,” says Prince Turki, now ambassador to London. “Just the fact there's a friendly voice heard from time to time is very pleasant in today's world,“ he adds.

Reports of Saudi nuclear ambitions have been around since the 1970s in spite of the consistent rejections by the government. In 1975, according to one report, Saudi Arabia opened a nuclear research centre in a desert military complex, later closing it down.

In 1986-88, Saudi Arabia bought 30 or more intermediate-range DF-3 Chinese missiles, a type used by Beijing to carry nuclear weapons. Both Chinese and Saudi officials said they were adapted to carry conventional warheads, even though their inaccuracy would make them ill-suited for this purpose. In response to US pressure following the purchase, Saudi Arabia signed the non-proliferation treaty and legally foreswore nuclear weapons.

These obsolete missiles may soon have to be replaced. Robert Einhorn, a senior arms control official in the Clinton administration, said Saudi Arabia's missiles came up in US discussions aimed at curbing Chinese sales of long-range missiles in the autumn of 2000. China wanted, he said, to be able to fulfil some pre-existing servicing arrangements. “It became clear they were talking about Saudi Arabia,” he said.

In 1994, a Saudi defector who worked for the kingdom's United Nations mission claimed the Saudi government had paid up to $5bn to Saddam Hussein to build a nuclear weapon and provided funds to Pakistan in return for security guarantees. A visit to Pakistan last year by Crown Prince Abdullah also fed rumours of a new nuclear deal but the allegations were dismissed by the US State Department.

Saudi officials say the country's leaders always considered the acquisition of nuclear weapons a taboo that would bring the kingdom more controversy than comfort. Last year, in the aftermath of the Iraq war, senior princes considered a strategic paper that offered them three options: to acquire a nuclear capability as a deterrent, maintain or enter into an alliance with a nuclear power that would offer protection, or work to rid the region of banned weapons. Prince Turki insists the paper “died in its place”.

Mr Einhorn says that, in fact, there is little hard evidence that Saudi Arabia is pursuing the bomb: “It's like a suspected crime where you have a motive but not much more than that.”

Over the years, however, Saudi Arabia's ties with Pakistan gained strength and the discreet but deep inter-dependency has kept suspicions of nuclear co-operation alive.

Rooted in co-operation between military generals and intelligence operatives, the relationship survived repeated political upheavals in Pakistan. The two countries also have been drawn together by religious ties: the Saudis, custodians of Islam's two holiest sites, have been eager to protect a country, also governed by Sunni Muslims, that was born on the basis of its religion. Moreover, the kingdom has also poured money into religious schools - madrasas - spreading its puritanical brand of Wahabi Islam throughout Pakistan.

“When Pakistan was formed (after the 1947 partition from India) we were losing Palestine. So it seemed in public minds that the establishment of a Muslim state out of a colonial past was somehow a recompense for the losses of the Muslim world in Palestine,“ says Prince Turki.

Saudi officials say Pakistan probably received more Saudi financial aid - which started in the 1960s - than any other country outside the Arab world. In return the Saudis received military and diplomatic assistance. In the 1960s, Pakistani instructors were dispatched to Saudi Arabia to train Saudis on the use of newly acquired British aircraft. In the 1970s, an agreement was reached with Pakistan to second 15,000 military personel to the kingdom. They pulled out in 1987, an era of depressed Saudi oil revenues.

“When we had a large military contingent deployed in Saudi Arabia, the Pakistani government happily noted that the payments for keeping our troops there helped us to pay for a part of our defence,” says a former senior Pakistani military officer who served in Saudi Arabia. “The principle of our relationship is that the Saudis would not let Pakistan sink”.

In the 1980s and 1990s the two countries found common cause in arming the Arab fighters who helped drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal and Afghanistan's descent into civil war, both the Saudis and the Pakistanis favoured the Taliban militia which emerged from the Wahabi religious schools in Pakistan.

Hasan Askari Rizvi, a leading Pakistani analyst on defence and national affairs, says Saudi Arabia paid for a batch of 40 F-16 fighter aircraft bought by Pakistan in the 1980s from the US for approximately $1bn. “Not only did the Saudis pay for the aircraft but they also lobbied for Pakistan with the US government,” he says. “The Saudis have played a critical role for Pakistan. Consequently, that has won them tremendous influence in Islamabad”.

Ali Awadh Asseri, the Saudi Ambassador to Islamabad for almost four years, is widely seen as one of the most influential diplomats in Pakistan, though major policy discussions are carried out directly between key officials and leaders in Riyadh and Islamabad.

“Asseri has the kind of access to the Pakistani president and the prime minister which few other ambassadors receive. Maybe the US ambassador falls in the same category” adds Dr Rizvi.

Such is Saudi influence in Pakistan that Saudi officials, including the ambassador, also play a mediating role in Pakistani politics. A year after Pakistan's nuclear tests, Mr Sharif was removed from office in a bloodless military coup and then sentenced to life imprisonment on a controversial charge of ordering the hijacking of a Pakistani airliner.

But he found himself exiled to Saudi Arabia in 2002 for a 10-year period, under a deal struck between General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler, and the Saudi regime. The deal assured a life of comfort for the former Pakistani leader and saved him from the prospect of a long jail term. “The Saudis may not have the ability to change Pakistan's strategic profile in that they don't have a military which can support Pakistan and they're not an arms supplier. But they have the means to make things happen,” says Teresita Schaffer, head of the south Asia program at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/440d27d4-e638-11d8-b549-00000e2511c8.html

Chatroom Revolutionaries

August 05, 2004
Reason Online
Marc C. Johnson

"Got a Mullah?" asks a stainless steel coffee mug for sale on the Web. Emblazoned alongside the question is a cartoon of a giant hand clenching two irritated-looking clerics who resemble Iran’s late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

One click away, a heather gray, 100-percent cotton T-shirt proclaiming "Free All Political Prisoners in Iran NOW!" features a famous image of Ahmad Batebi, an Iranian film student sentenced to 15 years for anti-mullah activities. The widely reproduced image shows Batebi’s "crime": holding aloft a bloodstained shirt that belonged to a friend beaten by regime forces.

Both items -- along with lunch boxes, greeting cards, and bumper stickers -- are available to any Iranian expatriate at activistchat.com, a site that also features news, petitions, forums, editorials, and other information of interest to the Iranian diaspora. Such sites are the tools of the would-be next Iranian revolution. Many are produced by revolutionaries who grew up not in Iran but in Europe and North America. They communicate with their comrades however they can, surfing for any scrap of news available from within the tightly controlled Islamic Republic of Iran. Aside from their unconcealed disdain for the ruling clerics in Tehran, they are characterized by an intense nationalism and not a little intergroup disagreement over where Iran should be headed.

"I cannot go into specifics," Potkin Azarmehr, director of the Campaign to Free Iran’s Students (cfisnews.com), says cryptically of his group’s work with those inside Iran. Careless communications, the dissidents explain, can trigger crackdowns, closing precious avenues of contact. "Certainly the global communications revolution has made things a lot easier," he says. "You only have to look at the areas in which the Islamic Republic has endeavored to crack down," he adds, to get clues about how the world of dissident Iranians is operating.

In fact, the way the opposition communicates with students inside Iran is no great secret. E-mails, chat rooms, and phone calls to family and friends are the only near-realtime ways to find out what is going on inside the Islamic Republic. All involved are acutely aware of the fact that Iran’s intelligence and security services try to intercept such communications, with inconsistent results. Roozbeh Farahanipour, executive director of the Glorious Frontiers Party (marzeporgohar.org), notes matter-of-factly that such communications are dangerous, "because if the regime finds out, you are probably going to be executed." But for the students and their supporters, that’s a very big if.

The students believe that in the long run they can defeat the regime’s security efforts. But the regime isn’t their only problem. Despite their high-tech communications, expatriate opponents of the regime face a number of low-tech challenges. Among them are competing agendas, a debilitating scramble for leadership, and a chronic lack of funds.

Such challenges notwithstanding, the dissidents make daily efforts to undermine the regime. As with all authoritarian governments, the Islamic Republic’s security agencies can process only so much information about the counterrevolutionaries, and they are constrained by security requirements, financial resources, even the banal strictures of available time. The student groups know this and hope that through sheer message volume and guile they can stay one step ahead of their adversaries.

Aryo Pirouznia, spokesman for the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (daneshjoo.org -- daneshjoo means "student"), observes that when the game is cat and mouse, the mice have to stay on the cutting edge. "Our site has been blocked" by the regime, he states. "But what they don’t understand is that...we are not in an age in which a country’s borders can be closed." Indeed, dissident groups have found a technological solution to their communications problems: Anonymizer.

This program, which allows surfers to view sites while concealing their identities by going through an anonymous proxy server, has been a boon to the Iranian students. When the Iranian security apparatus finally catches up with them, Pirouznia explains, "We change, then they change. We change user names, we change places. We use several chat rooms now. You have the public chat rooms, which are totally monitored [by the regime]; then you have the private chat rooms, which we use."

Proxy servers and chat rooms are not the only Internet-based approaches Pirouznia’s group uses. Such groups are also sending encrypted and compressed documents via U.S.-based free e-mail accounts, a tactic also used by organized criminals, terrorists, spies, journalists, and even businessmen.

"Let’s imagine you have Hotmail, Yahoo, whatever, and you are in Iran," Pirouznia says.

"You have several accounts. Why? Because the [Internet backbone] ‘belongs’ to [the Iranian security services], you can’t claim, ‘I never went to Yahoo or Hotmail.’ They say, ‘Here is the log. You went to it.’" But by having numerous accounts, and by using at least one of them only for apparently benign activities such as sending jokes and family gossip, the user covers his dissident communications. The other accounts, says Pirouznia, "are destroyed after a time, and you get another under another name. And all of the materials that come and go, they are all encrypted. It has become a way of life."

American administrations since the late 1980s have ignored the student groups, instead pursuing a policy of unofficial dialogue with the Islamic Republic. The would-be revolutionaries’ unrequited desire for attention, however, may be coming to an end. In August 2003, for example, the International Broadcasting Bureau, the agency that administers such services as Radio Free Europe, confirmed for the information technology newsletter Security Focus that Uncle Sam would give every Iranian with Internet access a free subscription to Anonymizer -- as long as the subscriber was resident in Iran. Neither the bureau nor Anonymizer will disclose how much this deal is worth, but it could total up to 2 million users.

And last May, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) sponsored Senate Bill 1082, the Iran Democracy Act, intended to reform Radio Farda (a sort of Farsi Voice of America), provide grants to other external Iranian media, and back a referendum on Islamic rule. Most observers believe the bill was meant to be a shot across the Islamic Republic’s bow. Brownback’s bill has not been signed into law, however, and further legislation is unlikely in an election year. Congressional interest notwithstanding, the dissident groups, both external and internal, are still largely on their own.

The sites officially represented by Azarmehr, Pirouznia, and Farahanipour are three of perhaps a dozen that form the core of the Iranian opposition in exile’s fractious electronic vanguard. There are monarchists, socialists, constitutionalists, Zoroastrians, republicans, hard-core communists, moderate Islamists, Mossadeghists, Azeris, and other less well-defined confederations of students, aging ex-students, and businessmen distributed throughout the West. They are far from unified. Iran watchers believe that "the opposition" is a misnomer, that there simply is no unified opposition. Privately, many members of the opposition will admit as much. Why they can’t unify is a tougher question. Pirouznia attributes it to Iranian character. "We have a problem with being self-centered," he argues.

"If I am a political activist, I think that everything should be channeled through me."

The only times in recent memory that the expatriate opposition has even gathered around the same table have been during periods of major crisis for those still in Iran -- when the regime has cracked down on dissent. Even when they do get together, it rarely results in any significant action. Describing an "old guard" among the opposition, Azarmehr says: "One thing which seems very fashionable amongst the Iranian opposition outside Iran is signing up to charters. They gather in some hotel, draw up a charter, and put their signatures at the bottom of the charter. Then they go away and nothing further happens."

Azarmehr’s point is underlined by the array of Web sites advocating alternatives to the current regime, each of which seems to have a petition or charter of its own. With some, like activistchat.com, the ideology is difficult to divine on first examination; the site espouses secularism and provides news. Others, such as the Iran National Front (jebhemelli.net), proudly proclaim, "our path is the Mossadegh path," referring to the Iranian prime minister ousted by a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1953.

Still others want to re-install a shah on the Peacock Throne. Freemyiran.com, a site that features pro-monarchist elements, offers free bumper stickers as well as flyers in Adobe Acrobat format that supporters can print out and distribute. And far from the front lines, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Reza Pahlavi, son of the late shah, is pushing his own political agenda with books, a Web site, and public appearances. Skirting a discussion of the troubling human rights record of the shah’s intelligence and security service, the SAVAK, rezapahlavi.org provides position papers and speeches advocating secularism and a referendum on Islamic rule.

Farahanipour’s Glorious Frontiers Party advocates a boycott of Shell Oil, the Dutch petroleum conglomerate that does business with the regime. Farahanipour’s point is one pushed by many parts of the opposition: Cut off the money -- in particular the European investment that continues to support the leaders in Tehran -- and you will sever the regime’s lifeline. His site -- which features a picture of a lion holding a sword in front of a blazing sun, a favored pre-revolutionary symbol -- asks the visitor to "support Iranians in their fight against religious apartheid in Iran."

Farahanipour concedes the diversity of opposition groups may be the external dissidents’ undoing. "Unfortunately, each group wants to be the leader of the opposition," he says.

"Most groups focus their attention on putting down other groups, so they can make themselves more credible. The majority of political groups outside Iran simply do not have any power or members inside Iran."

The one factor that seems to bind the groups together is that their members all have day jobs. For the most part, funding is so scarce that they are beholden to a few meager donations from well-meaning businessmen. Despite the considerable size and relative affluence of the Iranian diaspora, the groups say funds are slow to come. Azarmehr, whose organization is based in Britain, complains: "Hardly any money comes from anywhere...Our own income last year came from one donor who gave a few hundred pounds to us to print some T-shirts with the picture of Batebi...and the sale of those T-shirts and our own individual donations has been our entire budget. We are all part-time activists and have the normal stresses of having full-time jobs."

Pirouznia spins it a different way. "We are night partisans and day workers," he says cheerfully.

The internal groups are finding it especially hard to make ends meet. "There is hardly any money which is being channeled to the combatants inside Iran," says Azarmehr. "We are talking about a few thousand pounds in irregular donations. Certainly compared to the financial backing that Khomeini had from some foreign sources and the Iranian bazaar merchants [in 1979], we really are talking a pittance." Farahanipour echoes this point: "We get our money from personal donations and our members. Whatever money we do receive, we simply try to pass on to our members inside Iran, or fund events to inform the public of what’s going on in Iran."

To simplify the donation process, some of the groups have adopted high-tech money raising techniques. Several have signed onto PayPal and other online money transfer services. Farahanipour attributes the difficulty in raising funds to confusion about the groups themselves; he even hints at malfeasance by other anti-regime fund-raisers. "Unfortunately Iranians that live outside Iran have been lied to so frequently by the supposed opposition that they no longer believe that there are genuine opposition groups that need their donations," he says.

Few, if any, of the Iranian opposition groups receive U.S. government money, at least overtly. Radio Farda, funded through the State Department, keeps the opposition groups largely at arm’s length. This suits the opposition, which takes a dim view of the State Department’s strategy of engagement with the Islamic Republic. Farahanipour scoffs that Mohammed Khatami, Iran’s reformist president, "attempted to show that a theocracy can be made a democracy, and it seems the only [people] he fooled were the State Department."

The Iranian opposition groups were apoplectic when -- following a dinner in January with Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iran’s permanent envoy to the United Nations -- several members of Congress proposed an official visit to Iran. Opposition message boards around the world lit up, their participants incensed at the idea of rapprochement with the mullahs. It was spectacularly bad timing for the proposal, coming just as the Guardians’ Council was disqualifying reformist parliamentarians from running in the February elections.

In the end, the opposition groups needn’t have worried. Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi indicated that the trip was "not on the agenda," a diplomatic way of telling the American politicians they couldn’t invite themselves to Tehran so easily.

The State Department and errant members of Congress are not the only such objects of scorn. The European Union is derided by many groups for its "critical dialogue" policy, which stipulates that engagement with the clerical regime can in the long run improve conditions for ordinary Iranians. "We have always had a bad experience with European countries," says Farahanipour. "If you were to draw out all the advancements the E.U.’s critical dialogue brought, you’d be hard pressed to cite three things."

Azarmehr is equally skeptical of European efforts. Iranians, he says, "want the E.U. to finally admit that their policy of critical dialogue with the Islamic Republic in the last 25 years has been futile." Azarmehr observes that the Islamic Republic "still abuses human rights, still sponsors terrorism and still destabilizes peace and prosperity in the Middle East and the world despite 25 years of ‘critical dialogue’ by the European Union countries."

What the groups want from America is solidarity, especially rhetorical support from the White House in their campaign to delegitimize the mullahs. "We welcome any support, but not involvement," Farahanipour says. "When President Bush spoke of how Americans are standing with the people of Iran in their quest for democracy, that was moral support."

Pirouznia agrees. "In general the new U.S. administration has understood the reality of things going on in Iran," he says. "We are asking not to intervene militarily; that would be the biggest mistake the U.S. could make. We ask for their moral support."

Marc C. Johnson, a former CIA officer, is a consultant and freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

August/September 2004

http://www.reason.com/0408/cr.mj.chatroom.shtml

Europe's Iranian Dilemma

August 05, 2004
Deutsche Welle
Opinion

Iran said this week it didn't feel bound by promises brokered by Germany, France and Britain to control its nuclear program. Fruitless talks in Paris, at the same time, have left Europe increasing frustrated.

The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Britain avoided an escalation in the row over Iran's nuclear program by convincing Tehran to sign a supplementary protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) late last year.

Then the Iranians said they would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to carry out unlimited checks, and Tehran would suspend all activities to enrich uranium.

In return, the Europeans promised not to bring the "case of Iran" to the UN Security Council, but to leave it with the IAEA. And they suggested that if Iran continued to cooperate, they would provide the country with technical expertise for the peaceful use of nuclear power.

Nothing has come of it.

Even after the agreement was made, Tehran concealed its activities to build centrifuges that could be used to make weapons-grade uranium. Tehran continues to insist it has no plans to enrich uranium -- to complete the process of purifying the element for use as fuel for nulear power or weapons.

But, in Europe, mistrust and irritation have grown considerably since that announcement.

Still, the Europeans have avoided drastic declarations or measures. They want to wait until the IAEA presents its next report, in September. The Europeans would only change course to the American position -- to bring the case before the UN Security Council -- if the report does indeed turn out to be negative.

Washington is convinced that that will be happen.

Aided by Israeli claims, the United States has long accused Iran of using its nuclear program to fashion itself into a regional nuclear power, rather than pursuing peaceful means, as Tehran claims it is doing.

Washington is also the driving force behind the attempt to bring the issue before the Security Council, although, in view of developments in Iraq, the Americans' "enthusiasm" has waned somewhat. Apparently, Washington has abandoned the idea of "dealing with" Iran -- the second country in its "axis of exil" -- next.

In Tehran, the issue was long ago declared a question of national honor -- even more so since parliamentary elections in February strengthened the conservatives' influence. But the Iranians haven't exactly demonstrated tactical skill: Secretiveness and threats to revoke last year's agreement only increase the Europeans' mistrust and the Americans' arguments.

Less could surely achieve more: The Europeans have a strong interest in showing the United States that diplomacy accomplishes more than muscling. Europe would certainly be sticking to its promise to Iran, which it also wants to gain as a partner in other areas. Nobody's making it easy for the Europeans.

http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,7549_A_1287695_1_A,00.html

Iraq Accuses Iran of Fuelling Violence in its Territory to Settle Scores with US

August 05, 2004
AP
Khaleej Times

KUWAIT CITY -- Iraq's defence minister has accused Iran of promoting the violence in his country, saying that Iran should not be using his country to "settle its scores" with America.

In an interview published in yesterday's Al Anba, Defence Minister Hazem Shaalan accused certain neighbouring states of a lack of concern for Iraq's predicament as a land struggling to be reborn from the poverty and destruction left by the war that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.

"Some of the neighbours did not care about this. They added fuel to the fire," Shaalan said.

Asked if he meant Iran, the defence minister said: "Yes, it is Iran. I have said it before ... and I say Iran, Iran, Iran."

It was the second time in two months that Mr Shaalan has blamed Iran for the insecurity in Iraq. Last month he said Iran was Iraq's "first enemy" because it was playing a role in the insurgency. Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi later distanced his government from the remark.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2004/August/middleeast_August142.xml&section=middleeast&col=

Iran Accused of Playing Double Game

August 05, 2004
smh.com.au

Iran has served as a refuge for al-Qaeda operatives suspected of plotting attacks in Europe and the Middle East, despite its periodic crackdown on the terrorist network, and of playing a central role in the Iraqi insurgency, terrorism investigators in Europe say.

Investigations in France, Italy, Spain and other countries since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US point to an increasing presence in Iran of al-Qaeda figures, including suspected organisers of train bombings in the Spanish capital, Madrid, last March, and last year's car bombings in Saudi Arabia.

But Iran's complex politics and secretive policies have made it difficult to determine the nature of any relationship between Iranian officials and the terrorist network, investigators say.

The potential ties between Iran and al-Qaeda were highlighted last month with the release of the final report of the US special commission into the September 11 attacks. The US panel found that eight of the hijackers had travelled through Iran, but produced little evidence of an al-Qaeda-Iran alliance before the 2001 attacks.

Western law enforcement officials are concerned about the menace posed by the group since September 11, including its involvement in Iraq and attacks in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Osama bin Laden's movement has re-formed since 2001, with Iran often used as a refuge for key members who have gained stature and autonomy while bin Laden has faded from the limelight, officials say.

An unnamed French law enforcement officer said the Iranians played "a double game. Everything they can do to trouble the Americans, without going too far, they do it". The Iranians "have arrested important al-Qaeda people, but they have permitted other important al-Qaeda people to operate. It is a classic Iranian style of ambiguity, deception, manipulation."

Iran insists it has dismantled any terrorist networks in its territory. Hamid Reza Asseif, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said recently: "Iran has no affinity with Taliban and al-Qaeda, and Iran has proven it by words and acts."

European investigators say Iran has alternately pursued and tolerated al-Qaeda, because the group serves as a tool for Iran's geopolitical interests in neighbouring Iraq and against key foes: the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Any Iranian support for al-Qaeda remains indirect and limited, investigators believe, because of fundamental differences between bin Laden's Sunni Muslim movement and the Shiite regime in Tehran.

Some experts also distinguish between Iran's comparatively moderate political leadership and its hardline security forces, particularly the Revolutionary Guard, which functions as a "state within a state," a London-based analyst said.

"When the Iranian Government says it is not dealing with al-Qaeda, it is telling the truth," said Mustafa Alani of the Royal United Services Institutes, a think tank affiliated with the British Ministry of Defence. "It's not the Government, it's the Revolutionary Guard."

Al-Qaeda figures who allegedly have operated in Iran, according to court documents and investigators in Europe, include Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian seen as a leader of the Iraq insurgency, Saif Adel, an Egyptian regarded as al-Qaeda's military chief, and Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, suspected of organising the Madrid attacks.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/04/1091557924775.html?oneclick=true

Shi'ites Declare Holy War On British

SkyNews ^ | August 05, 2004
Posted on 08/05/2004 7:28:20 AM PDT by traumer

Militiamen loyal to Shi'ite Muslim radical leader Moqtada al-Sadr have declared holy war against British forces based in Iraq's main southern city of Basra.

The declaration came after four of their comrades were arrested.

"We will wage jihad and war against the foreign troops, not against police and Iraqi forces," said Sheikh Saad al-Basri, al-Sadr's representative in the largely Shi'ite city.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1185529/posts

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