Iranian Alert - January 5, 2005 - Risks of appeasing Iran's mullahs

Iran: U.S. spy planes spotted over nuke sites

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COMTuesday, January 4, 2005
Iran has reported flights by U.S. military aircraft over nuclear facilities near the borders with Afghanistan and Iraq.
Iran's state-controlled media said the overflights by U.S. aircraft were spotted near a range of nuclear facilities, including the Bushehr nuclear reactor constructed by Russia.
In late December, Teheran ordered the Iranian Air Force to shoot down unidentified aircraft flying anywhere in the country, Middle East Newsline reported. Iranian officials have accused Israel and the United States of seeking to conduct reconnaissance flights over Iran.
Iran has deployed anti-aircraft missiles around major nuclear sites, including Bushehr. So far, there have been no reports of Iranian missile fire toward U.S. or Israeli warplanes.
The U.S. reconnaissance flights were conducted as Iran was said to be accelerating its nuclear weapons programs in facilities unaccessible to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The U.S. aircraft said to have entered Iranian air space included F-16 multi-role fighters and F/A-18 attack jets, the reports said. The Iranian media said the aircraft appeared to have been sent on reconnaissance missions over Iran's nuclear sites, particularly in the southwestern province of Khuzestan.
On Monday, the Iranian newspaper Aftab reported the entry of a U.S. fighter-jet on Jan. 1. The unidentified fighter was said to have flown at low altitude over the northeastern province of Khorrasan which borders Afghanistan.
Iran's air defense command contains aging U.S.- and Russian-origin surface-to-air missile batteries not regarded as a threat to U.S. fighter-jets. The Iranian systems include the U.S. Hawk MIM-23B, the Russian SA-2, SA-5, SA-6 as well as the shoulder-launched SA-18. Iran has sought to purchase the Russian-origin S-300PMU long-range system.

EDITORIAL
The Iran Factor in Iraq's Vote

Published: January 5, 2005
lot could go wrong with Iraq's elections on Jan. 30. But one fear that seems misplaced is that the two main Iraqi Shiite parties, which are likely to be the biggest winners, would take orders from Iran's radical Shiite ayatollahs, imposing pro-Iranian policies on Baghdad or establishing an Iraqi Shiite theocracy.
It's true that both of these parties, the Dawa Islamic Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (known as Sciri), have strong historical and personal links with Iran and its leadership. But their politics, aspirations and main constituencies are now firmly rooted in Iraq. If these parties come to power as part of a national Iraqi government, with broad support from all major population groups, their independence from Iran seems assured. That independence will be harder to preserve if the January vote splits Iraq between a self-governing but weak Shiite and Kurdish zone and a Sunni region with continuing, violent insurrection.
Sciri and Dawa are the dominant parties of the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of mainly Shiite parties running as a joint slate in the January election. Even with high voter turnout in Sunni areas, these parties are expected to do well because 60 percent of Iraqis are Shiites. With reduced Sunni participation, they are likely to do even better.
Both parties fell under strong Iranian influence when Saddam Hussein was ruthlessly persecuting Iraq's Shiite majority and assassinating its main political and religious leaders. Their leaders received sanctuary and money from Iran. But many of the new constituents they are courting have bitter memories of Iran, dating to the suffering of the Iran-Iraq war. And Iran's corrupt, autocratic and economically floundering clerical dictatorship is not very popular in Iran right now, let alone Iraq. Iraq's leading Shiite ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, has repeatedly rejected the Iranian political model.
The real threat looming over the January elections comes from the continuing alienation of most of Iraq's Sunni minority. This extends well beyond the terrorists trying to intimidate election workers or the die-hards unable to accept majority rule. The military actions in Falluja and Mosul this fall seem to have deepened it, and it now embraces almost the entire Sunni community. The January election can begin to address this problem only if large portions of the Sunni population accept its results. Otherwise, the gravest dangers facing Iraq after Jan. 30 will not come from Iran's plotting ayatollahs, but from Iraq's own disaffected Sunnis.

Iraqi defence minister says Iran mainly to blame for Iraq unrest

DUBAI –AFP- Iraqi Defence Minister Hazem al-Shaalan took a fresh swipe at Iran, accusing it of being mainly responsible for the deteriorating situation in Iraq, in statements published here Wednesday.
"We have a strong belief that Iran is the main accused in the deterioration of the security situation in Iraq, such as illegal entry, smuggling of arms and means of sabotage," he told Emirati newspaper Al-Bayan.
"The proof which we have bears witness to Iran's responsibility in many operations that have shaken Iraq's stability," said the minister, who has previously pointed the finger at Iran and Syria in acts of violence in Iraq.
"Despite this, I say to Iranians and the regime of Tehran that it is in the interests of Iran to have balanced, healthy and positive relations," he added.
Shaalan earlier branded Tehran as Baghdad's "most dangerous enemy" and a source of terrorism.
Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was, meanwhile, quoted as calling on Syria to hand over to Baghdad Iraqis implicated in the violence in Iraq.
"What we want is to be handed those wanted elements accused of planning and executing" such acts, Allawi told the United Arab Emirates' Al-Khaleej newspaper.
On December 16, Allawi accused Damascus of harbouring fugitive Saddam Hussein aides suspected of orchestrating rebel attacks.
"Sebawi al-Tikriti, former head of the general security service, is in Syria with other former security officials," Allawi told Al-Arabiya television.
Both Syria and its key regional ally Iran have repeatedly rejected US-led accusations that they are meddling in Iraq.

UN To Visit Iranian Military Site

The IAEA announced that the UN will inspect an Iranian military site that the US believes was used for nuclear weaponization activities:
The inspection will be part of the U.N. investigation into allegations Iran has carried out work linked to nuclear 'weaponization,' the process of testing or assembling a warhead and attaching it to a delivery system. ...
According to globalsecurity.org, a Web Site run by a private Washington-based research group, the massive Parchin complex, around 30 km (19 miles) south of Tehran, is the center of Iran's munitions industry.
Officials from the United States and several other countries said in September that Parchin may be a site where Iran was testing explosives that would be appropriate for an atom bomb.
Although ElBaradei played down the U.S. allegations at the time, agency inspectors asked Tehran to visit the site. They want to take environmental samples to rule out the possibility that Iran had been working with nuclear materials at Parchin.

Either Iran has cleaned up Parchin or the intelligence was faulty. The mullahcracy would not risk detection with a voluntary inspection. The US and the EU-3 also know this, so perhaps the UN and IAEA will look for other indicators at Parchin. I suspect, however, that the end result of this inspection will be a public-relations win for Iran.

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