TOP STORIES
President Donald Trump on Thursday said he did not
believe that Iran was living up to the spirit of the 2015 deal to
curtail its nuclear weapons program. "I don't think Iran is in
compliance," Trump told reporters at his private New Jersey golf
club. "I don't they're living up to the spirit of the
agreement."
A young Iranian who was arrested,
convicted and sentenced to death as a child was executed Thursday, a
semi-official news agency in Iran reported. Human rights group
Amnesty International called the killing of Alireza Tajiki
"shameful." Tajiki was 15 years old when he was arrested
six years ago for murder and sodomy.
Two players on Iran's national soccer team were banned
for life from playing for their country on Thursday after they
participated in a match with their club team in Greece against an
Israeli team, an Iranian governmental official said. The players,
Masoud Shojaei, 33, the captain of the national team, and Ehsan Haji
Safi, 27, one of Iran's most promising players, played for their
Greek club team, Panionios, in a home game last week in Athens
against Maccabi Tel Aviv from Israel. "It is certain that Masoud
Shojaei and Ehsan Haji Safi will never be invited to join the
national football team because they violated the red line,"
Mohammad Reza Davarzani, Iran's deputy sports minister said Thursday
on Iranian state television.
U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS
The Persian empire strikes back. The Iranian parliament's Committee
for National Security and Foreign Policy agreed on Aug. 9 to allocate
additional money to projects intended to counter recent U.S. foreign
policy. The funds are included in a draft law pulled together
specifically in response to a new raft of U.S. sanctions. The draft
law proposes that, within six months, Iran will put together a new
strategy to counter persistent U.S. threats against Iran. The draft
law will be discussed in more detail when parliament reconvenes next
week. Iran's semiofficial ISNA news agency reported that 1 trillion
Iranian tomans (about $305 million) are to be allocated to expand
ballistic missile activities and another 1 trillion tomans will be
divided between the Ministry of Intelligence, Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and the Ministry of Defense. Yet another 1 trillion tomans
potentially will be allocated for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corp's Quds Force, which manages Iranian military activities abroad
and is therefore a source of concern for Washington.
The total value of trade exchanges between Iran and the
US over the first half of 2017 has decreased by 29 percent, according
to the latest data released by the US Census Bureau. The bilateral
trade between the Islamic Republic and the US from January to June
amounted to $77.2 million, showing a 29% drop, compared to the same
period last year, the data showed. The trade transactions between the
two countries in the first half of 2016 had reached $109.2 million,
according to the report. The data also showed that US exports to Iran
from January to June this year amounted to $41.3 million, a drop of
42 percent compared to the same period in 2016. From January to June
2016, the United States had exported $71.9 million worth of goods to
Iran. US imports from Iran during the first six months of this year
also reached $359 million, showing a 4% decrease compared to the same
period last year.
EXTREMISM
The expansion of Iranian regime
institutions in Germany has prompted the opening of an inquiry by the
Green Party in the Bundestag on Friday to assess Tehran's anti-Israel
and espionage activities. A Green Party document titled
"Direction of Shi'ite associations and their connection to the
Iranian regime," which contains 21 detailed questions on Iran's
influence in Germany, was sent to Chancellor Angela Merkel's
administration for a response.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
India has been cutting imports of Iranian crude oil,
making good on its promise to reduce imports by around 20 percent
this fiscal year ending March 2018, in a possible retaliation for
Tehran not awarding the development of a gas field in Iran to Indian
firms. According to ship tracking data from sources and data compiled
by Thomson Reuters Oil Research & Forecasts, India's oil imports
from Iran dropped by 16.3 percent in July from June, to 414,900 bpd.
Compared to July last year, India's crude imports from the Islamic
Republic plunged by 20.7 percent, Thomson Reuters Oil Research &
Forecasts data show. At the end of May, Iran's Oil Minister Bijan
Zanganeh said that Tehran had signed an initial agreement with Russia's
gas giant Gazprom for the development of the Farzad B gas field, in
what was the latest episode of the saga over the field which Tehran
had been taking its time to award to an Indian consortium.
HUMAN RIGHTS
An Iranian blogger for an Israeli news
site has arrived in Israel from Turkey where she says she had faced
possible deportation back to the Islamic republic. Speaking at a
press conference after her arrival in Israel on August 10, Neda Amin
said she feels "safe now." Amin, 32, wrote for the
Persian-language edition of The Times of Israel. She said she left
Iran for Turkey in 2014 after being threatened with prison for
writing material critical of the Iranian government. Amin said
Turkish authorities recently told her she would be deported to Iran,
and she feared that her writing in an Israeli media outlet
jeopardized her safety there.
DOMESTIC POLITICS
Thousands of speakers of Persian
appealed on social media to the world soccer federation to punish
Iran for its banning of two athletes on the national soccer team from
playing for their country over their participating in a match against
Israelis. The players, Masoud Shojaei, 33, the captain of the
national team, and Ehsan Haji Safi, 27, one of Iran's most promising
players, were banned Thursday for playing for their Greek club team,
Panionios, in a home game last week in Athens against Maccabi Tel
Aviv from Israel, the New York Times reported...The move prompted
thousands of speakers of Persian, including Iranians living in the
Islamic Republic or beyond, to call on the FIFA soccer federation to
impose sanctions on Iran for the move, according to Omid Memarian, a
New York-based journalist.
OPINION & ANALYSIS
One idea floating around is that we
need an Iran-style nuclear deal with North Korea-and that if we'd had
one, we wouldn't be debating the merits of nuclear versus
conventional war on the Korean peninsula, President Trump wouldn't be
blustering about "fire and fury," and Pyongyang wouldn't be
publically mulling a ballistic missile strike on Guam... The problem
is, we had an Iran-style nuclear deal with North Korea, and now North
Korea has nuclear weapons.
[T]he Iran Deal may well be the worst
possible model. For example, agreement with Iran famously provides
the regime up to 24 days of notice before inspectors are allowed
access to some suspect cites, and a regime with a record of cheating
like North Korea's is the worst possible regime to grant any leeway
or any trust. Moreover that same deal granted Iran enormous economic
benefits, access to international arms markets, and the ability to
build ballistic missiles. A similar deal with North Korea would have
the potential to supercharge the DPRK threat. That's not to say that
no agreement could work. Deals depend on their terms, obviously, but
any deal based on the Iran model puts America in a position of
weakness. In fact, given the failure of the North Korean beta test,
the Iran Deal itself is difficult to understand. Remember the old
saying - fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But
what if we're fooled three times? That just makes us fools.
Sure, Iran and North Korea - along with another of their
toxic allies, Russia - were partners as targets of the nearly
unanimous sanctions that recently sailed through Congress. But
they're partners in so many ways - other than both holding U.S.
hostages - from the weapons trade to circumvention of sanctions that
every action coming out of Pyongyang needs to be weighed in broader
context of the Iran relationship, and even as a test run of Iran's
ultimate ambitions for its own weapons capability. Iran is almost
living vicariously through North Korea's horn-locking with the Trump
administration, engaging in weapons-grade trolling with state media
loving the story and underscoring that Pyongyang is simply moving to
protect the DPRK from unbridled U.S. aggression - the same convenient
argument that Tehran makes to justify its own provocative actions.
Many Western diplomats hoped that the lifting of
sanctions and new investments that accompanied the implementation of
the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) would bolster the
hands of more reform-minded elements within the Iranian political
spectrum. If money talks, however, it seems that more hardline
elements have the upper hand in where and how to allocate funding.
The accompanying remarks by Kazem Jalali, who runs the major research
arm for Iran's parliament, suggest budget increases are looming for
Iran's ballistic missile program and the Qods Force-the elite unit of
the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) charged with export of
the revolution.
The Iranian economy consists of three distinct sectors:
public, private and semi-state - which includes religious,
revolutionary, military foundations and cooperatives, as well as
social security and pension funds. Experts agree that as a result of
flawed privatization processes in the past three decades, the
ownership of top governmental enterprises has been transferred to the
semi-state sector. Consequently, gradually the semi-state sector has
become the largest constituency in the country's economy. One of the
players in this semi-state sector is the network of companies around
the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), whose role in the
economy is usually subject to guessing games by all types of
commentators.
With the liberation of Mosul from ISIS and the impending
conquest of the "Caliphate" capital Raqqa, the U.S. is at a
decision point in the Middle East. But it does not yet have a
coherent strategy... The biggest problem facing the administration is
an Iran poised to control Iraq and Syria, and thus a corridor from
Tehran to southern Lebanon, in the wake of ISIS's defeat. Tehran,
with its Shia militias and missile arsenals and at least limited
Russian support, seeks thereby to upend regional security,
threatening Jordan, Israel, Turkey, and ultimately the Gulf states
from this corridor. The Trump Administration signed up to contain
this threat at the May Riyadh summit but so far has not figured out
how... To that end, the Administration should turn to the 1980's "Powell
Doctrine," a set of principles developed by then Defense
Secretary Caspar Weinberger and then General Colin Powell.
Iraqi politicians and civil society leaders resent the
tendency of outside analysts to depict Iraq as an Iranian puppet.
Beyond the ethnic differences between the two republics, there are
also religious differences. The concept of clerical rule inaugurated
by the late Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
is widely dismissed by the clerical leadership based in the Iraqi shrine
cities of Najaf and Karbala, where senior ayatollahs advocate a
greater separation between mosque and state. Economic interests also
distinguish the two countries. Iraqi businessmen resent the Iranian
dominance in some markets and accuse Iranian leaders of purposely
dumping manufactured goods into the Iraqi market in order to undercut
Iraqi factories It is against this backdrop that the excerpted
report in the Islamic Students' News Agency is interesting: It
suggests that Iranian authorities have suspended flights into Najaf
International Airport, Iraq's main gateway for Shi'ite pilgrims...
Whatever the ultimate resolution of the dispute, it may very well
leave lasting resentments between the two neighbors.
The ethnic stresses now stretching to their limits in
Afghanistan broke out into the open in Afghanistan's embassy in Ottawa
last week, when Ambassador Shinkai Karokhail was recalled to Kabul in
an uproar involving claims and counterclaims of in-house ethnic power
plays and recrimination. But that's small spuds. In the bigger
picture, Afghanistan's fracturing along ethnic lines, exacerbated by
the "war weariness" of the NATO countries, has opened up a
political and military vacuum that Russia and Iran are happily
filling, just as they did in Syria....When the Taliban leader Mullah
Mansour was killed in a drone strike last year in Balochistan, he was
returning from meeting government officials in Iran, where he also
met Russian officials. In recent weeks, Taliban commanders have
confirmed that Tehran is boosting its supply of funding and weaponry
to the Taliban leadership, and that some of those arms shipments
originate in Russia.
The Islamic Republic of Iran and the autonomous Kurdish
region of Iraq maintain cordial relations, and the two neighbors have
publicly cooperated in battling the Islamic State (IS). However, this
might change soon. The authorities in Tehran are increasingly
frustrated with the Kurdish leadership's decision to hold an
independence referendum on September 25 in territories under control
of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Tehran speculates that
the vote would speed up Kurdistan's walk towards full independence,
an event which Iran sees as a challenge not only to Iranian stability
but also to their regional ambitions...The United States should not
allow Iran to subvert the Iraqi Kurds' quest for independence, as
they have been an important ally to Washington in Iraq. If the
Iranian regime gets its way, it will only be emboldened to act in the
same manner against the United States' other allies in the region.
The United States has invested great military efforts and resources
to defeating the Islamic State in Iraq and bringing a degree of
stability to the country. An Arab-Kurdish war sponsored by Iran over
Iraqi Kurdistan's independence will only pave the way for chaos,
instability, and extremism to reemerge in Iraq, which will again
result in wasting American money and lives.
The Iranian Parliament's National Security and Foreign
Policy Committee on Wednesday approved a bill titled "Countering
America's Adventurous and Terrorist Actions" in response to the
latest U.S. sanctions, the Iranian media reported. According to the
text of the bill published today by the Islamic Republic News Agency,
the legislation obliges the ministries of foreign affairs, defense
and intelligence as well as the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps
(I.R.G.C.) and its elite Quds Force to work together to prepare a "comprehensive
strategic plan" in coordination with the Supreme National
Security Council to "counter the U.S. threats and subversive
activities" against the Islamic Republic... In the past,
Tehran's countermeasures have been symbolic as they targeted American
companies that do not do business in Iran. But since the new U.S.
sanctions target the I.R.G.C. and its elite Quds Force in a more
significant way, it is expected that Iran's response will carry more
weight this time.
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