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TOP STORIES
The Trump administration Wednesday continued its sharp
criticism of Iran, labeling Tehran the world's top government sponsor
of terrorism. In a new report, the State Department said terrorist
attacks and deaths from terrorism declined worldwide last year. The
Islamic State militant group remained the most active
"nonstate" perpetrator, the report said, despite having
suffered a significant loss of territory. The document, formally
titled Country Reports on Terrorism 2016, is issued annually under
congressional mandate. A section on state sponsors of terrorism
highlights Iran, its arming of the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon
and anti-Israel groups like Hamas, plus its support for Syrian
President Bashar Assad, whom the U.S. accuses of committing numerous
atrocities against his citizenry.
Iran will not fall into the "trap" that the
Trump administration is attempting to set in order to force the
collapse of the 2015 nuclear deal, President Hassan Rouhani said on
Wednesday. The U.S. "ploy today is to behave in such a way as to
have Iran say 'I am walking away'" from the agreement, Rouhani
told his cabinet, according to the state-run Iranian Students News
Agency. Iran "needs to be aware not to fall into their
trap," he said. Rouhani's intervention came after the U.S. again
made clear its readiness to confront Iran and the accord that scaled
back its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. On Monday,
it affirmed that the Islamic Republic has continued to meet the
agreement's conditions -- as required every three months -- but hours
later imposed new sanctions over what it called Iran's persistent
efforts to destabilize the Middle East. There is "a school of
thought in the administration" that wants to push Iran into
walking away from the deal, said Henry Smith, lead analyst on Iran
and the Middle East at the Dubai office of Control Risks, a research
group. "The motivation for that is to make Iran look like it's
at fault rather than" the U.S, he said. The White House is
conducting a broader review of policy toward the Islamic Republic.
The head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards said on
Wednesday Washington should move its bases and avoid "miscalculations"
over new sanctions against Tehran, Iranian agencies reported.
The Trump administration imposed the new sanctions on Tuesday
over Iran's ballistic missile program and said Tehran's "malign
activities" in the Middle East undercut any positive contributions
coming from the 2015 nuclear accord. Iran says its program to
develop ballistic missiles is defensive and does not violate the
nuclear accord. "If the United States wants to pursue
sanctions against Iran's defenses and the Guards, then it has to move
its regional bases to a distance of about 1,000 km (620 miles) around
Iran and be aware that it would pay a high price for any
miscalculations," Tasnim and other news agencies quoted Guards
commander Mohammad Ali Jafari as saying. The Pentagon said it
was not planning on its moving bases.
SYRIA CONFLICT
It has never been a particularly well-kept secret that
Israel has conducted clandestine airstrikes in Syrian territory over
recent years. But this week, Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to not only
admit that these strikes had occurred, but that they had occurred
"dozens" of times. The Israeli prime minister made this
admission accidentally - all thanks to a hot mic. Netanyahu's remarks
came during a meeting with Eastern European leaders in Budapest on
Wednesday. Although the meeting occurred behind closed doors, the
Israeli leader's microphone remained on and his voice was transmitted
to headphones given to reporters earlier. Speaking to the leaders of
Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, Netanyahu said
Israel had specifically targeted Iranian weapons shipments to the
Lebanese militia Hezbollah in Syria, where Hezbollah is helping
bolster Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces in the ongoing
civil war.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Kuwait said Thursday it is shutting the Iranian cultural
mission to the country and calling for a reduction in the number of
Iranian diplomats stationed there, deepening a rift between the Gulf
Arab states and Tehran. The official Kuwait News Agency announced the
move in a brief statement Thursday. It linked the decision to the
case of a terrorist cell broken up in 2015 that authorities allege
had contacts with Iran and the Lebanese Shiite militant group
Hezbollah. The Iranian ambassador to Kuwait has been notified of the
decision, the news agency, known as KUNA, reported. Iranian state
television and other news agencies in the Islamic Republic quickly
reported the news, citing Arab media. Embassy staff and officials in
Tehran did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The 2015
case centers on a group of 26 people known as the al-Abdali cell
whose arrests for links to Shiite powerhouse Iran touched on
sensitive sectarian issues in Kuwait, a Sunni-majority country.
MILITARY MATTERS
An Iranian Kurdish journalist reported in an interview
with Al Arabiya that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces in Iran's
Kurdistan and its recruiting forces, known as the Basij, received
orders to launch a recruitment campaign in preparation for a possible
war against the Kurdistan region in the event of its independence.
Azad Mustovi, an Iranian Kurdish journalist in exile in France,
quoted an informed source in Kurdistan Iran, who declined to be
identified for security reasons, as saying that in recent days, the
headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards and the mobilization forces
have launched a recruitment campaign to send troops to Iraqi Kurdistan
if necessary in preparation for a possible war with the Kurdish
Peshmerga of Iraq in the event of the declaration of independence of
Iraqi Kurdistan. The source added that some elements of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards of Iranian Kurds origins declared their
unwillingness to fight against the Kurds of Iraq, but they are ready
to fight against ISIS.
OPINION & ANALYSIS
The last thing the United States needs is another war in
the Middle East. Yet a drumbeat of provocative words, outright
threats and actions - from President Trump and some of his top aides
as well as Sunni Arab leaders and American activists - is raising
tensions that could lead to armed conflict with Iran. Tehran invites
some of this hostility with moves like detaining Xiyue Wang, a
Princeton scholar, and supporting the Syrian president, Bashar
al-Assad. And for many American politicians, Iran - estranged from
the United States since 1979 - deserves only punishment and
isolation. But Iran and the United States also share some interests,
like fighting the Islamic State. So why not take advantage of all the
diplomatic tools, including opening a dialogue, used before to manage
difficult and even hostile governments? It is useful to recall the
lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War, arguably America's biggest strategic blunder
in modern times. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the country was riveted
on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But in Washington, the
talk turned almost immediately to Iraq and the chance to overthrow
Saddam Hussein, even though he had nothing to do with Sept. 11 and
had no nuclear weapons, as President George W. Bush alleged. Mr. Bush
decided to fight a pre-emptive war without a solid justification or
strategy.
President Trump reportedly battled with aides before
deciding to certify that Iran is in compliance with the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a decision that rankled
opponents of the deal. While confirming Iran's compliance with the
JCPOA, the Trump administration tried to signal its willingness to
impose new sanctions for Iran's non-nuclear behavior. In addition,
Bloomberg's Eli Lake reports, "Administration officials on
Monday said the Treasury Department was still reviewing a proposed
sale of civilian airliners from Boeing to Iran's largest airline.
That deal is under scrutiny because Iran uses its civilian air fleet
to send supplies, personnel and weapons to the war in Syria."
That couldn't come a moment too soon, according to critics of the
JCPOA. John Hannah and Saeed Ghasseminejad write.
The world's biggest gas field lies between Qatar and
Iran, and the half-competitive, half-cooperative race to exploit it
has taken a new turn. For both countries, this enormous resource is
also a source of political power. Now, with the emirate at odds with
Tehran's foe, Saudi Arabia, its tacit cooperation with Iran is
gaining, even as the two are set to compete more intensely in gas
markets. In 1971, Shell first drilled into what became Qatar's North
Field and was disappointed to find not oil, but gas, though in vast
quantities. The country was only a modest oil producer with a tiny
domestic and regional energy market. Through the 1980s and 1990s, it
struggled to develop a liquefied natural gas project to export to
Asia, but with low global energy prices, a cost-cutting BP gave up
and Mobil took over. The emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who
took power from his cautious father in a bloodless coup in 1995, was
keen to press ahead.
This week marks the 23rd anniversary of the 1994 bombing
of the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA) in Buenos Aires
that killed 85 people and wounded an additional 300. Iran has marked
the occasion by insulting the victims of the attack with a hollow
offer of assistance, even as it shelters the senior Iranians indicted
for the crime. Indeed, Iran continues to actively engage in a wide
range of illicit and militant activities around the world. Just this
week, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned 16 Iranian entities and
individuals responsible for supporting the Iranian military and
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), only further underscoring
Iran's commitment to illicit activities since 1994. In 1994, Iranian
agents and Hezbollah terrorists blew up a Jewish community center in
Argentina. Twenty-three years later, Tehran now says it is ready to
work with INTERPOL to resolve the case, even as it insists that the
investigation to date has been unduly influenced by "political
interests" - a thinly-veiled reference to the U.S. and Israel.
But like past Iranian offers to cooperate on the case, this should
not be seen as a genuine effort to solve the crime, but rather as an
attempt to absolve Iran of its role in a heinous act of terrorism.
Marking two years since Iran's nuclear deal (JCPOA), we
would be badly mistaken if we assumed that the 'architects' of Barack
Obama's policy of handing over the keys of the Middle East to Tehran
rulers feel any kind of regret or remorse. Not a bit. Obama's 'cabal',
which gave Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) a carte blanche
throughout the region when it was in charge of it Middle East
policies, is quite happy with what it has 'achieved' despite its
admission that "Iran's behavior in the region has not improved".
The other day, Robert Malley, a leading member of the said 'cabal'
tweeted an article co-written by Philip Gordon, another 'cabal'
member with Richard Nephew - a researcher and expert who dealt with
Iran's nuclear file between 2011 and 2013 - in The Atlantic magazine.
Malley, a 'progressive' admirer of Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iran's
rulers who detests Arab 'conservatives', tweeted 'Why the Iran deal
has worked, and why its critics have it wrong'. As for Gordon and
Nephew, they chose for their article the following title 'The 'Worst
Deal Ever' That Actually Wasn't'!
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