He proposes a suspension of the sanctions against Iran, while the Iranians simultaneously suspend enrichment of uranium. Iran says it needs time to review the idea of a "timeout" from it's drive to accellerate it's enrichment of uranium.
But it may be that Iran's announcement is little more than a bluff. Iran has been stonewalling for the past year with negotiations. There is no indication this is little more than more of the same. Besides Tehran has fallen behind it's own timetable for assembling centrifuges to enrich uranium. It predicted a year ago it would have 3,000 centrifuges running by now.In fact it is just getting the installation underway at Natanz.
But clearly once construction begins, the world will be hard pressed to stop Iran. Any new construction would instantly become a military target for the United States or Israel.
ElBaradie calls any such strike “absolutely bonkers,†Not only would it not deprive Iran of the technological expertise to pursue any nuclear ambitions, it would strengthen the hand of the hardliners in the Iranian government, and further destabilize the Middle East.
Everyone seems to agree that Iranians are three to eight years away from being able to manufacture a nuclear device. Apparently, the US is thinking like ElBaradie and wanting to stop them at the gate. So far the US negotiators have not discouraged ElBaradie's attempt at getting key players to the table.
PINR agrees with me that Tehran has been emboldened since the US invaded Iraq. And the US is scrambling desperately to regain leverage.
One way the US has been attempting to gain traction has been with a direct threat of military force. Despite repeated insistence it has no intention of using force, it soon will have two aircraft carrier fleet in the Persian Gulf, calling this development a "warning to Syria and Iran." Then the US military arrested six Iranians in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, accusing them of being part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and having an active role in the insurgency. This repeats the ridiculous assertion that Shiite Iran would aid Sunnis. Even the Kurds, no friends of Iran attacked the American move as violating the sovereign soil of an Iranian consulate, an accusation denied by US generals.
There are also ominous reports from Turkey that the United States moved 16 F-16 fighter aircraft into the Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey as well as a squadron of F-117 to South Korea, presumable to discourage North Korea of taking advantage of an increasingly engaged US military in the Persian Gulf.
PINR makes an interesting point that even though the attack militarily may not be in the interests of the US, it may be the ONLY path available to influence the current track of events in the Middle East towards a region dominated by Iran. Such an attack would prove detrimental to Iran's regional ambitions.
This could be why there appears to be movement in Iran to rein in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The New York Times has an excellent article giving an in depth review of a topic I've mentioned before, Khamenei is balancing competing forces within political Iran. Rued in America, honored in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini built his revolution on balancing the forces of democracy and fascistic theocracy. He drew support from both. It was only after the revolution that it became clear the left would be left wanting for a true democracy. His successor, Khamenei, supreme Imam of Iran, leads what is called the "traditional conservatives".
As president, Ahmadinejad looked to the extreme right rather than seeking allies among the traditional conservatives, and in so doing, he exposed himself politically. “They were very arrogant,†Hadian said of Ahmadinejad and his camp. “They didn’t want to make any compromises. He has stood against the entire political structure in Iran, not inviting any of them, even the conservatives, to be partners. You don’t see them in the cabinet; you don’t see them in political positions.â€
And for that there was a price to be paid. This fall, Rafsanjani, who had suffered a humiliating defeat at Ahmadinejad’s hands in the presidential election of 2005, was reportedly persuaded to run again for the Assembly of Experts by the supreme leader or people close to him. Rafsanjani is a divisive figure in Iranian politics. He is widely perceived as a kingmaker, the power behind the rise of Khamenei to the position of supreme leader and that of Khatami to the presidency. But though he remains highly respected among clerics, Rafsanjani is not a beloved figure in Iranian public life. During his presidency, he adopted an economic liberalization program that involved extremely unpopular austerity measures; meanwhile, through pistachio exports, he had himself become one of the richest men in Iran. Political and social repression did not ease until Khatami, his successor, came into office.
Nonetheless, in the Assembly of Experts elections in December, Rafsanjani emerged as the compromise candidate of the reformists and traditional conservatives. One reformist activist described him to me as the very last line of defense against the extreme right. And Rafsanjani delivered a staggering blow, winning nearly twice as many votes as Mesbah-Yazdi [extreme right-wing ally of Ahmadinejad and would be replacement of Khamenei as supreme leader]. The neoconservatives, it seemed, had been slapped down much the same way the reformists had: the traditional conservatives had decided that the threat they posed was intolerable, and the voters had decided that the president associated with them could not deliver on his promises.
[...]Sadegh Zibakalam, a reformist Tehran University professor, reflected when I visited him at his mother’s home in north Tehran in December. “Trying to make an amalgam of Western, liberal, democratic ideas and Shiite theology is nonsense. It doesn’t work." Later, he added: “Either Khamenei is infallible, or he’s not. If he’s not, then he is an ordinary person like Bush or Blair, answerable to the Parliament and the people. If he is, then we should throw away all this nonsense about Western values and liberal democracy. Either we have Western liberal philosophy, republican government and checks and balances, or we should stick to Mesbah. But to combine them? Imam Khomeini was so popular and charismatic. People rallied behind him and believed he was infallible. We never thought, What if the supreme leader is not supported by the people? The answer to this was brilliantly made by Mesbah: to hell with them.â€
Zibakalam described Mesbah-Yazdi’s reading of velayat-i-faqih as a radical version of the one first proposed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But when I looked back through the lectures in which Khomeini first delineated the theory in Najaf in 1970, I found a vision strikingly similar to Mesbah-Yazdi’s. At that time, Khomeini had little truck with popular sovereignty. He quoted the Koran and sayings attributed to Muhammad: “The prophet has higher claims on the believers than their own selves†and “The scholars are the heirs of the prophet.†The only legitimate legislation was that which had already been made by God, and this would be administered by the learned jurist, who would rule over the people like a guardian over a child.
Nine years later, from his Paris exile during the revolution, Khomeini would approve a constitution drafted by more liberal associates. It was the blueprint for a parliamentary democracy, in which a council of clergymen would play an advisory role. This draft became the basis for the debate that occupied the first Assembly of Experts, convened to revise and approve a final constitution. After much discussion of the contradictions it engendered, the experts, many of them clerics, nonetheless yoked velayat-i-faqih to the republican structure they had been handed.
To this day, the structure of the Iranian state remains too liberal for the authoritarians and too authoritarian for the liberals, but the traditional conservatives at the center of power cannot resolve this obvious paradox at the republic’s heart without relinquishing their own position. The best they could do was to revise the Constitution after Khomeini’s death, greatly expanding the powers of the clerical councils and of the supreme leader at the expense of the elected offices.
[...]After eight years in power, the reform movement found itself blocked by the conservative establishment, hamstrung by its own mistakes and unwilling or unable to shore up the failing economy. Ahmadinejad rose in its wake, campaigning not on ideological extremism but on populist blandishments. He would ease the financial pain of his countrymen, he promised, by bringing Iran’s oil wealth to the people’s tables.
As Omid Malekian had intimated to me at the Mahestan shopping mall, however, this was not a promise to make lightly. The Iranian economy has been mismanaged at least since the revolution, and to fix it would require measures no populist would be willing to take. Under Ahmadinejad, inflation has risen; foreign investors have scorned Iranian markets, fearing political upheaval or foreign invasion; the Iranian stock market has plummeted; Iranian capital has fled to Dubai. Voters I talked to pointed to the prices of ordinary foodstuffs when they wanted to explain their negative feelings about the government. According to Iranian news sources, from January to late August 2006 the prices of fruits and vegetables in urban areas rose by 20 percent. A month later, during Ramadan, the price of fruit reportedly doubled while that of chicken rose 10 percent in mere days. Housing prices in Tehran have reached a record high. Unemployment is still widespread. And Ahmadinejad’s approval rating, as calculated by the official state television station, had dipped to 35 percent in October.
Iran is not a poor country. It is highly urbanized and modern, with a sizable middle class. Oil revenues, which Iran has in abundance, should be channeling plenty of hard currency into the state’s coffers, and in fact the economy’s overall rate of growth is healthy and rising. But as Parvin Alizadeh, an economist at London Metropolitan University, explained to me, what ultimately matters is how the state spends its influx of wealth. The Iranian government has tried to create jobs swiftly and pacify the people by spending the oil money on new government-run projects. But these projects are not only overmanned and inefficient, like much of the country’s bloated and technologically backward public sector; they also increase the demand for consumer goods and services, driving up inflation.
Ahmadinejad has continued this trend. He has generated considerable personal good will in poorer communities, but hardly anyone I asked could honestly say that their lives had gotten better during his presidency. He fought to lower interest rates, which drove up lending, leading to inflation and capital flight. The government cannot risk infuriating the public with the austerity measures that would be required in order to solve its deep-rooted economic problems. But as long as its short-term fixes continue to fail, the government will go on being unpopular. The last two presidents have lost their constituencies over this issue. And so officials seek to distract people from their economic woes with ideological posturing and anti-Western rhetoric. Not only has this lost its cachet with much of the Iranian public, it also serves to compound Iran’s economic problems by blackening its image abroad. “Iran has not sorted out its basic problem, which is to be accepted in the international community as a respectable government,†Alizadeh said. “Investors do not take it seriously. This is a political crisis, not an economic crisis.â€
The rulers of Iran live on borrowed time. Their popular revolution has turned sour for the poor and is gradually turning off the the oil barons and the middle class. It's just a matter of time that the flagging support of the people will undo the rule of the Imams and bring into power the reformers. Bush and Israel seems so determined to strengthen the hand of our enemies in Iran. All military assessments agree that it is a useless attack on infrastructure that will simply delay the nuclear program and strengthen the hand of the Imams and President Ahmadinejad.
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