The 2015 Nuclear Deal Is Dying. A Nuclear-Armed Iran Is in Sight……..
18 January 2020
Three European signatories of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) - the nuclear accord Iran signed with six world powers in 2015 - on Tuesday, January 14 invoked its dispute mechanism over Iran’s breaches.
This was the first step of a process that could lead to the accord’s final demise.
While some international agreements are long-lasting, the nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration’s most prominent foreign policy achievement, has limped along for barely four years, chipped away by one Iranian violation after another.
From Day One, Tehran kept its nuclear industry alive on two levels – one ready for viewing by the International Atomic Energy Agency monitors, and a second clandestine infrastructure for developing advanced missiles, both cruise and capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Tehran consistently denied conducting this double game when challenged by Western signatories.
However, as recently as last Friday, January 10, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian [pictured below] said, “If they continue to unravel the Vienna agreement, then, yes, within a fairly short period of time, between one and two years, they could have access to a nuclear weapon, which is not an option.”
[We here at Israel Report are quietly confident that Iran already has nuclear weaponry purchased several years ago from Pakistan and possibly North Korea?]
Jean-Yves Le Drian's judgement was endorsed on Tuesday, January 14 by Israel Military Intelligence (MI) in its 2020 assessment report: ”If Iran continues its nuclear program at the present pace, it will have 25 kgs of highly enriched uranium by winter 2020 and a missile capable of carrying a nuclear weapon in two years.”
When the deal was signed in Vienna in the summer of 2015, the sceptics, especially in Israel, estimated that Iran would still be able to manufacture a nuclear weapon on the quiet to be ready shortly after 2020.
The agreement gave Iran the necessary time and space for producing enough enriched uranium.
When the Trump administration took the United States out of the deal in May 2018, Tehran claimed never to have contravened it.
President Donald Trump was slammed by the European powers for his action.
This week, the French, German and British foreign ministers said their countries had worked hard to bring Iran back into compliance and undertaken diplomatic initiatives to de-escalate tensions and bring Iran and the US back to the negotiating table “for a comprehensive solution of their dispute.”
While affirming their “full commitment to the diplomatic effort and resuming it as soon as conditions allow,” the three ministers admitted that “in the meantime, Iran has continued to break key restrictions set out in the JCPOA,” adding: “Iran’s actions are inconsistent with the provisions of the nuclear agreement and have increasingly severe and non-reversible proliferation implications.”
The ministers concluded: “We do not accept the argument that Iran is entitled to reduce compliance with the JCPOA.”
The tipping point came on January 5, when Iran decided – in response to harsh US sanctions – to scale back another of its commitments to the deal, the fifth, which limited the number of centrifuges used for uranium enrichment.
The three foreign ministers said then that they had no choice but to act within the framework of the JCPOA, including the Dispute Resolution Mechanism process.
This process, which consists of several cumbersome, dragging steps, would lead ultimately to the UN Security Council and a vote to “snap back” the international and multilateral sanctions lifted in 2015.
It could take a year or two before this ultimate stage is reached.
In the meantime, Iran is certainly not hanging around for punishment but forging ahead with its nuclear weapons program. Already on Wednesday, Tehran threatened “a serious and strong” response for the European move.
Therefore, when President Trump and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declared solemnly that Iran would not be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon, they were seen in Tehran to be whistling in the dark.
We'll see, but something must be done and soon?
Iran’s War of Attrition for US Forces in Iraq to Include Guerrilla Ops…….
18 January 2020
Far from being thrown off course by the targeted assassination of Qassem Soleimani, its regional operations mastermind, Iran has set its feet on the road to a drawn-out war of attrition on the US military in Iraq.
The missile attack on the big US Ain Al-Asad airbase in western Iraq on January 8 was a preview of the campaign to come.
The Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) are additionally arming and setting up Iran’s proxies, including Hizballah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, for strikes on strategic targets of the US and its allies across the Middle East.
Iran’s war planners are capitalising on two Washington miscalculations of the past three weeks:
1. The Trump administration counted on the Soleimani assassination of January 3 convincing Tehran that the US has the strength, capacity and will to put a stop to Iran’s assaults on America and its allies and give up its “bad behaviour.”
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday, January 13, strongly disputed domestic criticism by stressing that “the targeted assassination of the senior Iranian general was more than a simple retaliation for attacks on US assets in the region.“
He went on to explain: “There’s a bigger strategy to this. President Trump and those of us in his national security team are re-establishing deterrence – real deterrence – against the Islamic Republic. In strategic terms, this simply means persuading the other party that the costs of specific behaviour exceed its benefits. This requires credibility.”
Pompeo went on further: “Your adversary must understand that not only do you have the capacity to impose costs, but that you are willing to do so. Let’s be honest. For decades, US administrations from both political parties never did enough against Iran to get the deterrence necessary to keep us all safe.”
In the Secretary’s view, the nuclear deal made things worse.
It enabled the regime to create wealth. “It opened up revenue streams for the Ayatollahs to build up the Shiite militias – the very networks that killed an American and imposed an enormous risk to our embassy in Baghdad.”
Reliable sources note that while these arguments sound compelling and reasonable to Western ears, they have the reverse effect on Tehran, revving up their belligerence.
2. In Washington, Iran was widely expected to go again for Saudi Arabia, and so US air and missile defence equipment was transferred from Iraq to the oil kingdom.
The Iranians also planted this misleading disinformation. Reliable sources say that the 5,200 US troops stationed in Iraq were consequently denuded of adequate air defence capacity.
Tehran reacted fast to Soleimani’s loss by adopting his next plan of action, for a constantly escalating guerrilla campaign against US forces in Iraq, to be spaced out according to prevailing circumstances and America’s response.
To this end, large quantities of hardware streamed into Iraq from the first half of January.
Our military and intelligence sources report they consisted of surface-to surface missiles of about 500-km range with 300 metre accuracy; anti-air rockets; assorted drones, including explosive UAVs; heavy and light artillery; and tons of IEDs for the roadside bombing of US military convoys.
At the same time, the Iraqi Shiite militias taking these deliveries were strictly directed not to start shooting without explicit orders from the supreme ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
It is estimated that they would almost certainly have been sent into action before now were it not for the embarrassment of the Ukrainian airliner disaster, in which an IRGC team accidentally shot down a passenger plane killing all 176 people aboard.
Now they are waiting for the outrage at home and abroad to blow over.
But it won’t be for long.
Incoming intelligence shows Tehran and the Shiite militia chiefs raring to go and fully confident of settling the score with the adversary who killed their iconic general Soleimani.
IRGC chief Major General Hossein Salami [pictured below] in Tehran and Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut told a closed briefing in the Majlis on Sunday, January 12:
“The response to Soleimani’s killing is not a single operation but rather a long course that leads to the ouster of American forces from the region.”
Nasrallah warned Israel to learn from Iran’s strikes on US bases in Iraq what to expect from persisting in the attacks on Iranian sites or any other aggression against Iran.
The Hizballah chief was clearly assigned by Tehran with deterring Israel from intervening in Iran’s war of attrition against the US.
Iran drew further encouragement for going forward with its plans from the Trump administration’s non-response thus far to the missile attack on the two US bases.
Every day that goes by without an American reprisal further boosts Iran’s confidence that it can get away with realising its designs, safe from retribution.
It is reasonable to assume they have again miscalculated? Trump is no Clinton or Obama?
Khamenei: Iran slapped a superpower in the face “with support of God”…….
January 17, 2020
In his first public Friday sermon since 2012, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei derided President Trump as a “clown” who pretends to support Iranians but will “push a poison dagger in their backs.”
Iran’s ballistic missiles targeting US troops in Iraq had dealt “a blow to America’s image as a superpower,” he said.
That Iran had the power to slap its face shows that “God supports us.”
As for the Europeans, Khamenei dismissed them as too weak to “bring Iranians to their knees.”
Britain, France and Germany, who this week tried to bring Iran into compliance with the 2015 nuclear agreement, were, in the supreme leader’s words, “contemptible” and “servants” of the US.
Putin tried Twinning Diplomacy to Cash in on Syrian & Libyan Conflicts……..
18 January 2020
On his road to Damascus on January 7, Russian President Vladimir Putin would have needed more than an epiphany to pull off his next Middle East scheme.
In the first place, it depended on bringing the region’s leading rogues under his hand.
And then, even this master conjurer could not hope to successfully juggle Syrian oranges with Libyan apples.
What Putin was after was a high-wire, multifaceted arrangement for Turkey and Iran to support Russian policy in Syria, coupled with a Russian-Turkish deal for Libya.
The deal would also aim to limit US expansion in north-eastern Syria and its oil fields.
Turkey’s reward would be the withdrawal of the Russian mercenaries fighting for General Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) from his battle to wrest Tripoli from the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord (GNA).
Our sources report that Putin went to Damascus last week to make sure that the Syrian ruler did not set obstacles in his path.
The Syrian factor was easily kept in place.
President Bashar Assad obeyed Putin when, instead of his coming to the palace in Damascus as required by protocol, he summarily ordered Assad to join him at Russian military headquarters.
When Assad arrived, he found his own top generals concluding deals with their Russian counterparts without consulting him and was made to feel like a Russian vassal.
He therefore had little choice but to nod when the Russian ruler asked him to send his senior adviser on intelligence Ali al-Mamlouk to Moscow last weekend to meet the Turkish MIT intelligence agency chief Hakan Fedan to go through the details of Putin’s complicated scheme.
But then the spiralling military tension between the US and Iran got in the way by affecting Syria as well as Iraq.
How far Tehran could be expected to play ball with Russia or Turkey in Syria was now a conundrum.
According to our sources, Iran’s leaders took fright, fearful that the Russians would us the US-Iranian clash to throw Iran out of Syria.
Putin hoped meanwhile that the joint Russian-Turkish ceasefire initiative for Libya supposed to have gone into effect on Saturday, January 12, would act as the go signal for his plans.
But Turkish President Recep Erdogan demanded a lot more than a fragile symbolic truce in Libya.
For Ankara’s cooperation, he wanted the Russians to persuade Syria’s Kurds to go against their fellows in the Turkish separatist PKK group fighting Ankara’s forces in northern Syria with US military and financial support.
So long as the Turks were not assured that the Syrian Kurds had broken their ties with the PKK, under a Russian guarantee, Erdogan refused to come aboard the Russian plan for Syria.
His refusal unravelled Putin’s plan for Libya.
Strongman Khalifa Haftar left Moscow on Tuesday, January 14, without signing the ceasefire agreement promoted by Russia and Turkey for ending nine months of fighting.
His exit doomed Putin’s dual plan, although the Russian leader insisted he would continue his efforts at mediation between Haftar and the Tripoli government.
The Libyan general may have decided to wash his hands of the Russian president’s complicated scheme for mixing the Syrian conflict in with his own complicated troubles.
Maybe his other backers, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, tipped him off about Putin’s schemes.
At all events, Putin’s over-ambitious plan for lining up too many Middle East nations behind him remains stalled.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s abbreviated trip to Israel on January 23, will no doubt see him discussing with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu some interesting upgrades on the smooth military cooperation between their armed forces in Syria.
(The original plan was for a week-long visit starting Sunday, January 19. But since then, the Russian president has been immersed in constitutional reforms for extending his rule at the end of his term in office, resulting in the resignation of the government led by Dmitry Medvedev and the appointment of a Mikhail Mishustin [pictured above] as new prime minister.)
A co-ordinating mechanism, in place since 2016 and adjusted as needed by changing conditions, has allowed the Israeli Air Force to strike Iranian targets in Syria without incurring Russian air defences or any other obstructions.
Had it been up to the Russian military command or defence ministry in Moscow, the two armies would have clashed long ago.
However, their unique interaction was forged and overseen at the highest level by the Russian president and Israeli prime minister in person.
Putin sees no contradiction between allowing Iran to take up positions in Syria to threaten Israel from across its northern border, while plugging Russia’s arms industry to sell Israel weapons for destroying those positions.
He never misses a chance to flog Russia’s sophisticated military hardware. Negotiations are already afoot with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for the sale of the same systems he expects to offer Israel, for use against their common enemy, Iran.
It is hard to see him making a sale in Jerusalem, although it would give his arms industry a boost like no other transaction.
Turkey felt the sharp edge of US ire for being the first NATO ally to defy Washington and go arms-shopping in Moscow. As America’s most favoured Middle East ally, Israel would fare a lot worse.
Trump is a master of the “deal” and it would be unthinkable for Bibi to incur the wrath of the Donald?
Hizballah’s Nasrallah as Iran’s Secret Trouble-Shooter in Iraq. Sadr Joins Drive for US Expulsion…..
18 January 2020
With Iraq’s Shiites stormily divided against Baghdad’s ties with Iran – before and after the US assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January 3 – supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei secretly turned to a master manipulator in Beirut, Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah, and entrusted him with the task of mending fences in the largest Shiite community outside Iran.
Nasrallah promptly assigned a shadowy Hizballah figure to take a hand.
Hussein Kawtharani is the central liaison officer between the Lebanese Shiite chief and Iraq’s pro-Iran Shiite militia leaders.
But he additionally controls the Iranian-Hizballah financial fund in Iraq.
In the days of Soleimani and Iraq’s PMU (Popular Mobilization Units) chief Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis – both of whom died in the US strike on Baghdad – it was Kawtharani who, in consultation with them both, doled out funds to the militias.
Soleimani used the size of their allowances to keep their leaders in line.
According to rumours gaining substance in Baghdad in the last few days, Hizballah’s Nasrallah wangled a secret pact among the leaders of Iranian-backed Shiite movements in Iraq for a joint effort to help Tehran expel the United States - not just from their country but from the entire Middle East.
Secret meetings are said to have taken place from January 9 in Beirut, Tehran and Qom.
Moqtada Sadr, [pictured above] Iraq’s most popular Shiite cleric, again changed his political spots, this time in support of Iran’s goals.
On Tuesday, January14, he called for a “March of Millions” against the presence in Iraq of US troops.
Sadr’s move was consistent with the vote in the Shiite-dominated Iraqi parliament calling on the Americans to leave the country in the wake of the US air strike over Baghdad that killed Iran’s Soleimani and the top Iraqi Shiite leader.
“The skies, land and sovereignty of Iraq are being violated every day by occupying forces,” the fiery cleric intoned on Twitter. He called for a “peaceful, unified demonstration” to condemn the American presence, but did not set a date for this event.
Moqtadr Sadr’s turnabout in favour of Tehran is a serious blow for President Donald Trump’s policy of maintaining a US military presence in the country.
Iran is steadfastly adhering to the dead general’s masterplan (Iran is not standing down. Its Big Bang of Revenge still to come) for a war of attrition against US troops until they are driven out.
Sadr’s extensive influence in the Shiite community, possession of an active militia and control of the largest party bloc in parliament – “Marching Onward” (Saeroun) - are powerful assets which are now serving Tehran.
They have tilted the contest for determining the shape of government in Baghdad against America to the point that a pro-Iranian administration will be hard to prevent.
The days of the US stay in the country are therefore numbered.
Sadr was apparently enlisted during the months he spent in Iran’s holy city -both for his personal security and to win the support of Iran’s senior ayatollahs.
Those meetings saw Iraq’s Iranian-backed paramilitary groups agreeing to set their differences aside and back Hadi Al-Ameri as the new chairman of the PMU, the powerful umbrella group for those militias.
That gave Nasrallah the key to his broad strategy for ironing out the groups’ differences, the task assigned him by Ayatollah Khamenei,[pictured meeting above] for a united anti-US resistance movement.
If anyone thinks that Iran and its proxies are going to accept the continuing presence of American military forces in the region – or for Israel to survive the present situation, they are sorely mistaken.
The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has other plans altogether and they do not look at all like those of these Islamic foes?
Developing………….
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