November 25, 2022
Over the past few days, Iran has told international inspectors that it plans to begin making near bomb-grade nuclear fuel deep inside a mountain that is hard to bomb, and dramatically expand its nuclear fuel production at a plant that Israel and the United States have repeatedly sabotaged.
Iranian forces have shot or locked up antigovernment protesters, provided Russia with drones for its war in Ukraine and, some Western intelligence agencies suspect, may be negotiating to produce missiles as well for Russia’s depleted arsenal. The United States accused Iran on Tuesday of once again violating Iraqi territory to conduct attacks in the Kurdistan region.
A new era of direct confrontation with Iran has burst into the open. Its emergence was hidden for a while by more dramatic events — including the Ukraine invasion and rising U.S. competition with China — and negotiations with Tehran dragged on, inconclusively, for 18 months.
Now, President Biden’s hope of re-entering the United States into the deal with Iran that was struck in 2015, and that President Donald J. Trump abandoned, has all but died. Negotiations halted in September, and in recent weeks Mr. Biden has imposed new sanctions on Iran and expressed support for protests that Iran’s hard-liners have portrayed as a mortal threat.
At the White House, national security meetings on Iran are devoted less to negotiation strategy and more to how to undermine Iran’s nuclear plans, provide communications gear to protesters and interrupt the country’s supply chain of weapons to Russia, according to several administration officials.
“There is no diplomacy right now underway with respect to the Iran deal,” John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, bluntly told the Voice of America last month. “We are at an impasse right now, and we’re not focused on that.”
Henry Rome, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the scope of the threat goes well beyond the issue that has officials at the Pentagon especially concerned: the movement of the most worrisome nuclear enrichment activity to the underground facility called Fordow that was completed a decade ago.
“Imagine telling the incoming administration in January 2021 that within two years, Iran would be enriching to near weapons-grade uranium at Fordow, deploying its most advanced centrifuges in large numbers, accepting severely limited international monitoring, accumulating multiple bombs’ worth of highly enriched uranium and rejecting diplomatic efforts,” Mr. Rome said. “That’s not quite a worst-case scenario, but it’s pretty close.”
As recently as the summer, American officials still had hopes of reviving the nuclear deal. An agreement negotiated by European and Iranian teams was nearly complete. Representatives of the Biden administration — whom the Iranians refused to talk to directly — had approved the outlines and were awaiting a final sign-off from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It never came.
U.S. intelligence officials assessed that reviving the deal was as unpopular among Iranian conservatives and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which runs the military side of the nuclear program, as it was among many American critics of the arrangement. The Iranians had sought, unsuccessfully, a commitment that the United States would never again withdraw from the accord unilaterally. And they knew that once they re-entered the deal, most of the nuclear fuel Iran had amassed in response to Mr. Trump’s decision would have to be shipped out of the country.
Then came the street protests and an agreement with Russia that essentially put Iran, along with Belarus, in the position of aiding the Russian invasion.
“The regime has made a series of consequential choices that is increasingly cutting them off both from their people and from much of the international community — including European countries that had devoted the bulk of the Trump years seeking to salvage the nuclear deal,” Robert Malley, the State Department’s special envoy for the Iran negotiations, said on Tuesday.
Mr. Malley has usually been more optimistic about the chances of a diplomatic solution, but his view has clearly shifted. “Iran turned their back on a nuclear deal that was within grasp,” he said, adding that the country’s government “failed to engage” with the International Atomic Energy Agency when it demanded more visits and data to sites where nuclear material had been detected. Iran then announced plans for new nuclear production after the agency issued a resolution condemning the lack of cooperation.
The result has been “a series of vicious cycles,” Mr. Malley said. “The repression fuels more protests. The protests trigger more repression. The alliance with Russia only further isolates Iran, which prompts it to double down on this alliance for lack of any other partner.”
Of greatest concern to Israel and many in the United States was Iran’s announcement that it would begin enriching nuclear fuel to 60 percent inside Fordow, the facility it built inside a mountain, on a military base, after the repeated cyberattacks and physical assaults on the Natanz nuclear enrichment site. During the nuclear negotiations that ran from 2013 to 2015, the Obama administration tried to get the Fordow site closed. The lead negotiator, Wendy Sherman, now the deputy secretary of state, said at the time that the failure to do so was among her bigger disappointments — though the agreement explicitly barred the kind of nuclear activity that the Iranians recently said they would conduct there.
Now the question is whether the more hawkish new government that Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to form in Israel will press for an attack on the facility, which would be hard to destroy except with the largest bunker-busting bombs. Both the United States and Israel have trained to conduct a strike, and Mr. Netanyahu came close to ordering one when he last served as prime minister.
By the public assessments offered by the administration, Iran has now made so much progress that it could amass fuel suitable for a bomb in a matter of weeks — down from a warning time of more than a year under the 2015 agreement. But the West would still have time: The C.I.A. and Israeli intelligence officials say that fashioning the fuel into a working weapon that could fit atop a missile would take two years, and the United States recently issued an assessment that it had no evidence of a bomb-making project underway.
But that assumes near perfect intelligence about the state of the nuclear and missile programs, at a time that inspections have been limited and cameras installed by the International Atomic Energy Agency have been shut off by the Iranians. Growing gaps in knowledge could make the diversion of nuclear fuel hard to detect. And several experts have noted that Iran is developing large cruise missiles that could eliminate many of the obstacles to delivering a weapon.
There are other complications. Iran’s provision of drones to the Russians has now become an important factor in the war, and if that cooperation extends to missiles — so far, there is no confirmation that it will — the United States and Ukraine will look for ways to disrupt the arms flow. But that could risk escalation, since Russia has so far been reluctant to attack the shipments of Western arms into Ukraine.
Mr. Biden has been more outspoken in support of the antigovernment protesters than President Barack Obama was during similar demonstrations early in his presidency. Several of Mr. Biden’s aides who served in the Obama administration said they were overcautious the last time, fearing that the protesters would be tarred as instigators linked to the C.I.A.
But that leaves open the question of how the United States can provide more than rhetorical and moral support to the protesters, and whether Mr. Biden would risk covert action to help them — especially given the long history, back to the 1950s, of C.I.A. meddling in internal Iranian politics. While that history is largely forgotten by most Americans, it is taught to young Iranians in vivid detail.
Much may depend on whether Mr. Biden and his aides now regard Iran as a larger danger than it did when the president came to office.
“The administration used to say that it wanted to put Iran’s nuclear program in a box, and I think that reflected the broader idea of putting the Iran challenge off to the side once a deal was reached,” Mr. Rome said. “But the administration must now contend with the fact that, in essentially all fields, the Iranian threat to international peace and security is greater today than it was two years ago.”
Dariush X
November 24, 2022
Iranians have reached a juncture where they must be very careful. This genuine and authentic national uprising is gaining momentum and even the skeptics are envisioning a tomorrow where they are free from being a lab rat in a social experiment governed by delusional religious hallucinations founded on ignorance. What’s being written on the walls is, “You failed.”
Failure is what the Islamic Republic of Iran regime must accept before it continues to make the wrong decisions based on mistaken assumptions that could very easily lead to Iran being turned into a Syria or Libya.
Though some may dismiss such an outcome and label it as regime misinformation it is a very real possibility, and has its roots going back all the way to the famous interview that General Clark gave on Democracy Now!, during which he said,
“Because I had been through the Pentagon right after 9/11. About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.” So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
Those people that wrote that recommendation are still around and they still wield great power within the US Empire. And you can be sure that they have been waiting for the situation in Iran to become “ripe” for their direct interference and self-serving agenda. Their central objective is a weak Iran, so weak that it is unable to play any significant role in the Belt and Road Initiative. They want an Iran resembling Syria, which would make Netanyahu and his gang very happy.
One must not assume that such people have any interest in Iran becoming a democracy, or stable, or economically advanced, or play any significant role in the region. They want a destroyed Iran, or one that is totally obedient to their geopolitical objectives. There are no nice guys in this realm of international power politics.
On the other hand, the regime insiders must be re-calculating because they now face a situation where they are totally dependent on the front-line soldiers. The big unknown is what will it take for them to turn to the other side. This switch is all that it would take. And it is not that inconceivable. It could happen any day.
Or, things could drag on as they have been doing during the past 65 days, with more and more people joining in the protests. At some point the regime will be forced to act and given its past record and its blinkered and distorted views of reality it will probably do something stupid and make the situation worse. Given its inherent incompetence, created through its policy of only allowing obedient, uneducated, retards to be managers, the regime will continue to crumble. At the moment it has no response to being called a child killer, now numbering close to 60, all under the age of eighteen. What possible response can it give? Shame is still a very powerful force in Iran.
One recent development worth referring to is the large crowds of expatriates showing their support, which was soon followed with the inevitable confrontation within the “overseas opposition”, which has never been on the same wave length. The traitorous MEK need to disband, deprogram, and cut all ties with the noecons, Zionists, and Saudi money, if they are to be taken seriously by other Iranians. Masih Alinejad needs to get over her megalomania and come back down to earth, plus apologize for meeting with the ghouls of the Empire who only want the destruction of Iran. Our always unemployed Shah-in-waiting needs to be totally transparent and keep to his promise of not getting involved in creating a throne for himself, no matter how ‘constitutional’.
But most important of all is the mass education of those out in the streets on how to use the tools of democracy and how to arrive at good decisions that are made through consensus, open discussion, correct voting procedures, and the creation of organizations that are free of bureaucratic entanglements. If the young people who are leading this uprising do not have a clear common vision then how is the new Iran to be created? It is critical that this common vision takes shape in a form that it can be implemented. If this does not happen then there exists a danger that this uprising will be hijacked in the same way that the uprising of 1978 was snatched away from the Iranian people and distorted into a religious dictatorship that is now run by fake Muslims, thieves, and traitors.
This hijacking is a real danger and if they are able to sink in their claws then freeing ourselves from those claws will be very difficult. It’s best not to get hooked and that can be done through being mindful of this danger.
One step forward that can be taken is the formation of an advisory council. Not a political gathering, but simply a meeting of Iranians of all stripes who can help shape a good future.
Maybe it is time to talk to each other – our future depends on it.
Dariush X is the pen name for an Iranian living in Iran who due to the current conditions is not able to identify himself.
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