Pro-Israeli AMIA Linked To New Terrorist Attack

Argentinean president accused head of a pro-Israeli lobby in the country of being aware of a planned terrorist attack against Buenos Aires over its agreement with Tehran on the AMIA probe.
President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner hinted that the head of the AMIA Jewish center, Guillermo Borger, is in contact with a foreign espionage agency that knows of a new terror attack planned against Argentina, Press TV reported on Sunday.
Kirchner made the remarks in response to Borger claiming that the Argentina-Iran agreement to set up a committee to investigate the 1994 bombing of the center ‘will allow a third bombing in Argentina’.
Fernandez tweeted, “If there was an attack planned related to the agreement with Iran, who is the mastermind and the material author?”
A member of the Buenos Aires Jewish community says Kirchner’s comments seemed to accuse Borger of being in contact with foreign spy agencies which are supplying him with information.
On January 27, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi and his Argentinean counterpart Hector Timerman signed an memorandum of understanding for the two countries to shed light on the 1994 bombing of the AMIA building in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.
The Israeli regime reacted angrily to the deal a day after it was signed. “We are stunned by this news item and we will want to receive from the Argentine government a complete picture as to what was agreed upon because this entire affair affects Israel directly,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Yigal Palmor, said on January 28.
In a statement on January 30, however, the Argentinean Foreign Ministry said Israel’s demand for explanation over the agreement, described by Argentinean President Fernandez as ‘historic’, was an ‘improper action that is strongly rejected’.
Under intense political pressure from the US and Israel, Argentina had formally accused Iran of having carried out the bomb attack. The Islamic Republic has categorically denied any involvement in the terrorist bombing.

Envoy for Bolstering Tehran-Moscow Ties

Iranian Ambassador to Russia Mahmoud-Reza Sajjadi said here Monday Tehran and Moscow should bolster strategic cooperation.
Sajjadi made the remarks in the second International Hi-Technology Exhibition currently underway in Tehran, IRNA reported.
Given the pace of scientific progress in Iran, Sajjadi said Tehran and Moscow could build the foundations for strategic partnership.
“We have experienced cooperation with Russia in 150 fields of technology in the past years,” he said, underlining the need for further boost in technological ties.
The second International Hi-Technology Exhibition opened in Tehran on Monday and will continue for three days.
Russian Ambassador to Iran Levan Dzhagaryan also emphasized the need for bolstering technological relations between Tehran and Russia.
“The level of Iran-Russia technological ties does not match the political relations between the two countries and they should, thus, be promoted,” Dzhagaryan said.
He noted that holding technological fairs and exhibitions can help to the further development of the ties between the two countries, and said, “We hope that we can increase our relations in technological fields as well.”
Dzhagaryan said that a workgroup comprised of both Iranian and Russian officials recently held a meeting in Moscow and studied ways of further developing technological ties and cooperation between the two countries.
Iran and Russia have vast cooperation in various fields, specially in political, technological and economic spheres.
The two neighbors in 2011 inked an agreement to boost space cooperation, specially in building satellites.
The agreement signed during a meeting between Iranian Space Agency officials and Russian Minister of Communications and Mass Media Igor Schegolev focused on building Iransat satellite.
At the meeting, Iranian officials requested Russia to boost space cooperation with Tehran and cooperate with Iran in building new generations of satellites and sending astronauts into space.
The two sides also agreed to set up a joint working group to discuss the details of the protocol in biennial meetings.
The Russian official said that Moscow is ready to cooperate with Iran in the area of communications, promising his country will help Iran to manufacture small satellites.

Army to Hold Specialized Drill

A senior military commander said the Islamic Republic’s Army will conduct a specialized drill in the southwest of the country in the near future.
Commander of the Army’s Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan said on Sunday that the exercise would be held by the end of the current Iranian year (March 20), Fars News Agency reported on Monday.
The commander said the military maneuver would involve various corps of the forces, such as the infantry, armored, and artillery units, and is aimed at enhancing the defensive preparedness of Iran’s armed forces against enemy threats.
Iran’s armed forces have an active presence in the region and keep all the movements of regional and trans-regional forces under surveillance, he said.
Over the past few years, Iran has held several military drills to enhance the defense capabilities of its armed forces and to test modern military tactics and equipment.
The Islamic Revolution’s Guards Corps (IRGC) is currently conducting a major ground and air military exercise code-named The Great Prophet 8 in the eastern areas of the country, including the cities of Kerman, Siriz and Sirjan.

On Iran, Try Backscratching, Not Blackmail

Stephen M. Walt

If someone threatened to punish you unless you did something you didn’t want to do, how would you respond? Unless the threatened punishment was really horrible you’d refuse, because giving into threats encourages the threatener to make more demands. But what if someone offered to pay you to do something you didn’t want to do? If the price were right you’d agree, because that act of cooperation on your part sends a very different message. Instead of showing that you can be intimidated over and over, it simply lets people know that you’re willing to cooperate if you are adequately compensated.
This simple logic has thus far escaped most of the people involved with U.S. policy towards Iran. Today, the conventional wisdom is that the only way to elicit cooperation from Iran is to keep making more and more potent threats, what Vice-President Joe Biden recently called “diplomacy backed by pressure.” Even wise practitioners of diplomacy like my colleague Nicholas Burns maintain that the U.S. and its allies must combine engagement with sanctions and more credible threats to use force, even though the US and its allies have been threatening Iran for over a decade without success.
As my opening paragraph suggests, this approach ignores some important scholarly work on how states can most easily elicit cooperation. Way back in the 1970s, MIT political scientist Kenneth Oye identified a crucial distinction between blackmail and what he called “backscratching” and showed why the latter approach is more likely to elicit cooperation. States (and people) tend to resist a blackmailer, because once you pay them off the first time, they can keep making more and more demands. And in international politics, giving in to one state’s threats might convey weakness and invite demands by others. By contrast, states (and people) routinely engage in acts of “backscratching,” where each adjusts its behavior to give the other something that it wants in exchange for getting something that it wants. Backscratching -- which is the essence of trade agreements, commercial transactions, and many other types of cooperation -- establishes a valuable precedent: it shows that if you’ll do something for me, then I’ll do something for you.
Not surprisingly, this is precisely what Iran’s government has been trying to tell us. Their bottom line for years has been that they were not going to negotiate with a gun to their heads. Or as Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Seyyed Ali) Khamenei said in rejecting the most recent proposals for direct talks:
“The ball, in fact, is in your court. Does it make sense to offer negotiations while issuing threats and putting pressure? You are holding a gun against Iran saying you want to talk. The Iranian nation will not be frightened by the threats.”
Such statements are normally interpreted as just another sign of Iranian intransigence, but as just discussed, there is a sound strategic basis for Iran’s position. It is, in fact, precisely the position we would take if somebody were threatening us in the same way.
The other problem with the Western approach, of course, is that threatening Iran reinforces their interest in having a latent nuclear weapons capability, and might eventually convince them that they need to get an actual bomb. Therefore, if our goal is to keep Iran as far away from the nuclear threshold as possible, imposing ever-harsher sanctions, constantly reiterating that “all options are on the table,” and warning darkly of war should diplomacy fail is not a smart way to proceed.
And it’s worked really, really well thus far, hasn’t it?
It is also worth noting that the closest the US and Iran have come to deal was the aborted attempt to arrange a fuel swap of enriched uranium for the Tehran research reactor in 2009. The proposed deal nearly succeeded because it was a backscratching arrangement that didn’t require Iran to capitulate to threats. (And by the way, the Turkish and Brazilian officials who helped mediate the arrangement blame its failure mostly on the US, not Iran).
So why do so many smart people keep embracing an approach to Iran that is internally contradictory and has consistently failed for more than a decade? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has a lot to do with maintaining credibility inside Washington. Because Iran has been demonized for so long, and absurdly cast as the Greatest National Security Threat we face, it has become largely impossible for anyone to speak openly of a different approach without becoming marginalized. Instead, you have to sound tough and hawkish even if you are in favor of negotiations, because that’s the only way to be taken seriously in the funhouse world of official Washington.
Finally, nothing I’ve written above should be interpreted as evidence of sympathy for Iran’s current government. The Islamic Republic has done some pretty objectionable things at home and abroad, but then again, so have plenty of countries that we routinely think of as friends and allies. And it’s not as though the US is innocent of wrongdoing, as plenty of Iraqis, Pakistanis, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and others would be quick to tell us. My concern is simply with figuring out how to achieve a diplomatic outcome that would secure our primary objectives and avoid another pointless war in the Middle East.
It remains to be seen whether Obama will break out of the stale consensus that has hamstrung our approach to Iran thus far. The only question is whether the Obama administration can come up with a strategy that will convince Iran to remain on this side of the nuclear threshold and that will eventually open the door to a more positive relationship with that country. More than anything else, it will require tossing aside the confrontational approach that has been a consistent failure for more than a decade.
Source: Foreign Policy

Naval Fleet Crosses Malacca Strait

Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said that an Iranian naval fleet has crossed the Strait of Malacca for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
“For the first time since the Islamic Revolution, the Naval Forces of the Islamic Republic have crossed the Strait of Malacca,” Sayyari said on Monday.
He stressed the importance of the north Indian Ocean and southeastern Asia to Iran in view of the commercial vessel traffic through the Straits of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and Malacca, Mehr News Agency reported.
He added that the Iranian Navy’s 24th fleet of warships, comprising Sabalan destroyer and Kharg helicopter carrier, had set sail for the Malacca Strait to provide security for the route, adding that the fleet would move into the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday.
Kharg helicopter carrier is 207 meters long and the largest of its kind in West Asia. The carrier operates as a backup aircraft transport for Iranian Navy’s destroyers in international waters.
The Strait of Malacca is a narrow 805-kilometer (500-mile) stretch of water between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
After leaving the Strait of Malacca, the Iranian fleet will cruise northwards into the Pacific Ocean and dock at the Chinese Port of Zhangjiagang and the Port of Colombo in Sri Lanka, the Iranian commander added.
The dockings are aimed at ‘extending the Iranian nation’s message of friendship to China and Sri Lanka’, Sayyari said.
In recent years, the Navy has been increasing its presence in international waters to protect naval routes and provide security for Iranian merchant vessels and tankers.
In addition, in line with the international efforts to combat piracy, the Iranian Navy has been conducting anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden since November 2008 to safeguard vessels involved in maritime trade, especially the ships and oil tankers owned or leased by Iran.

Nuke Warheads Should...

From Page 1
Mashaei noted that building confidence in the use of nuclear energy ‘is the duty of all nations’, adding, “Iran is ready for cooperation and interaction in this regard.”
Referring to the role of Iran in the region and Muslim world, he added that expansion of mutual ties between Tehran and Stockholm would create an opportunity for increasing interaction between the two nations.
Mashaei noted that Iran and Sweden have had ‘constructive’ cooperation in the past, adding that the Iranian nation respects the Swedish people always.
Iran is ready to increase cooperation with Sweden in all fields, the head of NAM secretariat said.
The Swedish official, for his part, said that his country respects Iran’s rights to civilian nuclear program.
“Sweden, like Iran, stresses on nuclear disarmament and we hope all countries cooperate with the IAEA in this respect,” he said.

Nuclear Negotiators...

From Page 1
The talks will cover a range of topics including Iran’s nuclear energy program.
Jalili on Saturday reaffirmed Iran’s determination to defend the entirety of its rights to peaceful nuclear energy.
The last round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 over Tehran’s nuclear program was held in Moscow in June 2012.
The Iranian negotiating delegation in the Moscow talks was led by Jalili and the P5+1 group headed by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

Offer to Ease Sanctions
A US official said on Monday that the six world powers in talks with Iran will offer some sanctions relief during negotiations if Tehran agrees to curb its nuclear program, Reuters wrote.
The unnamed official added that the powers hoped that the Almaty meeting would lead to follow-up talks soon. “We are ready to step up the pace of our meetings and our discussions,” the official said, adding the United States would also be prepared to hold bilateral talks with Tehran if it was serious about it.

Iran Seeks Broader....

From Page 1
He also underlined the importance of developing ties, particularly in the field of economy and trade, with Persian Gulf states and called for greater efforts to tap into Iran’s vast capacities for such relations.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has constantly sought to expand and deepen all-out relations with neighboring countries based on the principles of mutual respect and non-interference in the internal affairs of others.”
Issues in the cultural, political, economic, and environmental fields were on the agenda of the meeting.

Kuwait’s National Day

First Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi in a message on Sunday felicitated the Kuwaiti Prime Minister, government and people on the country’s National Day.