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سيف الله
11-24-2013, 08:32 PM
Salaam

Iran seals nuclear deal with west in return for sanctions relief

Barack Obama hails historic accord as first step towards resolution of decade-old impasse over Iran's nuclear programme


Iran has struck a historic agreement with the US and five other world powers, accepting strict constraints on its nuclear programme for the first time in a decade in exchange for partial relief from sanctions.

The deal, signed at 4.30am on Sunday morning, marks arguably the most significant foreign policy achievement of Barack Obama's presidency, amounting to the most significant agreement between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

The move is intended as the first step in a six-month process aimed at a permanent resolution to the decade-old global impasse over Iran's nuclear programme, and heading off the threat of a new war in the Middle East.

"While today's announcement is just a first step, it achieves a great deal," President Obama said in an address from the White House. "For the first time in nearly a decade, we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear programme, and key parts of the programme will be rolled back."

The Geneva deal releases just over $4bn in Iranian oil sales revenue from frozen accounts, and suspends restrictions on the country's trade in gold, petrochemicals, car and plane parts.

In return, Iran undertakes to restrict its nuclear activities. Over the next six months it has agreed to:

• stop enriching uranium above 5%, reactor-grade, and dilute its stock of 20%-enriched uranium or convert it to oxide, which makes it harder to enrich further. The medium-enriched uranium, in its hexafluoride gas form, is relatively easy to turn into weapons-grade material, so it is a major proliferation concern.

• not to increase its stockpile of low-enrichment uranium.

• freeze its enrichment capacity by not installing any more centrifuges, leaving more than half of its existing 16,000 centrifuges inoperable.

• not to fuel or to commission the heavy-water reactor it is building in Arak or build a reprocessing plant that could produce plutonium from the spent fuel.

• accept more intrusive nuclear inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, including daily visits to some facilities.

The six-month life of the Geneva deal is intended to be used to negotiate a comprehensive and permanent settlement that would allow Iran to pursue a peaceful programme, almost certainly including enrichment, but under long-term limits and intrusive monitoring, that would reassure the world that any parallel covert programme would be spotted and stopped well before Iran could make a bomb.

That agreement would lead to the lifting of the main sanctions on oil and banking that have all but crippled the Iranian economy, and the eventual normalisation of relations between Iran and the US for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Iran's Gulf Arab adversaries, nervous of the rehabilitation of their long-standing regional rival, were tight-lipped about the agreement. Not so Israel, which warned that the agreement had made the world more dangerous.

"Today the world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world took a significant step towards obtaining the world's most dangerous weapon," the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told a weekly cabinet meeting.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, spent much of the three rounds of negotiations since September, closeted together in intense discussions, a dramatic break from the previous 34 years when there was barely any official contact between the two countries.

"This is only a first step," Zarif told a news conference. "We need to start moving in the direction of restoring confidence, a direction in which we have managed to move against in the past."

Sunday morning's deal was agreed after a diplomatic marathon of three intensive rounds, culminating in a late-night session in the conference rooms of a five-star hotel in Geneva, chaired by the EU's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, a former Labour peer and CND official, for whom the deal represents a personal triumph.

Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, and their German, Russian and Chinese counterparts, Guido Westerwelle, Sergey Lavrov and Wang Yi, also took part in a six-nation group mandated by the UN security council to handle the nuclear negotiations since 2006. Some of the complications involved in coming to a deal stemmed from the need to keep the six powers together.

However, the key overnight sessions that clinched the deal involved Kerry, Zarif and Ashton alone.

"This deal actually rolls back the programme from where it is today," Kerry said. However, he added: "I will not stand here in some triumphal moment and claim that this is an end in itself."

The bigger task, he said, was to go forward and negotiate a comprehensive deal.

The British prime minister, David Cameron, said the deal "demonstrates how persistent diplomacy and tough sanctions can together help us to advance our national interest". In a tweet from Downing Street, he said: "Good progress on iran - nowhere near the end but a sign pressure works".

The difficulties facing the negotiators in the coming months were highlighted by the different interpretations Kerry and Zarif took on the fiercely disputed issue of whether the deal represented a recognition of Iran's right to enrich uranium in principle. Zarif was insistent that it did because it was based on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which guarantees the right to a peaceful nuclear programme. Kerry said that neither the NPT nor Sunday's deal specifies a right to enrichment. That, he said, was a matter for negotiation in the coming six months.

News of the deal united Iranians from across the political spectrum in celebration, reflecting widespread hope that it would reduce the threat of war and ease punishing sanctions. Hundreds of thousands of people stayed up through the night to follow the minute-by-minute coverage of negotiations on satellite television, Facebook and Twitter.

The first announcement that a deal had been reached, by Ashton's spokesman Michael Mann, and the confirmation by Zarif, were both made on Twitter – a first for a major global accord.

"Day five, 3am, it's white smoke," tweeted the deputy Iranian foreign minister, Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, referring to the terminology used in Vatican for the announcement of a new pope.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/24/iran-nuclear-deal-west-sanctions-relief
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سيف الله
11-26-2013, 02:39 PM
Salaam

An update


Saudi hostility to the Iran nuclear deal should alarm us more than Israel's

Saudi Arabia feels double-crossed and is determined to contest a resurgent Iran. Could Europe replace the US in Riyadh's affections?


Of the two states most unhappy about the interim agreement with Iran, Israel is generally seen as potentially the more dangerous. This may not be correct. In the longer run, the hostility of Saudi Arabia could present the greater threat to regional stability.

This is not to underestimate Israel's genuine and deeply held fears about the peril that a nuclear-armed Iran would present. How could it feel otherwise, given the extravagant language of Iran's former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and its own still disputed position in the region. For all its fierce rhetoric, though, there are constraints on Israel, including its reliance on the US and the caution of its own military, that may make it less likely to resort to arms against Iran than many outsiders believe. In the end, it could be Saudi Arabia's quieter concern about a resurgent Iran that has cataclysmic consequences.

I say this after hearing an extremely well-informed and well-connected Saudi academic and adviser analysing his country's position at a London thinktank. From what he said it was clear that Saudi Arabia not only lacks the sort of constraints that rein in Israel, but that it sees Iran's return to the international fold as a threat that it may have to act upon, if it is to retain its present influence in the region – a greater threat, indeed, than the turbulence whipped up by the Arab spring.

Nawaf Obaid is a senior fellow at the King Faisal Centre in Riyadh, and an adviser – past, and probably present - to Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence and influential former Saudi ambassador to the UK and the US; and he gave his take on the present situation at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London on Monday. What he said was, to put it mildly, not consoling, and there were aspects that were outright alarming.

It is already known, from the speeches and writings of others, including Prince Turki, that Saudi Arabia is embarking on a more active – for active, perhaps read assertive – foreign policy. A new national security doctrine is being formulated to contest a resurgent Iran and its Shia population and ensure that Saudi Arabia is not dislodged as the region's dominant power.

Among the points that emerged from what Obaid said were these.

• Relations with the US are in deep trouble. Saudi Arabia resented the fact that the US-Iranian talks had been kept secret from Saudi Arabia, and felt that it had been double-crossed by a major ally. It was not the fact of the talks – Prince Turki, in fact, had long advocated direct US-Iranian talks – but "the way they were done, hidden from us".

• Saudi Arabia will not stand by as Iran tries to extend its influence regionally – as, Obaid claimed, it was already doing through Hezbollah in Syria. "We will be there to stop them, wherever they are," he said. And he lamented the fact that, in his view, a US-Iran agreement would have the undesirable effect of keeping Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in power, which in turn would "send a message about how much is wrong in the Arab world".

• Saudi Arabia has recently upped its arms supplies to anti-Assad forces in Syria to a significant degree – "we can't tolerate the blaring of Persian music in the middle of Homs" – which does not bode well for any calming of the hostilities soon.

• There is no prospect of imminent democratic change in Saudi Arabia under the influence of the Arab spring: "Any form of democratic opening is just not on the cards."

Not all of what Obaid said was so bleak. Among the more hopeful points, if you were in London or Paris, was his insistence that the Europeans, whether Britain, France or the European Union as a whole, could take over as Saudi Arabia's chief ally and interlocutor, should the US downgrade its alliance with Saudi Arabia or even leave the region altogether. It is not often these days that you hear the European Union presented as a potential major ally for the future. The question that hangs in the air, though, is whether an unreconstructed Saudi Arabia, pursuing its rivalry with a resurgent Iran through the region, is the sort of ally Europeans would want to have.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/26/saudi-hostility-iran-double-crossed-by-us
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