Politician Says Iran Lost Billions As Nuclear Talks Dragged On
A former senior lawmaker, who has been warning about Russia's intentions in Iran’s nuclear talks, says he is now more optimistic about a deal with Washington.
A former senior lawmaker, who has been warning about Russia's intentions in Iran’s nuclear talks, says he is now more optimistic about a deal with Washington.
Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh has written several articles and given many interviews during the past four weeks warning about Russia's obstruction of Iran’s nuclear talks with the West and calling on the Iranian government to adopt an independent approach. He has also warned the authorities not to fall in Russia’s trap and avoid becoming hostage to over-reliance on Moscow and Beijing.
This comes while Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who delivered two speeches in the past two days has not mentioned the nuclear talks and a possible deal with America. As Iran watcher Jason Bradsky observed in a series of tweets , Khamenei "gave a long, tedious lecture on the need for a knowledge-based economy. Khamenei stressed the need of not tying the economy to U.S. sanctions, but he hedged as usual."
Brodsky quoted Khamenei as saying: "of course this doesn't mean we are not seeking ways to lift these sanctions and those who are active in these fields should follow up on that," and added that this was all Khamenei had to say about the negotiations. However, Brodsky noted, "That doesn't mean the establishment isn't interested in a deal, but it is only interested in one on its terms," and that is "lifting the sanctions."
In his interview, Falahatpisheh, the former head of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, regretted that the talks were delayed for at least four years due to factional infighting among politicians in Iran. He observed that as a result, Iran's oil exports dropped to as little as 300 thousand barrels per day during the Trump administration.
He said that during the Biden administration, the figure rose to around 1.3 million barrels, however, Iran lost billions of dollars in oil revenues as it sold its output at a discounted price. He estimated that during the past 11 months Iran lost around $40 million a day, or at least $13.5 billion.
The conservative politician said Iran's first mistake was to hand over decision making to Russian negotiator Mikhail Ulyanov, and its second mistake was holding talks with all the JCPOA member states while it needed only to talk with the United States, a country that could have lifted all the barriers on the way of international trade for Iran.
Falahatpisheh opined that by winning a deal with the United States, Iranian leaders can move the country away from international tensions. He added that Iran needs to reduce tensions at the national, regional and international levels.
Meanwhile, he claimed that Iran's winning card was the resistance of its people against sanctions hinting that people carried the economic hardships without causing major unrest. But he failed to mention that their silence was largely the result of the regime's heavy-handed and violent suppression of dissent.
Two other winning cards, Falahatpisheh said, was Iran’s ability to advance in nuclear technology against all odds, and Tehran's self-reliance in defense. The latter, he said was what prevented the country from experiencing a fate similar to that of Ukraine.
“The Revolutionary Guards are a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans,” Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid said in a statement. “We have a hard time believing that the United States will remove it from the definition of a terrorist organization.”
During negotiations since April 2021 to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, Tehran has made clear it expects the United States to lift a raft of ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions introduced after the Trump administration in 2018 withdrew the US from the deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).
There has been speculation that one of the disagreements in not concluding a nuclear deal is over delisting the IRGC. Opponents of the JCPOA in the US and Israel are aware than not delisting the IRGC would make it harder to gain acceptance in Tehran for reimplementing the agreement, which limited Iran’s atomic program.
Shared global mission
The statement from Bennett and Lapid portrayed IRGC designation as part of a “global fight against terrorism…a shared mission of the entire world.” To remove the designation, they said, would mean the US abandoning “its closest allies in exchange for empty promises from terrorists.”
Former United States president Donald Trump added the IRGC to the list in 2019, the first time part of a state’s armed forces was included. Trump’s designation referred specifically to the 1983 bombing of a marine barracks in Lebanon, carried out by a Lebanese Shia group when the US intervened in the Lebanon war after the 1982 Israeli invasion, and the 1996 Khobar Tower bombing in Saudi Arabia, culpability for which has never been conclusively established.
The Israeli statement portrayed the IRGC as controlling a range of groups across the Middle East. “The Iranian Revolutionary Guards are Hezbollah in Lebanon, they are Islamic Jihad in Gaza, they are the Houthis in Yemen, they are the militias in Iraq,” it said.
Promise not to harm Americans
Bennett and Lapid argued against the US listing groups as terrorists only on the grounds of a perceived threat to Americans: “The Revolutionary Guards took part in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians, they destroyed Lebanon, they are engaged in the murderous repression of Iranian civilians. They kill Jews because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, and Muslims because they do not surrender to them. We find it hard to believe that the definition of the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization will be abolished in exchange for a ‘promise not to harm the Americans.'”
Not only that, the IRGC, for the Israeli leaders, is an “integral part of the murderous repression machine in Iran” whose “hands are stained with the blood of thousands of Iranians and the trampling of the soul of Iranian society.” Hence, argued Bennett and Lapid, removing the IRGC from the list would be “an insult to the victims and the erasure of a documented reality, with unequivocal evidence.”
Collision course
Reports say the Biden Administration is considering removing the IRGC from its ‘foreign terrorist’ list a part of agreement to revive the JCPOA limiting Iran’s nuclear program. But JCPOA opponents in Israel, the US and elsewhere have highlighted the IRGC recently firing a dozen ballistic missiles at Erbil in northern Iraq after an Israeli airstrike killed two Iranian soldiers in Syria. Iran claimed that it targeted an Israeli intelligence base, but Iraq and the US dismissed the claim.
Following a House Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday, Democrat congresswoman Elaine Luria, a naval veteran, tweeted that reviving the JCPOA would “put Iran and Israel on a collision course,” echoing remarks by Israel’s ambassador to the United States Michael Herzog.