UN Nuclear Chief Pursues Iran Over Uranium Traces

The European Union is considering new measures against Tehran, while the German foreign ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador Monday. According to Berlin-based Wall Street Journal reporter Laurence Norman has already agreed anti-Iran measures. The United States September 22 announced sanctions against Iran’s morality policy while National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told NBC Sunday the US was on the “side” of “fundamental justice, dignity and rights.”

Sullivan said the administration’s approach differed from that of President Barak Obama, which he said had been slow to express support for 2009 demonstrations in Iran for fear of protestors being seen as US proxies.

Some commentators are not satisfied. “Control of women’s bodies isn’t a by-product of Islamic rule but its foundation,” wrote Janice Turner in the London Times Saturday. “If hijab falls, so does the regime…By enforcing hijab, the government inveigles itself into your bedroom.”

‘Righteous anger’

Turner argued the veil was “neither a Persian tradition nor a practice that, as in Indonesia or Pakistan, grew with the ascendancy of conservative Islam.” Rather it arrived in Iran enforced after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

In earlier columns, Turner has argued that veiled women in Europe provoked among Muslims “a righteous anger whose logical conclusion is jihad,” and that allowing hijab in colleges and public buildings in Turkey brought the end of “Ataturk’s secular state.”

In the Sunday Times, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe wrote that Amini’s death had been marked by a gathering in Evin prison, where Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an employee of Thomson Reuters, was held for part of her four years in jail before she left Iran in March after the United Kingdom honored a £400-million debt ($428 million).

“Forty of the inmates then gathered in the communal yard, in solidarity with Mahsa’s family but also with all the women in Iran battling for their rights,” Zaghari-Ratcliffe wrote. “They lit candles, sang songs, chanted together and mourned the death of yet another innocent woman.”

Media ‘legitimizing gender discrimination’

In the Wall Street Journal, Karim Sadjadpour, Washington-based senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued that the “lone source of diversity” in Iran’s “rotting regime” was whether the beards and turbans of its ruling men are black or white.”

Criticizing CBS interviewer Lesley Stahl for wearing a headscarf when interviewing President Ebrahim Raisi in Tehran September 13, Sadjadpour accused news organizations, governments and NGOs of “legitimizing…gender discrimination.”

The Biden administration, Sadjadpour agued, should “reassess its Iran strategy” including “shortsighted” efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), which limited Iran’s nuclear program in return for eased international sanctions. A “representative” government in Tehran “could be a political geopolitical game changer for the United States” and was “the single most important key to transforming the Middle East,” Sadjadpour claimed.

But the Carnegie senior fellow stopped short of advocating the end of any talks with Iran. He suggested US should aim both to negotiate with Iran’s leaders and undermine them, as it had done with Soviet Union.

No deals with ‘savages’

By contrast, Masih Alinejad, New York-based social-media influencer and Voice of America contributor, said Sunday no talks should take place with “these savages.” Addressing the advocacy group United Against A Nuclear Iran, Alinejad said history would “judge” President Joe Biden for “saving” Iran’s rulers. “Instead of getting a deal, stand up for your values,” she said.

Alinejad told Fox News during Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi’s recent trip to the UN in New York that “Iranians” wanted to see Raisi meet the same fate as Qasem Soleimani, the general killed with ten others by a US drone strike in Baghdad in 2020 in what the UN deemed ‘unlawful killing.’ Alinejad told Fox presenter Martha McCallum that Raisi “was the terrorist…And he came here with the member of Revolutionary Guards.”

“We told them to realistically translate their words into action so that we can reach a deal,” he said on Saturday, referring to a final agreement on the revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Amir-Abdollahian, who is still in New York holding meetings on the sidelines of the 77th UN General Assembly session, highlighted that he has made it clear to representatives of the European Union and signatories to the JCPOA that Iran possesses the required will and determination to reach an agreement.

“It is now the American side that must have the courage to take a decision in order for us to talk about striking a good, strong, and durable agreement,” the Iranian foreign minister pointed out.

Since the start of the popular protests in Iran over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in custody of hijab police, the prospect of restoring the deal seems even dimmer. 

US Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley said Saturday, “While Iran’s government brutalizes peaceful demonstrators and tries to choke off Iranians’ access to the global internet, the United States is taking action to help the Iranian people communicate with one another.”

Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman said earlier in the day that the US Treasury's move to issue a General License to boost support for internet freedom in Iran is an effort to "violate Iran's sovereignty" and will not remain unanswered.

Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Prince Faisal bin Farhan said his country had concerns about a possible revived nuclear deal, especially over IAEA inspections. However, he said that even a flawed deal was better than no deal.

“We are hopeful that there is still potential for progress of the negotiations. But unfortunately, the signs, as of now, are not positive,” he said. 

He added that there were still differences with Iran that currently prevent him from meeting with his Iranian counterpart, but said "we certainly have the intent to build a positive relationship with our neighbors in Iran".

Iranian drone technology poses an increasing threat to the Middle East, bin Farhan said and stressed the importance of cooperation among regional countries to confront the matter.

“The short-term approach must be based on building capacity to face existing risks,” he explained, adding that “Meanwhile, the long-term approach requires cooperation to understand threats and construct frameworks for an action plan that could help in building future technologies for confronting this danger and protecting ourselves and our partners from it.”

A meeting of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council plus Jordan, Iraq and Egypt (GCC+3) was also held in New York on the sidelines of the General Assembly. The GCC+3 meeting, hosted by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was “very good” and followed up on President Joe Biden's visit to Jeddah in July, Prince Faisal added.

Accompanied by Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and lead negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani, Raisi met in New York with both French President Emmanuel Macron and European Union foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell. Bagheri Kani separately sat down with Enrique Mora, the senior European Union official who has mediated recent exchanges between Iran and the United States.

In public utterances both Iran and US kept up their positions as many analysts continued to rule out any changes before US Congressional elections November 8. Raisi told the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday and a televised press conference Thursday that Tehran expected guarantees over being cushioned from any future US withdrawal from any revival of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). On leaving the agreement in 2018, the US imposed stringent sanctions that sent the Iranian economy into two years of recession and severely restricts its international trade.

Raisi also reiterated Iran’s expectation that for JCPOA restoration the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) should close its current probe into nuclear work carried out by Iran before 2003. Tehran claims the agency revived its interest in 2018 – having produced a ‘final report’ in 2015 – only after Israeli allegations.

According to Raisi’s website, Iran’s president told Macron that Europe should distinguish itself from US policies and resist “pressures” over “technical” issues. IAEA director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi said Wednesday he hoped to speak to Iranian officials within days as Iran needed to resolve issues over uranium traces found by inspectors after 2018 in sites linked to pre-2003 work but not declared as nuclear-related. Grossi reported June his dissatisfaction with Iran’s explanations.

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‘Close these probes’

US President Joe Biden told the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday that the US remained open to reviving the JCPOA if Iran “steps up to its obligations.” A US State Department official Thursday told reporters Thursday Tehran was “asking us and European countries to put pressure on the IAEA and its director-general to close these probes, something we will not do.”

The official said the US respected the IAEA’s “independence,” although it was widely reported the US, and Russia, supported Grossi’s appointment in 2019. When US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, a staunch opponent of Iran nuclear talks and supporter of the opposition Mujahideen-e Khalq, reportedly in 2009 called then IAEA chief Mohammad ElBaradei a “pain in the neck.”

‘Credible military threat’

Also at the UN, Prime Minister Yair Lapid said Thursday said Israel, “a world leader in peace,” would, with the “world taking the easy option,” do “whatever it takes” against Iran. “The only way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is to put a credible military threat on the table,” he said. “We have capabilities and we are not afraid to use them. We will do whatever it takes.”

Lapid, who faces a general election November 1, has been sounding tough over Iran to ward off the challenge of opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and to win votes from ‘moderate’ voters inclined to Labor, National Unity, and Meretz. With Israel-Palestinian talks moribund since around 2011, Lapid told the UN he favored the creation of a “peaceful Palestinian state that would not threaten Israel,” so appealing not just to ‘moderate’ Israeli voters but to the Biden administration.

As well as electoral considerations, Lapid is keen to make the supply of air-defense systems to the United Arab Emirates more palatable to states, including the UAE, that in reaching ‘normalization’ agreements with Israel thereby ditched the Arab League precondition that this be done only once a Palestinian state was established in the Israeli-occupied territories.

Reuters reported “two sources familiar with the matter” Thursday that the arms deal was done during the summer, around the time Biden visited Saudi Arabia and met Arab Gulf leaders. Rafael-made SPYDER mobile interceptors would put the UAE is a stronger position against any Iranian deterrence over an Israeli attack and would move Israeli radars significantly nearer Iran.

In a long debate on the chatroom platform Club House earlier this week, several figures said that Iran loses at least $150 million per day because of delay and indecision in the talks for more than a year. Nonetheless, they warned that Iran is facing a threat far bigger than the delay in getting results from the talks - a government plagued by indecision.

Conservative politician Mohammad Mohajeri said this threat is far bigger than any unfavorable outcome in the JCPOA talks. Even if Iran decides not to go back to its obligations under the JCPOA, it needs plans to deal with pressing problems. "Under circumstances marked by indecision, no domestic or foreign investor will be ready to invest in Iran," he said.

Subsequently, he noted, medical doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs leave the country in droves, posing a serious problem for the future. A survey earlier this year published by Iran International, found that three out of ten Iranians want to leave the county because of economic hardship, while others highlight lack of freedoms and despair.

The survey, by Keyou Analytics, found that over 33 percent of 1,300 respondents would emigrate, permanently or temporarily, if able to.

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Meanwhile, another Iran International report quoted officials and lawmakers as warning that Iran may be forced to hire foreign doctors as Iranian physicians are emigrating to other countries in large numbers. According to an official at the Iranian Medical Council, wrong government policies is causing disillusionment among young medical practitioners leading to a wave of emigration.

Hojjatollah Samadi, an economic expert and a former banking official said on Club House that lack of planning by the Raisi administration has caused big losses for the country. Iran currently sells 1.5 million barrels of oil less per day because of the delay in reaching an agreement with the United States.

Samadi added that Iran is also losing around 7 to 8 billion dollars a month in revenue as it cannot sell items such as copper, iron ore, and petrochemicals. "We are losing out even more as Iran cannot import technology to boost its gross domestic product," he said.

Meanwhile, Morteza Afghah, an academic at the Shahid Chamran University in Ahvaz, said the impact of sanctions on the people of Iran has redoubled while the government appears to be confused about what to do while it knows that the livelihood of Iranians has depended on oil revenues in the past 40 years. "The impact of indecision on economic issues is undeniable. Indecision has done the worse harm to Iran's economy, the number of poor people has risen, and the situation is fueling tensions while the elite cadres are leaving the country," he said.

Afghah added that "the decision to make up for the budget deficit by increasing taxes will impose hardships on the people, while the government is unable to use the taxes to offer better services to the people."

Mehdi Pazouki, an economist at the Allameh Tabatabai University, said that the losses incurred because of the delay in reaching an agreement with the United States should be calculated not on a daily basis, but minute by minute.

He added: During the past two months while Iran has been making small amounts of profits, Iraq has sold 22 billion dollars and Saudi Arabia has sold 35 billion dollars' worth of oil thanks to benefitting from the US and European modern technology.