WAR 02-28-2015-to-03-06-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.mynews3.com/content/news...t-not-let-Iran-go/k6PrsynYhUScWP6zF91epg.cspx

Netanyahu tells AIPAC world must not let Iran go nuclear
Published: 4:12 pm
Updated: 4:16 pm

WASHINGTON (AP) — Israel's leader says the world must not allow Iran to attain nuclear weapons.

Benjamin Netanyahu's comments Monday to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee kicked off his charged visit to Washington. The centerpiece of his trip is an address to Congress Tuesday, which came at the invitation of congressional Republicans and was not coordinated with the White House. He is expected to harshly criticize a looming nuclear deal between the West and Iran.

"American leaders worry about the security of their country," Netanyahu said as he opened a controversial trip to Washington. "Israeli leaders worry about the survival of their country."

Netanyahu's remarks to a friendly crowd at a pro-Israel lobby's annual conference amounted to a warm-up act for his address to Congress Tuesday, an appearance orchestrated by Obama's political opponents and aimed squarely at undermining the White House's high-stakes bid for a nuclear deal with Iran.

Netanyahu tried to paper over his personal differences with Obama, insisting he was not in Washington to "disrespect" the president and saying that any reports of the demise of U.S.-Israel ties were "not only premature, they're just wrong."

Still, Netanyahu made clear that he would not hold back in criticizing the U.S.-led nuclear negotiations with Iran.

"I have a moral obligation to speak up in the face of these dangers while there is still time to avert them," he told the cheering crowd of 16,000 at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference. He said Israel had a unique understanding of the security concerns posed by any Iranian pursuit of a nuclear bomb because of its position in a "dangerous neighborhood."

Obama spoke dismissively of Netanyahu's warnings about the risks of an Iran deal, saying the prime minister had previously contended Iran would not abide by an interim agreement signed in 2013 and would get $50 billion in sanctions relief, a figure the U.S. says is far too high.

"None of that has come true," Obama said in an interview with Reuters.

As Netanyahu spoke, Secretary of State John Kerry was in Switzerland opening another round of talks with Iran, as the parties try to cobble together a framework agreement before an end-of-March deadline. Obama views the prospect of a nuclear accord with Iran as a central component of his foreign policy legacy - as much as Netanyahu views blocking such a deal as a component of his own.

Netanyahu has been wary of Obama's diplomatic pursuits with Iran from the start, fearing the U.S. will leave Tehran on the cusp of being able to build a bomb. As the outlines of a deal have emerged and the deadline has drawn near, his criticism has become more forceful.

U.S. officials have reported progress toward a prospective agreement that would freeze Iran's nuclear program for at least 10 years but allow the Iranians to slowly ramp up in later years. Netanyahu has said that framework suggests the U.S. and its partners have "given up" on stopping Iran. In response, Kerry has said America's historic support of Israel suggests Washington deserves the benefit of the doubt.

While Obama and Netanyahu have never gotten along personally, the rift over Iran has sunk their relationship to a new low. The White House has criticized the prime minister's address to Congress as a breach of diplomatic protocol and, officials have publicly questioned his judgment on the merits of the Iran deal.

Obama has no plan to meet with Netanyahu this week, citing Israel's March 17 elections and longstanding U.S. policy to avoid appearing to play favorites in foreign voting.

Netanyahu's remarks at AIPAC were bracketed by speeches from a pair of senior U.S. officials: U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

Power, softening the recent harsh tone, spoke warmly of U.S.-Israeli ties, saying the relationship was rooted in "shared fundamental values" and "should never be politicized." She highlighted the billions of dollars in military assistance Washington delivers as well as the constant defense the U.S. provides Israel at the United Nations.

On Iran, Power said the U.S. shares Israel's commitment to preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. While Obama prefers to achieve that goal through diplomacy, she suggested he would be willing to take more muscular steps if necessary.

"If diplomacy should fail, we know the stakes of a nuclear-armed Iran," she said. "We will not let it happen."

Rice was expected to deliver a more specific rebuttal to Netanyahu's criticism of the U.S.-led nuclear negotiations. She has been among the most outspoken critics of the prime minister's plan to address Congress, calling it "destructive" to the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Kerry and Netanyahu spoke by phone over the weekend, but it did not appear the prime minister would hold any in-person meetings with Obama officials. Vice President Joe Biden was traveling in Guatemala on a trip announced only after the Netanyahu address was revealed. Netanyahu did plan to meet with a bipartisan group of senators after the congressional address, according to his published schedule.

As Senate president, Biden would have sat behind Netanyahu during his speech to Congress. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the senior Republican senator, was expected to take Biden's place.

House Speaker John Boehner plans to present Netanyahu a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a gift chosen because the two men will be the only foreign leaders to have addressed Congress three separate times.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.delawareonline.com/story...hs-iran-nuclear-ambitions-will-live/24272027/

Even without mullahs, Iran nuclear ambitions will live on

James Gibney 3:11 p.m. EST March 2, 2015

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes his case to Congress on Tuesday against a nuclear deal with Iran, his argument will draw heavily on the untrustworthiness of that country’s theocratic rulers.

As he argued in his United Nations speech last fall, Iran’s millenarian vision of an Islamic world government animates its effort to get the bomb. “Once Iran produces atomic bombs,” he said, “the ayatollahs will show their true face and unleash their aggressive fanaticism on the entire world.”

It’s tempting to make mad mullahs the face of the Iranian nuclear problem. But the arc of Iran’s nuclear program before the 1979 revolution suggests something else: Obtaining the weapons has long been a central goal as Iran endeavors to secure its position as a power in the Middle East.

This history suggests that, even now, Iran’s nuclear ambitions are more likely to be managed than extinguished. And in the current context, the best one can hope for would be an imperfect negotiated agreement between Iran and the P5+1 that leaves some enrichment capacity intact.

The two-decade history of Iran’s nuclear program under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is one of growing ambitions and deceptions. Although the Shah was a close ally – his grip on power was cemented by an American-instigated coup – his nuclear efforts met with mounting alarm on the part of the U.S., which signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Iran as part of the Atoms for Peace Program in 1957.

During the early 1960s, the U.S. sold a five-megawatt research reactor to Tehran University. By the early 1970s, citing a need to save oil reserves and develop Iran’s technological capabilities, the Shah announced a sweeping plan to build enough nuclear plants to generate 23,000 megawatts of energy by 1994. A few months after making that splash, and shortly after India’s first nuclear test in May 1974, the Shah turned heads by telling a French magazine that Iran would have nuclear weapons, “without a doubt and sooner than one would think.”

U.S. anxiety over the Shah’s nuclear program is highlighted in a compendium of declassified cables and memos assembled by the National Security Archive. One June 1974 Department of Defense memo, for instance, notes that the planned nuclear power plants (including eight from U.S. companies) could produce enough plutonium for 600-700 warheads.

Using language that echoes the protests of Iran’s current leaders, the Shah and his ministers insisted that no country “has a right to dictate nuclear policy to another” and that “Iran should have full right to decide whether to reprocess” fuel.

U.S. policymakers wrestled to come up with ways to ensure control over reprocessing, suggesting a multinational enrichment facility or one jointly operated and controlled by the U.S. and Iran.

In a November 1975 cable, Ambassador Richard Helms (previously head of the Central Intelligence Agency) in Tehran laments the impasse over how much enriched uranium Iran can store and its “right” to reprocess U.S.-supplied fuel without prior U.S. approval:

“We do not believe it is realistic to expect that Iran will alter its position on these issues substantially. We are thus confronted with the option of continuing the impasse through insistence on holding to our own position or attempting to accommodate Iran on these questions. We recommend that we take the latter course of action … and instead assure the GOI of US participation in a binational reprocessing plant under mutually agreeable safeguards.”

As it happened, the final draft of the proposed agreement prepared in 1978 under the Jimmy Carter administration allowed for no reprocessing in Iran, and reprocessing outside Iran only with U.S. approval. But before it could be signed, the regime collapsed.

Subsequent revelations made clear the Shah’s intent to acquire the ability to build a bomb. In fact, a 2013 documentary, “Before the Revolution,” hints that Israel may have been one of the countries that helped to advance his nuclear ambitions.

The Israelis, of course, know how hard it is to stop the nuclear train from leaving the station. Another National Security Archive cable trove covers the Nixon administration’s unsuccessful tussles with Israel over its covert nuclear program, which one 1969 Pentagon memo called”the single most dangerous phenomenon in an area dangerous enough without nuclear weapons.”

So, the U.S. and its partners should by all means set a stringent inspection regime and limits on Iran’s centrifuges and nuclear material. But don’t expect the 10-year nuclear freeze reportedly under discussion in Geneva to turn ugly militant ducklings into nuke-free secular swans.

James Gibney writes editorials on international affairs.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414681/iran-its-not-about-bomb-its-about-strategy-john-hillen

On Iran: It’s Not about the Bomb, It’s about the Strategy

Achieving a weak nuclear deal will thrill the arms-control crowd but do little to erode Iran’s campaign to control the Middle East.

By John Hillen — March 2, 2015

This weekend’s​ Sunday-morning talk shows remained focused on Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and its possible effect on the ongoing talks with Iran on its nuclear program.

In the meantime, a seemingly innocuous but related event Sunday morning was lightly reported: Yesterday morning, Mahan Air of Iran landed its first commercial flight to Yemen in decades. Even though there is no passenger traffic of almost any sort between Yemen and Iran, Yemen’s new Shiite government and Teheran have scheduled 14 direct flights per week between the two countries.

This first flight was delivering “medical aid.” Ah, of course. Mahan Air, a “private” airline, was called out in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Treasury “for providing financial, material, and technological support to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF).” Treasury designated the airline a material and transportation supporter of terrorism, saying: “Based in Tehran, Mahan Air provides transportation, funds transfers and personnel travel services to the IRGC-QF.” In Treasury’s 2011 press release on this matter, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen said:

Mahan Air’s close coordination with the IRGC-QF — secretly ferrying operatives, weapons, and funds on its flights — reveals yet another facet of the IRGC’s extensive infiltration of Iran’s commercial sector to facilitate its support for terrorism. Following the revelation about the IRGC-QF’s use of the international financial system to fund its murder-for-hire plot, today’s action highlights further the undeniable risks of doing business with Iran.

The general pattern, evident over years, shows that Iran has a well-oiled machine for smuggling massive quantities of sophisticated weaponry to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza strip.

Despite the enormous political and military investment in Yemen over the past decade, the U.S. and its European allies fled the country over the past weeks, as it sank into chaos. Iran saw its chance and was in like a shot. This move is part and parcel of Iran’s national strategy: exporting its revolution through specialized military and intelligence units, gaining hegemony over the Gulf region and the greater Middle East, pushing the U.S. out of the region, and isolating and weakening, if not helping to dismember Israel. In just the past five years, Iran has created or consolidated well-armed satrapies from the Turkish border to the Gulf of Aden, and from the Mediterranean and Red Sea to the heart of Afghanistan.

The Middle East may be the graveyard of most foreign policies, but Iran’s, by contrast, has been remarkably successful over the past decade. And its success has accelerated dramatically over the last five years. And yet U.S. policy has largely failed to focus on comprehensively confronting, arresting, and rolling back the threat of an increasingly hegemonic Iran. Instead, our Iranian policy — outside of Treasury sanctions — seems to be centered almost entirely on achieving and then celebrating some kind of nuclear deal. (This is the subject of my speech today at AIPAC.)

There is no doubt that Iranian nuclear weapons would change the balance of power dramatically; inevitably, they would start a nuclear-arms race throughout the Middle East. And we should be more concerned with Iran’s nuclear ambitions than with North Korea’s programs for the simple geopolitical reason that North Korea is a weak state surrounded by strong states while Iran is a strong state surrounded by weak states.

Even so, Iran’s nuclear ambitions are just a means — a tool. It is Iran’s geo-strategy on which we should be chiefly focused, not the details of getting a nuclear-arms agreement. Others have written sensibly about why a bad nuclear deal is much worse than no deal, and I do believe that the priests and priestesses of the arms-control crowd are head-down in technical details and hell-bent on getting to any deal, no matter how weak. It is the way they define success — damn its strategic relevance.

But doing any deal right now — at the very moment when Iran is achieving unprecedented success in its campaign to destabilize the entire region — is like cheering about saving a tree as the forest burns all around. It is strategically incongruous, if not ultimately debilitating, to be having a let’s-reach-a-deal dialogue with Iran right now on this one set of means. It’s not the bomb; it’s the strategy that is our problem.

— John Hillen is the chairman of National Review and a former assistant secretary of state.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.breitbart.com/national-s...s-cairo-speech-middle-east-in-total-disarray/

Nearly Six Years After Obama’s Cairo Speech, Middle East in Total Disarray

by Fred Gedrich
2 Mar 2015
Comments 66

The Arab world is rife with political turmoil and violence. The Sunni Muslim Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and other jihadi terrorists are continuing their savagery within its boundaries, and Iran’s theocratic terrorist rulers are still exporting and/or solidifying their brand of the Shiite Muslim Islamic Revolution to Arab countries and territories. And the Obama administration appears unable or unwilling to effectively deal with each emerging crisis there.

The competing goals of Sunni and Shiite jihadists are to dominate the Arab world, and their forces and surrogates are engaged in nasty fights for supremacy throughout the region. The area they seek to control generally spans 21 Middle East and North Africa countries as well as territories under Palestinian control in Gaza and the West Bank. Its riches include 364 million people, the world’s largest known oil and gas reserves which fuel developed world economies, and strategic waterways where the petroleum-based commerce flows. About 92 percent of the Arab World population is Muslim (336 million), of which 87 percent are Sunni Muslim and 13 percent Shiite Muslim.

In 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke in Cairo, Egypt and promised the Arab and greater Muslim world a ‘new beginning’ in relations with the United States. However, hopefulness turned into hopelessness for tens of millions of Arab world residents after the speech and Arab Spring which followed. Consider the current state of affairs:
•Freedom House –a non-profit global freedom watchdog – ranked Middle East and North Africa countries (e.g., most of the Arab world) in 2015 as the world’s most freedom-less area with only Tunisia granting citizens political rights and civil liberties to qualify as a free nation.
•Freedom House also reported that not one Arab country or territory provided the necessary legal environment, political influences, and economic conditions to guarantee a truly free press.
•The U.S. State Department reports that 29 of 59 groups on its Foreign Terrorist Organization List have gestated and operate in Arab countries and territories, all of which endanger local residents, Israel, and U.S. citizens and security interests. Twelve FTO’s were added during Obama’s presidency.
•The U.S. State Department reports that three of four designated state sponsors of terror – Iran, Syria, and Sudan – apply their deadly trade in Arab countries. One of them, Iran, has an illegal nuclear weapons development program.
•Four Arab states and one territory – Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Gaza– are heavily dependent on Iran’s terrorist leaders for their governments’ survival.
•Five Arab countries – Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen – are either failed states or don’t exercise sovereignty over their boundaries.
•The average annual income of Arab world residents is $9,700, which is 26 percent below the global average of $13,100, with a wide income disparity between rich nations like Qatar and poor nations like Somalia.

The persons most responsible for perpetuating these conditions are an assortment of Islamic terror groups and extremists and authoritarian leaders. However, the Middle East and North African landscape is littered with the remnants of dubious Obama administration decisions that contributed to them ranging from the premature withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq; the Syrian ‘redline;’ the Libyan military misadventure; calling ISIS a junior al-Qaeda varsity team; unwillingness to admit jihadi terrorists are part of Islam; refusal to support Iran’s peaceful Green Revolutionaries, and thinking Iran’s terrorist state can be part of any peaceful Arab world solution.

Muslims consider the dominion of Islam as the central pillar of their global-domination political program. Sunnis and Shiites disagree sharply on which of them, and who, should lead. They agree that the prime basis of governance and administration of justice should be Islamic (Shariah) law as enunciated in the Koran and traditions of Muhammad, and further elaborated by classical Muslim legists.

The global Muslim population contains Islamists and jihadists. An Islamist is any Muslim who wants to impose and enforce Shariah – whether by violent or nonviolent means. A jihadist is an Islamic terrorist.

Shariah law totally subordinates women and mandates many other human rights violations, such as relegating non-Muslim minorities to a much lower legal status than Muslims and dispensing cruel and unusual punishment. It also rejects freedom of speech and conscience and mandates aggressive jihad until the world is brought under Islamic hegemony.

In forging a path to some kind of durable regional peace, it is not only important to understand the aforementioned Arab world problems and radical Islamic-driven terrorism but to effectively do something about them. Egypt’s Muslim President, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, showed the way by removing the repressive Muslim Brothers from power during a popular revolution, publicly meeting with non-Muslims being persecuted by the various jihadists, and calling on clerics to reform Islam by eliminating rhetoric that fosters violence.

The Arab world is the epicenter of a global jihadist threat, and it is time for the U.S. and its allies, regional and otherwise, to also act diplomatically, economically, and militarily if necessary against all of those jihadist forces – including ISIS and Iran – operating there who are using violence and Shariah to acquire and retain power. However, seeking to degrade and defeat the Sunni Muslim jihadist brand while leaving the Shiite Muslim jihadist brand intact, as the U.S. is currently doing, will only perpetuate problems for those Arabs and others who genuinely seek a better life and to live in freedom.

The time for decisive and effective action is now. Regional and world peace depends on it.

Fred Gedrich is a foreign policy and national security analyst and served in the U.S. departments of Defense and State.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.wsj.com/articles/john-vinocur-russias-missile-gambit-1425327322

Russia’s Missile Gambit

Offering antiballistic missiles to Iran, currying favor with the mullahs.

By John Vinocur
March 2, 2015 3:15 p.m. ET
1 COMMENTS

From deep in a world of wishful thinking, the White House’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, said on Friday that the Obama administration is hopeful of holding together “the unanimity of support” it is getting from countries described as a coalition working together to stop Iran’s rush toward nuclear weapons.

Was the White House closed for a spiritual retreat earlier in the week? Because last Monday, Russia offered to sell the Islamic Republic its most advanced S-300VM Antey-2500 antiballistic missiles. They would protect the mullahs’ nuclear installations from eventual strikes by Israel and/or—you couldn’t have forgotten President Barack Obama’s warnings that “everything remains on the table”—the United States.

Here was an extraordinary moment that roused barely a peep from the administration and piddling press coverage in the U.S., France, Britain and Germany, the countries that make up with Russia and China the American-led group negotiating with Tehran.

Extraordinary because Moscow deliberately picked a decisive phase in the bargaining process to send a brazen signal. And a coherent one in the sense that its gesture was one of unmistakable contempt for the U.S. and the West.

Most important, the missile proposition was immediately destabilizing since it savaged the notion, cherished in Washington and Western Europe, that the Kremlin is committed to compartmentalizing its approach to Iran—that is, walling it off into a cooperative sanitary zone away from the lies, maneuvers and gun-in-hand Russian strategy concerning Ukraine and the security of Europe.

Instead, the move said the Russians think they can both oppose Iran getting nukes and, through the offer of the missiles, come out from the current talks, concluding at the end of March, with the mullahs on their side regardless of the negotiations’ results. That’s hardly a Tehran moving closer to America, an event which the Obama administration seems to fantasize will accompany a deal.

For emphasis, Vladimir Putin ’s old KGB pal, Sergei Chemezov, head of the Russian state-weapons conglomerate Rostec, personally proposed supplying the missiles. Add this dose of spite: Mr. Chemezov is on Washington’s Crimea sanctions list. He said the Iranians are thinking the offer over.

The Antey-2500 missiles are a substantially improved version of the S-300V the Russians contracted to sell to Iran in 2007. The deal was cancelled by Russia in 2010 after a United Nations Security Council resolution banning the sale or transfer to Iran of missile systems. Russian accounts say the Antey-2500 missiles on offer aren’t listed among the excluded systems.

The U.S. reaction was of the don’t-bother-us mode. “It’s just some reports,” said the State Department’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki. Apparently the direct quotes from Mr. Chemezov via a Russian state-run news agency, stating that “We offered the Antey-2500 instead of the S-300,” don’t count.

Ms. Psaki issued a clause saying maybe-we’ll-take-a-look-later-at-an-appropriate-level, as if to cut off the story’s legs.

A good way to evaluate the Obama administration’s connection with reality on dealing with Iran was once to check this or that potentially deluded aspect with the French. They hadn’t inexactly called themselves “the guardians of the temple” on nuclear proliferation. Example: In 2013, when an interim agreement was about to be signed setting up the current talks with Iran, France successfully insisted that neutralization of the mullahs’ Arak nuclear site be included. America was prepared to leave it out.

And for verbal resolve on Iran, you couldn’t do better than when President François Hollande told Saudi Arabia’s royals in 2013 that France sought “the certainty, the guarantee that Iran definitively renounces atomic weapons.”

But now, when I asked a senior French official participating in the Iran negotiations about the Russian missile gambit and its implications, he responded: “Juridically, they can do it.” He added, “Politically, we’re not following it now.”

Talk about compartmentalization. The lessons of Russia’s march into Ukraine or its maneuvers on NATO’s borders won’t be superimposed onto Paris’s strategy for dealing with Iran, marking a French willingness, more in line with Washington’s, to disconnect from the issue’s widest realities.

So where are the French “guardians of the temple” these days, the ornery nuclear nags previously ready, they said, to lie across the tracks of an ambiguous or plainly bad deal that would leave Iran with an eventual good shot at nukes?

George Perkovich, the nuclear-security-and-proliferation expert who is vice president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me, referring to the “guardians” and Iran: “It’s become a different world. The circumstances and issues in the negotiations are not nearly as propitious as they once saw them.”

Russia apart—although the West’s unwillingness to deal with Moscow’s new disruptiveness on Iran says a lot about how it will ultimately face up to the mullahs—I wanted to know from the French how they see things turning out.

“The question for us is not Obama versus Netanyahu,” the senior French official said, seeking to return to the old sound of French noncompromise and autonomy on an issue of enormous importance. “The question is a weak agreement against a robust one. At this stage, the agreement with Iran currently under discussion is not robust.”

He added very diplomatically, “Of course, in three weeks, we’ll see.”

Mr. Vinocur is former executive editor of the International Herald Tribune.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thediplomat.com/2015/03/china-and-russia-vs-the-united-states/

China and Russia vs. the United States?

Just how likely are China and Russia to ally against the U.S.?

By Huiyun Feng
March 02, 2015

958 Shares
71 Comments

The rising tensions between Russia and the West, especially the United States, over Ukraine provide a constant reminder of the Cold War, when the two superpowers fought proxy conflicts for spheres of influence. A key question in the current game of great power politics is whether China and Russia will form an alliance against the United States?

In his Foreign Affairs article “Asia for the Asians: Why Chinese-Russian Friendship is Here to Stay,” Gilbert Rozman listed six reasons why the Chinese-Russian partnership is durable. However, Joseph Nye, in a recent piece published in Project Syndicate titled “A New Sino-Russian Alliance?” questioned the possibility by pointing to deep problems for a Sino-Russian alliance in the economic, military and demographic spheres.

Both Rozman and Nye are, in fact, looking at different sides of the same coin. However, both have missed something. The future of a China-Russian relationship depends largely on relations these two countries have with the West, especially the United States. If Washington pushes too hard on oil prices, Ukraine, and NATO expansion toward Russia, and if the U.S. rebalances too far against China in the Pacific, China and Russia may indeed move towards a formal alliance, even if that may not have been what they originally wanted.

One Mountain, Two Tigers

Both Chinese President Xi Jingping and Russian President Putin are strong leaders with aspirations to recapture past glories. Xi’s new foreign policy features strong positions over the East China Sea disputes with Japan and the South China Sea disputes with Southeast Asia. As the world has witnessed, Putin has been aggressive over Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Both Xi and Putin believe that their states were unfairly treated in the past and are uncomfortable with the current international order.

However, these similarities do not suggest that the two leaders will simply stand together. As the old Chinese saying goes, one mountain cannot contain two tigers. Although both Xi and Putin are pursuing national rejuvenation, the two nations have historically not gotten along. Although neither Xi nor Putin like the Western world order led by America, they do not share a common vision of a so-called new world order.

In particular, Beijing did not bend to Moscow even during the Cold War when both states belonged in the communist camp. Although facing tremendous economic difficulties caused by Western sanctions after the Ukraine crisis, the Russians have made it clear that what they need is China’s diplomatic support and not economic assistance. Even though both countries face domestic ethnic challenges, in Chechnya and Xinjiang respectively, when it comes to the 2008 War in Georgia, China’s lukewarm position due to its own concerns over Taiwan, Xinjiang and Tibet has made some Russians uncomfortable. Even though Xi and Putin might be in the same bed against the West, their dreams are clearly different.

Trade Imbalances and Strategic Ramifications

Economic ties are a key factor in the China-Russian relationship. Bilateral trade has been rising steadily, reaching $95 billion in 2014, very close to the $100 billion goal set for 2015. In 2014, Russia signed a thirty-year, $400 billion deal that will see as much as thirty-eight billion cubic meters of Russian gas go to China annually from around 2018 to 2047.

However, even the strongest ties between the two countries are problematic in nature. First, China-Russia trade remains highly imbalanced for it is limited to mainly three items: oil, gas and arms. The EU is still Russia’s leading trading partner while the U.S. is China’s (if Hong Kong is excluded). Although China is Russia’s second largest trading partner, Russia only ranks eighth forChina, with just 2 percent of China’s total trade volume. In other words, although both China and Russia may despise the West, China cannot sacrifice the U.S. market, and Russia can’t give up on Europe.

Second, the energy deals between the two nations are not really a “win-win” situation because of mutual concerns over their relative gains. It seems that Western economic sanctions against Russia have pushed Russia to seal energy deals with China, which in return met China’s booming needs for energy and resources. However, both countries understand that overdependence means potential vulnerability.

China has tried to diversify its oil supply by stepping up its economic cooperation with Central Asia, traditionally Russia’s backyard. Russia has also sought to expand its energy market with other Asian countries, such as Japan, India, Mongolia, South Korea, and Vietnam (even North Korea). Intentionally or not, Russia’s energy cooperation with some Asian countries somehow made China uncomfortable strategically. For example, Russia’s 2012 energy deal with Vietnam in the South China Sea, where China has claimed its undisputed sovereignty, was seen as a “stab in the back” by some Chinese analysts. In the same vein, Russia has deep concerns that China’s “silk road economic belt” across Central Asia will undermine Russia’s geopolitical influence in Eurasia.

Last but not least, Russia’s arms trade with China. Certainly, Russia is China’s most important supplier of weapons and military technology, but it is an open secret that Russia has been hesitant to transfer advanced military technology to China – a potential competitor. The S-400 missile system deal in late 2014 is widely seen as a practical financial decision instead of a strategic one. Russia’s military cooperation with China’s neighbors, such as Vietnam, entails strong deterrence and balancing ramifications toward China in the South China Sea. For example, Russia has sold three kilo-class submarines to Vietnam since 2009, which are more advanced than the vessels China obtained from Russia.

Irreconcilable Identities

China is an Asian power with global ambitions. Russia has historically defined itself as a European power, although it recently started its own pivot toward Asia. The two nations share a bitter and bloody history. After the Cold War, though, they seemed to find new chemistry in defending against U.S. hegemony. China and Russia established a strategic partnership in the late 1990s while the U.S. was extending its unipolar system. However, the strategic partnership between China and Russia was widely seen as an “axis of convenience,” with only symbolic gestures as both countries kept an eye on improving relationships with the United States even as they made public pledges against the hegemon. In other words, the so-called strategic partnership between China and Russia is simply a diplomatic tool for both nations to compete for more attention from the United States after the Cold War.

Even in the post-unipolar moment, China and Russia remain competitors rather than true partners. As a rising power, China is gaining more international say and influence, while Russia seems to be losing same, as was seen at the recent APEC and G20 meetings in 2014. Although both countries are having their issues with the West right now, sooner or later tensions will rise between them. Their uneasy relations within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) suggest the potential for strategic and economic competition in Central Asia and the even deeper problem of their irreconcilable interests over regional domination.

Three to Tango?

As always, power politics is still the major game in town. Another chapter in the rise and fall of the great powers – this time played by the United States, China, and Russia – has just opened. It is too early to categorize China-Russia relations as either a “partnership” or an “alliance,” because there are no permanent friends in world politics, only permanent interests. Despite the positive trends, the bilateral relationship still lacks a solid foundation of mutual trust and common identity. Only a strong common threat from the West could push China and Russia to move closer economically and militarily. This is in the hands of U.S. policymakers. Continue to prod Xi and Putin and they may indeed see a military alliance or at least a close partnership between Beijing and Moscow.

To avoid, the United States needs to consider how to re-set its relationships with Russia and China. For Russia, isolation and sanctions might not be the solution for the Ukraine crisis. For China, the U.S. needs to reconsider its Asia rebalance. Xi will visit Washington in September, a good opportunity for some relationship building. Although furious competition among the United States, China and Russia is probably inevitable, a delicate balance of power is the essence of diplomacy. In the context of world affairs, it may take three to have a peaceful tango.

Huiyun Feng is senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at Utah State University. She is the author of Chinese Strategic Culture and Foreign Policy Decision-Making: Confucianism, Leadership and War (Routledge, 2007) and the co-author of Prospect Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis in the Asia Pacific: Rational Leaders and Risky Behavior (Routledge, 2013).

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://krepon.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/4499/the-negotiating-endgame-in-iran#more-5257

The Negotiating Endgame in Iran

By krepon | 2 March 2015 | 2 Comments

The negotiating endgame with Iran is upon us. The Obama administration had no choice but to hold fast to the March 31st deadline, allowing further time only to add detail if a framework agreement can be reached. Restiveness on Capitol Hill is growing and Republican support is hard to detect. Extending these talks once again would whip up stronger opposition in Congress without providing any additional leverage on Iran¡¯s Supreme Leader to make concessions. A firm deadline is needed to finalize an agreement that effectively constrains Iran¡¯s bomb-making capabilities in verifiable ways.

Supporters and opponents of trying to reach an agreement with Iran have tried to move the goalposts for an acceptable agreement as the negotiations have progressed. U.N. Security Council resolutions beginning in 2006 have demanded that Iran suspend its enrichment program. The Government of Israel, vocal domestic critics, and Members of Congress who oppose an agreement now insist that Iran have no enrichment capability whatsoever. For its part, the Obama administration and its negotiating partners have shifted from suspension to allowing enrichment under observable constraints.

Critics, including the editorial board of the Washington Post, oppose the amount of enrichment that the Obama administration seems willing to accept. According to press leaks, the United States and its negotiating partners have upped the allowable number of first-generation centrifuges operating under an agreement from 1,500, to 3,000/4,500 to perhaps 6,500. Iran has around 19,000 centrifuges at two sites, with the production capacity to make more, and more efficient, machines.

Heavyweight and bellwether Henry Kissinger has criticized the administration¡¯s negotiating tactics with this artful formulation, provided in congressional testimony on January 29th:

¡°Nuclear talks with Iran began as an international effort, buttressed by six U.N. resolutions, to deny Iran the capability to develop a military nuclear option. They are now an essentially bilateral negotiation over the scope of that capability through an agreement that sets a hypothetical limit of one year on an assumed breakout. The impact of this approach will be to move from preventing proliferation to managing it.¡±

Moving away from unrealistic opening gambits in order to find mutually acceptable common ground is standard negotiating practice. Kissinger got hammered for doing just this by critics of the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation accords. The most prominent exception to this practice ¨C the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty ¨C came as a disconcerting surprise to those anti-arms controllers in the Reagan administration who supported the ¡°zero¡± option in the confident expectation that it would not be negotiable.

What matters most in Kissinger¡¯s formulation ¨C but not to diehard critics of any agreement with Iran ¨C are the particulars of the word ¡°capability.¡± The Obama administration has defined this term as Iran¡¯s ability to be in a position to have a usable nuclear weapon in a year¡¯s time. The package of constraints now under negotiation is designed to address this ¡°breakout¡± scenario, which Houston Wood of the University of Virginia and David Albright at the Institute for Science and International Security have done much to advance.

Some argue that designing an agreement against a breakout time of one year is too exacting; others that it is not nearly exacting enough. A third view holds that breakout from facilities under close scrutiny is unlikely, and that if Iran sprints for the Bomb, it will do so at secret sites. Provisions allowing access to undeclared facilities are needed to address this concern.

Current events in Ukraine lend support to designing an interlocking series of constraints around a one year timeline for breakout. The coalition of states required to work in tandem to implement an agreement with Iran will have different timelines and thresholds to make hard decisions, as is evident from the reluctance of Germany and France to draw a hard line against Vladimir Putin¡¯s encroachments in the Donbas region. If Iran violates its commitments under an agreement, lining up the requisite will and support for remedial actions could take months.

Sanctions have been an effective tool to engage a deal-minded government in Iran, but sanctions, no matter how tough, will not shut down Iran¡¯s enrichment activities. The ¡®no enrichment¡¯ camp, led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been handed even more of a megaphone by House Speaker John Boehner, seeks to stymie ongoing negotiations or kill any agreement reached. If Tehran responds to either of these eventualities with the expulsion of foreign observers at its nuclear facilities, tougher sanctions and bombing runs are likely to follow. Netanyahu would prefer the United States to undertake these airstrikes, which would have to be repeated periodically, each time with diminished support. If the U.S. Congress blocks or rejects an agreement that effectively curtails Iranian enrichment, and if Israeli or U.S. air strikes follow, Washington would be placed in an untenable position globally.

Opponents of an agreement ¨C assuming one can be reached that effectively establishes constraints commensurate to a one-year breakout capacity ¨C are obligated to explain how blocking or rejecting it would advance U.S. national, regional, and international security interests. How, for example, would rejecting an agreement that curtails Iranian enrichment affect proliferation prospects in the greater Middle East? Instead of providing forthright answers to hard questions, opponents take refuge in legislation for tougher sanctions.

Constraining Iran¡¯s enrichment capability in effective, verifiable ways is far better than leaving it unconstrained and unmonitored. Iran¡¯s nuclear programs have already prompted hedging strategies in the greater Middle East, as is evident by plans to proceed with nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere. The extent of these hedging strategies will depend on the extent to which Iran¡¯s nuclear capacity can be effectively constrained.

There are serious risks ahead whether or not an agreement can be negotiated. The agreement the Obama administration seeks would have less pernicious proliferation consequences than by torpedoing it. Those who oppose an agreement with Iran unwittingly invite more nuclear proliferation in the region.

Note to readers: A shorter form of this essay appeared in the March 1st edition of the Los Angeles Times.

Twitter
Facebook
2
¡û ¡°Nuclear Postures¡± (Previous)

2 Responses to ¡°The Negotiating Endgame in Iran¡±

Miles Pomper | March 2, 2015

Michael,
Your argument rests on the assumption that repeated bombing runs would have less and less support¨Cwhat¡¯s your basis for this?

Also, can anyone pinpoint the origin of the statement that Iran would be able to rebuild its facilities within 3-5 years? This is a familiar talking point, but I wonder how anyone can be so precise about something so speculative.

Reply

krepon | March 2, 2015

Miles,

Bombing takes place in a political context. If bombing is prompted because Iran fails to observe its obligations under an agreement, it will have meaningful support as well as opposition. If bombing occurs after an agreement that effectively constrains Iran¡¯s nuclear capabilities is rejected by the U.S. Congress, it will have little support internationally and lots of opposition. How many states will support successive bombing runs, playing whack-a-mole against covert Iranian attempts to reconstitute nuclear capability? Think of how this plays out, for example, in the NPT and IAEA arenas.

Prime Minister Netanyahu obviously doesn¡¯t agree with my analysis. He seems to think that rejection of an agreement that constrains Iran¡¯s nuclear capabilities and then taking military action subsequently is a sound strategy.

MK

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm........

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/doomsday-preparing-chinas-collapse-12343

Doomsday: Preparing for China's Collapse

China could be on the brink of collapse. Here's how Washington can leverage that to its advantage.

Peter Harris
March 2, 2015

A couple of weeks ago, AEI scholar Michael Auslin published a column for the Wall Street Journal about a quiet dinner in Washington where a senior China scholar declared the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had reached the final stage before collapse. The political collapse of the world’s second-largest economy and a nuclear power is no small thing. What should Washington do? Go outside the Fourth Ring Road (a Chinese reference akin to saying go outside the Beltway), forge links to marginalized Chinese and speak out about Chinese human rights to show the Chinese people that the United States has “a moral stake in China’s development.” Even if the CCP’s collapse does not occur for years, these measures will help U.S. policy makers be “on the right side of history.”

Such measures appear trivial in the face of a problem the size of China’s potential political instability and the collapse of its governing structure. By Auslin’s telling, this anonymous China scholar and those nodding in approval think that these first steps constitute a genuine signal to the Chinese people that Washington stands and will stand by them. Rhetorical support, however, will not grace the United States in the eyes of the Chinese people if their discontent demolishes the CCP. Actions, rather than words, in the heat of another crisis at least on the scale of nationwide protests in 1989 will be the measure of Washington’s moral interest in China’s future.

Being prepared for a political crisis with the potential to bring down the CCP requires a much more serious effort that involves both research and planning. Before that day of crisis comes, the mindset for dealing with China must include the ability to imagine a China without the CCP and how that outcome might develop. The tens of thousands of demonstrations serve as a reminder that, despite China’s rise to international prominence, the country still has political fault lines capable of causing an earthquake. With this kind of warning, the moral failing would be to ignore the potential for regime-changing unrest or any other political crisis that might threaten the regime, and what Beijing might do to prevent that from happening.

The purpose of these tasks is to reduce the uncertainty faced by policy makers as a Chinese crisis emerges and cascades across the country, as well as to identify ways and decision points where Washington can influence the CCP’s choices. If an effort is not made to reduce the uncertainty, then fear of the unknown is likely to drive U.S. policy makers to a decision about whether to support the Chinese government out of ignorance, rather than informed calculation.

One of the first research-related steps is to identify the cohesive and centrifugal forces inside China. The CCP used its sixty-six years in power to dismember Chinese civil society and insert itself into any group with the potential to become a political force. Groups that could not be coopted, like Falungong, became pariah and hunted by the regime. Nascent civil-society and activist groups survive in the blind spots of China’s underlapping bureaucratic maze. Chinese political culture beyond the party needs to be understood if Washington wants to claim a “moral stake.”

Ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the National Intelligence Council produced an assessment of Iraq’s political prospects after Saddam Hussein fell. The paper updated a periodically updated analysis begun in the early 1980s, and it accurately analyzed the sectarian rivalries and domestic cleavages that blew up under the post-Saddam U.S. administration. It is not clear, however, whether such a paper could even be done on China today, let alone in any accurate manner. Such a paper cannot be about Uyghurs and Tibetans, but the 1.24 billion Han Chinese who inevitably will dominate China’s autocratic or democratic future.

The second is to develop, maintain and update a database of leadership dossiers (as well as their families) that includes points of leverage, such as overseas assets that could be frozen, as well as electronic and telephonic contact information. The U.S. government is certainly as capable as Bloomberg and the New York Times of ferreting out this kind of information. If the CCP is imploding, the tense situation will ensure that many cadres start thinking in terms of their personal and family welfare, rather than the party. When survival is at stake, the CCP’s institutional cohesion is likely to falter as each looks after his own and looks to ensure there is an escape hatch. In this kind of situation, the ability to influence Beijing’s decisions will be highly personalized, and the ability to both contact and shape the incentives of individual decision makers in Zhongnanhai as well as provincial leaders and security officials could prove critical if Washington wants to shape outcomes.

Like corporate and nongovernmental organization databases, this project should be accompanied by records of meetings with U.S. officials and other prominent Americans. This way, Washington has awareness of who might have an existing relationship and can be called upon to reach out to a Chinese official if the situation demands (and it might even help in routine negotiations to which Chinese interlocutors always seem to come better prepared with knowledge of their U.S. counterparts). It also requires the White House to be honest, at least with the U.S. bureaucracy, about its dealing with Beijing—something that has not always been the case in U.S.-Chinese relations.

Third, determining the capability of China’s internal security forces, including domestic intelligence and paramilitary capabilities, is vital to understanding whether unrest is approaching a critical mass. Most studies of China’s future often assume the country’s security services will function, without understanding their ability to protect the regime depends on a fluctuating dynamic that also involves citizen-activists and technology. If political change comes to China through mass public demonstrations, then it is because the assumptions held about a loyal and capable security apparatus did not hold.

Relatedly, any decision for military intervention will involve at the very least the PLA headquarters, if not the Central Military Commission (CMC)—the senior-most political-military policy-making body chaired by Xi Jinping. If the order from the center comes, the military leadership must make a decision whether to support the current government, take power for themselves or stand aside. Although most PLA officers are party members, the relationship between the two organizations has changed substantially since the days of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping when the Chinese leadership was dominated by dual political-military elites. The PLA may be developing a professional identity separate from its party identity. Exacerbated by the military’s relative isolation from society on closed compounds and the absence of shared experiences, China’s robust military modernization has required PLA officers to become better educated and more professional. If the PLA’s professionalization gives strength to the idea that the PLA should be a national army, then U.S. policy makers need to know—and they need to know who is harboring such sentiments.

Fourth, U.S. policy makers and analysts need to map out the decisions Beijing will face as individual incidents of unrest begin to cascade into a larger crisis. First, Chinese leaders will have to make an assessment of whether the demonstrations can be stymied by buying off or capturing protest ringleaders. Or whether the unrest can be isolated and localized before it spreads across too many counties. The next big set of decisions faced in Beijing would involve whether to allow local and provincial authorities to resolve the crisis without involving the central leadership. Based on the complicated arrangements that make horizontal cooperation across jurisdictions almost impossible, widespread protests that cross provincial boundaries will require central intervention to coordinate action. Knowing how this works and who will decide at different levels could be crucial to influencing events. Parts of this process and the decision points can be imagined until new information can be acquired, but the important thing is to spell it out while never thinking that the answer is final. Concrete plans may be useless, to paraphrase President Dwight Eisenhower, but planning will be indispensable.

Fifth, the U.S. government needs to find a way to maintain communication with the Chinese people, even if Beijing starts cutting international linkages. The Great Firewall may not be impervious and it will be difficult to shut down the Chinese internet, but China, as proved by its recent interference in virtual private networks (VPNs), can make it extremely difficult to move communications and information via the Internet. Moving the American propaganda effort solely online without a failsafe would be foolhardy at best. If such a failsafe cannot be found with the capacity to elude censorship, then the next best thing would be retaining the capacity to broadcast radio into China in an emergency.

Finally, the kind of focused intelligence effort that this kind of contingency preparation will require may not be occurring. If the current U.S. intelligence collection and analysis apparatus—including the U.S. Foreign Service—is unsuited for these tasks, then some rethinking about how to build expertise, collect and process information and manage a political crisis inside China needs to occur. The question here is not necessarily the amount effort—as some claim U.S. intelligence needs—but focus and ensuring the continuous effort to sustain the aforementioned measures. And it will require the direct involvement of policy makers, because of their role in collecting some of the crucial personal information as well as the truism that policy making determines the limits of intelligence.

If Washington is concerned that the CCP is approaching its twilight, then asserting a moral stake in China’s development requires nothing less than a substantial effort to understand China’s political landscape beyond day-to-day policy-making concerns and to influence Chinese leaders before they pull the trigger on their citizens again. Without advance preparation, U.S. and other international leaders will find the prospects of an unstable China distressing, possibly with the view that it is “too big to fail.” They may even watch from the sidelines as in 1989, not knowing the best course of action or how to influence the decisions of Chinese leaders. This may not be wrong, but such a momentous decision should not be left to ignorance, preexisting mental images or scattered information collected as a crisis breaks.

Peter Mattis is a Fellow with the Jamestown Foundation and a visiting scholar at National Cheng-chi University’s Institute of International Relations in Taipei.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150302/un-united-nations-abyei-attack-93bf54cc8a.html

New attack in disputed region claimed by Sudan, South Sudan

Mar 2, 4:08 PM (ET)
By EDITH M. LEDERER

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United Nations reported another deadly attack Monday in the oil-rich region of Abyei that's claimed by both Sudan and South Sudan.

It was the fourth attack in two months in the disputed area, signaling a deterioration of security.

The status of Abyei was unresolved after South Sudan became independent from its northern neighbor in July 2011. A referendum on its future was supposed to be held before independence, but the two sides have still been unable to agree on terms.

The region's majority Ngok Dinka people are believed to be in favor of joining South Sudan. The Khartoum government insists that the Sudan-allied Misseriya nomads, who come to Abyei to find pasture for their cattle and spend up to six months there, should be eligible to participate in the referendum.

According to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric, the U.N. force in Abyei reported that some 100 armed Misseriya attacked the village of Marialachak on Monday. The attackers killed four members of the majority Ngok Dinka, wounded three others, abducted four boys and four girls, and burned 24 houses, he said.

Dujarric said the U.N. launched patrols to engage the attackers and that the operation is still going on.

In a firefight near the village of Shegag, he said three Misseriya were killed and four captured. A U.N. patrol also apprehended four unarmed Misseriya moving from the general direction of the incident, Dujarric said.

On Thursday, the U.N. Security Council extended the mandate of the more than 4,000-strong peacekeeping force in Abyei until July 15. It urged Sudan and South Sudan to immediately resolve a deadlock over the disputed area and establish a joint administration and police force.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.realclearworld.com/blog/2015/03/the_age_of_the_petty_nuclear_tyrant_111008.html

The Age of the Petty Nuclear Tyrant

Posted by Kaj Leers on March 3, 2015

Are you a world leader with dictatorial aspirations? Need cash quick? Want the world to listen? Would you like an embargo scrapped, or to invade a country without drawing immediate condemnations and threats of war from the other neighborhood toughs? Then build yourself some nuclear weapons, pronto.

That seems to be the message the West's diplomats are sending the world. Whether you're terrorist-supporting Iran, a tinpot dictator in North Korea or a would-be czar with aspirations to reunite Russian-speaking territories by force, the path to getting your heart's desire involves possessing and developing a nuclear weapons program.

At least you'll get the West's undivided attention. Russia is the perfect example: Vladimir Putin controls as many as 8,000 nuclear weapons, ranging from artillery shells to the latest SS-25 intercontinental ballistic missiles equipped with truly devastating nuclear warheads. Ever since Putin started his Special War in Ukraine, as specialist John Schindler termed it, NATO countries have done their best not to irritate him too much.

Russia has made sure the world understands that it is willing to use nuclear weapons. Just last year, a large military exercise involved a mock strategic nuclear strike aimed at Warsaw. More recently Russian bombers known for carrying nuclear missiles feigned an attack against a Swedish target following a typical nuclear delivery scenario. Weeks ago, British fighters escorted a Russian bomber that may have been carrying a large nuclear anti-submarine torpedo.

All Putin needed was just that little hint that he may not be so rational a decision-maker as his Western peers hope he is. "When a leader is 100 percent rational, you can develop policies to deal with that leader, adapt to him", former NATO Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said on Dutch TV some weeks ago. "However, when you have to assume that maybe that leader is just 95 percent rational - well, that's when things get difficult." A 95 percent rational autocrat with a serious grudge sitting on a huge pile of nukes seems enough for NATO's leaders to take a careful approach.

Then there are the Kims in North Korea. Whenever the dictators in Pyongyang need something from the West, they detonate a dirty bomb in a cave, reactivate a reactor, send an intercontinental ballistic missile crashing close to Japan, or threaten to build more nuclear bombs. Whatever Kim Jong Un wants from the West, all he needs to do is rattle North Korea's would-be nuclear sabre, and he gets it. Well, most of it anyway.

In fact, all you need to do is let the world think that you're making nuclear weapons. Doing so might convince your powerful opponents to drop their economic embargoes. This is what Iran is trying to do: trade its nuclear program for normalized relations with the West. Whether such a deal would also involve Iran dropping its support for Hezbollah or Syria's murderous dictator, or stop threatening its neighbors across the Persian Gulf, remains to be seen.

If you want a seat at the table, all you need to do is build nuclear weapons. That makes non-proliferation a pretty tough sell.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Conflict News @rConflictNews · 47m 47 minutes ago

BREAKING: Edward Snowden reportedly in talks with his Russian lawyer to come home to the U.S. - CNN


Conflict News @rConflictNews · 7m 7 minutes ago

UPDATE: Edward Snowden is prepared to return to the United States but only if he will be given a fair legal trial - Lawyer

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/03/us-libya-security-idUSKBN0LZ2DF20150303

Rival Libyan forces carry out air strikes, militants storm oilfield

By Ayman al-Warfalli
BENGHAZI, Libya Tue Mar 3, 2015 3:01pm EST

(Reuters) - Rival Libyan forces carried out tit-for-tat air strikes on oil terminals and an airport on Tuesday, escalating their battle for control of the oil-producing country days before United Nations peace talks are to resume in Morocco.

Islamist militants, who have gained ground in Libya's turmoil, on Tuesday also took over Libya's Bahi oil station and the Mabrouk oilfield, after forces guarding the installations were forced to retreat from the empty operations.

The United Nations called for hostilities to end before negotiations it hopes will stop fighting between Libya's two rival governments four years after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.

Oil installations and key infrastructure are prime targets in the conflict, pitting Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni's internationally recognized government against Libya Dawn, the group which took Tripoli last year and formed its own administration.

A warplane belonging to forces allied to Libya Dawn bombed the oil ports of Ras Lanuf and Es Sidra, causing minor damage, according to a security official with Thinni's government.

"The rockets fell near the tanks, resulting in only minor damage," said Ali Hassi, a spokesman for the forces guarding Libya's oil infrastructure.


ISLAMIC STATE

Es Sidra and Ras Lanuf, which make up half of Libya's oil output when operating normally, shut down in December due to the conflict. Libya currently produces around 400,000 barrels of oil per day, compared to 1.6 million bpd before Gaddafi was toppled.

Warplanes also hit Maitiga, Tripoli's airport, air force commander Saqir El-Jaroshi said. There were plans for strikes against the airport of port city Misrata, a base of Libya Dawn.

Jaroshi said the strikes were retaliation for Tripoli forces bombing Zintan, a town loyal to Thinni's government, and to stop suspected supplies to Islamist militants.

A source at Maitiga said a warplane struck near the runway but did not cause major damage. Most international airlines stopped flying to Libya and foreign diplomats were pulled out as fighting worsened last year.

Security spokesman Hassi said Islamist militants had taken over the Bahi oil pumping station and Mabrouk oilfield. Both operations were empty, their staff evacuated.

A spokesman for the National Oil Corporation did not respond to requests for confirmation. When it was operating, Mabrouk produced around 40,000 barrels a day of crude.

Militants in Libya claiming ties to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have carried out high profile attacks which have raised fears the country has become a haven for extremists, just across the Mediterranean from mainland Europe.


(Additional reporting by Ahmed Elumami and Feras Bosalum in Tripoli; Writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Ralph Boulton)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/03/us-ukraine-russia-soldiers-idUSKBN0LZ2FV20150303

Some 12,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine supporting rebels: U.S. commander

BERLIN Tue Mar 3, 2015 3:38pm EST

(Reuters) - The U.S. military estimates around 12,000 Russian soldiers are supporting pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine, U.S. Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges said on Tuesday.

The Russian forces are made up of military advisers, weapons operators and combat troops, Hodges said in a speech in Berlin, adding that a further 29,000 soldiers were stationed in the Crimea peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine last year.

In addition, 50,000 troops are positioned on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine in case the separatists suffer a severe setback and the Ukrainian army gains the upper hand, Hodges said.

Russia has repeatedly denied claims that it is directing the rebel assault in eastern Ukraine with its own troops and weapons, despite what the Kiev government and Western countries say is incontrovertible evidence.


(Reporting by Sabine Siebold. Writing by Caroline Copley; Editing by Gareth Jones)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/03/04/2015030401080.html

N.Korea Threatens Pre-Emptive Strike Against U.S.

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su-yong on Tuesday warned that Pyongyang has the power to deter the "ever-increasing nuclear threat" from the U.S. with a pre-emptive strike.

In a rare speech in front of the UN Conference on Disarmament, Ri said joint military exercises being staged by South Korea and the U.S. are "unprecedentedly provocative in nature and have an especially high possibility of sparking off a war."

Ri added that the North now "has the power of deterring the U.S. and conducting a pre-emptive strike as well, if necessary."

englishnews@chosun.com / Mar. 04, 2015 09:30 KST

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.americanthinker.com/arti...istential_threat_to_western_civilization.html

March 3, 2015

Obama Poses an Existential Threat to Western Civilization

By Lauri B. Regan
Comments 118

We are living through historic times – and perilous times. However, the leaders of the Western world are oblivious to the imminence of the dangers as Islamic fundamentalism takes hold on every continent in the world. While the focus since 9/11 has been on al Qaeda and its spin-off ISIS, the greatest danger to the Western world is Iran -- a country that, with a wink and a nod from the U.S., is on the precipice of becoming a nuclear hegemon.

Iran is the world’s largest sponsor of international terrorism, killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening pro-American regimes across the region. Its warships are expanding their movement in regional waters and cruising to Venezuela. Its aggression in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria has succeeded in causing vast regional instability and violence. And Iran does not simply seek regional hegemony –- it seeks global domination as it develops ballistic missiles capable of hitting the U.S.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Reuel Marc Gerecht reasoned, “The regime’s Holocaust [denial] rhetoric ought to signal to us that Iran’s clerical overlord lives in an alternate reality, where good and evil are reinterpreted if not reversed. …Modern Westerners… have a hard time dealing with a ‘clash of civilizations’ based on faith. Mr. Khamenei and his men have no such problem.”

We are now facing a clash of civilizations of the highest magnitude that goes to the very survival of the civilized world. Unfortunately, the Mideast policy emanating from Washington is based on ignorance regarding the causes of the conflict, history of the region, and religious motivations causing the violence. Obama refuses to acknowledge that the U.S. is engaged in a war against a totalitarian Islamic enemy and a fight for freedom worldwide.

John Bolton penned a book entitled Surrender is Not an Option and yet Obama is waving the white flag and shrinking away from a fight that is surely winnable if only he had the fortitude. What we have actually learned is that diplomacy is not an option. From Putin and Assad to the Mullahs, Western leadership is no longer feared -- it is laughed at.

Obama’s policies of retreat and appeasement are taking America down the road to catastrophe and ironically, may very well lead to war. His decision to weaken what was historically a strong US/Israel alliance, coupled with his extensive measures to prevent Israel from conducting a unilateral strike against Iran while simultaneously aiding Iran in obtaining nuclear weapons, may actually leave Israel no other choice than to strike -- alone.

Iran is emboldened. It continues to build nuclear weapons intended to destroy Israel while now developing international business relationships with countries worldwide. It continues to arm Syria’s Assad, Lebanon’s Hizb’allah and Hamas in Gaza. Imagine if it obtained nuclear weapons.

It is apparent that world powers have moved from a policy of preventing a nuclear Iran to a policy of containment. No one believes that Obama will act militarily. His actions prove otherwise. He began his presidency with an outstretched arm to Iran’s maniacal dictator, Ahmadinejad. He failed to support Iran’s freedom-fighting Green Movement in 2009 ending any immediate hope of regime change. And while Obama promised to produce “biting” international sanctions, in reality he wasted months preventing their passage and ultimately watered them down with waivers.

Obama tied the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to Iran, declaring that any action by the U.S. to stop Iran would be dependent upon Israeli concessions, continuing the “Blame Israel” mantra for a lack of peace. And despite the 40-year-old policy of prior U.S. presidents, Obama took the unprecedented step of internationally outing Israel’s nuclear capability, signing onto a Non-Proliferation Treaty resolution that calls for Israel to renounce nuclear weapons, permit inspections, and agree to sign onto the NPT.

Charles Krauthammer called Obama’s secret interim agreement with Iran “a sham from beginning to end” and “the worst deal since Munich.” Obama is allowing the Iranians -- the people who stand in the streets screaming “Death to America,” ruled by a government that attempted to blow up a restaurant in D.C. -- to have nuclear weapons, signing international agreements that will slow their development to a date beyond his departure from office. With the latest news that a final agreement will include a sunset clause bringing Iran into the nuclear club perhaps ten years hence, Krauthammer concluded, “We are on the cusp of an epic capitulation. History will not be kind.”

The only way to stop Iran is with the threat of military pre-emption. Which means it will likely be left to the Israelis to save the West. Israelis live with the knowledge that Iran poses an existential threat and unlike Americans, they take it seriously. Just as Hitler laid out in Mein Kampf prior to coming to power his plans to annihilate the Jews, the Mullahs have made perfectly clear their intentions. Having survived thousands of years of attempts at eradication, Israelis understand that history will repeat itself if they do not protect themselves.

What could happen if Israel does not preemptively strike Iran?
•Iran could nuke Israel resulting in the instant death of millions of Israelis.
•Israel could simply be destroyed by the emigration of fearful citizens fleeing from the continued threat of annihilation.
•The strategic balance of power in the Mideast will forever change, inspiring Islamist movements and expanding Muslim fundamentalism across the region.
•Iran will provide a nuclear umbrella for its terrorist proxies to continue their jihad without fear of reprisal.
•The proliferation of Iranian nuclear weapons globally is likely.
•An arms race in the Mideast would result in the Saudis, Turks, and Egyptians racing to arm themselves.
•Global gas prices will soar as Iran holds the world hostage.

But is Israel capable of successfully destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities? While the world waits for Israel to save the West, it ignores the reality of what is required in order to take out Iran’s installations or at least set the program back for several years, buying time for regime change.

To date, the Obama administration has done everything in its power to prevent Israel from striking and to make a successful strike close to impossible. There are reports that not only has the US diverted arms shipments destined for Israel, but Obama has refused to sell Israel certain fighter jets, Apache helicopters, rearmaments, and most importantly, the bunker busters required to destroy all of Iran’s underground installations.

Furthermore, in response to Obama’s pro-Palestinian advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s suggestion that the U.S. shoot down Israeli war planes flying over Iraqi airspace, a cadet asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he could be ordered to do just that, shoot down an Israeli jet. Admiral Mullen evaded a direct response, leaving open the possibility. And as outrageous as that seems, there are new reports that Obama, upon learning of Israel’s plans to execute an attack in 2014, did in fact threaten to shoot down Israeli jets.

But, if Israel does undertake an airstrike on Iran's nuclear facilities, what can we expect in the aftermath:
•Israel will face increased terror attacks and major strikes from Iran's stockpile of conventional weapons.
•Hamas and Hizb’allah will attack from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria with their tens of thousands of missiles.
•The U.S. will see increased attacks at interests worldwide and possibly at home.
•Gas prices will skyrocket as Iran wreaks havoc in the Straits of Hormuz through which oil tankers must pass.
•And if its response during this summer’s Operation Protective Edge is any indication, Obama will not assist Israel militarily with rearmament of lost and destroyed arms and equipment and will not support her after the fact with necessary arms to protect from a retaliatory strike. If past threats and recent dialogue are any indication, Obama will not stand up for Israel on the international stage and before the UN, which will condemn the act and impose sanctions. Nor will he defend Israel in the face of international condemnation and speak out in support of Israel's right to preemptively attack Iran in order to ensure her survival.

Now, more than ever, it is crucial that Americans, and especially American Jews, understand Mideast policy and attain moral clarity, supporting Israel in the face of irrational and hateful attacks on her. American Jews have a responsibility to help Israel’s survival by speaking out against American policies that may very well lead to another Holocaust and maintaining unconditional support of Israel in order to offset the damage done by Obama’s policies.

If not Americans, who will stand up and protect Israel? And without Israel, Jews will have no safe haven, no place where they are truly welcome, and God's chosen people living in the U.S. will be partly responsible for the eventual demise of their Israeli brethren.

But the Western world will also face mortal danger as a result. Obama ignores that no matter America’s relationship with Israel, “the Little Satan,” the U.S. always has and will be “the Great Satan.” Maintaining America’s strategic relationship with Israel is crucial to both of our countries’ national security. For once Israel is no longer on the front lines, the nuclear-armed fanatics will turn their attention to infidels the world over. Ignoring that will be Obama’s legacy, which is why he poses an existential threat to the West’s survival.


Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm.......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/recep-tayyep-erdogan-turkey-food

Erdogan's meals tested for poison amid security fears

Turkish president’s personal doctor says ‘It’s usually not through bullets that prominent figures are being assassinated these days’

Agence France-Presse in Ankara
Tuesday 3 March 2015 11.52 EST

Every meal that goes before the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is rigorously tested both at home and abroad for fear of assassination, his personal doctor said.

And now a special food analysis laboratory will be built at Erdogan’s controversial presidential palace to make sure all his food is safe to eat, Cevdet Erdol told the Hurriyet newspaper on Tuesday.

“It’s usually not through bullets that prominent figures are being assassinated these days,” Erdol said.

Currently, samples of the president’s food are analysed in laboratories in both Ankara and Istanbul and during his visits abroad, he said.

Erdogan’s opponents accuse him of increasing megalomania, and the authorities of setting up a cult of personality around the man who has ruled Turkey either as president or prime minister since 2003.

Erdogan’s 1,150-room palace, which opened last year on the outskirts of Ankara, has been condemned by critics as an absurd extravagance that shows he is slipping further towards authoritarian rule.

Erdol said a fully equipped lab will soon be built at the grandiose complex, where every dish will be inspected by medically qualified professionals. There is also a five-member emergency team on duty at the heavily guarded palace 24 hours a day, analysing everything he eats and drink to guard against radiation, chemical materials and bacteria.

“Fortunately, we have not had any serious incidents so far,” Erdol said, adding that the food was bought only from trusted sources.

Turkey’s eighth president, Turgut Ozal, survived an assassination attempt in 1988 when a rightwing gunman shot him at a party congress. Family members have long believed that Ozal, who died in office in 1993 of an unknown cause, was poisoned, but a court in 2012 ruled out the possibility.

Five-time prime minister Bulent Ecevit, who died in 2006, survived nine assassination attempts, most notably in the western city of Izmir and New York, where bullets narrowly missed him.

In 2006 the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko died from radioactive poisoning in London, three weeks after he drank tea infused with polonium-210 at a luxury hotel.

Erdogan in January appointed Ibrahim Saracoglu, a professor of biochemistry and microbiology known for his research on the healing effects of plants, as one of his advisers.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm.......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Wa...ast-key-to-dealing-with-a-nuclear-Iran-392847

War simulation finds that coalition-building in Middle East key to dealing with a nuclear Iran

By YAAKOV LAPPIN
03/04/2015

SIMLAB simulates policy developments.

A war-game simulation examining what might happen the day after Iran violates a nuclear agreement ended with the conclusion that Israel requires regional coalition-building abilities, not just military might, organizers said Tuesday.

The game was held on Monday by SIMLAB, which simulates policy developments.

The players found that Israel would have to display “flexibility that it did not have to produce in the past. Israel also has to move past old views of threats and regional players, old and new, and prepare accordingly,” SIMLAB said.

The simulation, held at Tel Aviv University, envisaged developments on the day after Iran signs a nuclear agreement with world powers.

According to the results, Tehran attacked Islamic State in Baghdad, before violating its nuclear agreement, breaking through to nuclear weapons and threatening unconventional attacks weeks later.

The simulation, held in cooperation with the Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security and the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, looked at the dynamics of violent processes, identified potential areas of cooperation for Israel and marked out the most urgent threats.

Players represented diplomatic, security and strategic decision makers in Israel, some of the participants were former senior officials.

They represented the US, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iran, Russia, Iraq, Hezbollah and the media.

MK Tzipi Livni (Zionist Union), who was present at the simulation, said, “It is important to remember that so long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not in the process of diplomatic negotiations, our ability to be part of a coalition of moderate states against regional threats remains out of reach.

We cannot create partnerships without solving the conflict.”

Dr. Haim Assa, chief of SIMLAB, said the central conclusion of the war game is that in a scenario in which Iran violates a nuclear agreement and threatens unconventional attack, Israel’s coalition forming abilities would be key to successfully dealing with the challenges of a nuclear Iran.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150303/ml-islamic-state-f9f89a6651.html

Mines, bombs slow Iraqi advance on Islamic State-held Tikrit

Mar 3, 1:19 PM (ET)
By SINAN SALAHEDDIN and SAMEER N. YACOUB

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi troops and Shiite militias battled the Islamic State group on Tuesday on the outskirts of militant-held Tikrit, unable to advance further on Saddam Hussein's hometown as roadside mines and suicide attacks slowed their progress.

Soldiers found some 100 mines and bombs scattered along an 8-kilometer (5-mile) stretch of road on the way to this strategic city on the Tigris River, Salahuddin deputy governor Ammar Hikmat said.

The discovery underlined how the battle likely will pivot on allied Iraqi forces' ability to counter such weapons, a mainstay of al-Qaida in Iraq, the Islamic State group's predecessor, as it fought American forces following their 2003 invasion of the country.

The bombs are "the main obstacle in the way of the attacking forces, which have to wait for bomb experts or to go around the area," Hikmat told The Associated Press. "And this costs time."

Extremists from the Islamic State group, which holds both a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria in its self-declared caliphate, have littered major roadways and routes with mines. Such mines allow the extremists to slow any ground advance and require painstaking clearing operations before troops can safely move through.

Suicide bombings also aid the militants in weakening Iraqi forces and have been used extensively in its failed campaign for the Syrian border town of Kobani. Already, a militant website affiliated with the Islamic State group has said an American jihadi carried out a suicide attack with a truck bomb on the outskirts of the nearby city of Samarra, targeting Iraqi forces and Shiite militiamen. The posting identified him by the nom de guerre of Abu Dawoud al-Amriki, without elaborating.

A suicide bomber also drove a military vehicle Tuesday afternoon into a checkpoint manned by government forces and Shiite fighters south of Tikrit, killing four troops and wounding 12, a police officer and a medical official said.

Tuesday marked the second day of the Iraqi advance on Tikrit, with soldiers supported by Iranian-backed Shiite militias and advisers, along with some Sunni tribal fighters who reject the Islamic State group. Hikmat estimated the Iraqi force besieging Tikrit at some 25,000 people. Iran's semi-official Fars news agency has reported that Iranian Gen. Ghasem Soleimani, the commander of the country's elite Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force, was taking part in the offensive.

Government forces, however, made little headway Tuesday, two local officials said. They said fierce clashes struck mainly outside the town of al-Dour, south of Tikrit, while government troops shelled militant bases inside the city. Those officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to brief journalists.

Brig. Gen. Saad Maan Ibrahim, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said explosive experts had disabled "so many bombs and car bombs."

"Tikrit has been besieged from three directions, from the north, west and south, but what has remained only from the eastern side," Ibrahim said. "The explosive experts were able to tackle so many bombs and car bombs."

Hikmat said the offensive had killed and wounded "dozens" of Islamic State extremists, but that the attacking forces also have been killed. Authorities in Baghdad offered no immediate casualty figures.

Past attempts to retake Tikrit have failed, as Iraq struggles with a military that collapsed last summer during the Islamic State militants' lightning offensive. The Tikrit operation is seen as a litmus test for the capability of Iraqi troops to dislodge the militants from major cities they conquered in the country's Sunni heartland.

Retaking Tikrit, the provincial capital of Salahuddin province, some 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Baghdad, would help Iraqi forces secure a major supply link for any future operation to capture Mosul, the country's second-largest city.

U.S. military officials have said a coordinated military mission to retake Mosul will likely begin in April or May and involve up to 25,000 Iraqi troops. But the Americans have cautioned that if the Iraqis aren't ready, the offensive could be delayed.

On Monday, Iraqi and U.S. officials said the U.S.-led coalition was not involved in the Tikrit operation and had not been asked to carry out airstrikes. Overall, coalition airstrikes have killed more than 8,500 Islamic State fighters since its campaign began in August, said Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, the commander of U.S. Central Command.

"The fact is that (the group) can no longer do what (it) did at the outset, which is to seize and to hold new territory," Austin said.

As the Tikrit battle rages, Iraq remains bitterly split between minority Sunnis, who were an important base of support for Saddam, and the Shiite majority. Since Saddam was toppled and later executed, the Sunni minority has felt increasingly marginalized by the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. In 2006, long-running tensions boiled over into sectarian violence that claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The Islamic State group tapped into that Sunni resentment, though Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a Shiite, has offered an amnesty for insurgents who abandon the extremists. His comments appeared to be targeting former members of Iraq's outlawed Baath party, loyalists of Saddam.

Later on Tuesday evening, a bomb exploded in a commercial street in southeastern Baghdad, killing three people and wounding nine, police and hospital officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

---

Associated Press writers Maamoun Youssef and Jon Gambrell in Cairo and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.

---

Follow Sinan Salaheddin on Twitter at www.twitter.com/sinansm.

 

[Be Well]

Conflict News @rConflictNews · 47m 47 minutes ago

BREAKING: Edward Snowden reportedly in talks with his Russian lawyer to come home to the U.S. - CNN


Conflict News @rConflictNews · 7m 7 minutes ago

UPDATE: Edward Snowden is prepared to return to the United States but only if he will be given a fair legal trial - Lawyer

That's interesting that he is apparently willing to risk a trial. How on earth could he know if any future trial would be fair and legal, under this administration???? Maybe in a trial he would reveal more stuff?

 

[Be Well]

The only way to stop Iran is with the threat of military pre-emption. Which means it will likely be left to the Israelis to save the West. Israelis live with the knowledge that Iran poses an existential threat and unlike Americans, they take it seriously. Just as Hitler laid out in Mein Kampf prior to coming to power his plans to annihilate the Jews, the Mullahs have made perfectly clear their intentions. Having survived thousands of years of attempts at eradication, Israelis understand that history will repeat itself if they do not protect themselves.

What could happen if Israel does not preemptively strike Iran?
•Iran could nuke Israel resulting in the instant death of millions of Israelis.
•Israel could simply be destroyed by the emigration of fearful citizens fleeing from the continued threat of annihilation.
•The strategic balance of power in the Mideast will forever change, inspiring Islamist movements and expanding Muslim fundamentalism across the region.
•Iran will provide a nuclear umbrella for its terrorist proxies to continue their jihad without fear of reprisal.
•The proliferation of Iranian nuclear weapons globally is likely.
•An arms race in the Mideast would result in the Saudis, Turks, and Egyptians racing to arm themselves.
•Global gas prices will soar as Iran holds the world hostage.

And Iran has or will soon have (can't remember which) ICBMs that can or will reach the US. No sane or rational person can disagree with any of the article. Sadly many people in this administration are neither.

 

[Housecarl]

And Iran has or will soon have (can't remember which) ICBMs that can or will reach the US. No sane or rational person can disagree with any of the article. Sadly many people in this administration are neither.

Though they don't "officially" have dedicated ICBMs, they have satellite launchers that have repeatedly placed into LEO satellites weighing up to 110 lbs. The last one placed into orbit this month, the Fajr, was the first reported to have "cold gas thrusters" for maneuvering.

The satellite launcher they've been using, the Safir, basically has stretched SCUD derived technology akin to the North Korean Unha SLV/Taepo Dong military system.

The "rule of thumb" is that a satellite launcher can "throw" a payload to intercontinental ranges that's between two and three times as heavy as it can place into low earth orbit.

The "difference" between a "dedicated" military system vs. a satellite launcher that a military system is supposed to be operational with a minimum of prepping and checks while a satellite launcher generally is fussed over and repeatedly checked over a period of weeks before it is used to launch a satellite. Because of this, it has been generally more common historically (US, USSR, PRC, Israel (?)) for ICBMs to be converted to satellite launchers than the other way around. That being said, the technological issues that have to be resolved in both kind of programs are the same and if a country is working on military systems on the sly, a satellite launch system is a good cover.

 

[Be Well]

Thank you for the explanation, Housecarl. You would know and you make it easy enough for people like me, much appreciated.

 

[Housecarl]

Thank you for the explanation, Housecarl. You would know and you make it easy enough for people like me, much appreciated.

You're welcome. I'm always a bit concerned that I might "overdo it" when answering questions like this.

I wanted to add was that both Iran and North Korea are reported to be working on larger "launchers" and have been "cooperating" on the whole spectrum of weapons programs, particularly nuclear for quite a while.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150303/ml--islamic_state-tikrit_analysis-889676e464.html

AP ANALYSIS: US on sidelines of key Iraqi battle against IS

Mar 3, 5:40 PM (ET)
By VIVIAN SALAMA

(AP) This file image made from video provided by an Iraqi soldier made available...
Full Image

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iranian-backed Shiite militias and Sunni tribes have joined Iraq's military in a major operation to retake Saddam Hussein's hometown from the Islamic State group, while the U.S.-led coalition has remained on the sidelines.

The campaign for Tikrit is a dress rehearsal for the real contest: The fight to recapture Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city and the extremists' biggest stronghold. But can a large-scale ground offensive alone succeed, without U.S.-led air support?

The Tikrit operation is aimed at stopping Islamic State fighters from closing in on Samarra, a Shiite holy city just to the south that tens of thousands of Shiite militiamen rushed to defend during the extremists' blitz across northern Iraq last June.

One of the biggest campaigns in the heart of militant-controlled Iraq, the battle for Tikrit involves a complex mix of several Iraqi military brigades and thousands of Shiite militiamen and Sunni tribal fighters. Directing the offensive with the aid of dozens of Iranian military advisers is a powerful Iranian general, Ghasem Soleimani, commander of the elite Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force.

(AP) In this image made from video, smoke rises from an explosion as Iraqi forces, Shiite...
Full Image

Glaringly absent are the U.S.-led coalition forces whose air campaign since last summer has nearly halted the Islamic State rampage across Iraq. Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren said this week that the U.S. is not providing air power in the Tikrit operation "simply because the Iraqis haven't requested us to."

Liberating the city without the backing of coalition airstrikes will put Iraq's security forces to the ultimate battle-readiness test since any operation to recapture Iraq's densely-populated cities — including Mosul and Fallujah — will have to rely almost entirely on ground forces to minimize civilian casualties.

However, more of a concern for the U.S.-led coalition is Iran's prominent role in the fight against the Islamic State militants. Iran has long been influential in Iraq, but never so much so as over the past year, when the Iraqi military collapsed in the face of the Sunni extremists' onslaught. Iraqi officials have noted Iran's quick response to their urgent requests for weapons and frontline assistance even as they accuse the coalition of falling short on commitments on the ground.

Embedding coalition advisers and forward air controllers — the officers who call in airstrikes — with Iraqi military units presents a twofold challenge. Frontline positions would put their lives in danger at a time when risk aversion is at its peak. But it also raises the potential for coalition forces and Iranian soldiers to share a battlefield, a politically untenable prospect for the U.S. given the uncertain future of ongoing nuclear talks with Tehran.

However, the U.S.-led mission has hit a roadblock in its efforts to support the Iraqi government. Both the Iraqi and U.S. government agree that airstrikes have pushed the militants back and the group has struggled to gain territory since airstrikes began. But there will come a point where airstrikes alone will not be enough.

(AP) This image made from video posted by Iraqi0Revolution, a group supporting the...
Full Image

Most of the battlefield successes in Iraq have been coordinated efforts, with Iraqi and Kurdish forces and Shiite militias fighting on the ground and the U.S.-led coalition providing air power. The siege on the village of Amirli just north of Baghdad, when many feared the capital itself might fall, was broken last year with the help of U.S.-led airstrikes and a fighting force of mainly Shiite militias.

Shiite militiamen backed by a coalition air campaign also retook the town of Jurf al-Sukhr, on Baghdad's outskirts, from the militants in October.

Soleimani, the Iranian general leading the Tikrit operation, was a key player in both of those campaigns. But Iraqi and Kurdish officials and Shiite militia fighters all acknowledge the crucial role the coalition airstrikes played in their modest victories.

With the military operation to retake Mosul planned for as early as April, many are skeptical about whether the Iraqi military will be ready for the fight. Efforts to recruit Sunni tribes — seen as crucial for rooting out the militants from their strongholds — have yielded few results. Training and arming of Iraqi soldiers have also stalled.

The failure so far to make headway in Tikrit does not bode well. Iraqi forces are bogged down on the outskirts of the city, unable to penetrate the extremists' defenses. On Tuesday, a suicide bomber drove a military vehicle into a checkpoint manned by government forces and Shiite fighters south of Tikrit, killing four troops and wounding 12, authorities said.

(AP) In this Dec. 8, 2014 file photo, Iraqi security forces and Shiite fighters...
Full Image

The stalemate persists despite assurances from Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi that momentum is on Iraq's side after recent successes in the oil refinery town of Beiji — an operation that received heavy aerial support from the U.S.-led coalition.

The Islamic State group, which controls a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria in its self-declared caliphate, has littered major roadways with mines that slow any ground advance and require painstaking clearance operations before troops can safely move through. Kurdish and Iraqi forces frequently cite bomb-detecting equipment as one of their biggest shortfalls on the battlefield.

The battle for Tikrit is likely to involve Iraq's first serious urban warfare challenge, involving street battles that Iraqi security forces are not trained for.

Concerns are also mounting over the Shiite militias' battlefield conduct in a largely Sunni region where some residents are said to have initially welcomed the Islamic State militants as a better alternative to the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. In their earlier battlefield successes, the Shiite fighters often flattened towns and villages so as to prevent Sunni residents from returning home.

Winning over the Sunni tribes is essential because they know the terrain of the Sunni-majority areas under Islamic State control and can fight with and advise the Shiite fighters. But animosity has reached a peak and fragile battlefield alliances could be short-lived once the common enemy is eliminated. And heavy Iranian involvement only threatens to exacerbate sectarian tensions.

---

Vivian Salama is the Associated Press Chief of Bureau in Baghdad.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2015/03/03/iran-squashes-is-us-scrambles-for-cover/

Iran squashes IS, US scrambles for cover

Fierce fighting has erupted around the Iraqi city of Tikrit to the north of Baghdad, best known the world over as the home town of Saddam Hussein and regarded to be the spiritual heartland of the Baathist regime. The Iraqi government forces launched an operation on Monday to recapture the city from the Islamic State [IS] militants. This hugely important development has three dimensions.

First, of course, if the operations succeed, it will constitute a big blow to the IS. Tikrit is not only a big trophy by itself but the Iraqi government will be carrying the war into the IS’ territory. Most likely, the next target will be Mosul, straddling Iraqi Kurdistan, where the IS’ dramatic surge first appeared last June. It is tempting to surmise that the IS faces a near-term prospect of extinction in military terms.

The second dimension is with regard to the crucial role that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards [IRGC] are reportedly playing in the Tikrit operation under the Iraqi flag. The BBC has reported, citing Shi’ite militia sources, that the charismatic and legendary commander of the IRGC Gen Qasem Soleimani has been seen in the frontline and is “personally taking part in leading the operation.” There is delightful irony that Soleimani is leading the liberation of the hometown of his old enemy Saddam. That apart, Shi’ite Iran is leading the fight today against a Sunni Islamist enemy who poses existential threat to the Sunni Arab regimes of the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, which has otherwise no love lost for Iran.

Finally, the fighting raging around Tikrit raises a big question: Where on earth is the US-led international coalition hiding? Iran has put the US and its coalition partners to shame by single-handedly taking the war into the IS tent. Iran is relentlessly exposing the IS as a pest that is easily squashed if gone about seriously, than the 10′ tall enemy with mythical prowess that the Western analysts made it out to be.

Meanwhile, the spin doctors are already at work, claiming that the US is deliberately steering clear of Tikrit as a matter of policy, since the fighting in Tikrit is spearheaded by the Shi’ite militia and there is a tacit ‘division of labor’ with Iran – a laughable proposition, to say the least.

Tehran alleges, on the other hand, that the US is actually dissimulating when it claims it is fighting the IS, and that in reality Washington has a nuanced approach that anticipates a future role for the IS as an instrument in its regional strategies. The Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian literally ridiculed the US claims of fighting the IS, when he alleged in a speech in Tehran on Monday, “The US has created the anti-ISIL coalition with the participation of 60 countries, but the coalition’s main practical measure is confined to controlling and administering the ISIL.”

Abdollahian disclosed that the US military aircraft are ferrying supplies for the IS in Syria and Iraq by flying great distances. He asked, “How can one make a 900-kilometer mistake in distance?” Good question, indeed.

In Afghanistan too the US intervened militarily in 2001 on the pretext of vanquishing the Taliban, who have in a curious role reversal today become Washington’s key interlocutors — and, maybe, are being groomed to become tomorrow’s catalysts of change in the vast Central Asian steppes still under Russian influence, or China’s restive Xinjiang Autonomous Region which is struggling with Islamist militancy.


Posted in Military, Politics, Religion, Terrorism.

Tagged with Islamic State, Sunni-Shi'ite rivalry.

No comments »

By M K Bhadrakumar – March 3, 2015

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm........

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-03-040315.html

Middle East
Mar 4, '15
Obama's nuclear squeeze: talk with Iran, handle Bibi
By Ehsan Ahrari

Netanyahu's address to the US Congress will have no effect on the future modalities of US-Iran nuclear negotiations. But if he can nudge Congress not to relax sanctions on Iran, even after a nuclear deal, then Tehran might retaliate by reversing some agreed upon issues of those intricate negotiations.

Relations between the United States and Israel have been hitting a new low, especially since the Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, issued an invitation to Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu to address a joint session of the US Congress.

Such invitations to foreign leaders, as a matter of long-standing protocol, are cleared by the White House before they are issued. But Boehner's decision to snub the White House was just another indication of the deteriorating relations between the Congressional Republican leadership and the Democratic administration. And since President Barack Obama's foreign policy has been increasingly coming under Republican attack, Boehner decided to take on the President by using the hot-button issue of the US-Iran ongoing nuclear negotiations.

That is also an issue on which Netanyahu is betting that he will improve his chances for reelection on May 17, 2015. Realizing the potential payoffs, Netanyahu promptly accepted the invitation and duly delivered his speech on March 3.

So, the American and Israeli public watched Bibi's speech in the US Congress with mixed feelings of wonderment, annoyance, and puzzlement. The question uppermost in everyone's mind is why he decided to antagonize a US administration that is supportive of Israel. The perpetually recurring unpredictability of the Middle East's politics is now set to affect US-Israeli ties about which there never used to be any confusion, either in Washington or in Jerusalem.

The question of the hour now is whether this relationship is heading toward the proverbial "interesting times" (aka troubling times) in the coming years. The answer to this question depends on what happens inside the Middle East involving US-Iran negotiations and how US-Iran ties involving the ongoing anti-ISIS war in Syria evolves, an issue on which both the United States and Iran are coordinating, if not cooperating, in their strategic interactions.

One also has to keep in mind that Obama and Netanyahu never got along from the very first days of the Obama presidency. Obama wanted to see the materialization of a "land for peace" basis to resolve the Palestinian conflict. Netanyahu, on the contrary, was more interested in creating new realities on the ground in the occupied territories that would make any political resolution of that conflict well-nigh impossible.

As the Obama presidency is going through its last two years, America's foreign policy in the Levant, Afghanistan, and North Africa is coming under heavy attack. Of all of the international issues that occupy the front pages of the global media, the US-Iran conflict grabs a lot of headlines and attention, because Iran remains a major actor throughout the Middle East. And, as the United States has decided to lower its military presence in Afghanistan, a potential US-Iran rapprochement in that country might also become important in the foreseeable future.

The Republican perception of the US-Iran nuclear negotiations is that it should be totally cut and dry: Iran's nuclear programs should be completely shut down, without allowing any room for any "ands", "ifs", or "buts" about it. That is precisely what Netanyahu wants. Since the world does not appear that unequivocal when viewed from the White House (regardless of whether the occupant is a Democrat or a Republican), diverse interpretations of the intricate issues of foreign policy are always expected and pursued by a sitting president and his top aides and advisors.

The US Congress has customarily allowed a wide berth to the White House's handling of highly multidimensional issues of foreign policy on the basis of bipartisanship. However, in the exceptionally divisive era of partisan politics of the past decade or so, the tradition of bipartisanship in the realm of foreign policy - so aptly reflected in the adage: politics stops at the water's edge - seems to have largely vanished.

Another related reason for the increased partisan divide may be the fact that the traditional notion of American leadership in the global arena either has seriously dwindled or is about to become a thing of the past. That sentiment inside the decision-making arena of the US government has created a lot of frustration.

Instead of understanding the difficulties faced by the US government in the global arena as a sign of the times and as an outcome of the rising hostilities toward the United States in such places like the Middle East, the partisan leaders inside America have become highly motivated to score political points by blaming the sitting president for the state of affairs. Such behavior becomes quite acute when the sitting president is in the last two years of his second term.

President Obama is particularly a target of such partisan attacks because he brought to the office a nuanced perspective that, in the aftermath of the "Arab Awakening", was largely guided by the understanding that the United States may no longer be able to dictate its will in the Arab world, where the Islamists as well as the autocratic rulers are tussling with each other for the materialization of the two diametrically opposite following goals.

The Islamists want to bring an end to the post-World War II political status quo in their region, while the Arab rulers are equally determined to sustain it. Obama won the presidential election of 2008 as a voluble critic of George W Bush's practice of thoughtless unilateralism, which guided his disastrous decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The United States under President Obama is finding itself with the highly unenviable task of not remaining stubbornly committed to the political status quo, but, at the same time, not knowing how to manage or at least how to facilitate political change without permanently damaging America's strategic interests in that part of the world.

For instance, the Obama administration's encouragement of the ouster of the dictator Hosni Mubarak from the presidency in Egypt, the subsequent turbulent events leading to the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood-led democracy, the ensuing criminal ouster of that democratically elected government by the Egyptian military junta, and the ultimate degeneration of Egypt into another military dictatorship has left a bad taste in the mouths of the mandarins of US foreign policy.

That is why a decision was made by President Obama to deal with Iran, another major power of that region, quite differently. In that "different" approach, the Obama administration is particularly guided by the quintessentially pragmatic conduct of its foreign policy.

On the issue of nuclear negotiations with Iran, the United States originally preferred a total stoppage of even its nuclear research programs. However, knowing that Iran would never agree to that, the Obama administration has been working closely with other members of the P5+1 (US, China, Russia, Britain, France plus Germany) to find a solution that would be acceptable to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as to the foreign policy hawks in the US Congress, Israel, and America's Arab allies.

When viewed pragmatically and from the perspectives of Realpolitik, such an agreement has to permit continuation of Iran's nuclear program, albeit at a considerably slower pace, in a manner that still enables that country to produce low quantities of highly enriched uranium. The contentious part of those features is that they are not acceptable to Israel, and, largely for the same reason, may be rejected by the congressional hawks.

Another highly contentious part of US-Israel disagreement is allowing Iran not only to keep some of the most sophisticated centrifuges but also to keep them operational. Israel, on the contrary, wants zero centrifuges for Iran.

The chief irony related to the US-Iran nuclear negotiations is that, while the Arab states unequivocally prefer to see the highly unlikely occurrence of the nuclear disarmament of Israel, they remain in full agreement with the latter that Iran should not be allowed to continue even its nuclear research program. To pursue that objective, both the Gulf States and Netanyahu have adopted the sky-is-falling-type of rhetoric related to any allowance by the Obama administration for Iran to continue its program of even a decelerated pace of enriched uranium for analogous reasons.

The Arab states see it as a threat to their security, and thus threaten to start their own nuclear programs [a frequently used public statement to that effect by the Saudi authorities]. Netanyahu has gone even further and depicted any continuation of Iran's nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel.

Needless to say, given that Israel possesses "between 80-100 nuclear warheads, with fissile material for up to 200", most sober-minded analysts privately reject that stance. However, no "friend of Israel" in the US Congress dares to challenge it.

The Obama administration would have preferred to see Iran's abandonment of even its nuclear research program; in fact, that was what it originally wanted. However, since such that potential never really existed as a basis of negotiations - and realizing that it was "no longer plausible to eliminate all of Iran's nuclear infrastructure" - US officials pursued the option that "any final deal would leave some nuclear capability in place".

That meant only the slowing down of Iran's production of highly enriched uranium. That is precisely why the states of the Arabian Peninsula and Israel are so staunchly opposed to any final nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran.

Netanyahu has made public criticism of the US-Iran nuclear negotiations a part of his country's security concern, but, more to the point, also as a way to get re-elected this spring. That is why he not only consistently used hyperbolic language to exaggerate the fear of Iran, but, in the process, seeks to sabotage the US-Iran negotiations by publicizing "points of agreement", which, in all likelihood, have never really been reached between the US and Iranian officials.

Consequently, the Obama administration has stated that it "withheld certain intelligence related to the diplomacy from the Israeli government, due to fears that it was being leaked to the media".

Needless to say, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates are silently cheering Netanyahu's arrogant challenging of the US administration, which not only rejects the highly strident position of the Israeli prime minister but has also been silently dismissive of the Arab intransigence toward the emergence of a nuclear compromise between Washington and Tehran.

Also lurking behind Arab-Iranian hostilities is the issue of mounting Iranian dominance in the internal affairs of such important Arab countries as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Yemen. Of these, the Iranian challenging of the Saudi/American dominance of the Yemen political dynamics is not only brand new, but it is clearly aimed at ensuring the prospects of the durability of the dominance of the Houthis inside Yemen for the foreseeable future, especially considering the fact that Ali Abdullah Saleh, a Saudi lapdog, is reported to have stolen US$60 billion, thus perhaps permanently sabotaging the chances of the emergence of an economically prosperous and politically stable Yemen.

Houthis, who are Zaidi Shi'ites, are reportedly receiving military and political support from Iran, which Iran denies. Consequently, as the Houthis fortify their grip on political power in Yemen, the Saudis find themselves hapless about how to counter them, and, by extension, how to take countermeasures to nullifying the strategic maneuvers of Iran inside Yemen.

By the same token, the dominance of Iran in Iraq and Syria is undeniable, while Saudi Arabia, despite its claim to support the leadership of the Sunni Arabs, remains only a marginal actor in both countries.

Perhaps as a tacit recognition of that fact, the United States, much to the chagrin of the rulers in Riyadh, is coordinating its military actions with Iran in both Syria and Iraq. Thus, the Gulf States are correct in concluding that, given the highly proactive interactions between Washington and Teheran, the chances of the emergence of a highly pragmatic US-Iran nuclear deal remain high.

That is one more reason why they are silently cheering the "bull in a China shop" public posturing of Netanyahu on this issue, and are secretly hoping that the Obama administration and Iran fail in reaching a nuclear deal.

Netanyahu's speech to the US Congress will have absolutely no effect on the future modalities of US-Iran nuclear negotiations, for those negotiations are already being driven by their own highly intricate dynamics.

Right now, it seems that Washington and Iran are edging closer toward a pragmatically negotiated agreement whose purpose it is to imminently decelerate the pace of uranium production and to restrict Iran's introduction of highly sophisticated centrifuges into its nuclear infrastructure. Once those processes are in place, the Obama administration would work assiduously to earn Iran's trust by slowly relaxing its economic sanctions on that country.

The United States also knows that it is badly in need of Iran's cooperation, especially in Iraq, where its air war against Islamic State does not appear to be palpably weakening that entity's forces.

In the final analysis, what Israel and its unpublicized Arab partners may be hoping for is that, if the US Congress refuses to relax economic sanctions on Iran, even in the aftermath of a nuclear deal, then Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei may retaliate by going back on some of the already agreed upon issues of those intricate negotiations.

Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an independent defense consultant and a specialist in Great Power relations and transnational security. He has 20 years of experience teaching in various senior military educational institutions, including the US Air War College, Joint Forces Staff College of the National Defense University, and the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (Honolulu, HI). He has consulted with and briefed top officials of USCENTCOM and USPACOM. His latest book on Great Power relations is The Great Powers versus the Hegemon (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011). He can be reached at ahrarie@gmail.com.

(Copyright 2015 Ehsan Ahrari)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/tackling-tehran-netanyahu-vs-obama-401005949

Tackling Tehran: Netanyahu vs Obama
#Diplomacy

Some US analysts agree with Netanyahu that Congress should reject a weak deal with Iran, while others say his speech was merely aimed at trying to win votes ahead of Israeli elections

James Reinl
Tuesday 3 March 2015 22:30 GMT
Last update: Tuesday 3 March 2015 22:40 GMT

NEW YORK - As negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program continued in Switzerland on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the US Congress that he feared the White House was close to striking a “very bad” deal indeed.

Netanyahu told US lawmakers that President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated bargain with Tehran and other major powers would do little to stop Iran from building doomsday weapons and turning the Middle East into a “nuclear tinderbox”.

The Israeli leader was cheered and applauded during his 39-minute speech, but the absence of as many as 59 Democrats from the joint session of Congress indicated that Netanyahu’s hard-line talk on Iran remains divisive.

As he spoke, officials from Iran, the US, and its negotiating powers met in the Swiss lakeside town of Montreux to hammer out a framework deal by the end of March on curbing Iran’s nuclear activities, inspecting facilities and lifting sanctions from its battered economy.

Middle East Eye (MEE) takes a look at the main arguments over tackling Tehran:

The Israeli Leader

Netanyahu said Iran is run by wicked theocrats who arm terrorists, are hell-bent on regional domination and are building nuclear weapons to bully neighbours and threaten the US. The planned deal “all but guarantees that Iran gets those weapons,” he said.

Elements of the deal are already public, he said, and include big concessions to Tehran. Iran would retain nuclear facilities and thousands of centrifuges, which enrich uranium. It would be at a nuclear weapons threshold, with a “short break-out time” of less than a year.

Worryingly, the deal will also “expire in about a decade,” leaving Iran free to expand its atomic schemes thereafter.

“Now, I want you to think about that. The foremost sponsor of global terrorism could be weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons, and this with full international legitimacy,” he said.

Instead, he called for using sanctions to wring more concessions and a “better deal” from Iran in which it abandons nuclear facilities and its “aggression ends”.

The White House

US National Security Advisor Susan Rice spelled out the administration position at the meeting of a pro-Israel lobby group on Monday, describing plans to “verifiably cut off every pathway for Iran to produce enough fissile material” for weapons.

Iran has scaled back its uranium enrichment work during talks, she said. A final deal would stop Iran from producing weapons-grade plutonium at a facility at Arak, and from enriching uranium at its underground centre at Fordow.

Calling on Iran to wholesale scrap its nuclear sector is “not a viable negotiating position”, Rice added. Instead, Iran’s “breakout window” should be “at least one year” and the deal should last “more than a decade”.

On Tuesday, an Obama administration official said Netanyahu had not offered alternatives to Congress.

“Simply demanding that Iran completely capitulate is not a plan, nor would any country support us in that position,” the official said in Switzerland, speaking on background.

The Iranians

Iran says its nuclear work is for making electricity and medical isotopes – not bombs.

Obama’s demand that Tehran freeze sensitive nuclear activities for at least 10 years is “unacceptable”, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in Switzerland on Tuesday.

“Iran will not accept excessive and illogical demands,” he added, according to the Fars news agency.

Iran’s economy is suffering from falling oil prices and sanctions, which it wants lifted. Oil exports have dropped almost 60 percent since 2012, costing it more than $200 billion, the US says.

The Pundits

Outside of Congress, analysts debated who is right on Iran: Netanyahu or Obama. Some said the Israeli leader was persuasive and that Congress should reject a weak deal; critics said he was trying to win votes ahead of Israel’s 17 March elections.

“Netanyahu sincerely views Iran as an existential threat, but it’s largely his personality that leads him to this Manichean view of Iran,” Michael O’Hanlon, a defence expert at Brookings Institution, told MEE. “His perspective is not compatible with US interests: he’s part of the problem in the Middle East and not the solution.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby, warned of a deal that will not dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. Congress must “review any agreement, and object if a bad agreement is reached”, it said in a statement. Conversely, Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said Congress scrapping the deal would be a “greater foreign policy mistake than the Iraq invasion”.

William Galston, a former White House advisor, said Netanyahu has an uphill struggle against US public opinion.

“The evidence suggests that Americans would like to see their leaders strike a deal with Iran, even if it leaves some nuclear infrastructure in place; impose the toughest possible inspection regime; and harshly punish major violations,” he told MEE. “Americans are willing to use force against Iran, but only after they have tested the consequences of a negotiated deal and found them wanting.”

For Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, a deal is better than war.

“A deal with Iran gives us a chance to work things out. It’s a no-brainer. It doesn’t mean that Iran will start behaving decently or that the US and Iran will have great relations - we don’t know yet. But at least it opens up that possibility without increasing the risks,” he told MEE.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm........

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-040315.html

Middle East
Mar 4, '15
World bows to Iran's hegemony
By Spengler

The problem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to the US Congress was not the risk of offending Washington but Washington's receding relevance. World powers, including China, have elected to legitimize Iran's dominant position, hoping to delay but not deter its eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons. But war cannot be avoided; it is inevitable.

The problem with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu's address to Congress March 3 was not the risk of offending Washington, but rather Washington's receding relevance. President Barack Obama is not the only leader who wants to acknowledge what is already a fact in the ground, namely that "Iran has become the preeminent strategic player in West Asia to the increasing disadvantage of the US and its regional allies," as a former Indian ambassador to Oman wrote this week.

For differing reasons, the powers of the world have elected to legitimize Iran's dominant position, hoping to delay but not deter its eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons. Except for Israel and the Sunni Arab states, the world has no desire to confront Iran. Short of an American military strike, which is unthinkable for this administration, there may be little that Washington can do to influence the course of events. Its influence has fallen catastrophically in consequence of a chain of policy blunders.

The best that Prime Minister Netanyahu can hope for is that the US Congress will in some way disrupt the Administration's efforts to strike a deal with Iran by provoking the Iranians. That is what the White House fears, and that explains its rage over Netanyahu's appearance.

Tehran may overplay its hand, but I do not think it will. The Persians are not the Palestinians, who discovered that they were a people only a generation ago and never miss an opportunity to miss and opportunity; they are ancient and crafty, and know an opportunity when it presents itself.

Most of the world wants a deal, because the alternative would be war. For 10 years I have argued that war is inevitable whatever the diplomats do, and that the question is not if, but how and when. President Obama is not British prime minister Neville Chamberlain selling out to Hitler at Munich in 1938: rather, he is Lord Halifax, that is, Halifax if he had been prime minister in 1938. Unlike the unfortunate Chamberlain, who hoped to buy time for Britain to build warplanes, Halifax liked Hitler, as Obama and his camarilla admire Iran.

China is Chamberlain, hoping to placate Iran in order to buy time. China's dependence on Middle East oil will increase during the next decade no matter what else China might do, and a war in the Persian Gulf would ruin it.

Until early 2014, China believed that the United States would guarantee the security of the Persian Gulf. After the rise of Islamic State (ISIS), it concluded that the United States no longer cared, or perhaps intended to destabilize the region for nefarious reasons. But China does not have means to replace America's presence in the Persian Gulf. Like Chamberlain at Munich, it seeks delay.

Obama, to be sure, portrays his policy in the language of balance of power. He told the New Yorker's David Remnick in 2014, "It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren't intent on killing each other. And although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion - not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon - you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there's competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare."

That, as the old joke goes, is the demo version. On the ground, the US has tacitly accepted the guiding role of Iranian commanders in Iraq's military operations against ISIS. It is courting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels who just overthrow a Saudi-backed regime in Yemen. It looks the other way while its heavy arms shipments to the Lebanese army are diverted to Hezbollah.

At almost every point at which Iran has tried to assert hegemony over its neighbors, Washington has acquiesced. "In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power," wrote Henry Kissinger. The major powers hope for peace through Iranian hegemony, although they differ in their estimate of how long this will last.

Apart from its nuclear ambitions, the broader deal envisioned by Washington would leave Iran as a de facto suzerain in Iraq. It would also make Iran the dominant power in Lebanon (via Hezbollah), Syria (via its client regime) and Yemen (through its Houthi proxies). Although Sunni Muslims outnumber Shi'ites by 6:1, Sunni populations are concentrated in North Africa, Turkey and South Asia. Iran hopes to dominate the Levant and Mesopotamia, encircling Saudi Arabia and threatening Azerbaijan.

It is grotesque for America to talk of balance of power in the Persian Gulf, because America destroyed the balance of power that defined the region's politics from the end of the First World War until 2006, when Washington pushed through majority rule in Iraq.

The imperialist powers in their wisdom established a power balance on two levels. First, they created a Sunni-dominated state in Iraq opposite Shi'ite Iran. The two powers fought each other to a standstill during the 1980s with the covert encouragement of the Reagan administration. Nearly a million soldiers died without troubling the world around them.

Second, the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 created two states, Syria and Iraq, in which minorities ruled majorities - the Alawite minority in Syria, and the Sunni minority in Iraq. Tyranny of a minority may be brutal, but a minority cannot exterminate a majority.

America's first great blunder was to force majority rule upon Iraq. As Lt General (ret.) Daniel Bolger explained in a 2014 book, "The stark facts on the ground still sat there, oozing pus and bile. With Saddam gone, any voting would install a Shiite majority. The Sunni wouldn't run Iraq again. That, at the bottom, caused the insurgency. Absent the genocide of Sunni Arabs, it would keep it going."

Under majority Shi'ite rule, Iraq inevitably became Iran's ally. Iranian Revolutionary Guards are now leading its campaign against the Sunni resistance, presently dominated by ISIS, and Iranian officers are leading Iraqi army regulars.

This was the work of the George W Bush administration, not Obama. In its ideological fervor for Arab democracy, the Republicans opened the door for Iran to dominate the region. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's National Security Advisor, proposed offering an olive branch to Iran as early as 2003. After the Republicans got trounced in the 2006 Congressional elections, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a pink slip, vice president Dick Cheney got benched, and "realist" Robert Gates - the co-chairman of the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations task force that advocated a deal with Iran - took over at Defense.

In the past, China has sought to strike a balance between Saudi Arabia and Iran with weapons sales, among other means. One Chinese analyst observes that although China's weapons deliveries to Iran are larger in absolute terms than its sales to Saudi Arabia, it has given the Saudis its best medium-range missiles, which constitute a "formidable deterrent" against Iran.

As China sees the matter, its overall dependency on imported oil is rising, and the proportion of that oil coming from Iran and its perceived allies is rising. Saudi Arabia may be China's biggest provider, but Iraq and Oman account for lion's share of the recent increase in oil imports. China doesn't want to rock the boat with either prospective adversary.

Among the world's powers, China is the supreme rationalist: it views the world in terms of cold self-interest and tends to assume that others also view the world this way. One of China's most respected military strategists told me bluntly that the notion of a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran (and by implication any regional nuclear power and Iran) was absurd: the Iranians, he argued, know that a nuclear-armed Israel could destroy them in retaliation.

Other Chinese analysts are less convinced and view Iran's prospective acquisition of nuclear weapons with trepidation. It is not only war with Israel but with Saudi Arabia that concerns the oil-importing Chinese. For the time being, Beijing has decided to accommodate Iran. In a March 2 commentary, Xinhua explicitly rejected Israeli objections:
The US Congress will soon have a guest, Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, who is expected to try to convince lawmakers that a deal with Iran on its nuclear program could threaten the very existence of the Jewish state.

Despite the upcoming pressure, policymakers in Washington should have a clear mind of the potential dangers of back-pedaling on the current promising efforts for a comprehensive deal on the Iranian nuclear issue before a March 31 deadline …

With a new round of talks in Switzerland pending, it is widely expected that the P5+1 [the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany] could succeed in reaching a deal with Iran to prevent the latter from developing a nuclear bomb, in exchange for easing sanctions on Tehran.

The momentum does not come easy and could hardly withstand any disturbances such as a surprise announcement by Washington to slap further sanctions on Tehran.

The Obama administration needs no outside reminder to know that any measures at this stage to "overwhelm" Iran will definitely cause havoc to the positive atmosphere that came after years of frustration over the issue.

While it is impossible for Washington to insulate itself from the powerful pro-Israel lobbyist this time, the US policymakers should heed that by deviating from the ongoing endeavor on Iran they may squander a hard-earned opportunity by the international community to move closer to a solution to the Iran nuclear issue, for several years to come if not forever.
Russia has taken Iran's side explicitly, for several reasons.

First, Russia has stated bluntly that it would help Iran in retaliation for Western policy in Ukraine, as I wrote in this space January 28. Second, Russia's own Muslim problem is Sunni rather than Shi'ite. It has reason to fear the influence of ISIS among its own Muslims. If Iran fights ISIS, it serves Russian interests. Russia, to be sure, does not like the idea of a nuclear power on its southern border, but its priorities place it squarely in Iran's camp.

The Israeli prime minister asserted that the alternative to a bad deal is not war, but a better deal. I do not think he believes that, but Americans cannot wrap their minds around the notion that West Asia will remain at war indefinitely, especially because the war arises from their own stupidity.

Balance of power in the Middle East is inherently impossible today for the same reason it failed in Europe in 1914, namely a grand demographic disequilibrium: Iran is on a course to demographic disaster, and must assert its hegemony while it still has time.

Game theorists might argue that Iran has a rational self-interest to trade its nuclear ambitions for the removal of sanctions. The solution to a multi-period game - one that takes into account Iran's worsening demographic weakness - would have a solution in which Iran takes great risks to acquire nuclear weapons.

Between 30% and 40% of Iranians will be older than 60 by mid-century (using the UN Population Prospect's Constant Fertility and "Low" Variants). Meanwhile, its military-age population will fall by a third to a half.

Belated efforts to promote fertility are unlikely to make a difference. The causes of Iranian infertility are baked into the cake - higher levels of female literacy, an officially-sanctioned culture of sexual license administered by the Shi'ite clergy as "temporary marriage," epidemic levels of sexually-transmitted disease and inbreeding. Iran, in short, has an apocalyptic regime with a lot to be apocalyptic about.

Henry Kissinger is right: peace can be founded on either hegemony or balance of power. Iran cannot be a hegemon for long because it will implode economically and demographically within a generation. In the absence of either, the result is war. For the past 10 years I have argued in this space that when war is inevitable, preemption is the least damaging course of action. I had hoped that George W Bush would have the gumption to de-fang Iran, and was disappointed when he came under the influence of Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. Now we are back in 1938, but with Lord Halifax rather than Neville Chamberlain in charge.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. He is Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and Associate Fellow at the Middle East ForumHis book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture, religion and economics, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End of You, also appeared that fall, from Van Praag Press.

Copyright 2015 Asia Times Holdings Ltd. All rights reserved.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thediplomat.com/2015/03/chinas-pla-crackdown-gathers-steam/

China’s PLA Crackdown Gathers Steam

The PLA releases a list of 14 generals under investigation for corruption, signalling a sea change.

By Shannon Tiezzi
March 04, 2015

14 Shares
4 Comments

On Monday, China’s military authority released a list of 14 generals under investigation or already convicted for corruption. The release, timed to come just before China’s annual parliamentary meeting, provides further evidence that anti-corruption efforts in the PLA are gaining steam. Monday’s announcement followed the release of a similar list of 16 military officers under investigation in mid-January.

The release of the list was accompanied by a flurry of state media coverage underlining the PLA’s determination to weed out corruption. A piece posted on the Ministry of Defense website argued that the announcement “makes [the] PLA more trustworthy.” That article also points out a key difference between Monday’s list and the list of names released in January: the former list included names that had already been reported on by official and unofficial media outlets. The March 2 list, on the contrary, included names being linked to anti-graft probes for the first time. Chinese analysts interviewed in the article stressed that releasing the names of corrupt officials could become standard practice for the PLA – a way of getting out ahead of media reports and boosting PLA transparency.

The list includes high-ranking officials from the joint logistics departments of various Military Area Commands as well as a number of deputy political commissars and deputy directors from various political departments. As the New York Times notes, this effectively captures China’s two main worries when it comes to PLA corruption: embezzlement from the logistics department (which handles procurement and other contracts) as well as position-buying and bribery in the political departments.

However, the name being most widely talked about is one missing from the PLA list. General Guo Boxiong, a former vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, is widely believed to be under investigation for corruption, although no official Chinese sources have confirmed this. Guo’s son, General Guo Zhenggang, was included on the March 2 list, which listed him as under investigation for “suspicion of illegal criminal activities.” Reuters’ sources say that announcement was a hint that Guo Boxiong is next – which would make him the second CMC vice chairman to fall, after General Xu Caihou was ousted last year. If Guo does go, it would mean the disgrace of both of China’s top military leaders under Hu Jintao.

The recent push in publicizing anti-corruption efforts in the PLA is unique. As late as last February, the PLA (though reportedly conducting investigations) was largely mum on the subject of who was being investigated for what. Rumors surrounding the fate of two “tigers” –Lt. Gen. Gu Junshan, formerly the deputy head of the General Logistics Department, and Xu Caihou – swirled for months before the PLA made its official announcements (in April and July, respectively).

The floodgates seemed to have opened since then, with 30 officers publicly named-and-shamed by the PLA in the past two months alone. Less publicized – but potentially of longer-lasting importance – are the recent efforts to revamp the PLA’s separate legal system to more effectively combat corruption; Susan Finder outlined those changes in a recent piece for The Diplomat.

Numerous high-ranking PLA officers have voiced concerns about the impact corruption has on the PLA’s ability to wage wars. General Fan Changlong, currently a CMC vice chairman, recently wrote that the corrosive effects of corruption contributed to China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War – a cautionary tale for today’s PLA. Xi Jinping himself has warned that a corrupt military cannot even fight battles, much less win wars. Those public remarks were a prelude to a serious crackdown on corruption in China’s military – a crackdown we are now beginning to see reach into the upper echelons of the PLA.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......Shades of the North Koreans not that long ago.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/04/us-colombia-china-arms-idUSKBN0LZ29W20150304

Colombia detains China Cosco Shipping vessel over illegal arms

BOGOTA/SHANGHAI Wed Mar 4, 2015 3:42am EST

(Reuters) - Colombian authorities detained a vessel operated by China's largest shipping group for illegally transporting thousands of cannon shells, about 100 tonnes of gunpowder and other materials used to make explosives, the attorney general's office said.

The Da Dan Xia, operated by Cosco Shipping Co Ltd, was headed for Cuba when it was stopped on Saturday in the northern port of Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast, after the materials were detected during an inspection.

The cargo was listed in the records of the 28,451 deadweight-tonne ship as grain products. The captain of the Hong Kong-flagged vessel had been arrested, the attorney general's office said.

China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the ship was carrying ordinary military supplies to Cuba and was not in violation of any international obligations.

"It is completely normal military trade cooperation. At present, China is communicating with Colombia on this matter," Hua said.

A Cosco Shipping official in the firm's Guangzhou head office said the ship was operated by the company but added she was unaware of the incident. Cosco Shipping is part of the state-backed China Ocean Shipping Group Co (COSCO) conglomerate.

Cargo documentation the captain presented did not match the load the ship was found to be carrying, Luis Gonzalez, national director of the Colombian attorney general's office, told reporters.

"Around 100 tonnes of powder, 2.6 million detonators, 99 projectiles and around 3,000 cannon shells were found," Gonzalez added.

Photographs from the prosecutor's office showed wooden cases inside a shipping container with labels stating Chinese defense manufacturer China North Industries Group Corporation as the supplier.

The company, known as Norinco, is China's biggest arms maker. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The recipient was stated as importer Tecnoimport in the Cuban capital Havana. The Cuban company could not immediately be reached for comment.

A man who identified himself as the Da Dan Xia's first officer confirmed the ship had been detained in Colombia when Reuters called the vessel's phone number on Wednesday. He declined to comment further.


CHINA-CUBA TIES GROWING

The attorney general's office said the ship's captain, Wu Hong, would be brought before a judge in order to be detained pending charges, and had been provided with an interpreter. Officials said he could be charged with illegal transport of military materials.

China is the fourth largest arms exporter in the world, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Its three major customers are Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

China and Cuba have increasingly close business ties, as well as political links because of their communist governments, but in Latin America, China is closest to oil-rich Venezuela.

President Xi Jinping visited Cuba last year at the end of a swing through the region, signing a series of deals, including debt restructuring and helping to build a shipping terminal.

A North Korean ship was detained in the Caribbean region in July 2013, near the Panama canal, when it was found to be carrying Soviet-era weapons from Cuba including two MiG-21 jet fighters, hidden under thousands of tonnes of sugar.

The United States and the United Nations both blacklisted two shipping companies which they said tried to hide the arms shipments destined for North Korea. Panama freed the ship and 32 crew to sail back to Cuba a year ago after most of a $1 million fine was paid.

(Clarifies that China's foreign ministry was referring to Colombia, instead of "the parties" in 5th paragraph)


(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta and Peter Murphy, writing by Julia Symmes Cobb; Additional Reporting by Brenda Goh in SHANGHAI, Ben Blanchard in BEIJING and Henning Gloystein and Keith Wallis in SINGAPORE; Editing by G Crosse, Bernard Orr and Dean Yates)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414741/how-obama-giving-iran-nuclear-arsenal-robert-zubrin

How Obama Is Giving Iran a Nuclear Arsenal

Obama’s treaty would give Iran the ability to quickly turn its enriched-uranium stockpile into bombs.

By Robert Zubrin — March 3, 2015


Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly objects to the treaty that the Obama administration is making with Iran concerning its nuclear program. He has good reason to be alarmed. Here is why.

In order to enable atomic bombs, the 0.7 percent U235 fraction of natural uranium needs to be enriched to 10 percent or more. This is typically done using centrifuges, and the amount of effort required by such systems to accomplish a given amount of enrichment is measured in Separation Work Units, or SWUs. The table below shows the number of SWUs needed to refine an initial feedstock of 100 metric tons (100,000 kilograms) of 0.7 percent U235 natural uranium into smaller amounts of more enriched materials.

table

Under Obama’s proposed treaty, Iran will be allowed 6,500 centrifuges to enrich uranium from its natural level of 0.7 percent U235 to a reactor grade of 3 percent to 5 percent, but not to higher grades that would be useful for making bombs. However, we see that close to 80 percent of the total effort required to turn 0.7-percent-enriched natural uranium into 93-percent-enriched, top-quality bomb-grade material is spent on the first step, to 4-percent-enriched reactor grade stuff, which, as noted, the treaty will permit. Only the last 20 percent is forbidden.

Iranian centrifuges now have a capacity of 5 SWU per year each. The regime is working on upgrading this to 24 SWU each, a figure that would match American centrifuge performance. Even if we assume that they will remain unable to reach that goal, the 6,500 centrifuges permitted by the treaty will still give Iran a capacity of 32,500 SWU per year. Examining the table above, we see that while producing 17 bombs from 0.7-percent-enriched natural uranium would require a total of about 75,000 SWU, if the first step of enrichment to 4 percent has already been accomplished, then only 17,000 SWU would be required. Thus, after allowing creation of a large stockpile of 4 percent U235, the 32,500-SWU-per-year enrichment capability that the Obama treaty will grant Iran would allow it to transform that stockpile into first-class nuclear bombs at a rate of 32 per year.

We should note that the current cost of natural uranium is about $100 per kilogram, while the cost of one SWU is about $140. Therefore, if all Iran wanted was 4-percent-enriched reactor fuel, it could buy the 100,000 kilograms of natural uranium for $10 million, and have France or Russia enrich it for them at a cost of another $8 million, for a total price that is insignificant compared with the cost that current international sanctions are imposing on the country. It should therefore be clear that there is only one reason Iran needs the enrichment capability it is insisting on: so it can quickly turn reactor-grade material into a powerful nuclear arsenal.

That is why Netanyahu is alarmed by Obama’s treaty, and the rest of us should be, too.

— Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy, a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy, and the author of Energy Victory. The paperback edition of his latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, was recently published by Encounter Books.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20150304000074&cid=1101&MainCatID=11

PLA's Type 094 sub upgrade allows greater missile capacity

Staff Reporter 2015-03-04 12:01 (GMT+8)

China has begun upgrading its Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, according to the military news website of the country's nationalistic tabloid Global Times, citing a Russian media report.

China had originally planned to build five or six of the submarines. US intelligence suggests that in the end they built five.

The submarines have a submerged displacement of 11,000 tonnes and should be capable of carrying 12-16 ballistic missiles, according to the report. The original design allowed for 12 missiles, but a few years ago an image of a Type 094 submarine carrying 16 missiles appeared, which suggests that experts have been working on an upgrade to the submarine.

The submarine will carry JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The JL-2 missiles are reportedly based on the DF-31 land-based ICBM, according to some sources. The JL-2 weighs in at around 42 tonnes and carries a payload of 2-2.5 tonnes, according to estimates. There is currently no information on its charge. The missile has a liquid propellant rocket engine and has a range of around 7,500-8,000 kilometers.

PLA Navy ballistic submarines are not known for being able to carry a large weapons payload but China seems to be pushing in this direction. Talk of ballistic submarines in China has been dominated over recent years by the Type 096 submarine, currently thought to be under development. This long-range submarine will be larger than any sub currently in service with the PLA. Another source said that the Type 096 nuclear submarine will carry 24 SLBMs. New nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines in China are likely to be equipped with JL-3 missiles, said to have a range of 10-11,000 km.

The current state of development of the Type 096 ballistic missile submarine is unknown, as no official reports on it have been issued. However, there are rumors that the first Type 096 submarine has already been constructed and is currently undergoing tests.

China's strategic nuclear deterrent is mainly concentrated on land-based missile systems. The five Type 094 ballistic missile submarines will be able to carry a total of no more than 80 JL-1A and JL-2 missiles, if the aforementioned reports are accurate. Currently China is reported to have 100-120 missiles equipped with nuclear warheads, including several dozen JL-2s.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150304/eu--poland-us-military_exercise-7d7c79e963.html

US-Polish live-fire army exercise begins

Mar 4, 11:53 AM (ET)

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish and U.S. troops are taking part in live-fire exercises in northern Poland that are part of a NATO operation showing its commitment to the region's security.

"Operation Atlantic Resolve" was launched in April 2014 in Poland and in the Baltic states and is expected to expand in the region.

Some 550 troops of the Germany-based U.S. Army 2nd Cavalry Regiment and 75 Stryker combat vehicles are taking part, along with the host nations' troops.

On Wednesday in Poland, live-fire training is taking place on a test range in Drawsko Pomorskie, also involving troops from Poland's 12th Mechanized Division.

The enhanced presence of U.S. troops along NATO's eastern flank is to "continue at least through the end of 2015," U.S. Embassy in Poland spokesman Sean O'Hara said.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150304/as--china-colombia-cargo_ship-1b93c3667e.html

China defends military items found by Colombia on cargo ship

Mar 4, 7:43 AM (ET)

BEIJING (AP) — China's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that a Chinese cargo ship was carrying legitimate military items when it was stopped in Colombia on its way to Cuba.

Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the items were part of "normal military trade" between China and Cuba and did not violate Chinese law or any of the country's international obligations.

"To my knowledge, the cargo ship carried general military items China exported to Cuba, and there were no sensitive items," Hua said.

Reports in Colombia said the ship was carrying 100 tons of gunpowder, shell casings and detonators when it was detained Saturday at a Colombian port.

Authorities told The Associated Press the ship's documentation failed to report the military items. The ship's captain appeared before a local judge on Tuesday to answer charges of arms trafficking.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150304/ml-libya-77deb3a396.html

Purported Islamic State militants attack Libyan oil field

Mar 4, 10:44 AM (ET)
By ESAM MOHAMED

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — Militants purportedly from the Islamic State group attacked an oil field near Libya's central coast, prompting a counterattack by the country's Islamist-backed government that included airstrikes, an official said Wednesday.

The militants swept down from the city of Sirte to attack the al-Dhahra oil field, trading fire with guards and blowing up residential and administrative buildings before retreating, said Mashallah al-Zewi, the oil minister in the Tripoli-based government.

"They surrounded the site from three different directions, and when guards ran out of ammunition, they stormed the place, looted everything and then bombed the buildings, leaving them in ruins," he said.

All employees and workers, including foreigners, were safely evacuated, he said.

Al-Zewi said that the field is run by al-Waha oil company and other American companies. Al-Waha said on its website that al-Dhahra is one of Libya's oldest fields, with production starting in 1962. Libya's state-run National Oil Corporation runs the field.

Officials believe the same militants were behind the February attack on Libya's al-Mabrouk oil field that killed 10 guards and saw seven foreigners abducted, including three Filipinos. French oil giant Total SA says it worked at that field until 2013.

Oil production dropped dramatically in Libya after the country's 2011 civil war that toppled dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Al-Zewi said Libya's daily production is now nearing 500,000 barrels a day.

Libya's internationally recognized government has been confined to the far east since Islamist-allied militias seized Tripoli last year and revived an earlier government. That's worsened militia violence and allowed militants allied with the Islamic State group to gain control of Sirte and Libya's eastern city of Darna.

These Islamic State-affiliated militants carried out a deadly attack on a luxury hotel in Tripoli in January, and in February released a video showing them behead 21 Egyptian Christians. The Egyptian military launched airstrikes on Darna in retaliation.

The government in Tripoli is led by Islamists. It has denied the existence of the Islamic State affiliate. The clashes at al-Dhahra are among the first known instances of Libya's Islamist-allied militias battling the Islamic State affiliate.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...right-north-korea-is-more-dangerous-than-ever

Bibi Is Right: North Korea Is More Dangerous Than Ever

New meaning in Kim's bloody rhetoric

by Bruce Einhorn
8:44 AM PST March 4, 2015

Was it a good idea for an Israeli prime minister to travel to Washington and criticize the president of the U.S. in public over Iran? Put that aside. When it comes to North Korea and its own nuclear ambitions, Benjamin Netanyahu had it right in his speech to Congress yesterday.

Kim Jong Un's regime is making considerable progress in becoming a more dangerous nuclear power.

"Inspectors knew when North Korea broke to the bomb, but that didn't stop anything. North Korea turned off the cameras, kicked out the inspectors. Within a few years, it got the bomb," the Israeli leader said. "Now we're warned that within five years North Korea could have an arsenal of 100 nuclear bombs."

A recent report published by Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies backs up Netanyahu's claim. The North Koreans, who already have some nukes, could indeed have 100 by the end of the decade, according to the worst-case scenario spelled out by the report's author, David Albright, who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science & International Security. Even Albright's most conservative projections have Kim's regime with 20 weapons by 2020.

That helps explain the bellicose rhetoric we're hearing from the North Koreans these days. While the Obama administration focuses on the Iran talks, the diplomatic process over North Korea's nuclear program is at a standstill. Last month, the North said it was through talking with the Americans, after Obama in an interview predicted the collapse of Kim's regime. Yesterday, the same day Netanyahu was on Capitol Hill warning about the Iranians borrowing from Kim's playbook, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong was in Geneva telling the United Nations Conference on Disarmament that his country was willing to go on the offensive. North Korea, he said, "has the power of deterring the U.S. and conducting a preemptive strike as well, if necessary."

Bloody, grandiose rhetoric from North Korea is nothing new, and the threats come at the start of annual joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises that regularly prompt extreme reactions from the North. On Monday, March 2, the first day of this year's exercises, North Korea showed its displeasure by firing two missiles in the direction of Japan.

But threats of a preemptive strike reflect the North's improved position. "North Korea is feeling more confident," said Charles Armstrong, a professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University. "That doesn't mean they would fire a missile at Guam out of the blue, but they feel they can say these things because they can be taken credibly."

Reliable statistics on the North are hard to come by, but Joel Wit, a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins's Nitze School, said things are getting better. For instance, "they are producing more food than ever," he said. And while UN sanctions remain in place, they're not very effective. "They have an impact, but the North Koreans know how to get around the sanctions, and they've been doing that," he said.

Kim Jong Un is also benefiting from closer ties with another leader at odds with the U.S.: Vladimir Putin. Russia is moving toward providing North Korea with oil, energy, and grain, said Armstrong, part of Putin's effort to break out of the isolation caused by Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine. North Korean leaders are feeling a little less isolated, even as the country's economy is showing some signs of improvement.

"North Korea knows that it's not alone," said Leonid Petrov, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University's College of Asia & the Pacific. Kim "has been emboldened by the antagonism between the Kremlin and the White House."

The most symbolically important sign of the new coziness between Russia and North Korea could come this spring, when Kim may be a guest of honor at a Moscow parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Russian news agency Interfax reported in January that Kim would attend, making his first trip abroad since coming to power more than three years ago following the death of his father, Kim Jong Il.

There are limits to how reliable a friend Russia can be to North Korea. "Russia, in its isolation, has clearly been using North Korea as one way of poking its finger at the U.S.," said L. Gordon Flake, chief executive of the Perth USAsia Center at the University of Western Australia, but he is skeptical that the fire-breathing, worm-hosting Kim Jong Un Show will be making its overseas debut in Moscow.

"Even if you're Putin and an international pariah, do you want to be hanging out with Junior and be in the same category as Dennis Rodman?" Flake said.

In his speech to Congress, Netanyahu tried to use the North as an example of what could happen should Iran build nukes, too. There's a flip side to that argument, Columbia's Armstrong said. The North Korean bravado now on display shows "what happens if you don't reach a successful nuclear agreement," he said.

"We don't want Iran to reach the point that North Korea has reached."

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.defensenews.com/story/de...-strike-us-denies-rights-violations/24324481/

North Korea Warns Can Conduct 'Strike' on US, Denies Rights Violations

Agence France-Presse 2:39 p.m. EST March 3, 2015

GENEVA — North Korea's foreign minister warned Tuesday Pyongyang had the power to conduct a "preemptive strike" on the United States, following joint US-South Korea military drills earlier this week.

Ri Su-yong also slammed a UN rights inquiry released last year that laid bare Pyongyang's brutality as a "misdeed" and called for a resolution on North Korea's rights record to be "revoked immediately."

Speaking at the United Nations in Geneva, Ri said the joint military exercises that kicked off Monday were "unprecedentedly provocative in nature" and could spark a war.

"The DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) cannot but bolster its nuclear deterrent capability to cope with the ever-increasing nuclear threat of the US," he told the UN Disarmament Conference.

"Now the DPRK has the power of deterring the US and conducting a preemptive strike as well if necessary."

The annual joint exercises always trigger a surge in warlike rhetoric on the divided peninsula.

North Korea fired two short-range Scud missiles into the sea off its east coast on Monday, and South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported Tuesday that Pyongyang may be readying to test fire a medium-range missile.

Missile tests have long been a preferred North Korean method of expressing displeasure with what it views as confrontational behavior by the South and its allies, though Seoul and Washington insist the exercises are defense-based in nature.

'Overwhelming Sorrowful Pity'

Later Tuesday, Ri spoke to the UN Human Rights Council, angrily denying there were any "widespread" violations in a country whose political system "enjoys the eternal vitality."

A UN report released last year concluded that North Korea was committing rights violations "without parallel in the contemporary world."

Based on the testimony of North Korean exiles, it detailed a vast network of prison camps and documented cases of torture, rape, murder and enslavement.

The report formed the basis of a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in December that urged the Security Council to consider referring Pyongyang to the International Criminal Court — putting it under unprecedented pressure.

But in January, defector Shin Dong-Hyuk — one of those who testified for the inquiry — acknowledged that some elements of his story as told in a book were inaccurate, although he stressed that the crucial details of suffering and torture still stood.

North Korea has since leapt on this as proof that the entire report is invalid, and Ri reiterated this on Tuesday.

"In any court, a ruling based on false testimony is to be nullified," he said.

"The anti-DPRK resolutions based on the... report should be revoked immediately without delay."

He pointed out that the fact that his country's current political system had survived despite "years of hardships" proved there were no widespread rights violations.

The country suffered devastating famine in the 1990s, and remains hugely impoverished with malnutrition widespread.

"Those hostile towards us cannot understand the ties of blood between the leader and the popular masses and the world of single-minded unity that can be found only in the DPRK," he said.

His comments were almost immediately shot down by South Korea's vice foreign minister, who said he felt "an overwhelming sorrowful pity" upon hearing them.

"The minister knows better than anyone else about the horrific human rights situation in the DPRK and the grave concern verging on despair of the international community over the situation," Cho Tae-yul said.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://sputniknews.com/asia/20150304/1019057232.html

N. Korea Warns US About Nuclear Strike in Response to 'Provocative' Drills

Asia & Pacific
19:41 04.03.2015(updated 21:56 04.03.2015)

Never-mincing words, North Korea is out with a new warning, saying it would use a pre-emptive strike if necessary to stop “an ever-increasing nuclear threat” by the United States.

“The DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) cannot but bolster its nuclear deterrent capability to cope with the ever-increasing nuclear threat of the US,” North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong said during the United Nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland on Tuesday. “Now the DPRK has the power of deterring the US and conducting a pre-emptive strike as well, if necessary.”


North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (R) laughs as he watches a drill by the Korean People's Army (KPA) for hitting enemy naval target at undisclosed location in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang January 31, 2015

© REUTERS/ KCNA

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (R) laughs as he watches a drill by the Korean People's Army (KPA) for hitting enemy naval target at undisclosed location in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang January 31, 2015


Ri said that joint military exercises by South Korea and the US were “unprecendently provocative in nature and have an especially high possibility of sparking off a war.”

The US and South Korea have been conducting joint military exercises for four decades without incident, said US ambassador Robert Wood, arguing that Ri’s comments were baseless and that Pyongyang should get rid of its nuclear weapons and stop making threats.

“(The exercises) are transparent and defense oriented,” Wood told Reuters. “We call on the DPRK to immediately cease all threats, reduce tensions, and take the necessary steps towards denuclearization needed to resume credible negotiations. We will not accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state and we will do what is necessary to defend ourselves and our allies,"

North Korea believes that the annual military exercises between the US and South Korea are just a ruse to prepare for war.


South Korean and U.S. Marines participate in the U.S.-South Korea joint landing exercises called Ssangyong, part of the Foal Eagle military exercises, in Pohang, South Korea, Monday, March 31, 2014

© AP Photo/ Ahn Young-joon

South Korean and U.S. Marines participate in the U.S.-South Korea joint landing exercises called Ssangyong, part of the Foal Eagle military exercises, in Pohang, South Korea, Monday, March 31, 2014


South Korean officials say that North Korea fired two short-range missiles on Monday.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/mar/4/us-china-south-korea-should-prepare-north-koreas-c/

U.S., China, South Korea should prepare for North Korea’s collapse, former top negotiator says
By Guy Taylor - The Washington Times - Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Comments 5

SEOUL ¯ The U.S. should embrace China’s growing relations with South Korea, and all three nations should prepare for the inevitable collapse of North Korea and the hard work of unifying the peninsula.

That’s the message that Washington’s former top negotiator with Pyongyang brought with him during a special visit to South Korea this week.

While former U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill said he doesn’t known when or how the inevitable demise of the North Korea will come about, he believes that it will come about. And when it does, he said, “we need to make sure that China, the Republic of Korea and the U.S. all understand what we’re going to do.”

Mr. Hill made the assertion Wednesday at a regional security conference hosted by The Washington Times in Seoul, where officials from the South Korean government office for reunification say they’re already pursuing small steps and confidence-building measures aimed at rekindling relations that have worsened with Pyongyang since the 2012 rise of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Current relations occurs mainly through the joint Kaesong Industrial Park, inside the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that has divided the two nations for more than 60 years.

But officials with South Korea’s Ministry of Unification say their efforts are focused now more than ever on establishing what has come to be referred to here as a “World Peace Park” inside the DMZ. The facility, the officials claim, will feature touristic wildlife attractions aimed at opening a new era of positive cultural interaction between the two sides.

“When this park is established, it will help heal the scars of division and will promote exchanges between the Koreas,” said Lee Duk-Haeng, a senior policy officer in the Ministry of Unification. “The basic value of the park is ecosystem exchange and peace.”

“Our view is that if we reconnect the ecosystem between the two Koreas, it will channel into peaceful exchanges,” he said.

What remains to be seen is whether the government here will move anytime soon to actually finance the effort, which is likely to cause unease among skeptics wary of advancing — and paying for — initiatives that do little to address North Korea’s nuclear weapons program or confront its antagonistic rhetoric toward much of the world.

It is not uncommon, for instance, to hear young South Koreans lament their government’s history of providing aid to North Korea, despite Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons in defiance of the United Nations.

At the same time, there are big questions at play over the extent to which officials in North Korea will embrace the idea of a world peace park in the DMZ. While Mr. Kim has made some overtures in recent months suggesting an openness for new diplomatic engagement with Seoul, he has spent much of the past three years threatening the south militarily.

But that did not stop Mr. Hill from declaring on Wednesday that Seoul and Washington must find ways to interact positively with North Korea — and asserting that China, long considered to have deeper influence over Pyongyang than any other player in the region, should have a central role in such efforts.

“I can think of no better way to do this than to continue to intensify our discussions [and] dialogues with China,” he said. “This dialogue can be done with the U.S. and the Republic of Korea sitting together with the Chinese, or it could be done with the Republic of Korea and China sitting together, or the U.S. and China sitting together. It doesn’t really matter.”

Mr. Hill appeared eager to build on any momentum for three-way cohesion toward North Korea that was generated last July, when Chinese President Xi Jingping made an almost unprecedented visit to South Korea — the first time a new Chinese leader has visited Seoul before Pyongyang.

The point is that Washington and Seoul should be finding ways to convince China that its support for North Korea is a barrier to wider international integration, Mr. Hill said. He also said efforts should be made to draw Japan into the conversation as well.

“I hope that at the end of this difficult process, we can all perhaps build a statue to the North Korean leadership thanking them for the fact that they brought China and the Republic of Korea and the U.S. closer together,” Mr. Hill said. “Because at the end of the day, we need to be together … [and] we need to do more to bring Japan into this.”

Distinct as they were, the assertions sounded like something of a throwback to the late-2000s. As U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the time, Mr. Hill had been tasked with heading up a Washington-led effort to breathe life into failed six-party talks that were aimed at steering North Korea away from developing nuclear weapons.

The effort ultimately ended in 2009 when Pyongyang carried out an underground nuclear test, much to the demise of Washington, Seoul and just about everyone else in Northeast Asia.

But Mr. Hill, who now heads the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, said Wednesday that the world would be dangerously remiss simply accepting North Korea as a nuclear armed state. Regional leaders should be putting their weight behind efforts to positively engage Mr. Kim, controversial as it may seem, Mr. Hill said.

He added that the best way to start would be to get behind the reunification talk currently coming from Seoul.

“Reunification, should the Korean people want that, is very much in our interests,” Mr. Hill said. “A unified Korean peninsula is something that would benefit not just the region but the world.”

But many regional analysts say tension between North and South Korea is far too deep to take such talk seriously. The consensus, they say, is that the Kim government in Pyongyang simply cannot be trusted to engage in positive diplomacy.

It follows that any serious move toward reunification may depend on the collapse of the Kim regime.

But other major obstacles are also at play. Polls show a majority of young people in the Seoul lean against the idea of reunification out of fear that it will ruin the South’s economy, which is generally regarded to be light years ahead of that in the North.

Pro-reunification politicians in Seoul are prone to downplaying such fears by likening the economic differences between North and South to those that existed — and were successfully overcome — between East and West Germany following their own reunification in 1989.

But critics say the economic and social differences that have developed between the Koreas over the past 70 years are far greater than those that developed between the once-divided German states.

Mr. Hill acknowledged such factors Wednesday, but asserted that they should not stand in the way of attempts by leaders in Seoul to push a narrative that reunification should and could occur.

Mr. Lee, meanwhile, argued that Germany remains the best model for the peninsula to be focusing on.

“Germany achieved reunification, but Korea remains divided,” he said. “It’s time to think about our reunification. … We hope the international community will join in the effort.”

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150305/ml-united-states-saudi-89c2a8cd61.html

Kerry in Saudi Arabia to talk Iran, Yemen instability

Mar 5, 2:09 AM (ET)
By MATTHEW LEE

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is in Saudi Arabia seeking to ease Gulf Arab concerns about an emerging nuclear deal with Iran as well as instability in Yemen and other nations.

A day after wrapping up the latest round of Iran nuclear negotiations, Kerry was meeting Thursday in the Saudi capital of Riyadh with foreign ministers of the Gulf states and the new Saudi king. U.S. officials said Kerry will reassure them a deal with Tehran won't allow Iran to get the bomb and won't mean American complacency on broader security matters.

Iran is supporting forces fighting in Syria and Iraq and is linked to rebels who toppled the government in Yemen.

Kerry will also discuss the fight against Islamic State group militants in Syria and Iraq.

_____

The earlier article.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150304/eu--united_states-saudi-d2bd2f8a82.html

Kerry arrives in Saudi Arabia to consult on Iran nuke talks

Mar 4, 5:19 PM (ET)
By MATTHEW LEE

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Fresh from the latest round of Iran nuclear negotiations, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Saudi Arabia Wednesday to ease Gulf Arab concerns about an emerging deal and discuss ways to calm instability in troubled Yemen and other Mideast nations.

Kerry left the Iran talks in the Swiss resort town of Montreux and flew to Riyadh, where he will see the new Saudi monarch, King Salman, and meet separately with the foreign ministers of the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Sunni-ruled Gulf states, like Israel, are unnerved by Shiite Iran's suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons and its increasing assertiveness throughout the region.

U.S. officials say Kerry will reassure them that a deal with Tehran will not allow Iran to get the bomb and won't mean American complacency on broader security matters. Iran is actively supporting forces fighting in Syria and Iraq and is linked to Shiite rebels who recently toppled the U.S. and Arab-backed government in Yemen.

One senior official said that no matter what happens with the Iranian nuclear talks, the U.S. would continue to confront "Iranian expansion" and "aggressiveness" in the region and work closely with the Gulf states on mutual security arrangements and boosting their defense capabilities. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about Kerry's visit to Riyadh and spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity

U.S. officials said Kerry will reiterate that the U.S. supports U.N. efforts to promote a dialogue leading to a political transition in Yemen, which is embroiled in a political crisis that threatens to split the country. The U.N.-mediated talks are aimed at breaking the political stalemate between the rebels known as the Houthis and Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

On Tuesday, Hadi proposed Riyadh, the Saudi capital and headquarters of the Gulf Cooperation Council, as a possible venue for the resumption of U.N.-sponsored talks with Shiite rebels who have seized Yemen's own capital, Sanaa. But the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are almost certain to reject moving the talks to Riyadh, given Saudi Arabia's opposition to their power grab in Yemen, the kingdom's southern neighbor. Complicating the situation, the political crisis comes as Yemen's al-Qaida branch, considered by Washington the terror network's most dangerous offshoot, is stepping up attacks against the Shiite rebels.

Hadi's offer of Riyadh as a negotiators' venue came during a meeting with tribal leaders in Aden, where he has been based since fleeing house arrest in Sanaa last month.

Hadi has called for the relocation of embassies to Aden, as several GCC members have done already.

The United States, which closed its embassy in Sanaa last month and evacuated its diplomatic staff, has no plans to relocate to Aden, although the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Matthew Tueller, met with Hadi in Aden on Monday. Until the crisis is resolved and the embassy reopened, Tueller and some of his staff will be based in an office at the U.S. Consulate in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, the officials said.

In addition to the Iranian nuclear issue and Yemen, Kerry will also discuss the continually deteriorating conditions in Syria and the fight against Islamic State group militants there and in Iraq.

U.S. officials said Kerry would stress that the United States does not see a military solution to the conflict in Syria, but also does not think a political solution is possible while Syrian President Bashar Assad remains in power.