Rapture Watch

Dangerously fruitful dialogue

Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is entrusted with a decisive mission in Tehran Sunday, May 20: collecting Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s broad endorsement of the interim eight-point deal he and US President Barack Obama have drafted through secret dialogue. debkafile has obtained exclusive access to the eight points - with the caveat that they may not be final. The details are still to be hammered out and proved practicable. But the way the deal stands now, it will be unacceptable to Israel because if affords Iran enough leeway to carry on developing a nuclear bomb program with no real hindrance.

The White House is waiting tensely for Khamenei’s nod to activate the link promised by Obama between their back-track talks and the formal negotiations the Six Powers (P5+1) negotiations with Iran, which go forward in Baghdad on May 23. This link would grant the bilateral US-Iranian deal UN-world power imprimatur and vindicate the US president’s contested Iran policy.

From that moment, Israel would find it doubly hard to go through with its military option against Iran’s nuclear sites without risk of international isolation and opprobrium.

Until that moment, the Obama administration had found Israel’s threatening stance useful for bending Iran to a diplomatic accommodation on its nuclear plans, while at the same time holding Jerusalem back from actually going through with its threat.

It was this double game that made the US-Iranian dialogue workable.

It was also used adroitly by Khamenei to achieve another of the Islamic Republic’s key strategic goals, to destroy the abiding friendship between the US and the Zionist state. The Iranian leader’s main argument to his colleagues in support of his secret dealings with the US president was that sanctions were well worth enduring if at the end of the road a deal with the US forced a breach between Washington and Jerusalem and so substantially weakened the Jewish state.

debkafile has obtained exclusive access to the eight-point draft with the caveat that it may not be final; the details remained to be hammered out and proved practicable:

1. Because the US and Iran agree that a real and comprehensive accord for halting Tehran’s nuclear program is unobtainable, they are accepting an interim agreement with each party at liberty to interpret its substance and future implementation in its own manner.

debkafile: This wording allows Obama to assure the American voter and Western public that Tehran has capitulated on its nuclear ambitions while, at the same time, Khamenei portrays America to Iranians and Muslims as having yielded on recognizing Iran’s right to develop an independent nuclear program, enrich uranium and continue its drive for a bomb.

2. Iran will suspend uranium enrichment up to the near-weapons grade of 20 percent but not dismantle or stop work at the Fordo underground nuclear plant as Israel demands.

3. Iran will export its stock of 110 kilograms of 20-percent enriched uranium which can be used for producing a weapon. This material will be reprocessed and returned as fuel plates from which it is much more difficult though not impossible to make a bomb.

4. No ceiling will be placed on the production of low-enriched uranium of 3.5-5 percent purity. debkafile: Washington tacitly grants this concession by leaving it off the record.

5. Iran will sign the Non-Proliferation Accord’s additional protocol and so permit the expansion of IAEA on-site inspections.

6. The secret Iranian nuclear sites of which Washington has no explicit knowledge will also be omitted from the record and therefore outside the sphere of international inspection.

debkafile: The guiding principle governing America’s approach to the eight-point interim accord therefore is, “Don’t know; don’t want to see.”

7. The US and European Union will dilute sanctions against Iran stage by stage. debkafile: Here too, dual tactics will be used: The formal embargo on Iran’s central bank and its exclusion from the SWIFT international money transfer system will not be formally annulled. However a blind eye will be applied to any small banks in the West executing Iran’s international business, just as the sanction-busting measures used by China, Russia, India and Turkey to their trade with Iran, were tolerated.

8. The US and Europe will revoke the oil embargo due to go into effect on July 1, 2012.

debkafile: While the Obama administration has given its “agreement-in-principle on the interim deal,” the Iranian leader has not yet endorsed it. Hence the Amano mission to Tehran Sunday.

If he comes away with a nod from Tehran, Obama will have achieved two key objectives: the world power talks with Iran can proceed through sessions spaced several weeks apart until the November date of the US presidential election, and Israel will be constrained from striking Iran before that date.

Last week, Israel reiterated its demand for Iran to stop uranium enrichment at any grade and dismantle the Fordo nuclear facility as non-negotiable.

The interim agreement drafted by Obama and Khamenei will therefore be unacceptable to Israel because it provides for neither and so affords Iran enough leeway to carry on developing a nuclear bomb program with no real hindrance.

Iran attack decision nears, Israeli elite locks down.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/17/us-israel-iran-idUSBRE84G0UC20120517

"I think they have made a decision to attack," said one senior Israeli figure with close ties to the leadership. It is going to happen. The window of opportunity is before the U.S. presidential election in November. This way they will bounce the Americans into supporting them."

"But behind the carefully evasive language of top officials, basic facts are clear. Time is running out. Iran's nuclear program - regarded by Netanyahu as an existential threat to the state of Israel - will soon be buried deep enough underground to render an Israeli attack impossible. The Jewish state's options are narrowing.

"I think they've gone into lockdown mode now," the senior Western diplomat said. "Whatever happens next, whatever they decide, we will not find out until it happens.'"

U.S., Iran seek closer ties alongside nuclear program

By Amir Oren | May.19, 2012 | 3:56 PM | 15

Washington radiates optimism after IAEA progresses toward inspection of Parchin base; Leon Panetta emphasizes that ‘a military option is not being weighed at this point.’

An Iranian technician works at the Uranium Conversion Facility just outside the city of Isfahan 410 kilometers south of the capital Tehran, Iran, Feb. 3, 2007. Photo by AP

An Iranian technician works at the Uranium Conversion Facility just outside the city of Isfahan 410 kilometers south of the capital Tehran, Iran, Feb. 3, 2007. Photo by AP

The Obama administration and the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are entering a critical week of decisions over the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. The sides are moving toward a “warming of relations alongside enrichment”, whereby the relationship between Washington and Tehran will improve, while Iran continues enriching uranium without pursuing a weapons program, but does not give up on its existing program. The threat of American or Israeli military action still exists, yet no one is holding the gun to Iran’s head.

Several developments have taken in the last couple of days, causing the White House to radiate optimism:

- Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Yukiya Amano announced that he will visit Tehran in two days for talks with head of the Iranian negotiating team Saeed Jalili. The visit, which comes on the heels of a round of talks in Vienna, as well as another evening of talks, reflects a narrowing of the gap between the IAEA’s demand to allow its inspectors to access the Parchin base - where it is suspected that Iran is developing nuclear weapons - and the Iranian claim that Parchin is a military base exempt of all inspection. Iran’s readiness to accept the inspection of Parchin – after suspicious traces have been erased – will serve as proof of Iran’s new policy of “transparency” over its nuclear program.

- In response to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro’s statement that “a U.S. military option is ready,” the spokesperson of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stated that “a military option is not being weighed at this point,” and that “American and international focus” is on diplomatic and economic measures on Iran “so that it does the right thing.”

- In the framework of the G8 summit, Obama met with the heads of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Japan, Italy and Canada at Camp David in order to agree on a coordinated position on Iran. The coordination is necessary in the run-up to a meeting between German representatives and the P5+1 members in the UN Security Council with the Iranian envoy this week in Baghdad. Of the six countries slated to participate in the Baghdad meeting, only China is absent from the Camp David summit.

- The location of the G8 summit, in the small pavilions of Camp David, with an unbuttoned atmosphere devoid of entourages (each leader was allowed to be accompanied by no more than two advisers), was intended to promote personal agreements on the highest level, with no cumbersome mechanisms that would prevent reaching quick decisions.

- Obama hosted French President Francois Hollande on Friday for a first meeting since the latter’s election victory over Nicolas Sarkozy, and due to the American worry (based on Hollande’s declarations during his campaign) that the new government in Paris will become more moderate in its stance on Iran. Obama’s adviser, Tom Donilon, told reporters before the meeting that on the issue of Iran, like the issue of the pullout from Afghanistan, the expectation is that France should “be a good ally” that will supply “good support.”

- The NATO conference, which will take place on Sunday and Monday in Chicago, is not going to directly discuss the Iranian issue, but throughout the conference it will be announced that the system to intercept surface-to-surface missiles, which is partially located in Turkey and is meant to thwart the threat of Iranian missiles on Europe, has reached an interim stage of operational development.

- Pentagon spokesperson George Little said at the end of the meeting between Panetta and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Thursday that Panetta and other officials shared with Barak and his colleagues in the Israeli government their worry over a possible Israel Defense Forces strike in Iran. In an attempt to soften Ambassador Shapiro’s words on the option of an American attack on Iran, Little stated that the Pentagon is, by nature, a “planning organization”, whose day to day activities include formulating emergency plans.

In addition, American officials said over the weekend were reported by the New York Times as saying that the six world powers are willing to offer Iran an incentive package in return for a freeze in enrichment. Among the incentives is an offer to relieve the limits set on Iran’s aviation and energy sectors, but without canceling the heavy sanctions on its oil industry, which are set to be implemented in July.