OfficialWire.com

Iran has posed the most serious nuclear challenge to the international community, and experts believe that it is only steps away from getting the nuclear weapons capability. Yet, international efforts have to date failed to stop the mullahs and evidence shows that they are carrying out secret work to further enrich uranium.

It is also too clear that Tehran does not need nuclear energy. Iran is the second-largest crude producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) after Saudi Arabia. The country’s Deputy Oil Minister Ahmad Qalebani said that Iran’s oil reserves has reached 155 billion barrels following the recent discovery of new onshore oil and gas fields in southern and western Iran with reserves of 500,000 million oil barrels and five trillion cubic feet gas respectively.

Sounding worried about Iran’s nuclear activities, this is what the former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Olli Heinonen, said in an interview with Spiegel on October 6th, explaining how he felt they were tricked and misled:

“It’s undeniable that Iran’s nuclear program is far more advanced than it was in 2003, when the discovery of the Natanz facility brought it to the IAEA’s attention. At the time, uranium enrichment tests were being carried out in secret on a small scale. But at the end of 2003, the Iranians admitted they were also planning to set up a heavy-water reactor in Arak to generate plutonium.

Today the facts are as follows: The conversion plant in Isfahan has produced 371 tons of uranium hexafluoride. Some 8,000 centrifuges in Natanz are being used to enrich this raw material. In February 2010, Iran began increasing enrichment to 20 percent. That’s a significant step closer to making an atomic bomb because it takes only a few months to turn that into weapons-grade material.”

 In september, the  head of the United Nations nuclear agency announced plans to publish new information backing up his belief that Iran may be working on a nuclear warhead—developments that leaves his organization “increasingly concerned.” 

There are two important questions that need to be answered:

One. Why does Tehran not accept to stop nuclear enrichment?

Two. Does Iran have an Achilles’ heel to force it stop its drive to become a nuclear power?          

To answer the above questions, we need to look inside Iran.

First: The mullahs are facing a very young population (more than 70% below 30 years of age), who are almost entirely against the regime. The protests in the Iranian streets two years ago, showed the threat facing Tehran. The demonstrations have to date been stopped by brutal crackdown and wide spread torture of those arrested in the prisons, but the wind of changes in the Arab world is certainly not blowing against the regime in Iran.

The mullahs utterly need a way out. Capability to produce nuclear weapons is being seen as a solution to create crisis and survive. Tehran is too weak and is surrounded by too many problems to be able to negotiate stopping nuclear enrichment, no matter how many carrots it is offered.

Second: Tehran has a very hurt able Achilles’ heel that it has to be attentive of. The weakness, which is well recognized by the mullahs themselves, is their main opposition group, the MEK.

Shackling the MEK is a must for the mullahs as they feel the threat facing them inside country and they experienced it two years ago on the streets of the capital. The opposition must be kept under maximum pressure no matter what and that is the reason why the mullahs lobbies in Europe and the US, have clear-cut outlines to work with. The MEK was put in the FTO list in 1997 when the Clinton administration, keen on placating Tehran’s regime through various “goodwill gestures,” designated the group as a terrorist organization. Since then, the MEK has won every legal challenge it filed, whether in the United States, the United Kingdom, France or the European Union. Eight European courts have reviewed thousands of pages of classified and unclassified materials and have concluded that the MEK is simply not involved in terrorism.

The correct policy towards the mullahs in Iran is to recognize their Achilles’ heel. Tehran’s threat is too real but it does not need to be stopped by a war. The impasse can be opened by unshackling the mullahs’ opposition and delisting the MEK before it is too late.

Kambiz Assai is a scholar of Iranian politics living in exile in Britain and a former political prisoner of the religious dictatorship in Iran. He writes about Iranian current events and human rights issues extensively and dreams of returning to a free and democratic Iran.

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has appointed an advisor to mull over the fate of thousands of outlawed Iranians facing expulsion from a camp in Iraq, their home for 30 years.

Catherine Ashton, EU foreign policy chief

A spokesman for Ashton said Monday that Jean De Ruyt, Belgium’s former ambassador to the EU, will act in Brussels “as an advisor on the European Union’s response” to Camp Ashraf, located near the border with Iran and home to some 3,400 Iranian dissidents.

The camp, which has become a mounting international problem, has been in the spotlight since an April raid by Iraqi security left 34 dead and scores injured, triggering sharp condemnation. Iraq wants its closure by year’s end.

It was set up when Iraq and Iran were at war in the 1980s by the then Iranian People’s Mujahedeen and later came under US control until January 2009, when US forces transferred security for the camp to Iraq.

Maryam Rajavi, head of the dissidents, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, on Monday called for the new nominee to visit Ashraf and to demand Iraq drop its bid to close the camp by the end of 2011.

And in a statement, the head of a European parliament group on Iraq, MEP Struan Stevenson, said “Ambassador De Ruyt should visit Ashraf as soon as possible.”

Stevenson said the camp’s residents were being assessed individually by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees after applying for refugee status, which would allow them to resettle elsewhere.

“This major operation cannot be completed within the timescale set by Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki,” he added, referring to the December 31 deadline for closure.

THE HUFFINGTON POST

Once again, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has used the United Nations podium to churn out his misinformation and half-truths. And once again, the American media accepted his invitation for a fancy luncheon afterwards, enabling a ruthless murderer to wage his not-so-charm offensive. Apparently, some media outlets just want Ahmadinejad to say something, anything, as long as they get their story.

Children at an anti-Ahmadinejad rally outside the UN headquarters stomp on a poster of the controversial Iranian president before he is scheduled to speak at the UN General Assembly, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011, in the Manhattan borough of New York. A few hundred demonstrators turned out to hear former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former UN Ambassador John Bolton speak. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Has no one learned anything from the free passes provided to Ahmadinejad’s allies, such as Moammar Qaddafi of Libya and Bashar Assad of Syria?

Ahmadinejad allocated almost the entirety of his speech to just about anything unrelated to the clerical rulers of Iran. He talked about flooding in Pakistan, famine in Somalia, how a large percentage of the world’s population earns so little, and how a small percentage of the world’s population has so much. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Next he took on an authoritative posture, portraying himself as an engineer who knows that the two planes that hit the Twin Towers could not have brought those buildings down. (Huh!) Of course, one might wonder when he practiced his sophisticated engineering skills, in that he has spent pretty much all of his adult life first as a chief thug, organizing hooligans to attack and beat up students in the early days after the revolution, then as a notorious torturer in Evin prison, and later as a commander of the terrorist Qods Force during the Iran-Iraq war.

But what is more important is what Ahmadinejad did not address. He addressed numerous problems around the world, held America responsible for much of the world’s misery, but did not talk about the Arab Spring; no mention of Libya, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, or Yemen.

He attacked world powers for intervening in other countries’ affairs, but stayed off the topic of his Revolutionary Guards’ helping Bashar Assad to violently suppress the revolt in Syria; and avoided details of how his regime used violence, bribery, intimidation, and blackmail to put Iraq’s defeated Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki back in office and deny the winning candidate, Ayad Allawi, a substantive role in the political process in Iraq.

Nor did he mention his use of proxies in the Iraqi Government to kill dozens of Iranian dissidents and former political prisoners who had taken refuge across the border in Camp Ashraf, Iraq in 2009 and 2011. No wonder that while most of the delegations left the General Assembly Hall when Ahmadinejad started speaking, the Iraqi delegation remained, cheering him on.

Ahmadinejad expressed concern about three billion people in the world not earning enough to live, but failed to mention the fact that as many as 80 percent of the Iranian population live below the poverty line; the official figures put it at 55 percent. He attacked the West for making exorbitant profits, but said nothing about his own closest allies in Iran, the ruling clerics and their cronies, who are plundering billions of dollars, dominating the nation’s industry, and running or taking a cut from all business in the country.

And lastly, he said nothing about the rising rate of executions in Iran, this year’s numbers close to 490 so far, higher even than last year. Since he spoke at the last General Assembly session, his State Security Forces and the Iranian Judiciary have sentenced to death or already executed more Iranian dissidents whose only crime was peaceful participation in the anti-government demonstrations in Iran.

But let’s not be picky about the facts. Especially since again this year, prominent American media were invited to a fancy lunch after his ranting at the UN, for a taste of more of his rhetoric. The attendees are expected to throw him soft balls, and some went so far as to praise Ahmadinejad for being impressive, “well-prepared,” and speaking “confidently.”

But while Ahmadinejad spoke inside the UN, and hosted some journalists, the story outside was very different. He may be able to suppress the voices of dissent in Iran, escalate violence in Iraq, help Assad quash dissent in Syria, and defy international demands to desist enriching uranium, but in New York he was confronted by thousands of Iranian-Americans, who called him a murderer and insisted that he is not representative of the Iranian people.

That should have grabbed the headlines.

Alireza Jafarzadeh is author of ‘The Iran Threat’.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alireza-jafarzadeh/ahmadinejad-un-speech_b_978812.html