Putin Will be in Tehran October 16

Stratfor:

...Mottaki also confirmed -- and this is significant -- that Russian President Vladimir Putin would visit Tehran on Oct. 16. The occasion is a meeting of the Caspian Sea littoral nations, a group that comprises Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. According to the Iranians, Putin agreed not only to attend the conference, but also to use the visit to confer with top Iranian leaders.

This is about the last thing the United States wanted the Russians to do -- and therefore the first thing the Russians did. The Russians are quite pleased with the current situation in Iraq and Iran and do not want anything to upset it. From the Russian point of view, the Americans are tied down in an extended conflict that sucks up resources and strategic bandwidth in Washington. There is a similarity here with Vietnam. The more tied down U.S. forces were in Vietnam, the more opportunities the Soviets had. Nowadays, Russia's resources are much diminished compared with those of the Soviets -- while Russia has a much smaller range of interest. Moscow's primary goal is to regain a sphere of influence within the former Soviet Union. Whatever ambitions it may dream of, this is the starting point. The Russians see the Americans as trying to thwart their ambitions throughout their periphery, through support for anti-Russian elements via U.S. intelligence.

If the United States plans to stay in Iraq until the end of the Bush presidency, then the United States badly needs something from the Russians -- that they not provide arms, particularly air-defense systems, to the Syrians and especially the Iranians. The Americans need the Russians not to provide fighter aircraft, modern command-and-control systems or any of the other war-making systems that the Russians have been developing. Above all else, they want the Russians not to provide the Iranians any nuclear-linked technology.

Therefore, it is no accident that the Iranians claimed over the weekend that the Russians told them they would do precisely that. Obviously, the discussion was of a purely civilian nature, but the United States is aware that the Russians have advanced military nuclear technology and that the distinction between civilian and military is subtle. In short, Russia has signaled the Americans that it could very easily trigger their worst nightmare.

The Iranians, fairly isolated in the world, are being warned even by the French that war is a real possibility. Obviously, then, they view the meetings with the Russians as being of enormous value. The Russians have no interest in seeing Iran devastated by the United States. They want Iran to do just what it is doing -- tying down U.S. forces in Iraq and providing a strategic quagmire for the Americans. And they are aware that they have technologies that would make an extended air campaign against Iran much more costly than it would be otherwise. Indeed, without a U.S. ground force capable of exploiting an air attack anyway, the Russians might be able to create a situation in which suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD, the first stage of a U.S. air campaign) would be costly, and in which the second phase -- battle against infrastructure -- could become a war of attrition. The United States might win, in the sense of ultimately having command of the air, but it could not force a regime change -- and it would pay a high price.

It also should not be forgotten that the Russians have the second-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The Russians very ostentatiously announced a few weeks ago that their Bear bombers were returning to constant patrol. This amused some in the U.S. military, who correctly regard the Bear as obsolete. They forget that the Russians never really had a bomber force designed for massive intercontinental delivery of nuclear devices. The announcement was a gesture -- and reminder that Russian ICBMs could easily be pointed at the United States.

Russia obviously doesn't plan a nuclear exchange with the United States, although it likes forcing the Americans to consider the possibility. Nor do the Russians want the Iranians to gain nuclear weapons. What they do want is an extended conflict in Iraq, extended tension between Iran and the United States, and they wouldn't much mind if the United States went to war with Iran as well. The Russians would happily supply the Iranians with whatever weapons systems they could use in order to bleed the United States a bit more, as long as they are reasonably confident that those systems would not be pointed north any time soon.

The Russians are just as prepared to let the United States have a free hand against Iran and not pose any challenges while U.S. forces are tied down in Iraq. But there is a price and it will be high. The Russians are aware that the window of opportunity is now and that they could create nightmarish problems for the United States. Therefore, the Russians will want the following:

In the Caucasus, they want the United States to withdraw support for Georgia and force the Georgian government to reach an accommodation with Moscow. Given Armenian hostility to Turkey and closeness to Russia, this would allow the Russians to reclaim a sphere of influence in the Caucasus, leaving Azerbaijan as a buffer with Iran.

In Ukraine and Belarus, the Russians will expect an end to all U.S. support to nongovernmental organizations agitating for a pro-Western course.

In the Baltics, the Russians will expect the United States to curb anti-Russian sentiment and to explicitly limit the Baltics' role in NATO, excluding the presence of foreign troops, particularly Polish.

Regarding Serbia, they want an end to any discussion of an independent Kosovo.

The Russians also will want plans abandoned for an anti-ballistic-missile system that deploys missiles in Poland.

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The Bankruptcy of External Threat Argument

The External Threat Argument

By Potkin Azarmerh

I don't envy the Islamic regime's apologists and lobbyists, for although they have a lot of funds at their disposal, from Iranian government or the oil giants, they have a tall order. Islamic Republic is a religious dictatorship, where the rights of a citizen are determined by their religion or more accurately by their adherence to the state's interpretation of Shiite theology. Pure and simple, Islamic Republic is evil and wrong.

So how do these lobbyists and apologists cope with such a difficult task of window dressing the Islamic Republic? First of all they rely on the 'useful idiots' in the West. The same ones who tried to glamorise the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao.

'Useful idiots' are very active, and they seem to have a lot of time for activism. They are also experts in getting grants and funding. The army of 'useful idiots' as well as the funds at their disposal is their strength.

The Achilles heel of the IR apologists and lobbyists is their bankrupt arguments. One really has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with a viable argument to defend the Islamic Republic.

One of the pivotal arguments they have been posing is that while Iran is under external threat, the human rights abuses and all the other wrongs in the Islamic Republic should not be highlighted and we should all concentrate on fighting this external threat first and foremost. See CASMII's protest at a mild petition put up by Znet that mildly criticised the human rights abuses in Iran. Now lets examine one of CASMII's leading members, Abbas Edalat.

He was educated in the US after having received a scholarship from the Pahlavi Foundation, i.e. from the Shah's regime. Yet this receiver of the scholarship from the Pahlavi Foundation did not hesitate to campaign against the Shah's regime as a student.

Under the Shah, Iran was definitely under the external threat from two of its immediate neighbours, the Soviet Union and Iraq. The Russian ambitions to reach the warm waters of the Persian Gulf go back to Peter the Great's will and after the second World War, the Soviets tried to break up Iran by supporting and promoting a separatist movement in Azerbijan, North West Iran.After their failure in Azerbijan, the Soviets continued their desires to turn Iran into a Russian satellite by supporting and funding the puppet pro-Soviet Tudeh Party and other insurgencies.Programs by the Peyk Radio of the Tudeh Party, broadcast from Eastern Europe, continued to disseminate Soviet propaganda against the Shah’s regime.

Iraq's ambition on breaking away Khuzestan province from Iran was aided by Egypt's other Pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdul-Nasser, who referred to Iranian Khuzestan as Arabestan. Iraq also disputed the river borders of Arvand-rood, and on several occasions Saddam's forces attacked Iranian border posts only to be pushed back by the well organised Iranian army at the time.

So Iran was definitely under external threat at the time, yet students like Abbas Edalat studying abroad on a government grant, never considered that they should stop their activities against the Shah to combat the external threats. In fact many of them directly collaborated with the governments that posed that very external threat.

These students would be educated in US and Western European countries but for some peculiar reason then wanted an Albanian, Chinese, Algerian or some other tin-pot dictatorship styles for Iran! Patriotism to them was either a dirty word and just was not found in their vocabulary.But all of a sudden now, their 'patriotism' is preventing them from criticising the Islamic Republic.

The fact is that the Islamic Republic feels threatened even by its own shadow, and will always create an 'external threat' and an 'external enemy'. Islamic Republic craves and lives on crisis as a way of extending its shelf life. After 28 years however, most Iranian people are seeing through these gimmicks and bluffs of the clerical state.

They rightly demand their rights to a decent standard of living, their right to have a say in how they are governed, and their right to personal freedoms. I can not imagine how for example, Iranian teachers, who only demand the enactment of the Islamic Assembly bill for public workers, and nothing more, can be regarded as colluding with the 'external threat'?!

Nor indeed how Iranian women who want justice in state gender laws, nor the workers who demand their unpaid wages, nor any other stream of the Iranian pro-democracy movement, in any way are colluding with any external threats. The argument to suppress home grown dissent because of external threats has been used by just about all dictatorships. If such an argument had any shred of consistency, Israel should be the most brutal dictatorship against its own citizens because of all the external threats it faces.

Yet even during the missile attacks on Israel by the Hezbollah, some Israeli citizens felt free enough to demonstrate against the war and criticise their government. Imagine what would have happened if a group of Iranians protested in Iran, during the war with Iraq, and demanded that the Islamic Republic accepted the peace treaty that was on offer after the Iraqi aggressors had retreated from our borders.

Demanding justice at home not only does not promote external threats, but a perception of being able to campaign freely for justice and bring one's government to accountability actually strengthens one's resolve to defend the system against external threats.

The 'external threat' argument is so old, repetitive, bankrupt and baseless that only 'useful idiots' will be convinced by it. Any sane person can realise that the motivation for such arguments is more suspect than it appears on the surface and there is another agenda behind it.

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Russia Gives Iran Ultimatum on Enrichment

NY Times: PARIS, March 19 — Russia has informed Iran that it will withhold nuclear fuel for Iran’s nearly completed Bushehr power plant unless Iran suspends its uranium enrichment as demanded by the United Nations Security Council, European, American and Iranian officials say.

The ultimatum was delivered in Moscow last week by Igor S. Ivanov, the secretary of the Russian National Security Council, to Ali Hosseini Tash, Iran’s deputy chief nuclear negotiator, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because a confidential diplomatic exchange between two governments was involved.

For years, President Bush has been pressing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to cut off help to Iran on the nuclear power plant that Russia is building at Bushehr, in southern Iran. But Mr. Putin has resisted. The project is Tehran’s first serious effort to produce nuclear energy and has been very profitable for Russia...There's more

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Iran and Russia: Trouble in Paradise

Russia Urges Iran To Fulfill UN Demands To Freeze Enrichment
March 13, 2007
Dow Jones Newswires AP

MOSCOW -- Russia has urged Iran to fulfill the U.N. demand to freeze its uranium enrichment program and to cooperate with a U.N. nuclear watchdog, officials said Tuesday. Russian officials made the call during the two-day of talks in Moscow with Ali Hosseinitash, a deputy secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement which appeared to signal Moscow's growing irritation with its close partner. During the talks with Hosseinitash, Moscow emphasized the need for Tehran to " fulfill the demands of corresponding resolutions of the U.N. Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency Board."

Russian officials also urged Tehran to "take the necessary constructive steps that would allow an immediate start to the negotiation process," the statement said. Iran insists its enrichment program is peaceful and aimed solely at producing nuclear energy, but the U.S. and its allies believes it serves as a cover for seeking to build atomic weapons. In December, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to impose limited sanctions against Iran for its refusal to freeze uranium enrichment. Senior representatives of the five permanent Security Council members - Russia, China, the U.S., the U.K. and France, along with Germany - have been discussing possible new sanctions against Iran to force it to suspend enrichment efforts. Officials said Monday that the major powers moved closer to agreement on a package of new sanctions against Iran likely to include an embargo on arms exports and an asset freeze on more individuals and companies linked to Tehran's nuclear and missile programs....

None of this deviate from the habits of history -- the Russians have been bamboozling the Iranians for almost 200 years. The mullahs should have known that there is no honor among thieves..hehe

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