Let us now talk about Iran and nuclear weapons. Why? How about because the annual Munich Security Conference got started today and will run through the weekend, and, from a European perspective at least, that is currently the leading security issue.

But wait . . . here’s maybe a better reason to talk about Iran: the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung is now reporting that that country has a design ready for atomic warheads. The newspaper hints heavily that this revelation is its exclusive scoop; according to information it has managed to obtain, the key to Iran’s efforts was a certain Russian nuclear expert, present in that country from the mid-nineties to the year 2000 (or maybe all the way to 2002), and whose work in developing a certain high-speed camera process was crucial to the Iranians being able to fashion a so-called two-point implosion system for setting off the nuclear explosion. Now the Iranians have the blueprints they need to develop bombs that in fact would be small enough to fit comfortably on the medium-range Shahab-3 missiles they possess. Supposedly, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency know about this new development and concede that the warhead design would certainly work. (It was in fact an IAEA document that was the source for the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s revelations.) (more…)

Among the many other serious things currently happening on the international front – think Obama’s decision on Afghanistan, for example, or the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen – the knotty problem of Iran is also re-emerging. OK, they’ve had their massive street-demonstrations in the wake of last June’s fraudulent presidential election, but those were suppressed by the authorities, and the resulting show-trials are largely winding down. So you’d think that country could simply settle down into the sort of quiet dissatisfied-people-under-dictatorship status that Eastern Europe under Soviet rule displayed for decades (with periodic violent interruptions) and let the rest of the world get on with its other urgent business.

It’s not quite like that, though, because even if we get “All Quiet on the Iranian Front,” that tranquillity could be shattered on any given morning as Europe and the US wake up to news of an Israeli airstrike against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities. Furthermore, the current heightening confrontation – in which the Iranian regime has recently announced that it has plans to build 10 more nuclear fuel-enrichment plants – was admittedly sparked by last Friday’s demand to Iran from the International Atomic Energy Agency that it freeze operations at its already-existing uranium enrichment plant at Qom. And this, as Atlantic journalist James Fallows would have it, was itself a result of successful behind-the-scenes diplomacy in Beijing during President Obama’s recent Asia trip.

Be that all as it may, this Iran-vs.-the-World stand-off is indeed getting steadily nastier, as is described in that previously-cited NYT article from today but also by another piece in the Dutch newspaper Trouw (“Iran weighs pulling out of nuclear treaty”). That “nuclear treaty” is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), originally from 1968, in which treaty-signatories who don’t have nuclear weapons pledge never to try to get them, in exchange for those that do have them working to (eventually) give them up. Iran is a signatory to the NNPT, which among other important things means it is obliged to allow period visits from IAEA inspectors, which it has done. (Although that enrichment plant in Qom was for some reason kept secret – ooops, sorry about that! – and that was the main point of the IAEA’s complaint of last Friday.) The Trouw article cites growing sentiment from among important Iranian parliamentarians that their country might as well just withdraw from the NNPT regime if it’s going to be treated that way. And while they are at it, they say, why not just explicitly bar entry to any more IAEA inspectors as well?

It must be borne in mind that, as the article also points out, such thoughts are for now being aired only within the Iranian parliament, not by government officials. Furthermore, the intent here may just be – for now – to bluff and remind Iran’s accusers at the IAEA of what further non-cooperation they could provoke if they go too far with their demands. But surely all of this also brings that much closer to us all that terrible morning when we wake up to news of the Israeli attack.

Today we go from yesterday’s discussion of the implications of the melting ice in the Arctic Sea to . . . the Arctic Sea. But hold on: the “Arctic Sea” I’m talking about this time is not the geographical area, but rather the freighter (Maltese-registered; Russian crew) which has recently been at the center of a bizarre tale, having been hijacked just off Sweden on July 24 and which then proceeded seemingly to traverse the English Channel (one of the more-crowded stretches of water in the world) undetected, only to finally be found and captured by Russian warships weeks later in the Atlantic, near the Cape Verde Islands off the West African coast. If needed, you can refresh your memory from this Reuters report, and you might also consider an additional Associated Press report about a “Russian maritime expert,” now having fled Russia for fear of his life, who raised the possibility that the ship’s cargo could very well have included things a bit more interesting than just the Finnish wood listed on the manifest – like maybe weapons, for example. (more…)

Tomorrow shapes up as a very important day for the on-going internal conflict in Iran, as Friday prayers will be delivered by none other than Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who generally has aligned himself throughout the crisis on the reformers’ side and has spent much of the period since the election on June 12 in the holy city of Qom, supposedly trying to mobilize opinion among the Assembly of Experts (of which he is the Chairman) against Ayatollah Ali Hoseyni Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader and supporter of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad. Time Magazine’s Joe Klein gave us the heads-up yesterday in a post on his “Swampland” blog.

The Berlin newspaper Die Tageszeitung also released a Friday-preview piece yesterday (End-Time scenarios in Iran), which generally agrees with Klein’s evaluation, going on to provide additional supporting details. For one thing, Rafsanjani’s speech is to be televised on Iranian State Television; for another, both the main putative loser of that June 12 election, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, and another high-placed ayatollah who has been supportive of him (as well as formerly serving Iran’s president himself), Mohammad Khatami, will be sitting there in the first row, as we learn from Moussavi’s Facebook page. (more…)

That’s right: someone has publicly put Twitter forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing the impact of its supposed assistance to the protest movement in Iran against the results of the 12 June national elections. That someone is Mark Pfeifle, formerly Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor to George W. Bush, and he does so in an opinion-piece in the Christian Science Monitor (in English, of course). Although I have dealt with questions of Twitter here recently, I was unaware of this editorial until I was informed of it today by this German website intern.de. (And how did I find out about intern.de? Hey, you’ve got to let me have a few professional secrets!)

Naturally, I leave it to you, dear reader, to examine Pfeifle’s article itself as you may wish. Intern.de, though, has some reservations about it, like Pfeifle’s assertion that Twitter was mainly responsible for the emergence of the story of the assassination of Neda (Neda Agha-Soltan), who basically became the lead-martyr for the Iranian opposition’s cause. I also rather believe that it was YouTube, if anything, that figured most largely in spreading the news and horror of her killing. Pfeifle also conveniently ignores the very substantial defects to Twitter that emerged during those days of Tehran street-demonstrations, such as the sheer volume of “tweets” to be digested (221,000 per hour at their height, it says here) and the related problem of a high “noise-to-signal ratio” (i.e. it was difficult to glean out useful information – much less anything that could be verified – from that flood), as the audience for the “#iranelection” hash-tag eventually was even treated to tweet-advertising piggybacking on that tag from a UK furniture company! The intern.de blogger also detects a high level of sheer PR content in Pfeifle’s piece, whether it’s trying to spin for Twitter or for Mark Pfeifle himself. I agree, but again, you can go off to the Christian Science Monitor site and judge for yourself.

This news deserves more coverage in the US than Google News tells me it is getting; hopefully the fault is merely in the timing, namely around the 4th of July holiday. In any event, as the Dutch Volkskrant reports (in an article credited to Reuters and the AP), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) now has a new chairman to succeed Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, who has occupied that post since 1997 (and who together with his organization won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005). The new man is Yukiya Amano, currently Japan’s resident representative at the IAEA and who boasts a long record of service in the Japanese diplomatic corps, who last Tuesday (30 June) needed six rounds of voting among national IAEA representatives to finally (barely) gain the necessary two-thirds vote for selection to the post.

This has to be an important development, in the first place because of the vital importance these days of the IAEA, which is more-or-less the UN’s atomic power/atomic weapons supervisory agency. (It is formally an autonomous organization, but reports to both the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.) Just think of all the countries where possession/non-possession of nuclear weapons is currently an issue: North Korea, Israel, Syria – and then, of course, Iran. It’s also important because of the very troublesome relationship the US has had in the recent past with the IAEA, particularly under the George W. Bush administration (e.g. over whether the 2003 invasion of Iraq was really necessary), which actively campaigned against the re-election to the post in 2005 of Dr. ElBaradei.

Again, these days the main atomic trouble-spot is Iran (if only because, in North Korea’s case, the cat is already long out of the bag). So what is Amano’s view on the alleged Iranian ambitions for nuclear weapons? “I see no sort of indication of that in official IAEA documents” – that is, put him on the skeptics’ side (when even Dr. ElBaradei, in a recent interview with the BBC that the Volkskrant article cites, maintains that his “intuition” tells him that that is what the Iranians ultimately are pursuing). Amano’s attitude here will certainly go down rather poorly among most ranges of American public opinion but, again, it is the official attitude of the IAEA itself, i.e. of the impartial experts who are supposed to know (and whose expertise was blatantly ignored in the Bush Administration’s rush to war in 2003). For what it’s worth, it is also the long-held view of leading Middle East expert Juan Cole, who has also covered past American attempts to fool the IAEA into detecting an Iranian weapons threat by supplying it with forged evidence.

Don’t worry, we’re not talking here about Mir Hussein Mousavi: The Flemish daily De Standaard is now reporting that one of the three defeated candidates in the 12 June Iranian presidential election, Mohsen Rezaei, has now withdrawn his official complaint of “irregularities” in the conduct of that balloting, as announced today by the official Iranian news-agency IRNA. Rezaei is quoted thusly: “The political and social situation in the country and security have become more important than the election.”

Could this be a sign that the authorities have succeeded in quieting down the opposition and convincing the country to forget about that election, accept Ahmadinejad, and just go back to work? Probably not; Rezaei is identified in that Standaard article as the “conservative presidential candidate,” i.e. the one closest anyway to the current government establishment. Juan Cole implies that, in the true tally of the 12 June votes, he probably came in dead-last.

So now Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has made his long-awaited speech, on Friday, making it clear that any further street demonstrations would draw a ruthless crackdown by the security forces. And those further demonstrations, which nonetheless took place over the weekend, have duly resulted in pitched street-battles, with many among the protestors (and innocent by-standers) killed and wounded. What happens next?

Andreas Relster, writer for the Danish opinion newspaper Information, certainly has no idea. Still, at least he has that forum in which to raise the subject, and can resort to a strategy of canvassing the opinions of every Iran-expert out there whom he can get to respond to his inquiries. This is essentially the method behind his current piece, Iranian mirage. (more…)

The German press has lately also taken to covering events in Iran in a big way. First a couple of informative articles from the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, both from reporter Wolfgang Günter Lerch: here you’ll find a handy diagram (title: “Who has authority in Iran”) showing the formal structure of governmental power in Iran; helpfully, the most important Machtzentren, or “power-centers,” are outlined in red. They are, from left-to-right, the Guardian Council (twelve persons total, made up of six religious personnel and six jurists/legal experts); the Supreme Spiritual Leader, which is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (in English spelling); and the State President, which is still our good friend Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad. Then you also have this interesting article, entitled “Fragile state of many peoples,” about Iran’s ethnic and religious make-up. (If you visit, do be sure to click to check out the fantastic color-map at the upper-left.) We tend to think of Iran as Shiite and Persian/Farsi, but only the Shiite part is really true (90% of the population); the Persians make up only about 50%, followed by ten other ethnic groups, of which the Azeris are the next-largest. They are to be found in the northwest (near neighboring Azerbaijan, naturally), speak a different language that is close to Turkish, and boast a capital city, Tabriz, that is the home-town of presidential challenger Mir Hussein Musavi. (more…)

Fear not, all you thousands of EuroSavant fans, whether on Twitter, by RSS, or simply frequent direct visitors to the site! While I’m always on the look-out for news of quirky Euro-events that I can pass on to you (see, for example, immediately below), especially if they provide fertile breeding-ground for puns, I do also regularly treat the major news of the day when I can add to the discussion a new insight or perspective as gleaned from the European press.

As of this Sunday, the world’s burning news is of course the recent election in Iran, the apparent plot by the authorities in that country to steal it, and the people’s reaction thereto. Unfortunately, all of this is occurring so far over a weekend, which might be another dastardly trick by the current Tehran regime designed to limit take-up of the story by the regular European press, some parts of which do not work on Sunday at all (although there’s also word that the American MSM has been similarly slow off the starting-blocks). (more…)

Sorry, the Olympics get started today, but that doesn’t mean that EuroSavant coverage will be dominated by them. You wouldn’t want that anyway, no? . . .

One aspect of the ongoing crisis around the alleged attempts by the Iranian government to develop nuclear weapons that usually goes unexamined is the attitude of Arab states, especially those in Iran’s immediate neighborhood. (Well, it’s true that the vagaries of the Iraq-Iran relationship have certainly received their fair share of attention – but let’s treat that as a special case.) Sami Al Faraj, President of the Kuwait Centre for Strategic Studies (all I could find on the Net was this), gives an enlightening interview to Der Tagesspiegel about the Gulf state perspective on Iran (specifically, that of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia) in the article “Against Iran Much Harder Economic Sanctions Are Necessary”. (more…)

The proverbial fly-on-the-wall managed to give his report of the interesting discussions that took place last week in Davos, during the annual World Economic Forum gathering of the world’s movers-and-shakers that comes to a close tomorrow. That “fly” was one of the publishers of Germany’s Die Zeit, Dr. Josef Joffe, and the star of the show (actually, a private dinner) was the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi (whose name in German is apparently spelled “Charazi”). Joffe found that if he closed his eyes (and of course made allowance for the accent) he could just as well have been listening to George W. Bush or Condi Rice, as he writes in American-Iranian Unison.

The subject was tomorrow’s long-awaited (long-feared?) Iraqi general elections. And Kharazi was delighted about them. Not only that, but he was also glad to give the Bush administration props (strictly within what he thought was the limited scope of a private dinner party, you understand) for its grim determination that they were going to happen on 30 January 2005, and not a day later. Postponing them in any way, according to him, would have been a victory for the Baathists and the terrorists. (more…)

Princeton professor emeritus Bernard Lewis is awful smart about the Middle East, having made that the specialty of his entire scholarly life. How smart? Smart enough to already have a book out like What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East when the terrorists struck on September 11, 2001, and so made it a best-seller among those trying to fathom just what it is about that part of the world that would make human beings commit such acts.

Wolfgang G. Schwanitz of the German newspaper Die Welt popped by Princeton recently for a visit, and the resulting interview transcript appears today on the Die Welt website. The point Lewis makes in the conversation that Schwanitz picks out to be his teaser is interesting enough (the interview’s title is “Europe Will Be Islamic By the End of the Century”), although he advances it at the interview’s very end, almost as a throw-away, telling Schwanitz that demographic trends clearly indicate that Europe can look forward to becoming nothing more than an extension of Arab North Africa (the Maghreb) in a few decades’ time, and not any sort of world-counterweight to America.

But Lewis makes a number of other interesting points as well in the interview. (more…)

And now to the latest Iraq-related scandal. No, really: this one centers around the person of Ahmed Chalabi, of the Iraqi National Congress, long the Pentagon’s favorite anti-Saddam Iraqi exile, recipient of a monthly $335,000 payment from the (US) Defense Intelligence Agency, and, in return, the source of juicy intelligence from within the Hussein regime, most notably about its stocks of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The recent raid on Chalabi’s Baghdad house to seize computer records and documents, performed by Iraqi policemen under the protection of US soldiers, was a signal that perhaps this relationship is not so cozy anymore, something understandable given the record so far of those WMD actually turning up in practice. Now there is talk that Chalabi might have been an agent in the pay of Iran all along, feeding the Bush administration with the false information on Iraq that it wanted to hear as a justification to depose Hussein, while at the same time feeding his Iranian paymasters with truly exclusive top secret American intelligence information.

Yes, the suspicion is dawning that the United States might essentially have been hoodwinked into going to war against Iraq – and that officials at this administration’s highest levels might eventually have to answer charges of the unauthorized passing-on of choice information to their good comrade Chalabi, only to see it transferred right along to officials in Tehran. The broad outline of all this, at least, should be familiar by now to anyone who peruses the major American papers (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times) on a regular basis; I myself rather like the extensive account given here on the Parapundit weblog (and updated here). One interesting side-question that Parapundit’s Randall Parker raises is: How long before the rest of the world wakes up to the fact that, when it comes to international intrigue, we (i.e. the Americans) are nothing but “a bunch of country hick rubes”?

Well, the Danes probably are already aware of this, for one. (more…)

The current most-talked-about press-scoop about current conditions in the Middle East belongs to the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. A search on Google News indicates that scattered English-language periodicals have picked up on its eyebrow-raising report from last Saturday. (I first became aware of it via the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant.) As before, when Al Gore cited in a speech a damning interview about the Bush administration’s economic policies in Der Spiegel by top American economist George A. Akerlof, EuroSavant is glad to step in to assist its English-speaking audience. (more…)