Tony Blair: West must prepare to use force against Iran

22 January 2011 | 16:33 Code : 10075 General category

Haaretz--As six world powers enter second day of talks with Iran in Istanbul the former U.K. prime minister warns that Iran is a ’looming and coming challenge’ who is ’against our way of life.’

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Friday that the West should be prepared to confront Iran with force in order to face the "looming and coming challenge" from the Islamic republic, French news agency AFP reported.

"It [Iran] has to be confronted and changed. Iran is a looming challenge. It is negative and destabilizing. It supports terrorists," Blair, who currently serves as the Quartet envoy to the Middle East said at the Chilcot inquiry, the U.K. inquiry into the war in Iraq.

Tony Blair: West must prepare to use force against Iran

As six world powers enter second day of talks with Iran in Istanbul the former U.K. prime minister warns that Iran is a ’looming and coming challenge’ who is ’against our way of life.’

"I say this to you with all of the passion I possibly can -- at some point the West has to get out of what I think is a wretched policy or posture of apology for believing that we are causing what the Iranians are doing, or what these extremists are doing," the Quartet envoy said, adding that "we have to get our head out of the sand. They disagree fundamentally with our way of life and will carry on unless met with determination and, if necessary, force."

Blair, who regularly visits the Middle East as the Quartet envoy, said that he could see the "impact and the influence of Iran everywhere."

Blair’s comments came as Iran began talks in Istanbul with six world powers over its disputed nuclear program.

World powers enter a second and final day of talks with Iran on Saturday, having made scant progress toward persuading the Islamic Republic to curb its nuclear program on the first day of the meeting in Istanbul.

There was some relief that Iran was ready to continue, as diplomats expressed concern that talks could have collapsed on the first day as both sides dug in around old positions. Continued…

Iran’s enrichment now more efficient’

Press TV--The Federation of American Scientists says Iran is enriching uranium more efficiently than before despite US and Israeli claims that Iran’s drive to master the nuclear fuel cycle is losing steam.

The Washington-based Federation of American Scientists released a study on its website on Friday assessing Iran’s nuclear industry in 2010.
The report said that the centrifuges at Iran’s main uranium enrichment plant in Natanz became more efficient last year.
It also noted that Iran’s enrichment capacity witnessed considerable growth in 2010 compared to the previous years.

"The growth in enrichment capacity from 2009 to 2010 is greater than from 2008 to 2009," author Ivanka Barzashka wrote, adding that the calculations were made based on data provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Contrary to statements by US officials and many experts, the report asserts that Iran clearly is not slowing down its efforts to master the nuclear fuel cycle, saying, “It has a greater enrichment capacity and seems to be more efficient at enrichment.”
The report was issued on the first day of comprehensive talks between Iran and the representatives of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany in the Turkish city of Istanbul.
Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and thus has the right to enrich uranium to produce fuel.
And the IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence showing that Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been diverted to nuclear weapons production.

Iran nuclear talks enter final day, little to show

Reuters- World powers enter a second and final day of talks with Iran on Saturday, having made scant progress toward persuading the Islamic Republic to curb its nuclear program on the first day of the meeting in Istanbul.

There was some relief that Iran was ready to continue, as diplomats expressed concern that talks could have collapsed on the first day as both sides dug in around old positions.

The West suspects that Iran plans to develop a nuclear weapon and negotiators went into the Istanbul meeting with low expectations for any breakthrough in the eight-year-old stand-off. Tehran says its atomic energy program is peaceful.

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is the lead negotiator for the big powers -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany.

"She seems to have had some success in trying narrow the gaps and the Iranians seem to be responding positively to her," a Western diplomat said.

Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili also met separately with heads of the Russian and Chinese delegations, but it was uncertain whether he would agree to meet Under-Secretary for Political Affairs Bill Burns, the head of the U.S. team.

"We are fully prepared to have a conversation with Iran, but whether it will happen remains to be seen," U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in Washington.

Burns and Jalili met on the sidelines of an earlier round of talks in Geneva in 2009, but such contacts have been rarely confirmed by the Iranian side and usually have taken place behind the scenes since the fall of the U.S.-backed shah in Iran in 1979.

Early on during Friday’s sessions, an Iranian delegate said Iran refused to discuss any suspension of its uranium enrichment activities during the Istanbul talks.

Iran has ignored Security Council resolutions demanding it suspend enrichment, with trade and other benefits offered in return, and refused to grant unfettered access for U.N. nuclear inspectors.

Uranium enriched to a low degree yields fuel for electricity or, if refined to a very high level, the fissile core of a nuclear bomb.

Iran’s nuclear standoff with the West has escalated in the past year, with the United Nations imposing new sanctions and Western states rejecting a revised proposal for Iran to swap some of its fuel abroad as too little, too late.

Ashton outlined a possible revised offer for a nuclear fuel swap that would entail Iran handing over a large chunk of its stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU). But no offer was made as Iran’s preconditions included a suspension of economic sanctions, a Western diplomat said.

The big powers are looking for some gesture from Iran that would demonstrate serious intent to engage and form the basis for a next round of talks.

They are prepared to revise 2009 proposals for a swap, whereby Iran would exchange some of its LEU for highly processed fuel to keep a
Tehran reactor that makes medical isotopes running

Al Sadr returns to Iran from Iraq
GulfNews--Al Sadr returned to the holy Iraqi shrine city of Najaf on January 5 after four years of self-imposed exile in Iran. Najaf: Radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr has returned to Iran after having only arrived in Iraq around two weeks ago, two senior officials within his movement said on Saturday. "He left Iraq on Thursday to go back to Iran," an aide to the firebrand cleric told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity. "That’s all we can tell you." Another senior official within the movement, who also did not want to be named, confirmed that Al Sadr left on Thursday for Iran, but neither official would comment on the reasons for the cleric’s departure. Al Sadr returned to the holy Iraqi shrine city of Najaf on January 5 after four years of self-imposed exile in Iran, with a source in his movement at the time saying he was not visiting but had come to stay. Shortly afterwards he called on his supporters to resist the US "occupation" by all means. He had left Iraq at the end of 2006 or early in 2007, according to US and Iraqi officials, and had reportedly been pursuing religious studies in the Iranian holy city of Qom. The fiery, controversial Al Sadr gained widespread popularity among Shiites in the months after the 2003 US-led invasion, and his Mahdi Army militia later battled American and Iraqi government forces in several bloody confrontations. However, in August 2008, Al Sadr suspended the activities of the Mahdi Army, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, after major US and Iraqi assaults on its strongholds in Baghdad and southern Iraq in the spring.

30 years after the Iran hostage crisis, we’re still fighting Reagan’s war

Washington Post--Thirty years ago, 52 American diplomats, intelligence officers and Marines were finally released after being held hostage for nearly 15 months at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Americans saw it as the end of a long national nightmare. Iranians saw it as a successful phase in what the Pentagon would come to call the Long War.

We were wrong; they were right.

On the face of it, the Iranians achieved what they wanted. President Jimmy Carter had labored with key advisers through the last night of his presidency, desperately trying to bring about the hostages’ release before Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 40th president. The Iranians, though, were determined to humiliate our 39th president and were not about to free the captives on Carter’s watch.

As the television networks began their Inauguration Day coverage, the expected moment of release became the theme. TV screens were split to accommodate parallel images from Washington and Tehran. Just outside the Iranian capital, camera crews were taken to Mehrabad International Airport, where the soon-to-be-former hostages would board their flight to freedom.

At ABC News, where I worked at the time, one of our camera crews had been granted access to the Oval Office the previous night. We had video of Carter, looking grim and exhausted, wearing a cardigan, consulting with his aides until, quite literally, it was time to dress for the inauguration of his successor. Those images and live shots of desperate diplomacy, followed by the stately run-up to the transfer of power in Washington, played on one side of the screen. The preparations for departure from Mehrabad played on the other.

The Iranians stage-managed the drama down to the last second. Precisely at noon, just as Reagan began to recite the oath of office, the planeload of Americans was permitted to take off. The Iranians’ message was blunt and unambiguous: Carter and his administration had been punished for America’s sins against Iran, and Reagan was being offered a conciliatory gesture in anticipation of improved behavior by Washington.

That was hardly the interpretation that the Reagan administration put on the event. The new president portrayed the hostage release as a long-overdue act by which the Iranians acknowledged the obvious: There was a new sheriff in town. The feckless days of the Carter administration were over, and the Iranian mullahs had bowed to the inevitable. Indeed, the administration seemed to be saying that Iran’s greatest concern was now the possibility of U.S. retaliation for the humiliation of the preceding 444 days.

That last point probably was a part of Iran’s strategic calculus. Iran was not then, and is not now, any military match for the United States. Without the American hostages in Tehran, Iran was plainly vulnerable to U.S. power.

Further complicating its position, since September 1980, Iran had been fighting a massive invasion by the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein, the beginnings of a bloody war that would last most of the decade. The United States officially proclaimed neutrality - Henry Kissinger famously observed that it was a shame both nations couldn’t lose - but Washington considered Iran the greater threat and covertly assisted Hussein.

Once the hostages were released, however, no reprisal came, and the Iranian leadership offered no evidence of wanting to reconcile. Continued…