Iran-west historic nuclear deal being sabotaged

[David Guyatt]

Zero surprises about this.

Iran nuclear deal under threat from 'dark forces', say Tehran's negotiators

Deputy foreign ministers hopeful of agreement by 20 July but warn of opposition from anti-Rouhani hardliners and Israel

• Simon Tisdall in Tehran
  
• theguardian.com, Tuesday 6 May 2014 15.41 BST
  
• Jump to comments (212)
  

Iranian deputy foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araqchi, one of its nuclear negotiators. He said Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, had 'invested a lot' in getting a deal. Photograph: Herbert Neubauer/EPA

Spoilers and "dark forces" are attempting to wreck efforts to clinch a historic compromise between Iran and the west on the country's nuclear programme, senior members of Iran's negotiating team have told the Guardian.
Speaking before a new round of expert-level talks, due to begin on Tuesday in New York, Seyed Abbas Araqchi, the deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, said Iran remained hopeful that a comprehensive agreement could be reached by the 20 July deadline.
But Araqchi, part of Iran's three-man lead negotiating team, warned that many pitfalls remained, including a chronic lack of trust between the US and Iran, a host of inter-related technical issues, and outside attempts to derail the process.
"There are spoilers everywhere who don't want an agreement, there are dark forces who don't like this process … It is clear some people don't want to resolve this issue in a peaceful and logical way," Araqchi said during an exclusive interview at the foreign ministry in Tehran.
"I don't want to use the word 'warmongers'. But these people want continuing tension, a continuing crisis in our region. They don't want the sanctions on Iran to end. They don't want Iran to be a major player in this region, although in fact it already is."
Araqchi did not name any country but his remarks appeared aimed at the Israeli government, which believes Iran is intent on covertly developingnuclear weapons a claim Tehran firmly denies. Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has been highly critical of the talks between Iran and the P5+1, the five permanent UN security council members plus Germany.
Araqchi noted that rightwing Republicans in the US Congress had opposed an interim agreement reached in Geneva last November that afforded Iran limited sanctions relief in return for slowing its nuclear programme. Congress must approve any final deal.
But he conceded that he and the other negotiators were under fire within Iran, where hardliners have condemned earlier concessions. "Obviously in Iran we have a pluralistic society. There are different ideas, different opinions, there are those who believe we should not negotiate at all.
"There are some people in the Majlis [parliament] who are very critical and we must answer to them. We should let all the voices be heard."
Araqchi said there was considerable pressure on the Iranian team to get an acceptable result. Although the atmosphere in the talks was friendly and constructive, carrying responsibility for the negotiations was "very stressful".
The two other team members are Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, and Majid Takht-Ravanchi, the deputy foreign minister for European and American affairs.
"We feel supported by the majority of the society. The political structure of the country supports us as a whole. That does not mean there is not criticism."
Araqchi said the talks were going in the right direction. "Whether it gets to a conclusion is something else. Obviously we are hopeful. For our part, we are very serious and we have goodwill. If the other side reciprocates, hopefully we will come to an end. But anything can happen."
He said the next top-level round of talks, due to begin in Vienna on 13 May, would be the most difficult part so far, because the parties had agreed to start writing a draft of a final agreement.
The many outstanding, highly complex technical issues were all linked, he said. The P5+1 countries did not always have a united position. And it was understood that nothing was agreed until everything was agreed. "We could get 95% agreement and the last 5% could ruin everything."
Araqchi said Iran's centrist president, Hassan Rouhani, was keen for a deal in order to end sanctions but the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, a religious conservative, was "not optimistic" agreement could be reached.
"Rouhani has invested a lot in this, he has raised expectations … But I think people understand the complexities of the situation. I don't think it would be a big blow to Rouhani if there is no agreement. People understand he has done his best."
Iranian insiders say that while Araqchi has the ear of the supreme leader and Zarif is Rouhani's right-hand man, Takht-Ravanchi, the third member of the team, is the brains behind the Iranian operation.
Speaking to the Guardian in his office in Tehran, Takht-Ravanchi said: "I am not pessimistic regarding a deal. We are doing our best to finish the job before 20 July." Extending the deadline was not ruled out, he said.
The Iranian government had to reassure domestic critics that a deal was in the nation's interests. For its part the Obama administration must ensure any agreement was fully implemented, including obtaining congressional approval.
"All the sanctions must be lifted if we are to have an agreement," he said. "It is up to them [the Americans and Europeans] to do their homework."
Ravanchi said apparent US attempts to introduce what Iran regards as irrelevant issues into the negotiations, such as human rights and Iran's long-range missile capabilities, could not be allowed and would not be discussed.
Asked whether the Ukraine crisis had strengthened Iran's hand by highlighting Europe's need for non-Russian oil and gas supplies, as some in Tehran believe, Ravanchi said the negotiators were focused solely on the nuclear issue.
"We have nothing else in mind. Naturally Iran and Europe could have much better cooperation on the economy, trade, energy. We believe there is much room for improvement."
Enmity between the US and Iran dating back to the 1979 revolution constantly overshadowed the talks and was hard to escape, Araqchi said. "We have tried to rebuild confidence but we have not been very successful … What we need now is wisdom and luck."

[Magda Hassan]

Heart of Empire, Six Questions May 6, 2014, 2:37 pm
Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare

Gareth Porter on the true history of Iran's nuclear program

By Andrew Cockburn




Gareth Porter. Photograph by Mike Chiaverina

In all the discussion of Iran's nuclear program, the consequent international economic blockade directed by the United States, and the ongoing negotiations to resolve the issue, Washington's official history of the program has rarely been challenged. In Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Books), award-winning investigative journalist Gareth Porter traces the true history of the program, as well as how and by whom the official narrative was constructed. I put six questions to Porter about his book.
1. Although the Iraqi nuclear "threat" was discredited as an utter fraud years ago, the idea that across the border Iran has sought, at least in the past, to build a nuclear weapon has long been widely accepted in political and media circles. Are you saying that the claim of secret work on nuclear weapons is equally fraudulent, and that the Iranians have never had a nuclear-weapons program?
Yes. In Manufactured Crisis, I show that the claim of an Iranian nuclear-weapons program has been based on false history and falsified records. The description of the Iranian nuclear program presented in official documents, in commentaries by think-tank "experts," and in the media bears no resemblance to the essential historical facts. One would never know from the narrative available to the public over the years that Iran had been prepared in the early 1980s to rely entirely on a French-based company for enriched uranium fuel for its Bushehr reactor, rather than on enriching uranium itself. Nor would one learn that the Reagan Administration sought to strangle Iran's nuclear program, which was admitted to have presented no proliferation threat, in its cradle by pressuring Germany and France to refuse to cooperate in any way. The significance of that missing piece of history is that Iran was confronted with a choice of submitting to the U.S. effort to deprive Iran of its right to a peaceful nuclear program under the Non-Proliferation Treaty or else acquiring its own enrichment capability.
Not surprisingly, the Iranians chose the latter course, and went to the black market in defiance of what was by that point a unilateral U.S. policy. Their decision is now described in the popular narrative as evidence that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons early on.
The other relevant historical reality that has been systematically excised from the story of the Iranian nuclear program is what happened in regard to chemical weapons during the IranIraq war. Contrary to disinformation issued by the U.S. Defense and State departments, which suggested that both sides had used chemical weapons in the Iraqi city of Halabja in 1988, the evidence is very clear that Iran never used chemical weapons during the war. The only explanation consistent with the historical record is that Ayatollah Khomeini forbade the use of such weapons, on the ground that both the possession and use of weapons of mass destruction are illicit under Islamic jurisprudence.
This policy, maintained despite the terrible losses Iran was suffering from Iraqi chemical attacks, represents powerful evidence that Shia jurisprudence is a fundamental constraint on Iranian policy toward weapons of mass destruction. It also makes credible the claim that Iran is forbidden by a fatwa from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei from possessing nuclear weapons. But senior Iranian officials, including a former president of Iran, Hashami Rafsanjani, have been making cogent arguments against nuclear weapons based on strategic grounds since the early 1990s.
2. The U.S. produced various items of evidence over the years to demonstrate the felonious intent of the Iranian program. Where did this evidence come from, and how well does it stand up to scrutiny?
The evidence adduced to prove that Iran secretly worked on nuclear weapons represents an even more serious falsification of intelligence than we saw in the run-up to the war in Iraq. I tell the real story behind a large collection of intelligence documents that appeared mysteriously in 2004 and have been crucial to the Iran nuclear narrative. They supposedly came from the purloined laptop of an Iranian participant in a nuclear-weapons research project, but a former senior official with the German foreign office told me the real story: the documents were provided to Germany's intelligence service by an occasional source who was part of the Iranian-exile terrorist organization Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK).
The obviously self-interested MEK member was thus the Iranian equivalent of the now-discredited Iraqi source known as "Curveball," whose tales of mobile bioweapons labs in Saddam's Iraq became the centerpiece of the Bush case for invading Iraq. It is well documented, however, that the Israeli Mossad was using the MEK to launder intelligence it didn't want attributed to Israel, with the aim of influencing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and foreign governments. Further pointing to the Israeli origins of the documents is the fact that Israel was the only country in the world known to have a special office responsible for influencing news coverage of Iran's nuclear program.
Some key points in the documents give away the fact that they were falsified. The most important example is a set of studies, supposedly done in 2002 and 2003 on the Shahab-3 missile's reentry vehicle, with the purported aim of allowing the missile to accommodate a nuclear weapon. Evidence from the U.S. intelligence community and authoritative independent sources shows that the Iranians had already abandoned the Shahab-3 by then, and were far along in developing an improved missile with a reentry vehicle that bore no resemblance to the one depicted in the studies. And we now know from Mohamed ElBaradei's 2011 memoirs that in 2009 Israel provided a new series of intelligence reports and documents to the IAEA that offered further claims of Iranian work on nuclear weapons both before and after 2003.
Those claims were ultimately published in an IAEA dossier of intelligence reports in November 2011. The most sensational assertion made there was that Iran had constructed a large metal cylinder for testing nuclear-weapons designs at its military-research base at Parchin in 2000. This led officials from the IAEA and some of its member states, including the United States, to charge that Iran was altering the site to eliminate evidence. But as I document in the book, Iran had allowed the IAEA to carry out inspections at ten sites of the agency's choosing on two different occasions in 2005. Furthermore the IAEA obtained satellite images of the site covering February 2005 to February 2012, and found no indication that Iran had been concerned about hiding anything. Finally, a former chief IAEA inspector in Iraq, Robert Kelley, has said that the agency's description of the alleged cylinder made no technical sense.
3. How did the IAEA end up endorsing the notion that the Iranians have had a covert bomb program in the past and may still have one today?
The IAEA was crucial in legitimizing claims of a covert Iranian nuclear-weapons program, because it was seen as a neutral actor. That image was largely the result of the independence of its former director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, from the Bush Administration. In 2005, when the IAEA received the documents that had come in through Germany's intelligence service, ElBaradei was deeply skeptical of their authenticity and warned publicly against using them as evidence in a case against Iran.
But his control over the Iran issue was eroded starting in 2008, when the head of the IAEA's Department of Safeguards, Olli Heinonen, began collaborating with U.S. officials on how to treat the documents. Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, when read against the background of 2008 IAEA reports, show that Heinonen and his Western allies came up with a strategy to falsely portray Iran as having conceded the authenticity of some of the documentation. Their aim was to justify IAEA demands for highly classified information on Iran's missile and conventional-weapons programs. When Iran predictably refused, the IAEA and a U.S.-led coalition cited this as evidence of a cover-up.
The IAEA came to play an even more partisan role after Yukia Amano of Japan replaced ElBaradei in November 2009. A WikiLeaks cable from July 2009 reveals that Amano promised U.S. officials he would be firmly in their camp on Iran in return for American support of his election as director general. "In their camp" could only have meant that he would support the publication of the intelligence dossier based entirely on intelligence reports and documents from Israel that ElBaradei had refused to authorize. The dossier's November 2011 publication date was timed to provide a political boost to the U.S.-led campaign for crippling international sanctions against Iran.
4. The U.S. intelligence community became a global laughingstock when its assessments of Iraqi WMDs were revealed as entirely bogus. Yet its pronouncements about the Iranian nuclear program are treated with deferential respect. How do you compare the performance of the U.S. intelligence community on Iran with its record on Iraq?
The same political and institutional dynamics drove both failures. The March 2005 RobbSilberman Commission Report cited analysts who worked on the Iraq WMD file as admitting freely that they had effectively reversed the burden of proof, refusing to believe that Iraq didn't have WMD unless a highly credible human source said otherwise.
The same thing happened on Iran. It began in 1991, when then CIA director Robert M. Gates singled out Iran as the premier assessment target for the agency's new center for proliferation issues. Not surprisingly, analysts immediately began interpreting even the most ambiguous evidence as indicating Iran's intention to develop nuclear weapons. This predisposition just happened to be in line with American policy of forbidding its allies from providing nuclear technology to Iran. In other words, the intelligence followed the policy, not the other way around.
CIA brass apparently went so far as to suppress WMD intelligence obtained by one of its best covert agents in the Middle East because it didn't fit the conclusion they knew George W. Bush's administration wanted. I reveal for the first time in the book that a former undercover operative who brought a lawsuit against CIA leadership in 2004 claimed that a highly respected source in Iran had told him in 2001 that Iran had no intention of "weaponizing" its nuclear program. The CIA apparently never informed the White House of that information, and refused to circulate it within the intelligence community.
National Intelligence Estimates in 2001 and 2005, and a draft estimate in mid-2007, all concluded that Iran had a nuclear-weapons program. Paul Pillar, a former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East who participated in the 2001 and 2005 exercises, has recalled that no hard evidence of weaponization informed either estimate, and that their conclusion was based on inference. In the 2005 estimate and the 2007 draft estimate, the conclusion was influenced by the intelligence documents that had come from Israel by way of the MEK. The failure of the CIA's well-staffed weapons-proliferation center to detect the fraud paralleled its failure to notice the obvious signs that the "Nigergate" document offered as evidence of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger was a rather amateurish fabrication.
The final 2007 NIE, which was issued in November, asserted that the 2005 NIE and the mid-2007 draft had both been dead wrong in their assertions that Iranian still had a nuclear-weapons program at the time of their writing. It concluded, rather, that based on intercepted "snippets of conversation," Iran had had a nuclear-weapons program as of 2003, then stopped it. This finding, which gave additional credibility to the official narrative of Iran's nuclear intentions, is itself highly questionable. It is very likely that the 2007 NIE authors interpreted evidence of one or more individuals' work as confirmation of the existence of a full-fledged program a belief in which they had clearly acquired a strong vested interest.
5. The news media generally disgraced itself in its coverage of the Iraqi nuclear issue. How has it comported itself with respect to Iran?
With Iraq, there was at least dissent over issues like its alleged illegal importation of aluminum tubes, which reflected debates within the intelligence community. Coverage of Iran, on the other hand, has been virtually unanimous in reporting the official line without the slightest indication of curiosity about whether it might be false or misleading. The closest we got to investigative work in the commercial media were hints, buried inside longer stories in the Washington Post, of skepticism in the intelligence community about the 2004 laptop documents.
Some of the most egregious misinformation came in late 2007 and early 2008, in stories in the New York Times and Washington Post about two IAEA reports containing the final results of a major agency investigation. Rather than reporting the fact that the agency had been unable to challenge any of Iran's explanations of the six issues under investigation, the Times and Post stories simply quoted Bush Administration officials and an unnamed IAEA official as dismissing the Iranian responses.
When the media challenged the official line, it was only because that line wasn't hawkish enough. David Sanger of the New York Times carried out a relentless campaign in innumerable articles after the 2007 NIE attacking its conclusion that Iran had ceased work on nuclear weapons in 2003.
6. What impact do you believe the essentially unquestioned acceptance of this fraudulent nuclear narrative is likely to have on negotiations with Iran and beyond?
It creates serious obstacles. For one, it makes the Obama Administration much more vulnerable to the arguments of Israel and its followers in Washington that Iran cannot be allowed to have any enrichment capacity. But then, the administration itself has absorbed the essential elements of the narrative into its own analysis, notably via the creation of the "breakout" concept.
"Breakout" is defined as the time it would take Iran to enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade level to allow it to construct a single nuclear bomb. But it was a bogus idea from the beginning, because it assumed that Iran had the desire to rush-build a nuclear weapon. Furthermore it was based on highly unlikely worst-case scenarios for very rapid Iranian enrichment of uranium to a level sufficient for a bomb. According to the worst-case scenarios conjured up by conservative U.S. think tanks and others promoting the myth, Iran has had the same theoretical capacity for breakout a month or two since 2010. But rather than racing for a bomb, it has instead converted much of the uranium it enriched to a concentration of 20 percent uranium-235 (the enrichment level that has most worried the United States) to an oxide form that makes it unavailable for enrichment to weapons-grade level.
Nevertheless, the Obama Administration has been so intimidated by the breakout drumbeat that it has now adopted a policy of limiting Iran's breakout period to between six and twelve months. That translates into a demand that Iran agree to be stripped of 80 percent of its centrifuges, which is all but certain to ensure the breakdown of the talks. Unless the administration changes its posture which became less likely after it publicly cited that goal as a baseline fear-mongering propagandists may well succeed in pushing the United States into a situation of increased tension with Iran, including the possible mutual escalation of military threats. That, of course, would be the result that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long sought.
http://harpers.org/blog/2014/05/manufact...ear-scare/

[Magda Hassan]

Now that the US and Iran now have a shared interest, for a while at least, in Iraq things are moving along rapidly in these talks....

Burns to join Iran nuclear talks in Vienna

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Laura Rozen


US Deputy Secretary of State Williams Burns will join talks between Iran and the P5+1 in Vienna on Monday, a US official told Al Monitor.
Burns was seen by Al-Monitor on the plane Sunday traveling with the US delegation, led by Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, to Vienna from Washington.
Burns previously led secret US bilateral talks with Iran last fall. But last week the State Department announced that he and Sherman were co-leading the US team to bilateral talks with Iran in Geneva in order to break what is reportedly has been a deadlock in the negotiations.
As negotiators intensify efforts to reach a final nuclear accord by July 20, the US bilateral and p5+1 nuclear negotiating teams seem to have merged, as the US Iran contacts on a nuclear deal become less secret.
Burns, when he traveled to Oman for secret nuclear talks with Iran last fall, reportedly traveled on an unmarked US government plane. But he, Sherman and their team were seen Sunday at the Washington Dulles airport business lounge awaiting their flight to Vienna, with little apparent attempt at hiding his presence.

http://backchannel.al-monitor.com/index....in-vienna/

[Lauren Johnson]

Now that the US and Iran now have a shared interest, for a while at least, in Iraq things are moving along rapidly in these talks....

Burns to join Iran nuclear talks in Vienna

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Laura Rozen


US Deputy Secretary of State Williams Burns will join talks between Iran and the P5+1 in Vienna on Monday, a US official told Al Monitor.
Burns was seen by Al-Monitor on the plane Sunday traveling with the US delegation, led by Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, to Vienna from Washington.
Burns previously led secret US bilateral talks with Iran last fall. But last week the State Department announced that he and Sherman were co-leading the US team to bilateral talks with Iran in Geneva in order to break what is reportedly has been a deadlock in the negotiations.
As negotiators intensify efforts to reach a final nuclear accord by July 20, the US bilateral and p5+1 nuclear negotiating teams seem to have merged, as the US Iran contacts on a nuclear deal become less secret.
Burns, when he traveled to Oman for secret nuclear talks with Iran last fall, reportedly traveled on an unmarked US government plane. But he, Sherman and their team were seen Sunday at the Washington Dulles airport business lounge awaiting their flight to Vienna, with little apparent attempt at hiding his presence.

http://backchannel.al-monitor.com/index....in-vienna/

This has to be on the prime suspect list for the reasons for missing the ISIS invasion -- the creation of an enemy that brings former enemies together. How's that for a narrative.

[Magda Hassan]

Well, interesting timing with ISIS and all that...I expect the Iran nuclear matter will be green lighted in this case as well. They can always turn Iran back into the 'axis of evil' when they are done with them and Iran has served its purpose.

UK plans to reopen embassy in Tehran as relations with Iran ease

By Laura Smith-Spark, CNN
June 17, 2014 -- Updated 1317 GMT (2117 HKT)



Protesters prepare to break in to the British Embassy on November 29, 2011 in Tehran, Iran.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Foreign Secretary William Hague: "Iran is an important country in a volatile region"
  
• "The circumstances are right to reopen our embassy in Tehran," Hague tells lawmakers
  
• The embassy in Tehran was closed after an attack on the site by protesters in 2011
  
• Britain also shut the Iranian Embassy in London and ordered all Iranian diplomats to leave
  

London (CNN) -- Foreign Secretary William Hague announced plans Tuesday for the United Kingdom to reopen its embassy in Tehran, Iran, which has been closed since an attack by protesters in 2011 triggered a dramatic breakdown in relations.
Hague's announcement to Parliament follows a series of steps taken by both nations in recent months to improve ties.
In a written statement to lawmakers, he said that, given the progress made, "I have therefore now decided the circumstances are right to reopen our embassy in Tehran.
"There are a range of practical issues that we will need to resolve first. However it is our intention to reopen the Embassy in Tehran with a small initial presence as soon as these practical arrangements have been made."
Hague said his two chief concerns in making the decision had been whether UK Embassy staff would be safe and secure, and whether they would be able to work "without hindrance."
He added, "There has never been any doubt in my mind that we should have an embassy in Tehran if the circumstances allowed. Iran is an important country in a volatile region, and maintaining embassies around the world, even under difficult conditions, is a central pillar of the UK's global diplomatic approach."

The assault by student protesters on the UK Embassy and a separate diplomatic compound in Tehran in November 2011 prompted outrage in the United Kingdom and led Britain to close the embassy's doors and withdraw all its staff from Iran.
Britain also closed the Iranian Embassy in London and ordered all Iranian diplomats to leave.
The protest in Tehran was sparked by anger at UK sanctions imposed against Iranian institutions over Iran's nuclear program. The embassy buildings should have been guarded by Iranian security officers.

Since the election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani last year, there's been a more positive tone to Iran's interactions with the West.
That relationship has taken on a new significance in light of the current crisis in Iraq, where Sunni militants have seized vast swaths of territory.
Iran, a majority Shiite nation, is an ally of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shia-led government and has said it would provide help if asked.
The United States, whose formal relations with Iran ended after the 1979 takeover of its embassy there, now faces the politically unpalatable option of cooperating with Tehran to stop gains by the militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The United States and Iran held "very brief discussions" about Iraq and the threat posed by ISIS in Vienna, Austria, on Monday, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.
Deputy Secretary of State William Burns is in Vienna for nuclear talks with Iran.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/17/world/...n-embassy/

[David Guyatt]

Yes, I had to smile when I heard this on the news yesterday.

Maybe we should redefine the word diplomacy to duplicity, as that is what it really is.

[Magda Hassan]

Another interesting article from the Guardian being fed something from their friends in high/low places. Diplomatic sources have told them Washington has lost confidence in Maliki. Well, that's nice. And the Iranians get to have a say in who gets elected in Iraq by giving their list of acceptable candidates for any upcoming Iraqi election.

Iraqis raise questions over army's collapse as jihadi advance slows

Several theories spread about why a force touted as the best trained and armed in the Arab world folded in contested region

• Martin Chulov in Baghdad and Fazel Hawramy in Irbil
  
  
• The Guardian, Wednesday 18 June 2014 04.53 AEST
  
• Jump to comments (54)
  

Members of the Kurdish security forces stand at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Kirkuk. Photograph: Reuters

Last Wednesday, a day after Islamist fighters surged south towards Baghdad, an Iraqi officer in the town of Jalula heard tyres crunch on the gravel near his window and stepped outside to investigate.
A convoy of Kurdish military vehicles disgorged dozens of troops, known as peshmerga, who told him they had come to take over his base, 80 miles north-east of the Iraqi capital, and seize its weapons. The Kurds were a long way from home, having driven 220 miles south from Irbil, deep into a region that for decades has been fiercely contested by the Kurdish north and the rest of Arab Iraq.

The officer checked the Kurds' request with his superiors, who told him to comply. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing," he said. "The division commanders told us to leave."

Similar scenes were repeated at bases and outposts across the disputed areas of the north and in the K1 base west of Kirkuk, which was also in the midst of a historic changing of the guard. The extraordinary events were the final curtain for Iraq's army a force that has spent billions on equipment and training and was touted as the best trained and armed military force in the Arab world.
In just three days, the army had simply folded as first the jihadist insurgents and then the Kurds rode into town. Its soldiers returned to their homes and its weapons were carted away, either by the peshmerga or the jihadists, depending on who got there first.
The army's collapse signalled a sudden and dramatic shift in the balance of power between Kurds, Sunnis and Shia. The significance of that shift has been obscured by a week of bloodshed and uncertainty. But as the jihadi advance has slowed, questions are being asked across Baghdad about how a region so central to the bitter feud between Iraq's Kurds and Arabs was so easily surrendered.
One scenario, given widespread credence, is that the three Iraqi generals responsible for Mosul, Tikrit, and Kirkuk simply didn't want to fight for a state that wasn't working. Another is that the Iraqi troops quickly realised they were no match for battle-hardened and ideologically motivated jihadis heading their way.
A third theory is that giving the Kurds the crown jewel of Kirkuk capital of a region with huge oil reserves would be the first step in a set of carefully choreographed moves to reframe relations between Baghdad and the Kurds and drag the dysfunctional country from a state of permanent chaos. Central to this theory is the reality that the Kurds had long ago lost faith in prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's ability to serve either their interests or those of Iraq.
Few of Iraq's Shia majority had much enthusiasm for the embattled leader, whose coalition won more seats than any other group in general elections seven weeks ago but nowhere near enough to secure a mandate. The result was sure to be many months of political stagnation.

Iran, weighed down in Syria and also disenchanted with Maliki, would not have cherished the prospect of its regional interests being threatened further by more political drift in Baghdad.
Maliki seems to have next to no chance of forming a government. Diplomatic sources have confirmed to the Guardian in recent days that Washington has also lost faith in its former ally. Iran is yet to declare its hand, but has told Iraqi politicians that it has a list of four acceptable candidates to form a government: Maliki; the former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari; Adel Abdul Mahdi, a senior political figure; or the former US ally and deputy prime minister Ahmed Chalabi.

Of the four, Chalabi has the support of many Kurdish leaders and has strong links to Iran. His links to Washington were severed more than a decade ago, after he helped persuade the Pentagon to invade Iraq. His return to political centre stage would be a remarkable twist in the contentious history of the former favourite of George W Bush.
"Maliki had no idea this was going to happen," said an Iraqi politician. "He was blindsided. But others weren't."
Officers with Kurdish and Iraqi units say they are still trying to fathom what took place in the north why the army was told to stand down, and who ultimately called the shots. A Kurdish secret police officer in Kirkuk said Iraqi officers started to flee the day before the city fell. By then, Islamic insurgents had taken Tikrit and Mosul and were on the move east. "We saw many Iraqi officers from Kirkuk mainly Arabs leaving the K1 base [the largest in northern Iraq]," he said. "We asked them why they were leaving when they were on alert. They all said they had orders from their superiors. The officers were leaving from afternoon until midnight.
"The following day … when we asked them why they were leaving they said their officers had left the base and switched off their telephones."
Shakhawan, a peshmerga fighter, said: "The night before [10 June] two Iraqi army outposts abandoned their positions in Kirkuk and we immediately moved in. A few days ago, my cousin who is also in the peshmerga saw an Iraqi army officer who came back to K1 because he had left some official documents.
"The officer was so overwhelmed when he saw the state of the base that he started crying. He said they had orders from their superiors to abandon the base."
Three other Iraqi soldiers told similar stories. All had asked for answers from their superiors, but said they were starting to believe that the questions would be better answered by politicians in Baghdad, the Kurdish north - or Tehran.
"This will all be sorted out sooner than most people think," a senior Iraqi official said. "And clarity will emerge from the mist of last week."
This article was amended on 18 June 2014. The original version wrongly stated that Islamic insurgents had taken Kirkuk and Mosul, instead of Tikrit and Mosul. This has been corrected.

[Magda Hassan]

Iran TV Shows off Allegedly Downed Israeli Drone

TEHRAN, Iran Aug 25, 2014, 6:22 AM ET
By NASSER KARIMI Associated Press








Iran's state TV on Monday broadcast footage purported to show an Israeli drone the country's Revolutionary Guard claimed to have shot down over the weekend near an Iranian nuclear site.
The brief video, aired on the Arabic-language Al-Alam TV, shows what the channel says are parts of the drone, scattered in an unidentified desert area.
A scroll accompanying the footage says the drone was downed on Saturday and identifies it as a Hermes 450, a known Israeli model. The Iranian TV also says the model is dubbed "Spy Goddess."
However, there were no visible Israeli markings in the footage and Israel's military has declined comment on the matter. Calls by The Associated Press to Iranian officials for details on the drone were not immediately returned. The aircraft was not shown to foreign media.
The incident comes as Iran negotiates with world powers over its controversial nuclear program and Iranian hard-liners press moderate President Hassan Rouhani to demand more concessions before limiting the country's atomic capabilities. Israel has not ruled out taking military action against Iran's nuclear facilities if its capability to build an atomic weapon progresses.
The West suspects Iran's nuclear program is geared toward building a nuclear weapon. Iran denies the charge, saying its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes only, such as power generation and medical research.
The Guard statement on Sunday said its forces fired a missile as the drone neared Iran's uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, some 240 kilometers (150 miles) south of the capital, Tehran, without providing more details.
On Monday, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Guard's airspace division, insisted that the drone was Israeli, though he said its last flight did not originate in Israel.
Hajizadeh said the drone's range was about 800 kilometers (500 miles) and that it had two front and side cameras capable of providing high-resolution panoramic imaging. Israel is about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) away from Iran's westernmost boundary and Natanz is about 600 kilometers (370 miles) inland from the closest border point in Iran.
"The operational range of the drone indicates it did not start its flight in Israel but departed from a country in the region," he said, adding cryptically, "We have some clues."
Iran's nuclear program has been the target of espionage and sabotage efforts in the past. In 2010, the so-called Stuxnet virus temporarily disrupted operation of thousands of centrifuges, key components in nuclear fuel production, at Natanz.
Iran says it and other computer virus attacks are part of a concerted effort by Israel, the U.S. and their allies to undermine its nuclear program through covert operations. Israel has never commented on the allegations but is widely believed to have been involved in the Stuxnet attack.
Since then, Iran has also said that it discovered tiny timed explosives planted on centrifuges but disabled them before they could go off.
On Monday, Asghar Zarean deputy head of Iran's atomic department, told the semi-official ISNA news agency that some of the malware discovered over the past month had targeted a nuclear facility that went online over the weekend.
He was likely referring to the plant in the central city of Isfahan inaugurated on Saturday. Under an interim nuclear deal with the world powers, the facility will convert a type of uranium into a material that cannot be used to make nuclear weapons.
"It's obvious to us that countries like Germany, France and Britain under leadership of the United States are involved in efforts to disturb our activities," said Zarean.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wire...e-25102259