Report: France to send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan

Associated Press

March 22, 2008 at 9:20 AM EDT

LONDON — A British newspaper says French President Nicolas Sarkozy plans to announce next week that France will send 1,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

London's The Times newspaper cites unnamed senior ministers as saying Mr. Sarkozy wants to demonstrate his commitment to the NATO alliance's Afghan mission during his two-day visit to London, which begins Friday.

One minister is quoted as saying Britain's Defence Ministry has made a working assumption Mr. Sarkozy will announce that “slightly more than 1,000 troops” are to be deployed to eastern Afghanistan.

Canada recently pledged to extend its mission in the dangerous southern region of Kandahar to 2011, on the condition that its NATO allies provide an additional 1,000 troops in the region.

The refusal of key European allies such as Germany, Italy and Spain to send forces to join Canada, Britain, the U-S and the Netherlands who are leading the fight in the south has led to months of ugly infighting within NATO.

France is widely expected to boost its role in Afghanistan beyond the 1,900 soldiers current there at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, on April 2-4. However, it's not yet clear whether the French soldiers will be sent to the south.

British and French defence ministries and the presidential Elysee Palace declined to comment on the report when contacted Saturday.

France Adds Nuclear Sub and Vows to Cut Warheads

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS — Dedicating France’s fourth nuclear-armed submarine, President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday defended his country’s arsenal as vital to deter a range of new threats, including the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran with intercontinental missiles.

“The security of Europe is at stake,” he said, conflating the Continent’s interests with those of France.

“Countries in Asia and the Middle East are rapidly developing ballistic capacities,” he said. “I am thinking in particular of Iran,” which is “increasing the range of its missiles while serious suspicions weigh on its nuclear program.”

Mr. Sarkozy, stung by defeats in local elections in some large French cities, stuck to traditional presidential themes of national security and defense. His sudden divorce and remarriage, and his tendency to flit from one scheme to another, have made him seem slightly unserious, contributing to his party’s losses.

His mood on Friday was somber, as he inaugurated a new generation of nuclear submarine of the “Triomphant” class, this one named Le Terrible, which could be best translated as The Fearsome. It will be equipped with a new, nuclear-tipped missile, the M-51, whose range is secret but is understood, according to Le Monde, to be some 4,970 miles, able to reach Asia.

Clearly trying to balance nuclear modernization with gestures toward a European population more interested in eliminating nuclear weapons than improving them, Mr. Sarkozy said France would continue to reduce the number of warheads on airplanes, bringing its total nuclear force to fewer than 300 warheads, half the number during the cold war.

The actual number of warheads France possesses is secret. This year, the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks nuclear arsenals, said France had 348 warheads — 288 on submarines, 50 on air-launched cruise missiles and 10 bombs.

Mr. Sarkozy also called for all nuclear powers to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, as France had done, and he proposed talks on a treaty banning nuclear-armed short- and medium-range ground-to-ground missiles, a category that includes Scud-type missiles, and an idea likely to go nowhere in a world of Hezbollah, Hamas and the like. He also called for an immediate moratorium on the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons and a treaty banning its production, similar to an American proposal of 2006.

Mr. Sarkozy has been criticized, especially by Germany, for leaping ahead without consultation with European allies on major initiatives, like the “Mediterranean Union,” a looser grouping than the European Union and modified after Berlin’s protests. On Friday, he offered a “dialogue” on the role of French nuclear weapons in Europe’s collective defense.

“Regarding Europe, it is a fact that France’s nuclear forces by their very existence are a key element in its security,” he said. “Let’s together draw the logical conclusions: I propose to begin, with those of our European partners who wish to, an open dialogue on the role of deterrence and its contribution to our common security.”

Britain also has nuclear weapons, the main reason that Britain and France remain permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Neither country has been willing to cede its seat to the European Union. The United States provides most of Europe’s nuclear deterrence through NATO and its doctrine of collective defense.

At the same time, Mr. Sarkozy described the French “force de frappe” as a weapon of self-defense. He was vaguer about France’s national interests than his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who made a similar speech in January 2006, in which he appeared to broaden the list.

Then, Mr. Chirac delivered an unexpected and controversial warning to “rogue” states sponsoring terrorism by threatening to use nuclear weapons against any state that supported attacks on his country or considered using unconventional weapons.

“The leaders of states who use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would consider using, in one way or another, weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and adapted response on our part,” Mr. Chirac said. “This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind.”

Mr. Sarkozy, an aide told Le Monde, wanted to “return to the ‘fundamentals’ ” of deterrence.

European powers drop bid to push resolution against Iran

The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

VIENNA: Facing objections by Russia, China and developing nations, European powers abandoned on Tuesday an attempt to introduce a resolution on Iran's nuclear defiance at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Western diplomats said.

Opponents felt a resolution against Iran would be superfluous a day after the UN Security Council toughened sanctions on Iran and could provoke a Tehran to reduce, not increase, cooperation with UN inspectors, they said.

"The board doesn't need to compete with the Security Council," said an Asian diplomat on the 35-nation governing board of the IAEA. Almost half the governors are from developing nations.

Britain, France and Germany scrapped the resolution after concluding that their goals had been achieved by the Security Council and there was no point risking a schism among UN nuclear policy makers that Iran might exploit, Western diplomats added.

"Iran thought it could manipulate the IAEA to avoid a Security Council resolution while moving forward to develop its uranium enrichment capability," Gregory Schulte, U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, told reporters.

"As the resolution adopted yesterday in New York shows, Iran clearly failed. In fact what the resolution does from a Vienna perspective is to underscore that Iran's file remains open and to fully support the IAEA in its continuing investigation of outstanding issues, particularly with respect to weaponization."

In Tehran, the government rejected the resolution imposing new sanctions as "worthless" and vowed to move ahead with its uranium enrichment program.

"This resolution is contrary to the spirit and articles of the International Atomic Energy Agency," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Muhammad Ali Hosseini, according to the official press agency IRNA.

"It has been issued based on political motivations and a biased approach. It is worthless and unacceptable."

He said the sanctions would "have no impact on the resolve and determination of the Iranian nation and government to fulfill its legitimate rights in continuing its peaceful nuclear activities within the framework of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."

Iran has pursued a uranium-enrichment program it says is meant only to generate electricity. But its history of nuclear secrecy and continued curbs on IAEA inspections stoke fears it could turn enrichment technology to yielding nuclear arms.

In imposing more far-reaching sanctions by a 14-to-0 vote, the Security Council cited Iran's defiance of demands to suspend enrichment, failure to fully explain past nuclear activity and continued restrictions on IAEA inspections.

The third round of sanctions approved Monday orders a freeze on assets of more Iranian officials and companies with links to the country's nuclear and missile program, and for the first time bans trade with Iran in some goods with both civilian and military uses.

Last week the IAEA's chief of nonproliferation safeguards presented to board diplomats detailed intelligence suggesting Iran had tried to "weaponize" nuclear materials.

He revealed diagrams, slides and video, much of them from a laptop removed from Iran by a defector, indicating administrative links between projects to process uranium, test high explosives and modify a missile cone for a nuclear payload.

The IAEA director, Mohamed ElBaradei, opening the weeklong governors session Monday, pressed Iran to cooperate with the agency inquiry into the allegations, signaling the IAEA would not take Tehran's flat denials for a final answer.

Iran's ambassador to the IAEA repeated on Tuesday that Tehran would have nothing more to do with the inquiry and would never suspend its nuclear program, but would keep its declared enrichment sites under IAEA monitoring despite the new sanctions.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh noted that ElBaradei had certified Iran had resolved six outstanding questions about its past nuclear activity and said arms studies did not count because they were "fabrications" of Iran's chief foe, the United States.

"The alleged studies were thoroughly reviewed in two rounds of talks, and we gave our final assessment," he told reporters invited to a slide presentation held to counter the IAEA one last week.

"The issue is over."

He offered no substance in the presentation, entitled "A Short Glance at Iran's Peaceful Nuclear Activities," to refute the intelligence material.

Iran: As Tensions Rise, So Does Rhetoric

By Jeffrey Donovan

September 28, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- To any reader of the English-language blogosphere, September appeared destined to be the month of the Iran war media blitz.

A first sign of an impending war of words over Iran came in late August. In an Internet blog, professor Barnett Rubin, a highly respected authority on Afghanistan at New York University, said a Bush administration insider told him there would be an "Iran war rollout" in the media in September.

Yet it was in Paris, not Washington, that perhaps the first salvo in the war of words with Iran was fired -- a drumbeat of rising rhetoric over the last month that Admiral William Fallon, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, has called "not helpful" and "not useful."

On August 27, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking to a group of French diplomats, called a nuclear-armed Iran "unacceptable." He added: "I underline France's full determination to support the alliance's current policy of increasing sanctions, but also to remain open if Iran makes the choice to fulfill its obligations. This policy is the only one that will allow us to escape an alternative, which I consider to be catastrophic. Which alternative? An Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

Iran Media Blitz

As if on cue, the language of U.S. President George W. Bush, speaking the very next day, also took a confrontational turn toward Tehran.

"Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust," Bush told a gathering of U.S. war veterans. "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late."

Publicly, Bush has refused to take military action off the table if Iran does not comply with UN Security Council resolutions demanding that it suspend its uranium enrichment programs.

Led by the United States, the Western powers are seeking to pass a third round of even tougher Security Council sanctions against Iran. However, at a meeting today in New York, the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany agreed to delay a vote on tougher sanctions until late November at the earliest.

That outcome is a setback to U.S. and French efforts, yet their cooperation still signals a key break from the recent past.

Unlike during the Iraq war run-up, when France voiced fierce opposition to toppling Saddam Hussein, this time Paris is backing up Bush with tough talk of its own.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner weighed in with perhaps even stronger words than his boss, stating on September 16 that the world should brace for war with Iran if negotiations to end its nuclear program fail. Although he later tempered his comments, Kouchner and Sarkozy's rhetoric starkly contrasts with that of former French President Jacques Chirac, whose vocal opposition to war with Iraq dealt a blow to U.S.-France relations.

So what’s motivated France to talk tough now? Jean-Pierre Darnis, a political analyst at the University of Nice and Rome's Institute of Foreign Affairs, says the new French leader is partly motivated by a genuine desire to repair relations with Washington. Darnis adds that France clearly wants to avoid war with Iran, but sees its threat as a necessary prod to change Tehran’s behavior.

"Sarkozy said: 'I don't like the word war. I don't want to use the word war,' after Kouchner [used the word]," Darnis says. "But nevertheless, he is very open to a large panel of actions against Iran."

On September 25 at the UN General Assembly in New York, Sarkozy reiterated that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be an "unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world." He was echoed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said, “If Iran were to acquire the nuclear bomb, the consequences would be disastrous."

Robert Whitman, who studies European foreign policy at London’s Chatham House think tank, says the tough talk from Paris, and to a lesser extent Berlin, is partly aimed at permanent UN Security Council members China and Russia to persuade them to drop their opposition to new Iran sanctions since the alternative -- namely, war -- should appear so much worse to them.

New France

But Whitman adds that Sarkozy’s rhetoric should also be taken at face value -- that is, it reflects genuine French concern over the danger of Iran’s nuclear program:

"I think that’s partly why the French have been using the language why they have, because they think the Iran case is a very serious test of the credibility of the international nonproliferation regime for nuclear weapons," Whitman says. "And I think that their analysis is that it will have grave consequences for nuclear proliferation in the Middle East if Iran is not stopped. And the French do believe that they are being a responsible international citizen by bearing down on the Iranians."

But what about the Iranians? Are they, too, somehow served by all the war talk?

Speaking on September 25 at the UN, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad vowed Tehran would continue to defy any UN resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program. He said the nuclear question was "closed" as a political issue and that Iran would pursue the monitoring of its nuclear program "through its appropriate legal path," the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog.

British analyst Whitman says the media circus that accompanied Ahmadinejad’s trip to the United States, along with the hard-line rhetoric against him, may actually be helping him in his domestic political battles back home. "Certainly, in terms of external criticism of the regime, and particularly criticism in the U.S., this will obviously assist him in terms of his struggle against moderates in Tehran," Whitman says.

Others have noted that every time the Iranian crisis escalates, the price of oil increases, further filling petroleum-rich Tehran's coffers.

The war drums have also been beating in the right-wing U.S. media, particularly among those "neoconservative" pundits who pushed successfully for the Iraq invasion and now reportedly seek to topple the clerical regime in Iran. Reports say their pro-Iran war views may be shared at least in part by Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration.

According to the U.S. magazine "Newsweek," in its October 1 edition, David Wurmser, a former adviser to Cheney on the Middle East, was considering a plan to press Israel to strike Iranian nuclear targets in a move that could bring the United States into a war with Tehran. Wurmser, in remarks today to the "New York Sun" daily, categorically denied those allegations.

But in a clear signal of the mood in Washington, this week the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that would tighten sanctions on Iran. The bill, which passed by a vote of 397 to 16, also calls on the U.S. government to list Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist group. The bill calls for sanctions against foreign companies that have U.S. subsidiaries who invest in Iran's energy sector.

A day later, the U.S. Senate passed a similar nonbinding resolution on Iran. Critics such as Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia said the motion "could be read as a tantamount to a declaration of war on Iran."

But if the martial rhetoric serves the interests of "hawks" in Washington, some say it also aides "hawks" in the Middle East opposed to Iran’s ascendance in the region.

Independent author Robert Baer, who spent two decades in the Muslim world as a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, predicted in a recent article for the website of the U.S. magazine "Time" that there would be a military strike against Iran "within six months."

Military Caution

Last week, U.S. Admiral Fallon told Al-Jazeera television that he believed there would not be war with Iran, and called the war talk unhelpful. Similarly, General John Abizaid, Fallon's predecessor as chief U.S. commander in the Middle East, said this month that while every effort should be made to stop Iran's apparent march toward nuclear weapons, the world could live with and deter a nuclear-armed Iran.

Baer, for his part, contends that part of the Bush administration, led by Cheney, wants to strike Iran for a number of reasons including the nuclear threat, Shi’ite Iran’s growing influence in Iraq and the region, its ties to terrorism, and its alleged threat to Sunni regimes friendly to Washington, such as Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis "are saying basically, if you want to keep your 10 million barrels or 9 million barrels [of oil] a day flowing freely in international markets, and keeping the price relatively low on oil, you better come to our protection," Baer recently said. "You better do something about Iran. And they’re telling us, or what they’re telling me, is that you have to decapitate the Iranian regime."

Today's UN talks in New York effectively gave the green light for IAEA chief Muhammad el-Baradei to carry on in his efforts to try and clear up doubts about Iran's past nuclear activities. El-Baradei recently gave Iran three months to clear its record in a move criticized by Washington as a tactic to stall sanctions and evade the key issue of halting enrichment.

Reports say the Western powers are considering their own economic and political sanctions against Iran, should efforts to pass a new resolution in the Security Council prove fruitless.

Where the Iran story ultimately goes is anyone’s guess. But as September 2007 draws to a close, some have recalled a famous remark by former White House chief of staff Andrew Card.

About Washington’s Iraq media blitz in September 2002, a half-year before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Card said, "From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August."

New Iran Nuclear Sanctions Delayed

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:42 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- In a setback for the United States, Iran won a two-month reprieve from new U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program on Friday. The Bush administration and its European allies ceded to Russian and Chinese demands to give Tehran more time to address international concerns.

An agreement reached in talks here between six key nations and supported by the European Union gives Iran until November to make progress in answering questions about the program that the United States and others alleged is a cover for nuclear weapons development.

The decision marks another blow for Washington in its diplomatic struggle to toughen existing U.N. sanctions on Iran, whose leader this week declared to the U.N. General Assembly that the nuclear issue was ''closed'' and vowed to defy attempts to add new penalties.

The Bush administration had hoped to capitalize on growing international frustration with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hardline stance in refusing to halt uranium enrichment and reprocessing that he insists are purely for peaceful civilian energy use.

Despite increasing support for new sanctions in Europe -- particularly from Britain, France and Germany -- Russia and China refused to yield, insisting on giving Tehran more time to accept an offer for negotiations in exchange for suspending its nuclear activities.

After talks hosted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, backed by the E.U.'s top diplomat, agreed to delay a new sanctions resolution.

A joint statement from the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany said they would finalize the new resolution and bring it to a vote unless reports in November from the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog and the E.U. foreign policy chief ''show a positive outcome of their efforts.''

At the same time, Rice said, they would continue work on a new sanctions resolution so if there were no progress, the resolution would be ready to be introduced in the Security Council for a vote.

''We'll be working to finalize the text and we will be watching to see what progress takes place ... in the November timeframe so that we can move to Security Council sanctions should there not be progress,'' Rice told reporters after the meeting in a New York hotel.

She also noted that the United States and the European members of the so-called ''P5+1'' group would pursue bilateral financial sanctions against Iran and Iranian government entities. For its part, the United States is considering imposing such measures against elements of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.

However, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner signaled Europe wasn't ready to move on multilateral sanctions quickly. The French, British and Germans will meet with the full EU on Oct. 15 to discuss sanctions, but will wait until the Security Council decides before imposing their own measures, he said.

Kouchner said 14 different types of sanctions were being considered, and he wouldn't rule out Iran's oil industry, the Revolutionary Guards, banks and travel visas as possible targets.

''Nobody refused to follow up, to have a discussion on these 14 items,'' Kouchner told reporters after the meeting, but he added that some leaders were ''completely reluctant'' to accept some of them.

Rice denied that the agreement to put off U.N. sanctions was tantamount to a U.S. cave-in to Russia and China although her top negotiator in the matter, the State Department's No. 3 diplomat Nicholas Burns, allowed that ''the alchemy of this group is such that anything is going to be a compromise.''

Burns, who will meet at least twice with his counterparts in the P5+1 before November to produce a new draft sanctions resolution, maintained that the statement sent ''a very tough and strict message to Iran.''

He said the U.S. saw the statement as a commitment by all signatories to back a third sanctions resolution if there is no positive Iranian response. But U.N. diplomats cautioned that what constitutes a positive response may differ, especially between the U.S. and Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who exchanged sharp words with Rice on the sanctions matter earlier this week, appeared to confirm that thinking by saying Friday's agreement did not automatically mean new sanctions in November.

''The statement is very unambiguous,'' Lavrov told reporters. ''What we discussed today is to concentrate on doing everything to help negotiations to succeed.''

In the statement, the ministers and E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana welcomed a July agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency to answer questions about 20 years of nuclear activity -- most of it secret until just over four years ago.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei is expected to present a report to the agency's board of directors in late November on the status of his investigation, which the United States has downplayed because it only relates to past, and not current or future, actions.

Two U.N. resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran have failed to persuade it to suspend uranium enrichment and in a Tuesday address to the U.N. General Assembly, Ahmadinejad said the nuclear issue is ''closed'' and vowed to defy any U.N. Security Council move for more sanctions.

No date was set for submitting the new sanctions resolution to a vote in the Security Council because the six nations want to give Solana and ElBaradei flexibility in producing their reports, Burns said.

^------

Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer and Lily Hindy contributed to this report.

Split in Group Delays Vote on Sanctions Against Iran

By HELENE COOPER

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 28 — The United States, Britain and France chose unity over speed and agreed on Friday to delay until November a United Nations Security Council vote on a third sanctions resolution against Iran.

The delay, a concession to Russia, China and Germany — the other three countries in the fragile coalition of six world powers that are seeking to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions — came after a week of haggling on the outskirts of the General Assembly. The six countries issued a statement advising Iran that a diplomatic offer of economic incentives remained on the table if Iran suspended its uranium enrichment program.

The statement said the six powers would complete the new resolution and bring it to a vote unless reports from the European foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and the International Atomic Energy Agency in November “show a positive outcome of their efforts.”

Bush administration officials, who have been pushing diplomats to increase sanctions against Iran, said the move to put off a decision until November reflected the harsh realities of getting all six countries to speak with one voice. While officials from Britain, France and the United States were pressing for another sanctions vote right away, China and Russia in particular wanted to wait for another report from the nuclear monitoring agency.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose often volatile relationship with her Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, erupted again this week as Russia refused to go along with immediate sanctions, sought on Friday to minimize the differences between their countries.

“We’ve made it very clear that we’ve always wanted to keep the two tracks under way,” she told reporters in New York. American officials routinely use the phrase “two tracks” to refer to both the sanctions and the negotiations with Iran. “We will be watching to see what progress takes place.”

But her deputy, R. Nicholas Burns, the top United States negotiator on the Iran issue, acknowledged that “the alchemy of this group is such that anything is going to be a compromise.” He took issue with the speech by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, before the General Assembly this week, when Mr. Ahmadinejad said that the nuclear dispute with the West, which believes that Iran is working on a nuclear weapons program, is now “closed.”

“I’m sorry, he was badly mistaken,” Mr. Burns told reporters during a news conference. “Here, he has six ministers saying so.”

Iran has maintained that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Clearly, American diplomats were hoping for a bit more this week, but signs emerged early on that they would not get it. During a lunch of ministers from the Group of 8 industrialized nations on Wednesday, Ms. Rice and Mr. Lavrov exchanged sharp words on the right time to push for more Iran sanctions.

One European diplomat who was present said that “it’s getting to the point that you can’t get any work done if those two are in the room together,” referring to Ms. Rice and Mr. Lavrov. The diplomat spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about tension between Ms. Rice and Mr. Lavrov.

Mr. Lavrov told The Associated Press after the lunch that he had strong words with Ms. Rice about whether the time was right for new sanctions when the International Atomic Energy Agency had struck an agreement with Iran about its past activities. Ms. Rice has been clear that she does not think much of the recent forays by Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency’s director, into the Iran negotiations, telling reporters on her airplane last week that the agency would be better off leaving diplomacy to diplomats.

Mr. ElBaradei reached an agreement in July with Iranian officials in which Tehran agreed to provide the agency with answers to questions about more than two decades of nuclear activity, most of it secret.

Sudan rebel affects peace talks by sitting out

As other opposition leaders meet today to map strategy, Abdel Wahid will wield considerable clout -- from exile in Paris.
By Maggie Farley
Times Staff Writer

August 3, 2007

PARIS — At the moment, the headquarters of Abdel Wahid's faction of the Sudanese Liberation Movement is a cafe in Paris.

"I may be in exile, but my people know I am still with them," says Wahid, reaching into his bag and pulling out four cellphones and a chunky Thuraya satellite phone with its thumb-like antenna.

"This one is for the commanders, so I can tell them what to do and what not to do. This," he said, holding up a newer Nokia, "is for civil society so we can discuss their next move. This one is for [displaced people] and refugees. This one is for students. Sometimes I address their secret meetings by speakerphone."

And who is the satellite phone for? "I can't tell you." He smiles.

Wahid, a round-faced 39-year-old, is one of Darfur's original rebel leaders, and even from afar, a man of secrets, contradictions and considerable power. He is a holdout who gains influence over the conversation about peace by refusing to talk; a would-be peacemaker who threatens more war; a fighter for the rights of displaced people, yet a figure who derives his power from their misery. And he is one reason it is so hard to stabilize Sudan.

Wahid began the SLM in 1992 while a law student in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, to agitate for a secular democratic state and a greater share of the country's power and wealth for the long-neglected people in the vast western region of Darfur. The group evolved into an armed movement, which along with other rebels attacked Sudanese forces in 2003. The rebellion resulted in widespread retaliation by militias known as janjaweed, widely believed to be backed by the Sudanese government. The militias terrorized the villages harboring rebels, resulting in more than 200,000 deaths and driving more than 2 million people from their homes into U.N.-run camps.

Though he has been living in Paris since 2004 for what he says are security reasons, Wahid remains one of the most influential leaders of the Fur tribe, which makes up the majority of Darfur's population and has been the main target of attacks.

In addition to working the phones, Wahid sends videotapes to camps, exhorting Darfur natives to press to return to the land from which they were forced, to hold out for compensation, to demand United Nations protection. It is a message of hope and defiance in a place where there is not much left but despair, and when you ask people in the camps who represents them, many still say, "Abdel Wahid."

Wahid's continued popularity explains why U.N. peace negotiators want him at the table at preliminary peace talks due to begin today in Arusha, Tanzania, not at this zinc cafe table sipping Coke Light. The talks are meant to help the splintered opposition find a common platform so they can face the government in negotiations this fall.

Unlike other rebel leaders, Wahid refused to sign the Darfur peace agreement in May 2006, holding out for additional compensation and a greater role in the central government for Darfur residents. Without the support of the Fur, the agreement quickly crumbled. But Wahid once again refuses to attend negotiations, even the Tanzania talks among fellow rebels, which run through Monday, saying that more signed paper is not the path to peace.

"There have been many agreements before and no change," he said, counting off 11 rounds of talks that yielded several unsuccessful cease-fire and peace agreements. "The government must show us they are serious by stopping the attacks.

"Just this week there were more attacks" by militias against villagers in Darfur, he said, his voice rising. "My trust of the government is under zero. I need to see action first. Once there is security in Darfur, we will know it is time to talk about peace."

Though past agreements have foundered — on account of violations by the janjaweed, the government and rebels alike — U.N. peace envoys believe that this time they have momentum.

On Tuesday, the U.N. Security Council authorized the deployment of 26,000 peacekeepers to help stabilize Darfur. The government, facing growing international pressure and seemingly losing support of some Arab and African allies, is willing to talk. Neighboring countries that have been stirring the pot have agreed to step back. Most of the dozen or so rebel groups are trying to come together for the sake of peace.

The main holdout is Wahid.

"Without him, I am afraid the talks won't go forward," said the U.N.'s special envoy for Sudan, Jan Eliasson, who has spent months trying to nudge all the players to the table. "This is the big chance."

Wahid seems to take pleasure in rejecting the high-ranking dignitaries from the U.N., the U.S. and France, who come to quietly court, or warn, him. They have let him know that if he blocks the move toward peace, he will be subject to sanctions, just as surely as if he violated a cease-fire. Specifically, France could revoke his right to stay here.

"France can go to hell," he said loudly, provoking looks from nearby patrons in the cafe. "Sanctions are for criminals. Sanction Khartoum! I am not a criminal. I am fully committed to a cease-fire, I am fully committed to the peace process, but I am in exile and I am already sanctioned. My people are in camps — those who are not are killed — and the rest are raped and hopeless. They are already sanctioned."

He gesticulates in his passion and smacks a passerby, who apologizes to him.

"If I can't stay in Paris, I can go anywhere," he said.

So why not go back to Darfur?

He stands and hikes up his beige button-down shirt to display the splash of a bullet wound scar on his right side, and rolls up his left sleeve to show another on his arm.

"To make peace, I have to be alive, not dead. That is why I am here," he said, tapping the table. "But if I have to, I will go back to my people and die with them."

Some of the other SLM factions have split from Wahid, and are anxious for peace. They would like Wahid to represent them, but appear ready to leave him behind.

"Abdel Wahid feels threatened as a leader. He has lost ground," said Ahmed Idriss, a member of the newly formed SLM/Unity faction led by Abdulla Yahyia. "He would rather remain a big fish in a small pond than be a big fish in a big pond."

Because Wahid's chair in Arusha will probably remain empty, U.N. envoys have been scrambling to ensure that other Fur leaders with popular credibility will be there: Ahmed Abdelshafie, who replaced Wahid a year ago in Darfur, and Ahmed Diraige, a godfather of the rebel movement who now heads the National Redemption Front alliance.

Wahid asserts that his ideas have formed the basis of the peacemakers' blueprints, and he says he is the only one who can ensure the backing of the Fur and the people in the camps for any agreement. He will not be left out in the cold.

"Three things will not work with me. Pressure, persuasion, and isolation," he said. "I don't get my power from the international community, I get my power from my people." He paused and frowned. "If they try to make peace without me, I will sabotage everything."

--

maggie.farley@latimes.com

The Iranian Nuclear Challenge

Gareth Evans
Address by Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group, to The Greens/European Free Alliance Conference on Iran: Alternatives to Escalation, European Parliament, Brussels, 4 July 2007 ______________________________________________________________________________

The Urgent Need to Meet the Nuclear Challenge

Over the last decade, there has been a serious, and dangerous, loss of momentum and direction in disarmament and non-proliferation efforts. Stocks of nuclear weapons held by the nuclear weapons states remain extraordinarily and alarmingly high - some 30,000 in all, of which around 12,000 are still actively deployed - with no serious moves in sight to diminish them significantly, and Britain’s apparent determination to replace the Trident system indicating that it is no more serious than any of the other weapons states about moving to meet their own side of the grand NPT bargain, to move steadily toward absolute nuclear disarmament.

India and Pakistan have joined the ranks of nuclear weapons states, and like Israel doing so outside the framework of the NPT; North Korea, after building its capability while in the NPT and subject to its constraints, has withdrawn from the treaty, and now has the fissile material to manufacture perhaps a dozen nuclear weapons. Treaty making and implementation has stalled and there is fear of a new wave of proliferation, with Iran widely seen (accurately or otherwise) as being in the vanguard: determined to acquire full fuel cycle capability, as it is technically able to do while remaining a member in good standing of the NPT, and clearly wanting, at the very least, to keep open the option of stepping across the line out of the NPT and into weaponisation when it has the capacity to do so, precipitating in the process a rush by others in the region to follow suit.

2005 saw two loud wake-up calls in the failure of the NPT Review Conference, and the inability of the World Summit in September to agree on a single line about any WMD issue – despite the recommendations coming to it from the High Level Panel (of which I was a member) and many others to commit to a raft of measures designed to give the NPT and associated measures new life and teeth ( including, e.g., attaching some penalties to withdrawal from the Treaty, having stronger verification measures, developing international means for guaranteeing the external supply of fissile material to civilian users; and putting some real heat on the nuclear weapons states to get serious about disarmament).

We know what needs to be done. The Blix Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which reported last year (and of which I was also a member) has set out the agenda as clearly as it has ever been done, grouping its recommendations into four sets:

o First, agree on general principles of action – in particular that disarmament and non-proliferation are best pursued through a cooperative rules-based international order, applied and enforced not unilaterally but through effective multilateral institutions; and that states, individually and collectively, should consistently pursue policies designed to ensure that no state feels a need to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

o Second, work toward outlawing all weapons of mass destruction once and for all – including through the progressive extension of nuclear weapons free zones (most urgently in the Middle East). The general objective here is not as impossibly romantic as it seems to a lot of people (as even extreme realists like Henry Kissinger now seem prepared to acknowledge). As the Blix Commission put it in two of the most important passages in the whole report,

- Weapons of mass destruction cannot be uninvented. But they can be outlawed, as biological and chemical weapons already have been, and their use made unthinkable. Compliance, verification and enforcement rules can, with the requisite will, be effectively applied.

and, repeating the mantra first spelt out in the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons a decade earlier:

- So long as any state has nuclear weapons others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain, there is a high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. And any such use would be catastrophic.

o Third, reduce the danger of present arsenals – in particular through better security of stockpiles; diminishing the role of nuclear weapons by no-first-use pledges, assurances not to use them against non-nuclear weapons states, and by not developing nuclear weapons for new tasks; and prohibiting the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, and phasing out the production of highly-enriched uranium.

o Fourth, prevent a new wave of proliferation - above all by reviving the fundamental commitments of all NPT parties: the five nuclear weapon states parties to negotiate towards nuclear disarmament and the non-nuclear weapon states, while retaining the right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy, to refrain from developing nuclear weapons, and in particular to explore international arrangements for an assurance of supply of enriched uranium fuel, and for the disposal of spent fuel, to reduce incentives for national facilities and diminish proliferation risks.

Of course the Blix Commission was not unconscious of the argument – very familiar to a Greens audience - that the ‘atoms for peace’ principle is unsustainable, and that civil nuclear energy production (whatever its superficial attractions in an age of anxiety about the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming) inevitably will reinforce and make ever harder to control the move toward wider nuclear weapons possession.

But we felt that recognizing and accommodating the demand for civilian nuclear capability was the only possible way the NPT could be held together – and, as it must be, strengthened – in the present environment , and that it would be Quixotic in the extreme to tilt at this windmill while trying to hold together a broad based international consensus in favour of drawing an absolute red line against anything in the nature of weaponisation.

Alternatives to Domestic Fissile Material Production within the NPT System

Leaving aside for present purposes the position of those who are not prepared to support any role for any kind of civil nuclear energy, the optimal non-proliferation solution would be for all fissile material production, and all spent fuel disposal, to be internationalized and fully controlled so as to make impossible any diversion for weapons production purposes.

This remains a dream for many of us, and innumerable efforts have been made over the years, in the IAEA and elsewhere, to get a serious debate started and serious steps put in train, to achieve just that - and other speakers on this panel will no doubt be referring to that effort. Let me refer briefly to just two of the proposals which have been floated.

o International Fuel Bank
Under one of them there would be a moratorium on the construction of new facilities for the enrichment of uranium or reprocessing to allow time for a scheme to be worked out for the multinational control of all such facilities, wherever located.
States complying with non-proliferation commitments would be then able to turn to an international fuel bank, assured that they could buy low-enriched nuclear fuel at market prices. There would be an international framework of agreed rules in which both producers and consumers would have a say on rights of purchase.

Many problems still have to be overcome, however, before this could be workable, for example:

- the unresolved question (certainly asked by Iran and others) as to who exactly would decide whether a country is fulfilling its non-proliferation commitments and thus be entitled to purchase enriched uranium); and

- the fact that there has been no sign of US buy in, not least because it has plans for additional capacity and doesn’t like moratorium, and because it is not happy to even contemplate the internationalisation of its own production. (See WMDC Report, pp 74-5)

o Global Nuclear Energy Partnership
Another proposal – ‘GNEP’ - has been advanced by the US itself last year and discussed with governments in London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing New Delhi and Tokyo. Under it a small number of states would produce enriched uranium and ‘lease’ it to states, and then take back the spent fuel – which would then be reprocessed by a new process which would recover uranium and plutonium in a form that would be unusable in weapons, and could be used in special reactors that would be built only in these fuel-producing states, with a drastically smaller remaining volume of waste. The general idea is to encourage rather than oblige other states to use this system – though if they joined in they would have to undertake to do no enrichment or reprocessing of their own.

There are technical doubts as to whether the proposed new recovery process will work, and political doubts as to whether the return of spent fuel to the ‘leasing’ states will prove acceptable, but the basic problem with this approach is that it adds a visible new inequality – between fuel cycle and user states – to the existing NPT inequality between nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states. The deeper the cooperation between the fuel cycle states the more it would look like a cartel of the powerful. (See WMDC Report pp 75-6).

The Iran Impasse and How to Get Out of It

It is obvious that neither the international fuel bank nor GNEP solutions are going to be available within any kind of time frame that could possibly help resolve the current Iran problem – and that neither of them, even a fully internationalised fuel bank, is likely to be particularly attractive to Tehran anyway.

Nor does it appear that Iran is in any kind of mood to accept a ‘guaranteed’ supply from some other particular offshore source, along the lines proposed by Russia, in return for foregoing its fuel-cycle ambitions and agreeing to indefinitely relinquish whatever right as it has under the NPT to enrich uranium – even in the context of all the sanctions and threatened sanctions that are now on the table, and incentives (including restored relations with the US) that could be put back on the table.

Some are confident that sanctions – particularly the backdoor variety that the US, and Europeans under American pressure, are capable of applying through the banking system, to choke off both trade and investment finance - will ultimately force the Iranians to cave in, but that is not a confidence that we in the International Crisis Group share. Our reading is that, while the potential impact of these kind of measures can never be understated (and were probably decisive, e.g., in South Africa against the apartheid regime) in Iran just too many factors are pulling the other way, including,

- Iran’s sense of national pride, consciousness of its history, and deeply rooted ideology of independence, which cuts across other internal political and cultural divisions, and makes it deeply reluctant to be seen to be pushed around

- Associated with this the sense that Iran is a major, not minor, league player, not least in its own region, and entitled to have the kind of capability that goes with that

- The widespread sense that the West is trying to prevent Iran from having access to scientific progress, patronising it, to keep it in dependence and tutelage

- The sense that the international community’s heart is not really in a full-scale sanctions squeeze – that Russia (although it has gone along with the UNSC so far), China and the great majority of NPT countries don’t really believe that they are at present acting outside the letter or even spirit of the NPT in rushing to acquire full fuel-cycle capability.

Add to all that the Iranians’ current perception that military strike action is a non-starter in the present environment - with, except for a few fringe dwellers, the clear thinking in both the US and Israel that the negatives would far outweigh the positives - and you have all the makings of a full-scale impasse.

Crisis Group has long been arguing that a new approach is needed which goes back to basics – which focuses on strategy rather than immediate tactics - by redrawing the red line.

What matters, from a non-proliferation perspective, is not whether Iran has full enrichment capability, but nuclear weapons. What should ultimately concern Israel, Iran’s neighbours, and a world deeply anxious to avoid further nuclear breakout, is not whether Iran has the capacity to make weapons-grade uranium, but whether it actually makes it and puts it into deliverable bombs. While it may well be too late to stop Iran acquiring its own fissile material, and the technological capacity to enrich it to weapons grade, it is certainly not too late to halt it acquiring nuclear weapons.

To achieve this will require a different diplomatic strategy from that presently favoured by the EU and US. It means abandoning the ‘zero enrichment’ goal in favour of a ‘delayed limited enrichment’ plan. Under this:

o the wider international community would explicitly accept that Iran can enrich domestically for peaceful nuclear energy purposes;

o in return Iran would agree to phasing in over an extended period of years that enrichment program, with major limitations on its initial size and scope, and a very highly intrusive inspections regime – not just the Additional Protocol to which it has already signed up, which is significantly more intrusive than the basic safeguards regime, but (because of the doubts which have arisen – and are in fact widely shared by other NPT parties - about its reporting lapses and general lack of transparency in the past) specially negotiated ‘Additional Protocol Plus’ measures which would enable inspectors to have a rather more exact knowledge of what Iran was doing across a broader range of areas relevant to weapons capability; and

o there would be both incentives – in the form of security guarantees, progressive lifting of existing sanctions, moves toward diplomatic normalisation and the like – and strong disincentives to ensure that the agreement stuck. In particular, Iran would be disciplined by knowing that if at any stage it made any move at all toward weaponisation – through the production of weapons-grade fissile material, or any hardware in which to put it – all hell would break loose. A full range of economic sanctions would take immediate effect (including finance and investment sanctions fully supported by the Europeans as well as the US), and military options would not be off the table.

There are three advantages to this strategic approach, if the U.S. and EU could swallow their reservations:

o It is not inconsistent with what we know about Iran’s actual nuclear intentions. While there is every reason to believe that right across the political and social spectrum there is as an absolute determination to acquire full fuel cycle capability – and as such to be seen as being in the league of those countries capable of becoming nuclear weapons states if they so chose - there is also every reason to believe that no decision has been made to acquire weapons, and there is a very clear understanding of the huge risks that Iran would be running by so doing: not only the possibility of the balance of calculation changing toward a military strike in the US and Israel, but the real prospect of the Sunni neighbourhood reacting in kind.

o The approach proposed would spread the process out over time. If made clear to the Iranians, it would make much more achievable what has so far been unachievable, viz a suspension right now of enrichment-related activity right now to enable detailed negotiations to take place. And not only would those negotiations themselves take time, they would involve the phasing in over time of the various levels of capacity involved. And this in turn would allow time and space for a more moderate political dynamic to take hold in Iran. The internal political scene is multi-textured, multi-layered and always hard to read and predict, but if a new environment can be created of engagement and cooperation with the West, rather than demonisation and isolation by it, there are many analysts inside and outside the country who believe that a completely different mood than that now represented by Ahmadi-nejad is there for the taking, with all that flows from that in terms of security cooperation.

o But the greatest benefit is that it would command genuinely universal buy-in, first from all those NPT signatories who are wedded to the basic NPT bargain and presently totally reluctant to acknowledge any limitation on full ‘peaceful use’ capability, and, secondly, and very importantly, from Russia and China, who are likely to go on being extremely reluctant Security Council enforcers of the present ‘zero enrichment’ strategy, but who are totally willing to be very tough indeed when it comes to Iran actually weaponising, with all that that implies for destabilising the neighbourhood and changing global power balances.

Crisis Group published an early version of this plan 18 months ago, and we know from many consultations since that it has extremely wide appeal as a fallback if the present diplomatic strategy runs into the sand, as now seems very likely.

The obvious downside from the West’s point of view – which will be repeated over and over as this debate continues - is that, although stretching out the process, ‘delayed limited enrichment’ would permit Tehran to eventually achieve full fuel cycle capability, with the risk in turn of weapons acquisition when that happens. But the reality of Iran having that choice, sooner rather than later, and with minimal inspection and supervision along the way, now stares us in the face.

Nobody wants to see the present diplomatic impasse slide into the kind of situation where the West’s unwillingness to compromise strengthens its opponent’s extremists to the point that their country walks away from the NPT, shrugs off any kind of international monitoring, produces a large stock of weapons-grade material and ultimately takes the risk of building its own bomb. We have been there and done that with North Korea. Although there has at last been a major breakthrough in the six party talks, it is still going to be nightmarishly difficult to wholly recover the ground which has been lost to Pyongyang through earlier Western obduracy.

If the present diplomatic strategy is going nowhere but downhill, the only rational response is a new one which may be ideal for no-one but has attractions for everyone. If all diplomacy fails, the alternative course of military action is simply too horrible to contemplate.

CFR: Round Three with Iran

Iran has resorted to unpopular gas rationing in its latest economic problems.

July 5, 2007

Prepared by: Lionel Beehner

The economic noose around Iran may be tightening. Domestically, the government's plan for gas rationing, in a country that exports the second-largest amount of crude oil, sparked protests and chants of “Ahmadinejad should be killed!” (This Backgrounder explores Iran’s poorly run energy sector). Iran’s economy has also felt the effects, notes the Guardian, as inflation and unemployment rates soar close to 30 percent. Externally, a financial squeeze caused by sanctions, in addition to more general U.S. Treasury pressures on international banks, has hurt Iran’s standing and crippled its financial sector. The sanctions, contained in UN Security Council Resolutions 1737 and 1747, are to encourage Tehran to suspend its uranium-enrichment program, which outside powers believe is a ruse to develop a nuclear bomb, something Iran denies. The passage of the two UN resolutions, Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy writes in the Wall Street Journal Europe, “made the country’s professional classes, which are proud of Iran’s integration in the international system, feel the sting of diplomatic and economic isolation.”

A third round of proposed sanctions looms. Projections of what they will include run the gamut. Levitt recommends a two-way arms embargo (banning imports and exports). Mike Jacobson, also of the Washington Institute, suggests an independent monitoring team (JPost), which has proven successful for past sanctions regimes imposed against Sudan, Somalia, and Liberia. Tougher travel bans against select Iranian officials should also be put in place, Jacobson argues. Others suggest tougher inspections of Iranian cargo for nuclear material and/or freezes of more Iranian assets overseas.

The issue turns up these days on the political agenda in Washington, too. The House of Representatives just approved legislation that would deny U.S. nuclear cooperation to countries that aid Iran’s nuclear program. The bill also would label Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization.

The goal of the bill, says Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), is “zero foreign investment” (VOA) in Iran. Candidates in the 2008 presidential race, meanwhile, debate how tough a stance to take against the Islamic Republic. Democrats like Bill Richardson advocate talks with Tehran with “no preconditions” and say that refusal to engage Iran was “counterproductive.” On the Republican side, most candidates do not support bilateral talks and favor a further squeeze. Mitt Romney, for instance, called on the private sector to divest from Iran and “cut off the resources Iran uses to fuel terror.”

But Russia and China can blunt the effectiveness of such ideas. “Iran is adept at identifying rifts in the international community,” writes the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Karim Sadjadpour, “and diplomatic efforts will unravel if each country approaches Iran with a different redline.” Some signs of hope emerged from the talks in Maine between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin that the two countries might forge a “common message” (Economist.com) on Iran.

It still remains uncertain if Iran might agree to a temporary freeze in its enrichment activities and demands by the International Atomic Energy Agency to come clean on activities some suspect may be linked to a clandestine weapons program. In exchange, the United Nations says it would restart talks (AP) and hold off on further sanctions.

. . . Meanwhile, Iran "Doubles Enrichment Capacity"

Iran is taking steps toward enrichment of uranium and away from negotiations with the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China by starting a second cascade of centrifuges to enrich uranium, doubling its nuclear enrichment capacity. The report came from the quasi-official ISNA news agency in Iran.

President Bush called the reports "speculation," and restated that "the idea of Iran having a nuclear weapon is unacceptable, and it’s unacceptable to the United States and it’s unacceptable to nations we’re working with in the United Nations to send a common message." He also stated that the world must "double our effort" to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, in a parallel to Iran's announcement it was doubling its nuclear enrichment capacity.

In France, Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei stated that this was a "new signal" and a "negative signal" that would be considered in dealing with the Iran "dossier."

In Russia, defense minister/deputy Prime Minister Sergey LIvanov stated that he was not concerned by Iran's starting of a second set of centrifuges because the process was announced publicly and confirmed by the IAEA, and only being operated in "test mode," not performing enrichment. Lavrov stated that "It is at least premature to talk about uranium enrichment in Iran."

I haven't been able to figure out what the governments of Britain, Germany, or China have to say about this new development.