British Find No Evidence of Arms Traffic From Iran
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Iran: Sanctions Won't Derail Enrichment [
Russia Warns US Unilateral Decisions on Iran Could Thwart Diplomacy [
British Find No Evidence of Arms Traffic From Iran
By Ellen Knickmeyer
The Washington Post
Wednesday 04 October 2006
Troops in southeast Iraq test US claim of aid for militias.
On the Iraq-Iran Border - Since late August, British commandos in the deserts of far southeastern Iraq have been testing one of the most serious charges leveled by the United States against Iran: that Iran is secretly supplying weapons, parts, funding and training for attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq.
A few hundred British troops living out of nothing more than their cut-down Land Rovers and light armored vehicles have taken to the desert in the start of what British officers said would be months of patrols aimed at finding the illicit weapons trafficking from Iran, or any sign of it.
There's just one thing.
"I suspect there's nothing out there," the commander, Lt. Col. David Labouchere, said last month, speaking at an overnight camp near the border. "And I intend to prove it."
Other senior British military leaders spoke as explicitly in interviews over the previous two months. Britain, whose forces have had responsibility for security in southeastern Iraq since the war began, has found nothing to support the Americans' contention that Iran is providing weapons and training in Iraq, several senior military officials said.
"I have not myself seen any evidence - and I don't think any evidence exists - of government-supported or instigated" armed support on Iran's part in Iraq, British Defense Secretary Des Browne said in an interview in Baghdad in late August.
"It's a question of intelligence versus evidence," Labouchere's commander, Brig. James Everard of Britain's 20th Armored Brigade, said last month at his base in the southern region's capital, Basra. "One hears word of mouth, but one has to see it with one's own eyes. These are serious consequences, aren't they?"
They are. Allegations that Iran or its agents are providing military support for Iraqi Shiite Muslim militias and other armed groups is one of the most contentious issues raising tensions between Washington and Tehran. Most gravely, U.S. generals and diplomats accuse Iran of providing infrared triggers for special explosives that are capable of piercing heavy armor.
Evidence of Iranian armed intervention in Iraq is "irrefutable," one U.S. commander in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Michael Barbero, told Pentagon reporters in August. The lead U.S. military spokesman in Iraq renews the allegation almost weekly in Baghdad.
Iraq's remote Maysan province is "a funnel for Iranian munitions," said Wayne White, who led the State Department's Iraq intelligence team during the war and now is an adjunct scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. White said that in the first year of the occupation a well-placed friend had seen "considerable physical evidence of it, and just about everyone in al-Amarah knew about it." Al-Amarah is the commonly used name of Maysan province.
Here in Maysan, Jasim Alawa Salum, an Iraqi father of 10 whose home is in a warren of thatched farmhouses near the border, agreed. "All troubles come from Iran," he said, bending his head to show a wound from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.
But Maj. Dominic Roberts of the Queen's Dragoons said: "We have found no credible evidence to suggest there is weapons smuggling across the border."
Asked why he could declare himself so confident that no arms were coming through, Labouchere mildly cited his confidence in Iraq's border force.
Guards at one of the 27 border forts now used to guard Maysan were dismissive of talk of military support from Iran. "It's just fabrication," insisted one, Haidar Hassan.
At one crossroads checkpoint, two border guards grinned awkwardly when a British desert patrol stopped in. No smugglers had come by, no untoward travelers, no problems, the guards said. The guards, however, come from tribes with a history of smuggling, and since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi border workers have redoubled their reputation for taking bribes.
To determine the truth of the charges, British commanders say, the British troops did something no other large-scale conventional unit in the U.S.-led coalition here has tried. They gave up their base.
Almost every night for months, rockets and mortar rounds had pounded Abu Naji, the outpost where British forces made their home outside Amarah, Maysan's provincial capital. In the base's last five months of use, 281 rockets or mortar rounds hit Abu Naji, Labouchere said.
Young soldiers would slip out of base at night to try to find the attackers. They would return in the morning as frustrated as when they left, he said. "The boys felt they were powerless," Labouchere said.
So the British forces packed up. The night before they left, mortars gave Abu Naji a farewell pounding.
About 5,000 townspeople gathered at the gates of Abu Naji on Aug. 24. When British troops pulled out that afternoon, the mobs moved in. Iraqi forces briefly tried to hold back the crowds, then gave way, said Maj. Charlie Burbridge, a British military spokesman at Basra. The mobs looted the base down to the bricks.
"This is the first Iraqi city that has kicked out the occupier!" loudspeakers at the local offices of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr trumpeted.
In their new mission, the British spread out over a desert carpeted with shrapnel, the legacy of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that claimed the bulk of its 1 million dead here in the deserts of Maysan. Pressing all hands into duty, a former tank crewman became a medic; the regiment chaplain took the wheel as a fuel tanker driver.
If trouble in most of Iraq had inevitably followed foreign soldiers, the soldiers in Maysan didn't seem to hear anything coming. Attackers had lobbed a rocket or mortar round at them during their first week in the desert, but there had been nothing since, they said.
At the least, Labouchere said, "I am satisfied our presence will reduce" the dangers for the rest of Iraq.
Ultimately, however, the British can do little more than demonstrate that the borders are closed, Labouchere said. Save for that, he said, they find themselves trying "to prove a negative."
Iran: Sanctions Won't Derail Enrichment
By Ali Akbar Dareini
The Associated Press
Wednesday 04 October 2006
Hashtgerd, Iran - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned Wednesday that sanctions will not stop Iran from enriching uranium after a European negotiator conceded "endless hours" of talks had made little progress and suggested the dispute could wind up at the U.N. soon.
The talks had been seen as a last-ditch attempt to avoid a full-blown confrontation between Iran and the U.N. Security Council after Tehran ignored an Aug. 31 deadline to suspend enrichment - a key step toward making nuclear weapons - or face punishment.
The latest comments - and the view of senior U.N. diplomats who told The Associated Press on Tuesday that nearly two years of intermittent negotiations had failed - suggested an emerging consensus that the time has finally come to consider Security Council sanctions.
Iran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and does not violate international law. Its refusal to give up enrichment compounds the failure of more than three years of U.N. inspections to banish suspicions that Tehran might have a secret weapons program. The conflict picked up steam after last year's election of the hard-line Ahmadinejad, whose tough stance on the nuclear issue is wildly popular in Iran - even among moderates.
Javier Solana, the European official who has been negotiating with the Iranians, told the European Parliament on Wednesday that the Iranians had made "no commitment to suspend." The dialogue with the Iranians "cannot last forever" and it was up to Tehran "to decide whether its time has come to end," he said.
Solana said his talks had found "common ground" on some issues "but we have not agreed in what is the key point, which is the question of suspension of activities before the start of the negotiations." He suggested that if the talks ended, the standoff should be moved to the Security Council.
In a speech shortly afterward, Ahmadinejad warned that sanctions would not dissuade his country from pursuing nuclear technology, including the enrichment of uranium.
"You are mistaken if you assume that the Iranian nation will stop for even a moment from the path toward using nuclear energy, due to your nagging," he told the West, speaking to a crowd of supporters outside Iran's capital.
"For 27 years they haven't allowed us to use technologies that they possess," Ahmadinejad added. "This nation is powerful and won't give in to one iota of coercion."
In an apparent response to Solana, the Iranian president said his nation favored continued negotiations.
"We are for talks. We can talk with each other and remove ambiguities. We have logic. We want talks to continue," he said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and foreign ministers from five other major powers were expected to meet, possibly Friday in London, to discuss the situation.
Diplomats said the Security Council could meet as early as Monday to start work on a resolution imposing the first of a series of sanctions meant to make Iran roll back its program.
Iran was initially referred to the Security Council in February by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, which said Tehran's suspicious activities represented breaches of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The Vienna-based agency also said it could not be sure Iran was not trying to make weapons.
The United States insisted that Tehran halt enrichment as a precondition for further talks on its nuclear program, but Iran ignored the Aug. 31 deadline set by the Security Council.
The Americans then agreed to let Solana hold more talks with the Iranians after Russia, China and France spoke out against a rush to sanctions.
At first, both Solana and Iran's top negotiator, Ali Larijani, had signaled progress in the talks.
On Tuesday, however, diplomats said Larijani told Solana that the hard-line Iranian leadership had rejected even a limited enrichment freeze.
One diplomat said Western council members - the United States, Britain and France - favor an embargo on sales of nuclear or missile technology to Tehran as a first sanctions step. That would be followed by other sanctions, including travel bans on Iranian officials and the freezing of their assets.
Iran has so far shown little concern about the prospect of such sanctions - perhaps because such limited sanctions would not greatly hurt the country overall.
Russia and China, both veto-wielding council members, traditionally oppose sanctions, and the United States could still face a tough fight getting them to agree to any truly punitive measures.
U.S. officials have said they intend to start with trying for relatively lower-level punishments as a way to persuade Russia and China to sign on.
China's U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya, asked whether Beijing would support possible sanctions if Iran doesn't suspend uranium enrichment, said Wednesday that over the last few weeks "there has been some progress" in the Solana-Larijani talks so the door isn't completely shut.
"But I do hope that diplomatic means is still the best way to achieve a solution on this Iranian nuclear issue," he said.
Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said he hadn't heard Solana's comments, but if Solana was saying that Iran now had a choice of whether to suspend enrichment or face sanctions "it will be a very sad moment."
"We were very supportive of Mr. Solana's efforts and still are if he intends to continue those efforts. Of course, it was our hope that those efforts would be successful and things will be resolved diplomatically," Churkin said. "We do not want any extra work load here in the Security Council anyway, and of course, it's a very important matter and we are hoping Mr. Solana will be successful."
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, asked about the possibility of the U.N. Security Council discussing sanctions against Iran, said: "We haven't discussed sanctions here in New York for weeks, many weeks, lots of weeks. But as soon as I'm instructed, I'm prepared to begin as soon as the cable comes in."
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Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and George Jahn in New York contributed to this report.
Russia Warns US Unilateral Decisions on Iran Could Thwart Diplomacy
SpaceWar.com
Thursday 05 October 2006
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday warned that unilateral moves taken by Washington over the Iran nuclear crisis could hamper international diplomatic efforts to end the standoff.
"We believe the common action (over Iran) must be continued, but the United States have taken a unilateral decision affecting all parties, which limits activities in Iran not only of American companies but of all companies," Lavrov said during a visit to Poland.
"A unilateral step such as this will certainly not help efforts to draw up a collective response (to Tehran), but we will see what we can do tomorrow in London," Lavrov said.
The so-called P5-plus-1 group, made up of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States - and Germany, is due to meet in London Friday to try to reach compromise deal over Iran's nuclear programme, the Russian foreign ministry announced earlier.
"We will take as our lead the agreements that have already been struck by the Six, and on the basis of which (EU foreign policy chief) Javier Solana is continuing his efforts," Lavrov said.
"We are very worried by the fact that there has not been, up to now, a satisfactory response from Tehran," he said.
"We will continue with the diplomatic effort, even though some are in favour of sanctions as of now," the Russian foreign minister added.
"We have already said that sanctions are extreme measures. We will discuss the full range of measures available to the international community" to try to resolve the crisis with Iran, he said.
"We will see what other possibilities exist to continue with multi-party diplomatic efforts," he said.
Russia has strong economic interests in Iran, including a project to build a nuclear power station.
Moscow and Tehran signed an agreement last week for the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power station to come online in September next year.
The deal reaffirmed Russia's commitment to the controversial project, estimated to be worth some one billion euros, despite strong US objections to the project.
During a trip to Los Angeles last week, Lavrov said that Russia would not deal with the Iranian problem by joining other countries in issuing an ultimatum over its nuclear program, RIA Novosti news agency reported.
"We cannot endorse an ultimatum that will force everyone into a dead end and produce a new crisis in an already destabilized region," he said, insisting then, too, that compromise was the only way forward.
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