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1611. The IAEA and Iran: The Perils of Inaction

Author:
Michael Eisenstadt
Publication Date:
09-2004
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
Deep divisions among the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), currently meeting in Vienna, continue to hamper U.S. efforts on two key fronts: pressing Iran to suspend work on its nuclear program, and referring allegations of Iranian violations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to the UN Security Council. With the current meeting unlikely to produce tangible steps to halt Iran's nuclear program, it is important to understand the potential consequences of Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability.
Topic:
Security, Cold War, and Religion
Political Geography:
Europe, Iran, Middle East, and Arab Countries

1612. Incident in the Shatt al-Arab Waterway: Iran's Border Sensitivities

Author:
Michael Rubin
Publication Date:
06-2004
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
After several days of diplomatic tension between London and Tehran, eight British military personnel who had been captured by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were released and flown out of Iran on June 24. The men, who served with the coalition forces in Iraq, had been in three boats intercepted in the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that forms the border with Iran. (Tehran, which dislikes the Arab name, calls the waterway the Arvand River.) The incident comes after several weeks of minor clashes in the Persian Gulf and at a time when Iran is facing strong international pressure due to concerns about its suspected nuclear weapons program.
Topic:
Security and Religion
Political Geography:
Iraq, Iran, Middle East, Tehran, and Arab Countries

1613. Special Policy Forum Report: The 25th Anniversary of Iran's Islamic Revolution -- Looking Back and Ahead

Author:
Shaul Bakhash and Haleh Esfandiari
Publication Date:
02-2004
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
On February 17, 2004, Shaul Bakhash and Haleh Esfandiari addressed The Washington Institute's Special Policy Forum. Dr. Bakhash, who has worked for many years as a journalist in Iran, is the Clarence Robinson Professor of History at George Mason University and author of Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (Millefleurs, 1991). Haleh Esfandiari, who recently returned from a trip to Iran, is consulting director of the Middle East Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Previously she served as deputy secretary-general of the Women's Organization of Iran. The following is a rapporteur's summary of their remarks.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution
Political Geography:
United States, Iran, Washington, Middle East, and Arab Countries

1614. Iran Between Elections and the IAEA

Author:
Patrick Clawson
Publication Date:
02-2004
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
To no one's surprise, the Iranian parliamentary elections resulted in a conservative sweep; the hardliners had rigged the rules so as to prevent a serious contest. As the hardliners consolidate their control, they may be interested in improving relations with the United States, though a major initiative would likely appear only after they retake the presidency at the end of Muhammad Khatami's term in May 2005. The most obvious bait for such engagement is Iran's nuclear program. On February 22, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Mohamed ElBaradei met with Iranian Supreme National Security Council head Hassan Rohani to discuss the IAEA report due out this week, which shows once again that Iran has made clandestine progress toward nuclear enrichment, further raising the stakes. Given the risks, would a U.S.-Iranian deal be appropriate?
Topic:
Conflict Resolution
Political Geography:
United States, Iran, Middle East, and Arab Countries

1615. Iran's Threat to Coalition Forces in Iraq

Author:
Raymond Tanter
Publication Date:
01-2004
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
According to the State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002 (issued in April 2003), Tehran provides the Lebanon-based Hizballah with "funding, safe haven, training, and weapons." Such support (estimated at $80 million per year) has given Iran a terrorist proxy of global reach. For example, Hizballah suicide bombings against the U.S. Marine barracks and the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut (in October 1983 and September 1984, respectively) killed some 300 U.S. diplomats and soldiers. In addition, the twenty-two individuals on the FBI's list of Most Wanted Terrorists include three Hizballah operatives accused of the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, during which a U.S. Navy diver was murdered. The hijacking featured the infamous image of an American pilot peering out of the cockpit with a gun to his head. Moreover, according to a November 1, 1996, report by the Washington Post, Saudi intelligence concluded that a local group calling itself Hizballah was responsible for the June 1996 truck bombing of the Khobar Towers U.S. military housing complex on the kingdom's Persian Gulf coast. The Saudis also asserted that this local group was a wing of Lebanese Hizballah. More recently, Hizballah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah made the following remarks in a speech given one week before coalition forces launched Operation Iraqi Freedom (as broadcast on al-Manar, the organization's Beirut-based satellite television station): "In the past, when the Marines were in Beirut, we screamed, 'Death to America!' Today, when the region is being filled with hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, 'Death to America!' was, is, and will stay our slogan."
Topic:
Conflict Resolution
Political Geography:
United States, Iraq, Iran, Washington, Middle East, Tehran, and Arab Countries

1616. The Hizballah Threat in Africa

Author:
Matthew Levitt
Publication Date:
01-2004
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
On December 25, 2003, Union Transport Africaines (UTA) Flight 141 bound for Beirut crashed on take-off from Cotonou, Benin, in West Africa. According to accounts in the Arab press, a "foreign relations official of the African branch of the Lebanese Hizballah party and two of his aides" were among those killed. The Hizballah officials were reportedly carrying $2 million in contributions, raised from wealthy Lebanese nationals living in Africa, to the organization's headquarters in Beirut. In fact, Hizballah maintains a worldwide network engaged in financial, logistical, and operational terrorist activities, often in close cooperation with Iranian intelligence services. Hizballah operatives in Africa raise and launder significant sums of money, recruit local operatives, collect preoperational intelligence, and support the organization's terrorist activities against Israeli, U.S., and other Western interests.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution
Political Geography:
Africa, United States, Iran, Middle East, and Arab Countries

1617. Hizballah, Iran, and the Prospects for a New Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process

Author:
Michael Eisenstadt and Neri Zilber
Publication Date:
12-2004
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
The death of Yasser Arafat and the approach of Palestinian elections on January 9 have rekindled hopes for the peace process. However, if history is a guide, Hizballah and Iran—which worked tirelessly to undermine the Oslo Process—will try to sabotage such efforts. (Indeed, Israeli intelligence reports cited in the Israeli press indicate that they are preparing to do so.) Having emerged from the al-Aqsa Intifada as the principal outside actors in Palestinian politics and emboldened by what they see as recent successes, Hizballah and Iran could pose major obstacles to efforts to defuse the conflict and promote Israeli-Palestinian reengagement.
Topic:
Security and Religion
Political Geography:
Iran, Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and Czech Republic

1618. A Possible Path to Change in US-Iran Relations

Author:
Mark Edmond Clark
Publication Date:
12-2004
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Columbia International Affairs Online
Abstract:
In 1999, I visited Belgrade one month before the start of Operation ALLIED FORCE as a guest of the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs to hear the perspectives of key officials on the possibility of a conflict between Yugoslavia and NATO. I heard a singular perspective that NATO would not use force and threats to do so were used only to get the regime of Slobodan Milosevic to respond to diplomatic efforts by the US and EU. There was simply a refusal to recognize that the threat of attack from NATO was real.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
United States, Iran, Middle East, and Yugoslavia

1619. A Strategy for Nuclear Iran

Author:
Thomas Donnelly
Publication Date:
10-2004
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
Regardless of who is elected to the presidency in November, the growing threat posed by a nuclear Iran is certain to be at the top of the next administration's national security agenda. Unfortunately, neither a "grand bargain" with Tehran nor a conventional military strike against its nuclear facilities offers much hope of preventing one of the world's most dangerous regimes from acquiring the world's most dangerous weapons. In the short term, at least, the United States must instead work to isolate Iran not only militarily but ideologically, by succeeding in the democratic transformation of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Topic:
Security and Foreign Policy
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, United States, Iraq, and Iran

1620. Fundamentalist terrorism - the assault on the symbols of secular power

Author:
Jost Halfmann
Publication Date:
04-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of European Studies (IES), UC Berkeley
Abstract:
Jost Halfmann argues that fundamentalist terrorism is an extreme expression of protest against the separation of state and religion; this form of protest is motivated by a utopian vision of society as a community of the faithful. The protest against secular states arises in states with forced modernization politics (such as Iran or Egypt), but also in states which base national identity on religion (such as Israel) and in states with high popular religiosity (such as the US). The terrorist form of protest exhibits an extreme form of self-ascribed marginality. Terrorism seems to be the only expression of protest when the enemy is considered overwhelmingly powerful, the struggle must, however, not be lost. Fundamentalist terrorists view themselves as being engaged in a cosmic war enforced on them by the enemy. Terrorist assaults are, therefore, symbolic acts of violence against symbols of the enemy's power to demonstrate emporarily the enemy's weakness.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Religion, and Terrorism
Political Geography:
Iran, Israel, and Egypt