By Pooya Stone
While Iran has slowed down its threats towards the US in order to “recalculate”, the danger is far from over, according to the top commander of American forces in the Mideast on Thursday.
Gen. Frank McKenzie said that he is still concerned by Iran and would not rule out requesting additional US forces to defend against Iranian missiles or other weapons.
London, 08 June – For a second day running, Donald Trump has called for talks between the US and Iran but has stressed that under no circumstances will Iran be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
After a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in Caen, France, on Thursday, Trump said: “I understand [Iran] wants to talk, and we want to talk. That’s fine. We’ll talk. But the one thing that [Iran] can’t have is … nuclear weapons. And I think the president of France would agree with that very strongly.”
This came just one day after Trump told Britain’s ITV that he would prefer to talk to his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, but refused to take military action off the table.
He said: “Yeah, of course. I would much rather talk… [But] there’s always a chance [or military action]. Do I want to? No. I’d rather not. But there’s always a chance.”
Tensions between the US and Iran have been rising since Trump took power and began to exert pressure on Iran by pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal, reimposing sanctions on Iran, labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, among other things.
Trump said the nuclear deal didn’t do enough to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons or modify its other malign behavior, so his pressure campaign was designed to get Iran to agree to a new comprehensive deal.
Recently. tensions escalated when the US sent an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers to the Gulf in response to an as-yet-unspecified threat to the US, which was described as “imminent”.
On Tuesday, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei suggested that Trump’s supposed openness to talks was a “cunning political ploy” and Iran would not be deceived.
Tzvi Kahn, a senior Iran analyst at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said: “Iran knows that the current situation is unsustainable as sanctions are tearing apart the country. So, we’re beginning to see cracks in the regime’s facade.”
Indeed, Iran’s currency has been weakened significantly since the sanctions and inflation rates have soared.
Following his address with Macron, Trump said: “[Iran is] doing very poorly as a nation. They are failing as a nation. And I don’t want them to fail as a nation.”
While Macron said that the US and France agreed that Iran should not obtain nuclear weapons, reduce its ballistic missile activity, contain its involvement in regional conflicts; and pursue peace in the Middle East.
He said: “I think the [message] pronounced by President Trump is that [negotiations] are very important. We need to open a new negotiation in order to build and to get these four objectives.”
By Jubin Katiraie
The National Council of Resistance of Iran’s (NCRI) representative office in Oslo has issued a statement regarding the Iran’s latest activities. It has stated that the Iranian government is becoming more and more hostile towards the opposition in terms of its misinformation campaign against the NCRI and the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI / MEK).
By Jubin Katiraie
The World Bank is now predicting that Iran will experience a worse recession in 2019 than was previously thought, as US sanctions tighten around the oil exports that are the main revenue source for the Middle Eastern country.
In the Washington-based institution’s latest Global Economic Prospects report, published on Wednesday, it revealed that it expects Iran’s Gross Domestic Product to fall by 4.5% this year, compared with its previous estimate of a minus 3.6% GDP growth.
By Pooya Stone
Several US officials have said that military tensions between Iran and the US have been easing, just a month after that US sent an aircraft carrier to the Middle East because they feared that Iran as preparing to attack US troops in the region.
One defence official with direct knowledge of the situation said: “It seems tensions have dropped some, but we are still watching very closely, we haven’t relaxed, we remain vigilant.”
By Jubin Katiraie
US President Trump is waging financial warfare against Iran and its terrorist network. Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy in Lebanon, is getting the worst of it, as the Trump administration works to pry it away from Iran.
It receives 70 percent of its annual revenue from Iran — totaling around $700 million in annual funding. Hezbollah is running out of funds. It needs Iranian cash to survive.
By Pooya Stone
Evidence of Iran’s involvement in the sabotage of four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) last month, is set to be revealed in the coming days by the United States and will include intelligence that Washington has received from Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
London, 05 June – Iran is continuing to violate the 2015 nuclear accord by increasing its contested nuclear work, but Republicans in Congress are preparing to impose biting sanctions that the Donald Trump administration has so far neglected to impose, according to officials familiar with the effort.
Iran has already breached provisions of the nuclear accord about the installation of advanced centrifuges – used to speedily enrich uranium to make nuclear bombs – but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) now reports that Iran has begun restarting bomb-making portions of its nuclear program.
This is the fulfillment of a threat made by Iran if Europe would not help Iran evade US economic sanctions, which came into place after Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018. This amount to nuclear blackmail on the part of Iran, so Republicans see this as an opportunity to convince the Trump administration to end sanctions waivers that allow Iran to legally continue secretive nuclear work at a range of sites. (Unfortunately, the State Department has argued against revocation.) Essentially, this means that the US has not fully left the nuclear deal.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is a vocal critic of the decision to continue granting Iran nuclear waivers, said that the IAEA’s recent findings warrant more sanctions.
He said: “Today’s report by the International Atomic Energy Agency confirms what I have long said: Iran is cheating on the catastrophic Obama Iran nuclear deal. In addition to secretly storing blueprints for nuclear weapons and refusing to turn over materials related to their nuclear weapons program, now they have pushed the envelope so far on centrifuges that the cheating can no longer be denied.”
He continued: “The nuclear deal was designed to allow cheating, with the expectation that the Ayatollahs would blackmail the parties into ignoring their behavior. I have long said the nuclear deal should be ripped to shreds, and I applaud President Trump for all of the steps his administration has taken to that end. Now it is time to take the next step and invoke the multilateral snapback in United Nations Security Council resolution 2231, which the Obama administration rushed to pass in order to lock in the nuclear deal before Congress had a chance to weigh in.”
One senior congressional official explained that this is a loophole that allows Iran to work on advanced centrifuges until they are ready to back out of the nuclear deal.
Michael Doran, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former senior director of the White House National Security Council, explained that the debate is reaching a tipping point.
He said: “Although President Trump renounced the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran, a year later the United States is still respecting provisions of the deal by issuing waivers that permit what is euphemistically referred to as Iran’s ‘civil nuclear program. Some inside and the administration—and Senator Cruz outside it—are asking whether it makes sense for the United States to support the maintenance of facilities such as, for example, the Fordow enrichment plant.”
It is time for Trump to put the final nail in the coffin of the Iran deal and listen to Senator Cruz.
By Pooya Stone
Iran’s state TV channels are airing a music video that glorifies an anti-American Iraqi Shiite paramilitary group in an attempt to sway public opinion in Iran in favour of the mullahs’ involvement in Middle East conflicts.
The video, which is entitled “The Noble Ones” and praises Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, a group designated as a terrorist organization by the US in March, has been shown several times already.
By Jubin Katiraie
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps will hold a major ceremony in Tehran from June 13th through June 15th to commemorate the founder of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. At the Khomeini mausoleum in southern Tehran people will be allowed to pay tribute to the Islamic republic’s first supreme leader, who died 30 years ago, on June 3rd, 1989. Current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, will address the crowd.
