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Trump Seeks ‘Coalition Of The Willing’ Against Iran
After a somewhat quiet weekend the Trump administration today engaged in another push against Iran.
Today the Treasury Department sanctioned the leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It also sanctioned Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his office! There will be no more Disney Land visits for them.
There is more to come:
Josh Rogin – @joshrogin – 16:18 utc – 24 Jun 2019
Mnuchin: "The president has instructed me that we will be designating [Iran's foreign minister Javad] Zarif later this week." cc: @JZarif
The Treasury Secretary will designate Javad Zarif as what? A terrorist? Zarif is quite effective in communicating the Iranian standpoint on Twitter and other social media. Those accounts will now be shut down.
The Trump administration's special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, said today that Iran should respond to U.S. diplomacy with diplomacy. Sanctioning Iran's chief diplomat is probably not the way to get there.
All those who get sanctioned by the U.S. will gain in popularity in Iran. These U.S. measures will only unite the people of Iran and strengthen their resolve.
Iran will respond to this new onslaught by asymmetric means of which it has plenty.
On Saturday Trump said that all he wants is that Iran never gets nuclear weapons. But the State Department wants much more. Hook today said that the U.S. would only lift sanctions if a comprehensive deal is made that includes ballistic missile and human rights issues. Iran can not agree to that. But this is not the first time that Pompeo demanded more than Trump himself. Is it Pompeo, not Trump, who is pressing this expanded version to make any deal impossible?
Brian Hook is by the way a loon who does not even understand the meaning of what he himself says:
laurence norman @laurnorman – 10:53 utc – 24 Jun 2019
US Hook says Iran knew what getting into when struck deal with president who had 1 1/2 yr left in office. "They knew what they were getting into…They knew that there was a great possibility that the next president could come in & leave the deal." Note: US elections 17 months away
Those are two good arguments for Iran to never again agree to any deal with the 'non-agreement-capable' United States.
It seems obvious from the above that the Trump administration has no real interest in reasonable negotiations with Iran:
“The administration is not really interested in negotiations now,” said Robert Einhorn, a former senior State Department official who was involved in negotiations with Iranian officials during the Obama administration. “It wants to give sanctions more time to make the Iranians truly desperate, at which point it hopes the negotiations will be about the terms of surrender.”
That is part of the strategy. But the real issue is deeper:
Max Abrahms @MaxAbrahms – 16:41 utc – 24 Jun 2019
Pro tip: Sanctions against #Iran aren’t to retaliate for the downed drone or to punish tanker attacks or to improve the nuclear deal or to help the Iranian people but to foment revolution against the regime. The strategy is regime change with velvet gloves.
The U.S. now tries to build an international coalition against Iran. Trump invited China and Japan to protect their tankers in the Middle East:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump – 0:08 utc – 24 Jun 2019
China gets 91% of its Oil from the Straight, Japan 62%, & many other countries likewise. So why are we protecting the shipping lanes for other countries (many years) for zero compensation. All of these countries should be protecting their own ships on what has always been….
….a dangerous journey. We don’t even need to be there in that the U.S. has just become (by far) the largest producer of Energy anywhere in the world! The U.S. request for Iran is very simple – No Nuclear Weapons and No Further Sponsoring of Terror!
One wonders what the U.S. Central Command and the U.S. Navy will say when that Chinese carrier group arrives in the Gulf region.
Who else will join this?
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday he wants to build a global coalition against Iran during urgent consultations in the Middle East, following a week of crisis that saw the United States pull back from the brink of a military strike on Iran.
Pompeo spoke as he left Washington for Saudi Arabia, followed by the United Arab Emirates, ..
…
"We’ll be talking with them about how to make sure that we are all strategically aligned, and how we can build out a global coalition, a coalition not only throughout the Gulf states, but in Asia and in Europe, that understands this challenge as it is prepared to push back against the world’s largest state sponsor of terror,” Pompeo said about Iran.
Pompeo was hastily sent to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Brian Hook is now in Oman and Bolton is in Israel. The U.S. will also pressure Europe and NATO to join a new 'coalition of the willing'. The UK will likely follow any U.S. call as it needs a trade deal to survive after Brexit.
Other countries are best advised to stay out.
For All–What follows is a machine translation of a Russian article recapping Patrushev’s talks with Bolton and Israel’s National Security Man in Jerusalem that ended earlier today. Link to Russian original.
Russia has chosen an ally in the middle East
The escalation of the situation around Iran has brought the US to a standstill. The build-up of pressure and threats did not add weight to Washington in the international arena, did not break Iran. And senseless sanctions against the Supreme leader Khamenei led to Tehran’s retaliatory statement about the “end of diplomacy”. Russia is the mouth of the security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev reminded the US that Iran is our ally.
Three days before Putin and trump will arrive to Japan, negotiations of “second persons” in the Russian and American foreign policy – Nikolay Patrushev and John Bolton took place. In Jerusalem, they discussed for two days both the regional and middle East agenda, as well as important international issues for both countries – from Ukraine to Venezuela. Given that on Friday or Saturday the presidents of Russia and the United States will hold a meeting in Osaka, the current talks in Jerusalem can be considered their dress rehearsal.
But in the center of the Jerusalem meetings was, of course, the Iranian issue. It was important not only for the United States, but also for Israel, which also participated in the negotiations. Netanyahu generally filed this unique trilateral meeting (and in it except Patrushev and Bolton participated and the head of the national security Council of Israel Meir Ben-Shabbat) as his idea and merit. The Israeli Prime Minister held separate meetings with Patrushev and Bolton, and then opened the trilateral meeting itself, saying:
“I appreciate the strong relationship that Israel has with both countries and their leaders… I believe there is a broader basis for the cooperation of the three of us than many believe.”
Israel’s interest is clear – he wants to remove Iran from sight, that is, from Syria and Lebanon bordering the Jewish state (there are no Iranians, but there are Shiites friendly to them). To do this with the help of the US does not work, so it would be good to attract Russia to pressure on Iran. Completely unfounded dreams, but in Israel, many believe that Moscow for some reason need his help in the middle East game. Russia’s cautious position on the Israeli-Iranian confrontation in the region (Syria, Lebanon, etc.). for some reason, Israel perceived the reluctance to get involved in the conflict between the two regional powers as an opportunity to turn Moscow against Tehran.
And now in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said that Israel “will continue to prevent Iran from using neighboring territories to attack us.” That is, to strike on the territory of Syria and Lebanon, one of which last year has led to the death of a Russian military aircraft over the territory of Syria (when the Syrian air defense tried to get behind him an Israeli plane). This time Netanyahu said: “I would like to assure you that in protecting ourselves, we will not endanger the Russian forces in any way.” That is, he promised to continue to beat Syria. And in fact – on the Iranian parts and friendly to Iran Lebanese “Hezbollah”.
That is, Israel attacks Iran on the territory of a third state – and at the same time calls Iran an aggressor and demands to punish it. The theater is absurd, but its performances are forced to watch the whole world. The current phase of escalating the situation around Iran demonstrates this more than frankly. Netanyahu wants Iran to leave Syria, trump wants to earn the laurels of the “hard tamer of Iran” to put pressure on Europeans and return the favor of the Arabs. The whole world is on the ears, examining the next us-Israeli provocations against Tehran. In Jerusalem Patrushev listened to all the claims of Bolton and Netanyahu – and, in fact, all of them swept away. And so that questions do not arise.
For a start, the Secretary of the security Council, in fact, said that the last two provocations against Iran did not work. American drone Iranians shot down in its airspace, “some other evidence we have not received.” And the evidence in favor of the version about the torpedo attack on tankers in the Gulf of Oman is unprofessional and of poor quality.
Speaking about the strategy, Patrushev said that Russia noted “the importance of progressive reduction of tension in Iranian-Israeli relations through the implementation of mutual reciprocal steps” and stressed that “Syria should not turn into an arena of geopolitical confrontation.” Israeli strikes on Syria, the Secretary of the security Council of Russia called undesirable, saying that Israel could achieve many of its goals without them:
“Many attacks can be prevented in order to localize the situation that concerns Israel by non-military means.”
To do this, Patrushev called for more effective cooperation between the ministries of defense of Russia and Israel. That is, if Israel is concerned about its security, we can talk to the Russians about those detachments or warehouses of Hezbollah in Syria that bother him, and not try to beat them.
The problem is that Israel doesn’t want to report where it’s going to hit, because the Russians might find out that there’s nothing threatening Israel there. Israel cannot admit that it is not hitting what is threatening it now, but what may be threatening it in the future.
Russia does not consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Not even because it fought side by side with us in Syria, but because it is in fact the Lebanese army, only created by the Shiite population of this country.
Israel, like the United States, considers not only Hezbollah terrorists, but also the whole of Iran. Sanctions and statements against Iran are increasingly aggressive, and the latest us measures imposed against the Supreme leader – Ayatollah Khamenei, and did cause a response statement by Tehran about the fact that “diplomacy is over.”
Our leader has no millions, no foreign accounts, only prayers – this is how Tehran reacted to the sanctions against Khamenei. Rahbar (Supreme leader) and before that said that negotiations with the “false trump” impossible. And now the us President’s calls for negotiations look like a mockery of common sense.
The US and Israel think they can bring discord between Russia and Iran, but Moscow has made it clear that these calculations are groundless. Last week, Nikolai Patrushev met in Ufa with his Iranian counterpart, Secretary of the Supreme national security Council of Iran Ali Shamkhani. The meeting was timed to coincide with the international forum held in Bashkiria, but it is clear that the main topic was the upcoming Jerusalem talks. The day after the meeting between Patrushev and Shamkhani, Vladimir Putin, answering a direct line on the possibility of a deal between Russia and the United States and Israel (it was again about the information thrown in that Moscow can offer for the withdrawal of Iranian troops from Syria), said:
“What does the deal mean? This is some kind of commercial enterprise, shares. We trade neither our allies, nor our interests, nor our principles. We can agree with our partners on the solution of certain urgent problems.”
Well, now in Jerusalem Nikolai Patrushev said directly:
“In the context of the assessments made by our partners with regard to a major regional power, which is Iran, I would like to note the following: Iran has been and remains our ally and partner, with whom we are consistently developing relations both bilaterally and in multilateral formats. In this regard, any attempt to present Tehran as the main threat to regional security and even more so to put it on a par with ISIS* or other terrorist groups is unacceptable to us.”
Patrushev directly called Iran an ally of Russia – the most important signal for the US and Israel. Earlier this year, one of the Deputy foreign Ministers of Russia in an interview with the American TV channel, answering the question of whether Iran is an ally of Russia, said that it would be wrong to say so: we just act together in Syria, while Russia adheres to agreements with Israel on its security in connection with the Syrian war. Then this statement made a lot of noise in Iran and Israel.
Formally, Russia has no military allies, except the CSTO member States. But in recent years, the SCO, expanding into Asia, is becoming more like if not a military Alliance, then an organization that guarantees the security of its participants – especially from external, Western pressure. Iran has not yet joined the Shanghai cooperation organization. It is an observer country and the first candidate for full membership. Nikolai Patrushev’s statement not only brings Iran closer to joining the SCO, but also indicates Russia’s attitude to its ancient and great neighbor.
End Machine Translation.
As you read, several very important points were made by Patrushev that will again be made to Trump in Osaka. The writer did a very good job of relaying events in a neutral manner, but at a few points he couldn’t refrain from editorializing.
Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 25 2019 21:49 utc | 232
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