Iranian Alert -- January 2, 2004 -- IRAN LIVE THREAD --Americans for Regime Change in Iran

U.S.: 2003 Was a Very Bad Year For Rogue States

January 02, 2004
World Tribune
World Tribune.com

WASHINGTON – Bush administration officials said that over the last year the United States has hampered what they termed the terrorism and weapons of mass destruction policies of such countries as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria. They said the fall of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein has prompted changes in Iran, Libya and Syria.

The U.S. achievements were listed as the following. The destruction of the Saddam regime in March 2003; Syria's agreement to cooperate against Al Qaida; Iran's signing of the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in December and Libya's agreement to end its WMD and medium-range missile programs. Officials said the administration has also envisioned lifting sanctions from Libya and eventually from Iran.

The earthquake in Iran, which has killed up to 50,000 people, has provided the United States with an opportunity for engagement with Teheran. The United States has rushed tons of supplies on a military plane for survivors of the earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam.

On Wednesday, the administration decided to waive sanctions on Iran for three months to enable U.S. relief efforts. The U.S. relief delegation in Iran has surpassed 1,100 people and the administration has sought Teheran's permission for the visit by a leading Republican senator and members of the family of President George Bush.

"What we're doing in Iran is we're showing the Iranian people the American people care, that they've got great compassion for human suffering," Bush said on Thursday. "The Iranian government must listen to the voices of those who long for freedom, must turn over Al Qaida that are in their custody and must abandon their nuclear weapons program."

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said Iran, Libya and Syria – driven by their desire to return to the international community – have been pressured into rolling back their anti-U.S. policies. Armitage said the United States has long sought such changes in these Middle East states.

"The Libyan question, the discussions there, started over nine months ago," Armitage said in a radio interview. "The Syrians, we've been hectoring them to do the right thing for the last seven months. And Iran decided to accede to the Additional Protocol regarding nuclear inspections following the visit of the three foreign ministers of the European Union."

Armitage said Syria has cooperated in the U.S.-led war against Al Qaida. He said Syria has seized million in suspected Al Qaida assets. "I think that the fact the Bush Administration has engaged in muscular multilateralism is in the back of the minds of all those three countries," Armitage said.

Officials said the Syrian cooperation in the war against Al Qaida came despite a new law that would impose U.S. sanctions on Damascus. They said Bush is likely to cite Syrian cooperation with Al Qaida in any waiver of U.S. sanctions on the Assad regime expected to be demanded by Congress during 2004.

At the same time, officials said, the United States will press Syria to end its WMD programs. They said Syria might receive U.S. guarantees that Israel will also be urged to do the same.

http://216.26.163.62/2004/ss_terror_01_02.html

Ayatollah Jannati Slams US

January 02, 2004
Al Bawaba
albawaba.com

A prominent Iranian cleric on Friday mounted a strong attack on the US and on President Bush. Speaking at Friday prayers, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who heads the Council of Guardians, said the Americans were trying to exploit the disaster of the earthquake in Bam to seek relations with Iran.

On the Bam earthquake, Ayatollah Jannati thanked the Iranian and international rescue teams but the Americans, he said, were politically motivated and were trying to exploit it for opportunistic reasons. "Our answer is to slap you in the face and to say that for the paltry aid you sent we cannot forget our problems with you and extend the hand of friendship and relations," he said. He said the US assistance for the affected people of Bam could not bring about the normalization of relations between Tehran and Washington.

"If you're so full of compassion, why don't you go and help the Palestinians, whose earthquake you created?"

He commented on the "criminal policies" persuaded by the United States both in Palestine and Iraq and said though Saddam Hussein was removed from power he has been replaced by another dictator. "As a result of his (Paul Bremer) policies, the Muslim people of Iraq are facing increasing insecurity and their basic needs are not met either."

http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=267033&lang=e&dir=news

Iran Rejects US Delegation Plan

January 02, 2004
BBC News
BBCi

Iran says the time is not right for a high level visit by a US delegation in the wake of the Bam earthquake.

US officials were considering sending Senator Elizabeth Dole, a former head of the American Red Cross, on a humanitarian mission.

But the State Department said the Iranians were holding the visit "in abeyance" and the US had decided not to pursue it for the moment.

Earlier an Iranian cleric accused the US of trying to exploit the disaster.

Bad timing

The US authorities have already eased sanctions on Iran to allow Americans to make financial donations for disaster relief. An American medical and disaster relief team is also working in the country.

The BBC's John Leyne, in Washington, says the Iranian response shows that Tehran seems unwilling to move from humanitarian aid to more of a political reconciliation.

President George W Bush has said America's easing of some sanctions and its readiness to help Iran, after last week's earthquake, does not signal a change in Washington's policy.

Meanwhile, hard-line right-winger, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said at Friday prayers in Tehran: "Naturally America wanted to take advantage of this situation by offering some help and bringing up the issue of relations,"

But the BBC's Jim Muir, in Teheran, says that unusually his remarks were not carried in the lunchtime bulletins of the main state television channel and they were toned down in the official Iranian news agency account.

US 'compassion'

The US severed ties with Iran after the 1979 Iranian revolution. Iranian students had seized 63 hostages at US embassy in Tehran.

President Bush has since described Iran as part of an "axis of evil" along with North Korea and Iraq.

But State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said Washington had approached Iran on the subject of a visit after Tehran accepted a US aid shipment for the people of Bam.

An unnamed member of the Bush family was to have accompanied Senator Dole.

The mission would have been the first official US visit to Iran since 1979.

In a recent interview the Secretary of State Colin Powell also held out the possibility of a new dialogue with Iran.

UN report

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has pledged to build the ancient city of Bam which has lost up to half of its 100,000 citizens.

Head of the reconstruction team, Hamid Eskander, has said the task is huge but not impossible.

Workers have cleared away most of the corpses from the earthquake site.

The United Nations plans to complete an assessment of the needs of Bam by the middle of next week which will be presented to international donors.

Most residents have either left the city or are sheltering in tents.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3364345.stm

Tehran Mood Darkens as Doomsday Quake Fear Spreads

January 02, 2004
Reuters
Parinoosh Arami

TEHRAN -- The Bam earthquake has sent shockwaves of fear rippling through Tehran with chilling visions of what may happen to the capital if the 'big one' hits.

Sitting on a major fault line, Tehran was rocked by a powerful quake in 1830, which killed tens of thousands. Scientists monitoring small daily tremors say it is only a matter of time before disaster strikes the city of 12 million.

"It scares the living daylights out of me to see what happened to Bam and think about what's in store for us when a big quake like that hits Tehran," said Reza, 22, a photographer.

The loss of 30,000 lives in Bam -- a third of its population -- has darkened the mood in Tehran, casting a pall over its normally resilient populace. Sombre music filling radio and television airwaves only adds to a sense of gloom.

Experts say a quake as strong as in Bam, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, would mean doomsday. Death toll estimates range from 400,000 to a million or more.

"People are worried," said Shirzad Bozorgmehr, 59, managing editor of Iran News daily who lived through earthquakes in California for 25 years before returning 10 years ago.

"I know people in apartment buildings who all of a sudden are looking to buy land to build on so they can be sure their house will be earthquake proof," he added.

The daunting realisation that Tehran buildings are in such poor shape and that contractors often ignore regulations with impunity has sent shivers down many spines, especially in upscale north Tehran where the fault line crosses the city.

NO TIME TO WASTE

"I'm afraid my house wasn't built well enough to protect my family from earthquakes," said Mohammad Ali Azarabadi, 60, a physician. "I will have it reinforced. Bam showed us all that the quake wasn't the problem. Shoddy building is the problem."

Bahaeddin Adab, member of parliament's construction committee, said a study by Japanese scientists concluded an earthquake of 7 on the Richter scale would destroy Tehran, as one that magnitude did in 1830 when 45,000 in the region died.

"There's a lot of anxiety and even panic out there after Bam," he told Reuters. "We have no time to waste. We should demolish fragile buildings. Unsafe building must stop now."

A casual glance at some ramshackle architecture causes dread even among untrained eyes and makes engineers cringe.

Mehran Amiri, a civil engineer, said strict regulations to prevent structural failure have been in place for seven years, but are ignored as contractors put profits before safety.

"Schools, hospitals and state buildings must be checked and made earthquake-resistant," he said.

A Tehran newspaper, Sharq, reported only five of the 32 fire stations were built to withstand a strong quake. Bahram Akasheh, professor of geophysics at Tehran University, said a strong tremor would destroy 80 percent of the city's buildings.

But Touraj, a Tehran businessman, said he wasn't worried.

"It's just nonsense, all this panic about an earthquake in Tehran. No one can predict it. Fear of a quake is like fear of death. You can't live if you only worry about dying."

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L02249859.htm

US Has Big Plans for Embassy in Iraq

January 02, 2004
Washington Post
Robin Wright

In preparation for ending its occupation of Iraq, the United States is making plans to create the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world in Baghdad, complete with a staff of over 3,000 personnel, according to U.S. officials.

The transition will mark the hand-over of responsibility for dealing with Iraq from the Pentagon to the State Department, which will then help oversee the two definitive steps in creating Iraq's first freely elected democratic government.

"The real challenge for the new embassy, so to speak, or the new presence will be helping the Iraqi people get ready for their full elections and full constitution the following year," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview this week. "That's going to be a major effort on our part."

One of the first steps will be resuming diplomatic relations between Washington and Baghdad. Although the United States is the occupying power in Iraq, the two nations have not formally resumed relations, which were severed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

"Saddam broke off relations in 1991, and it requires a fairly complicated agreement to reestablish ties," a senior administration official said.

The other major challenge will be sorting out the terms of the U.S. military presence, which is expected to exceed 100,000 troops even after the occupation ends, U.S. officials say.

"We have to determine what command American troops will be under: Will it be part of some kind of multinational force, under the United Nations, under NATO? Or will they be relatively independent in an agreement with the Iraqi government? These are huge questions to be answered in a very short amount of time," the official added.

In the interview, Powell said he will spend the next six months pressing for larger international participation: "As I build up that large embassy, I've got to also generate more international support, U.N. presence -- get the U.N. back in there in force. . . . I think NATO is more and more willing to play a role in Iraq."

Over the next six months, the State Department will increasingly assume responsibility for jobs now carried out by the U.S.-led coalition authority, senior U.S. officials said. Several teams of lawyers are immersed in the complicated legal issues of handing back sovereignty to Iraq and making arrangements for a formal diplomatic relationship.

The bulk of the U.S. staff will continue to be headquartered in Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace. But to avert the potential psychological fallout from staying in the headquarters of the previous dictatorship, the new embassy will officially be in a building not far from the "Green Zone" of Baghdad, where the Coalition Provisional Authority operates. The embassy, however, will have nominal use.

The United States is tentatively planning to build a new embassy, although construction could take three to five years, U.S. officials say. Over the next two months, the State Department will be intensively recruiting to staff the U.S. Embassy.

Staffing has been an issue in recent months. Many on the staff of L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, are young, comparatively inexperienced in the Middle East, non-Arabic speakers and political appointees rather than career Foreign Service officers. Some have already left or plan to do so before the occupation ends to work on the president's reelection campaign, according to U.S. officials.

"There will be a fairly dramatic shift of personnel over the next six months," the U.S. official said. "It can't be precipitous and happen all at once."

The U.S. Embassy in Egypt has a larger presence, with more than 7,000 personnel. But they include many non-diplomats from various U.S. agencies, including, for example, two members of the Library of Congress who collect foreign books. The Baghdad embassy will have the largest diplomatic staff anywhere in the world, the State Department said.

http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/917

Why Did So Many Have to Die in Bam?

December 30, 2003
The Guardian
David Aaronovitch

The Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei yesterday managed to get to Bam, three days after the earthquake which may have killed 30,000 of his fellow Iranians. The president, Mohammad Khatami, followed soon afterwards. Khamenei had words of dubious comfort for survivors when he told them that "we will rebuild Bam stronger than before". Given the collapse of 80% of the buildings, from the old fortress to the new hospitals, the Iranian government could hardly make the new Bam as weak as the old one.

Some will see this as simply a natural disaster of the kind to which Iran, according to Khatami, is "prone". Four days earlier, however, there had been another earthquake of about the same intensity, this time in California. In which about 0.000001% of the buildings suffered serious structural damage and two people were killed when an old clocktower collapsed. So why the polar disparity between Bam and Paso Robles?

This is not a silly question. True, the Californians are much richer than the Iranians. But if you believed everything you read in the works of M Moore and others, you would anticipate a culture of corporate greed in which safety and regulation came way behind the desire to turn the quick buck. Instead you discover a society in which the protection of citizens from falling masonry seems to be regarded as enormously important.

Whereas in Iran - for all its spiritual solidarity - the authorities don't appear to give a toss. The report in this paper from Teheran yesterday was revealing. It was one thing for the old, mud-walled citadel to fall down, but why the new hospitals? An accountant waiting to give blood at a clinic in the capital told our correspondent that it was a "disgrace that a rich country like ours with all the revenue from oil and other natural resources is not prepared to deal with an earthquake".

The reformist Iran News asked on its website, "How many times have we reminded the ruling establishment that the first structures to fall during a major earthquake would be those dealing with emergency management and relief, such as hospitals, police and fire stations? The officials in charge are either deaf or simply don't care."

Iran had the money to do much of what was needed. After the Kobe earthquake of January 1995 a report concluded that most deaths had been caused by the collapse of housing built in the traditional Japanese manner. This style was based on a post-and-beam system, with tiles or thick mud laid on top. The roofs came down easily, and when they did, they crushed everything beneath. And exactly the same thing seems to have happened in Bam, as much to new as to old buildings. The use of corrugated iron roofs would have been much safer.

So why, despite the loss of 40,000 lives in the Gilan earthquake of 1990, had nothing been done? The same question was being asked back in the queue outside the clinic. Fariba Hemati told the Guardian what she thought of official efforts, "Our government is only preoccupied with slogans: 'Death to America', 'Death to Israel', 'Death to this and that'. We have had three major earthquakes in the past three decades. Thousands of people have died but nothing has been done. Why?"

As she was queueing Jahanbakhsh Khanjani, spokesman for Iran's interior ministry, was denying that a team from Israel was coming to help. "The Islamic Republic of Iran," he told the press, "accepts all kinds of humanitarian aid from all countries and international organisations, with the exception of the Zionist regime." The Israelis, of course, have some reputation for rescue work, but it was ideology rather than humanity that was at stake here.

The answer to Hemati is that, after a quarter of a century, Iran is still being ruled by a useless, incompetent semi-theocracy, which is fatalistic, complacent, unresponsive and often brutal. And such a system does not deliver to its citizens one fraction of what the Great Satan, for all its manifest faults, manages to guarantee to ordinary Americans.

Following the fall of the Berlin wall there was, as the philosopher John Gray put it, a "false dawn" of the New Age of Liberal Democracy, in which all problems everywhere could be expected to be solved by a free market and free elections. But this triumphalism has been replaced, in some quarters at least, by the equally vacuous tropes of the anti-globalisation movement and its demonisation of liberal capitalism.

What, I wonder, has Arundhati Roy to say now about the superiority of traditional building methods over globalised ones? Some Iranians might think that it's a shame there wasn't a McDonald's in Bam. It would have been the safest place in town.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,1113895,00.html

Bush Aids the Cause of Regime Change in Iran

January 03, 2004
Telegraph
Opinion

Earthquakes have a way of shaking the political landscape as well as the Earth's crust. In 1999, Greek aid to the victims of the Istanbul tremor broke through the hostility felt by two neighbours for each other. Today, following the Bam disaster, the same could happen between the United States and Iran.

An American mission is already in the afflicted area, helping to set up a field hospital. It is now proposed that Senator Elizabeth Dole, former head of the Red Cross in America, should lead a humanitarian aid delegation to Iran that would include a member of George W Bush's family. Does it require an earthquake to overcome decades of mistrust between the "Great Satan" and part of the "axis of evil"?

First, we await Teheran's response to Washington's suggestion. Hardline clerical voices at Friday prayers left their congregations in no doubt that an offer of aid could not hope to absolve America from its sins. Yet most Iranians would welcome closer ties with the West as part of a general move towards political liberalisation.

Iran's leaders have to weigh their natural distaste for the sole remaining superpower with public eagerness to use the earthquake as a means of détente. Apathy at street level about the shortcomings of the Iranian regime could ignite into demonstrations if the clerics mishandle the situation.

Before Mrs Dole volunteered to lead a mission to Iran, Mr Bush had asked whether more could be done to help the stricken country.

In Europe, which has chosen a policy of constructive engagement with Teheran, the latest American offer will be seen as a welcome retreat from "axis of evil" demonisation.

In an election year in which he wants to avoid foreign policy crises, Mr Bush, it will be argued, is seeking to distance himself from neo-conservative demands that the mullahs be overthrown.

But is it as simple as that? The President has reiterated his call to Iran's leaders to allow greater political freedom. Cease aid to Islamic terrorists and abandon nuclear ambitions. Temporarily easing the economic embargo against Teheran for humanitarian reasons does not amount to a fundamental change of policy.

The suppression of anti-government demonstrations in Iran, further suicide bombings in Israel or a confrontation over inspections between Teheran and the International Atomic Energy Agency could all undermine incipient rapprochement.

Indeed, there is a case for saying that, in approving Mrs Dole's mission, the President is attempting to appeal over the heads of the mullahs directly to the people. That is the sort of insidious manoeuvre of which the neo-conservatives would heartily approve.

Proffering the olive branch of aid is consonant with a desire to contain friction in the Middle East during an election year. But for Teheran to meet the Administration's basic foreign policy goals would require a change of regime. In that sense, Mr Bush's eirenic gesture can be said to have set the satanic cat among the clerical pigeons.

http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/01/03/dl0301.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/01/03/ixoplead.html

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