Iran at talks: No scrapping any nuclear facility

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By GEORGE JAHN

VIENNA (AP) - Iran drew a red line on Tuesday on how far it would go at landmark nuclear talks, saying as the meeting opened that it would not buckle to pressure from the U.S. and five other world powers to scrap any of its nuclear facilities.

The statement by Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi suggested tough talks ahead, constituting a rejection of a central demand by the six countries.

At the same time, neither side can afford to have the talks fail.

Lack of agreement would leave Iran struggling under the weight of harsh economic sanctions and a threat of military strikes by Israel, which sees Iran's nuclear program as an unacceptable security threat primarily designed to develop weapons.

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20140218/DAC1RR900.html

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Michael Mann, spokesperson for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton spekes to press during closed-door nuclear talks in Vienna, Austria, Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2014. Iran and six world powers are back at the negotiating table eager to come to terms on a comprehensive nuclear deal but deeply divided on what it should look like. The two sides began meeting Tuesday in attempts to build on a first-step accord that temporarily curbs Tehran's nuclear activities in exchange for some sanctions relief. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak)

[JohnyCanuck]

1. New book provides some context & background on the dispute with Iran over it nuclear program

Unravelling the false history of the Iranian nuclear program: An excerpt from ‘Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare’

By Gareth Porter


On Friday Just World Books published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare by Gareth Porter. The following exclusive excerpt is the introduction to the book. You can buy the book here.

In November 2013, the United States and five other states concluded a preliminary agreement with Iran on its nuclear program that was to be followed by a longer-term comprehensive deal. The agreement offered a way out of a crisis that had already lasted more than a decade and had involved both threats of war against Iran by the US and Israeli governments and efforts to cripple the Iranian economy by interfering with its international trade.

But the secret at the heart of the crisis is that the central assertions underlying the American, Israeli, and European pressure on Iran were not based on historical reality. This book documents the way in which US and Israeli officials “manufactured” the crisis quite deliberately, in order to maximize pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear program. They did this by creating a narrative portraying Iranian behavior as evidence that the Islamic Republic had long been hiding a nuclear weapons program. That narrative was then conveyed to the public through uncritical news media coverage of the official line.

This book shows that virtually nothing about the nuclear scare over Iran that was reported in the Western news media was what it seemed. It aims to unravel the false narrative that sustained the decade of crisis and to recover the real history of the Iranian nuclear program and the interactions between that program and the governments of the United States and Israel.

Manufactured Crisis shows that US-Israeli strategy was aimed at using the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to build a case that Iran’s nuclear program had been merely a cover for a nuclear weapons program. That case would serve as the basis for United Nations Security Council actions that would punish Iran, or even for unilateral US military action against Iran. As a result the IAEA, which had previously been a relatively nonpolitical actor performing technical analysis of nuclear programs, was transformed over the 2003–8 period into an adjunct of the anti-Iran strategy.

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/02/unravelling-nuclear-manufactured.html