News Agency in MI | A staff member positions an Iranian flag on a stage after a group picture during the Iran nuclear talks at Vienna International Centre in Austria on July 14, 2015. Why any new agreement would likely be worse than resuscitating the existing deal.

News Agency in MI | Apadana Media

Last week, Iran announced that it had started enriching uranium to 20 percent at its underground Fordow facility. This step is a serious escalation in a long-running crisis—but, even more ominously, it is also a threat. Iran is apparently signaling that if the 2015 nuclear deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action —is not salvaged in the weeks after U.S. President-elect Joe Biden takes office, it will further ramp up its nuclear program to strengthen its hand ahead of any future negotiations. Under these circumstances, any new agreement would likely be worse than resuscitating the current deal.

In spite of the Trump administration’s best efforts, the Iran deal has not collapsed completely. In 2018, the administration ceased providing Iran with promised sanctions relief. In response, Iran gradually ramped up its nuclear program, breaching the deal’s limits on uranium enrichment. Nonetheless, Iran hoped that President Donald Trump would lose the 2020 U.S. presidential election and a new Democratic administration would want to reenter the deal. Accordingly, Tehran did not withdraw or restart its plutonium program. It has continued to accept exceptionally intrusive monitoring of its ongoing nuclear activities. And it could reverse its ongoing noncompliance quickly and easily. If Biden can provide Iran with the sanctions relief it was promised, he can likely reassemble the deal (to which all the other signatories are still committed).

If he fails, Tehran will almost certainly escalate its violations. It probably won’t try to build a nuclear weapon (although the possibility it might is reason enough to preserve the deal). Instead, Iran will likely opt to scale up its nuclear program—by developing better centrifuges, installing more of them, stockpiling ever-greater amounts of enriched uranium, and perhaps even enriching to higher levels. In short, Iran will pick up exactly where it left off in 2013 when its nuclear program was first constrained by the Joint Plan of Action, the less comprehensive predecessor to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Iran will likely try to use its ramp-up to pressure the United States into negotiating an end to sanctions. Because of all the additional leverage at Tehran’s disposal, any new deal—if one is ever reached—will likely have to tolerate more nuclear activity in Iran than is currently permitted.

Advocates of holding out for a better deal argue that enhanced economic sanctions will drive Iran to make further concessions.

Advocates of holding out for a better deal argue that enhanced economic sanctions will drive Iran to make further concessions.

The problem is that Tehran has a greater capacity than Washington to escalate the crisis. Despite the current U.S. maximum pressure campaign against Iran, Iranian oil sales are back on the rise. Even maintaining the current level of economic pressure will be a challenge for the United States as Iran becomes more adept at circumventing sanctions and international support for them continues to wane. By contrast, without the 2015 deal in place, Iran could expand its nuclear program dramatically, without needing to cross the nuclear threshold.

If the idea of a competition in leverage feels speculative and abstract, the basic problem faced by the United States should be familiar from labor disputes. Managing the Iran crisis involves offering Tehran economic and security benefits in return for its not conducting certain nuclear activities. Managing a labor dispute, likewise, involves offering workers improved pay and conditions in return for their not striking. In both cases, the shape of any deal is determined by the relative leverage of the two sides.

To increase their leverage—and thus drive a harder bargain—unions may try to make the threat of a strike more credible. A classic tactic is for workers to vote to authorize a strike unless their negotiators can reach an acceptable agreement. This approach often proves effective, because it places the onus for averting a strike onto management, which can then feel pressured into making significant concessions.

In a similar way, Iran’s parliament recently sought to empower Iranian negotiators by passing a law that would prohibit international inspections and require an expansion of Iran’s nuclear program unless sanctions relief is forthcoming (enriching uranium to 20 percent is the first step in the implementation of the law). This law isn’t yet part of a dash to the bomb. But it is a signal that Iran is moving closer to the nuclear threshold and making the threat of a acquiring a nuclear weapon more credible.

As for the hope that the United States can win a competition in leverage by ramping up sanctions, its experience of playing—and losing—that game against North Korea should temper expectations. There are, of course, many differences between Iran and North Korea (starting with the fact that the former does not have nuclear weapons). However, the case does exemplify how enhanced capabilities translate into enhanced leverage—even as economic sanctions are progressively tightened

Over the course of last 40 years, North Korea has advanced its nuclear capabilities by amassing ever-larger amounts of plutonium, developing an enrichment program that “stunned” the U.S. weapons scientist who saw it, and conducting periodic long-range missile and nuclear tests. The result was that each of the deals concluded by the last four U.S. administrations was less restrictive than the previous one.

The Clinton’s administration’s Agreed Framework created a comprehensive road map for freezing and eliminating North Korea’s plutonium program. The George W. Bush administration’s deal provided for splashy “disablement” activities—including the televised blowing up of a reactor cooling tower—but was vague about next steps. A short-lived deal reached by the Obama administration in 2012 sought to freeze various North Korean nuclear and missile-related activities without requiring anything to be dismantled. And the hortatory summit declaration signed by Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump contained no concrete commitments whatsoever. (A nuclear and missile test moratorium trumpeted by U.S. officials was a unilateral gesture made months earlier.)

A senior North Korean diplomat once noted that, “the time that has been lost [in dealing with us] has not been beneficial to the” United States. If the Iran deal falls apart, the time lost will be similarly detrimental to U.S. interests. Biden is absolutely right, therefore, to indicate that the United States will reenter the Iran deal (rather than hold out for something better), if Iran comes back into compliance with its restrictions.

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National Media Agency in MI, USA | IRAN — Ruhollah Zam, a former opposition figure who had lived in exile in France and was implicated in anti-government protests, speaks in a courtroom during a trial, November 30, 2020

National Media Agency in MI, USA | Apadana Media

In its report on the state of journalism in the world in 2020, Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without Borders) has appropriately ranked Iran as the global record-holder of killing media staff.

Referring to Ruhollah Zam’s kidnapping process that led to his trial behind closed doors, sentencing, and hanging, the internationally renowned organization has called his death not execution but a murder.

However, 42-year-old Zam was not the only journalist killed by Iran merely for his views and activities as a social media activist and reporter.

The so-called Islamist forces that came to power in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, brazenly or secretly, started issuing death sentences for journalists and authors long before dominating the ancient country. The Islamic extremists have never hesitated to condemn to death anybody they considered to have views against the “Islamic” train of thought, or as they maintain the “Holy Shari’a.”

Before the downfall of Iran’s pro-West king, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, these fundamentalist forces believed that journalists, writers, and artists, or anybody opposing their views were apostates, and it would be “fair” to punish them by death for insulting Islam and Muslims.

After consolidating power in Iran, they practically added the killing of their critics to the extensive list of the nascent Islamic Republic’s crimes. Eliminating whoever dared to raise voices against the “glorious Islamic Republic” became a part of the new rulers’ daily life in Iran.

By grabbing all national resources across the country, Iran has successfully implemented various methods to force journalists and writers to remain silent. The plans include brutal censorship, banning newspapers and magazines, detaining and forcing writers and journalists into exile or blatantly killing them in the streets, or executing them in prisons after show-off trials.

Leading Iranian linguist, nationalist, historian, and former Shi’ite cleric, Ahmad Kasravi, is the most famous writer assassinated before the establishment of Iran.

On March 11, 1946, members of a shadowy group, Fadā’iyān-e Islam (Devotees of Islam or Self-Sacrificers of Islam), led by a controversial mid-ranking black-turbaned clergy, Navvab Safavi, stabbed to death Ahmad Kasravi and one of his assistants, while being tried on charges of “insulting Islam.”

The founder of the Islamic Republic and a supporter of Navvab Safavi, Ruhollah Khomeini, had earlier called on an offshoot of Fadaiyan-e Islam, “Young Martyrs for Islam,” to confront Kasravi, referring to him as “this illiterate (man from Tabriz).”

Furthermore, years before Kasravi’s assassination, Ayatollah Khomeini had attacked the prominent linguist and historian in his first book, Kashf al-Asrar (Decoding Secrets). He blatantly stated that Kasravi and other writers like him deserve death. In the same book, he boldly theorized the necessity of closing newspapers, magazines, and books, setting them on fire, and hanging their authors as divine rulings in Shi’ite jurisprudence.

Therefore, it is no surprise that a government based on his teachings is now leading the way in killing writers and journalists around the world.

In the last forty years, nearly thirty people, whose main occupation was journalism or writing, have lost their lives in several ways, from being shot, hanged, murdered in prison, and assassinated at home or on the street.

Two pre-Islamic Revolution directors of National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT), Mahmoud Ja’farian and Parviz Nikkhah, and the French daily Journal de Tehran’s editor, Simon Farzami, were executed. The Managing-Director of an influential weekly magazine, Khandaniha (Reader’s Digest), Ali Asghar Amirani, and a playwright and poet, Saeed Soltanpour, were killed by a firing squad. Jalal Hashemi Tangestani was assassinated and died of unknown causes. The Assistant Editor of the daily Kayhan, Rahman Hatefi, died behind bars under torture. Popular TV showman, poet, and crooner, Fereydoun Farrokhzad, was stabbed to death in Bonn, Germany. Prominent researcher, author, historian and poet, Ali Akbar Sa’eedi Sirjani, was killed in intelligence services’ custody.

Furthermore, the Islamic Republic agents assassinated lawyer and former MP, Reza Mazlouman (aka Kourosh Aryamanesh) in Paris; author and translator Ghaffar Hosseini; prominent Iranologist and professor of ancient Iranian languages, Ahmad Tafazzoli; journalist Ebrahim Zalzadeh, poet and political activist, Ms. Parvaneh Parastou; author and translator, Pirouz Davani; writer and ideologist, Majid Sharif; and members of Iranian Writers Association, Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Ja’far Pouyandeh, in Tehran. Meanwhile, a prominent author and translator, Ahmad Mir Ala’ee, and the poet and researcher Hamid Hajizadeh and his ten-year-old son were assassinated in Isfahan and Kerman, respectively.

Several writers and journalists, including Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Ms. Zahra Kazemi, bloggers Sattar Beheshti, Omid Reza Mir Sayafi, and Ya’qoub Mir Nehad, and journalists Alireza Eftekhari and Hoda Saber were killed in the Islamic Republic’s prisons.

Haleh Sahabi, a journalist and political activist, died after being physically attacked at her father’s funeral.

The administrator of a social media news channel with millions of followers, Paris-based Ruhollah Zam, was lured into Iraq, abducted, and taken back to Tehran, and executed.

A failed attempt to kill 21 Iranian journalists, writers, and poets on a bus destined for Armenia also must be added to the list of Iranian crimes against writers and people involved in media.

Iran is solely responsible for all these crimes. This process’s precedence and continuity clearly show that, regardless of which political camp has been in power in Iran, the Islamic Republic regime has always brutally dealt with journalists and writers who it considered unfavorable.

Some of these writers and journalists have been assassinated by the Iranian government when the judiciary and the country’s security services were simultaneously in the hands of the so-called reformist faction or the fundamentalists.

The saga of all those who have spent their best years of journalism or literary and artistic creation in forced silence, exile, prison, and grappling with censorship is another painful story needing a different feature.

The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Radio Farda.

National Media Agency in MI, USA | Apadana Media

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Media Agency in Battle Creek MI | FILE PHOTO: A general view of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, 1,200 km (746 miles) south of Tehran, August 21, 2010. Iran began fuelling its first nuclear power plant on Saturday, a potent symbol of its growing regional sway and rejection of international sanctions designed to prevent it building a nuclear bomb. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi

Media Agency in Battle Creek MI, US | Apadana Media

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States plans to announce additional Iran sanctions on Friday related to conventional arms and to the metals industry, sources familiar with the matter said.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not provide details on the sanctions, the latest in a series that U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed on the Iranian economy to try to force Tehran into a new negotiation on curbing its nuclear program. The State and Treasury Departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the announcement.

US News | Apadana Media

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National Media Agency in MI | Iran Seeks Leverage in Nuclear Standoff

News: Tehran wants U.S. to lift sanctions as price to recommit to landmark accord; some say moves aim to pressure Biden

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, shown in 2019, faces pressure to shorten the steps toward building a nuclear weapon.
PHOTO: ALEXEI DRUZHININ/KREMLIN/REUTERS

Since President Trump withdrew the U.S. from a multilateral agreement aimed at curbing Iran’s atomic ambitions, Tehran has moved steadily to step up uranium enrichment and, most recently, said it was starting work to produce a key material used in nuclear warheads.

European diplomats, who have sought to salvage the accord, say they see the Iranian moves as an effort to increase pressure on Washington and President-elect Joe Biden to rejoin to the deal and lift sanctions.

The question now is: Have the Iranians gone so far that a U.S. return is less likely?

Since the Trump administration started its maximum-pressure sanctions campaign, policy makers in Tehran skeptical of the 2015 accord have gained more sway, pressing President Hassan Rouhani to take increasingly serious steps that shorten the path to a nuclear weapon, according to Iranian officials.

“The hard-liners want to show public opinion they can achieve better outcomes,” said one senior Iranian official.

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