Eye on Iran: Iran Feels Heat Over Support for Damascus

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WSJ: ”Iran’s steadfast support for Syria’s regime has rapidly eroded Tehran’s credibility among Arabs, leaving the country with a foreign-policy dilemma as popular uprisings mount across the region. Supporting President Bashar al-Assad will further diminish Tehran’s already troubled standing in the region, political analysts say. But abandoning him would crumble Iran’s platform in Syria. ‘They’ve lost a lot of soft power and credibility, and the situation in Syria makes it worse,’ said Paul Salem, director of the Middle East Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ‘There are new revolutions and heroes to look up to in the Middle East, and Iran is passé.’ … Iranian officials, as well as leaders of Iran-backed Hezbollah, appear to have taken a selective approach to the Arab uprisings, cheering the movements in Egypt and elsewhere as an ‘Islamic awakening,’ while rebuking unrest in Syria as a plot by Israel and the West.” http://t.uani.com/pmn6K8

AFP: ”Iran has dispatched a submarine and a warship to the Red Sea on a patrol mission, navy commander Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said in a report by state media on Tuesday. ‘This flotilla which is comprised of a submarine and a warship will patrol the high seas and display the capabilities of the Islamic Republic of Iran,’ said Sayyari, quoted by the state television website. Soon after Sayyari’s declaration, the Israeli military said it had deployed two missile boats to the Red Sea. ‘The navy has deployed two missile boats to the Red Sea as part of a routine exercise,’ a military spokeswoman told AFP, refusing to link the move with Iran’s deployment. In July, Iran announced intentions to boost its military presence in international waters, with plans to deploy warships to the Atlantic.” http://t.uani.com/p6GjR4

NYT: ”Hackers passed themselves off as the Internet giant Google with the apparent goal of snooping on people using Google services in Iran, the company said. It was the latest in a string of breaches that call into question the reliability of certificates that are supposed to verify the authenticity of Web sites. Such breaches make dissidents and human rights workers particularly vulnerable because they can allow repressive regimes, or supporters of those regimes, to spy on their online activities. In this case, the attackers hacked into the site of a Dutch company, one of many that have the authority to issue the digital certificates, and obtained one that they used to impersonate Google. When users in Iran went to a Google site, including Gmail and Google Docs, they could be intercepted by the impostors in what is known as a man-in-the-middle attack. In a statement posted late Monday night on its security blog, Google said those affected ‘were primarily located in Iran.’ It did not offer further details. The Web site certification firm, DigiNotar, revoked the fraudulent certificate as soon as the attack came to light, Google said.” http://t.uani.com/n1jP5R 

Nuclear Program & Sanctions

Wired: “For two years, the United States regarded Rosoboronexport, Russia’s official weapons exporter, as an international pariah for selling arms to Iran and Syria. Then, in 2010, the U.S. suddenly lifted sanctions against it. By June of this year, the reversal was complete: the Pentagon awarded the company a no-bid contract worth upwards of $1 billion… Rosoboronexport, whose annual revenues have grown to nearly $9 billion, had only recently been removed from the list of companies sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for violating U.S. laws prohibiting the sale of weapons to Iran and Syria. Among the suspected sales were surface-to-air missiles to Iran. But after sanctions were lifted, the Army went full steam ahead with plans to sole-source a $375 million contract to the Russian arms agency, now arguing that it was the only legitimate vendor of Russian armaments.” http://t.uani.com/ns39ur

AFP: ”The United States and Australia schemed unsuccessfully in 2005 to block Mohamed ElBaradei’s election to a third term as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a newly leaked US diplomatic cable shows. Both countries were unhappy with ElBaradei’s ‘unhelpful’ response to Iran’s nuclear program, but the bid to prevent his re-election to the nuclear regulatory agency’s leadership ultimately failed for lack of international support. The February 18, 2005 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks Tuesday opens a window into the effort, describing a lunch conversation between Australian officials and a US special envoy for nuclear non-proliferation, Jackie Sanders. The cable spotlights US and Australian concerns over the Egyptian diplomat’s interpretation that Iran had a ‘right’ to civilian nuclear power, and his reluctance to declare Iran in non-compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”http://t.uani.com/nCiVKh

Human Rights

WSJ: “Authorities in authoritarian Iran have determined the latest threat to the Islamic Republic: squirt guns. Agents of the regime fanned out across Tehran late last month to question toy store owners about whether the fake guns had been imported from America. Nope: made right in Iran or imported from China. Why all this fuss? A water fight among playful youth at a water park. After heeding a call on Facebook, a group of nearly 800 young men and women were among those who showed up at the park. They were surprised to find others there eager to drench anyone in sight. They chased strangers around a giant water fountain, screaming and laughing as they splashed each other with water from toy guns, bottles and plastic bags. ‘We had a blast. It was a rare chance for boys and girls to hang out in a public place and have fun,’ said Shaghayegh, a participant who did not want her last name to be used. Among Iranian authorities, the fun and games triggered a different reaction. Police raided the park, engaging in a four-hour cat-and-mouse game with the youth, who turned their squirt guns on the cops and threw plastic bags full of water on the policemen’s heads, according to participants and media reports.” http://t.uani.com/pSDzbj

TIME: ”Above the outdoor cafés of this city’s trendiest suburb, some 60 exiles are busily dubbing Brazilian soap operas, Japanese cartoons and American music videos into Farsi. They work for GEM-TV, a privately owned, Dubai-based bootleg satellite station that beams the modern world into Iran from a broadcast station in Malaysia. This Southeast Asian nation is becoming, in the words of GEM-TV host Abed Rangamiz, ‘famous as a place to jump’ from Iran’s harshly religious regime. ‘It’s the best of three countries that freely give us visas,’ Rangamiz says with a shrug. ‘The others are Turkey and Turkmenistan.’ The Iranian influx is small but growing fast. At present, there are about 60,000 Iranians, studying, working or waiting for visas in this relatively easygoing, multiethnic Muslim-majority country.” http://t.uani.com/o9ARao

Domestic Politics

Reuters: ”Iran’s supreme leader said on Wednesday a parliamentary election scheduled for early next year posed a potential risk to the country’s security and he called for national unity. After the contested re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009 when huge protests were crushed by security forces, Iran’s ruling elite is keen for the voting next March to pass off without similar unrest or, as seems more likely, a low turnout from disaffected voters. ‘We have an upcoming election at the end of the (Iranian) year. To some extent elections have always been a challenging issue for our country,’ Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told worshippers at prayers marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. ‘Although, compared to elections in other countries and those so-called advanced countries where so much betrayal, malevolent acts, conflicts and even murder happen, thank God in our country it is not like that, but still it is a challenge,’ he said in the televised address. ‘We should be careful that this challenge does not hurt the country’s security,’ the 72-year-old cleric added.” http://t.uani.com/pkO62i

AP: ”Protesters demanding greater environmental protections for one of the world’s biggest saltwater lakes have clashed with security forces in western Iran. Photographs and video obtained by The Associated Press show police on motorcycles bearing down on dozens of demonstrators in Oroumieh on Aug. 27. The demonstrators threw rocks at police, who fired back. It was unclear whether police used live bullets. It took several days to confirm the event because residents were fearful of discussing it. Oroumieh is on the shores of a lake of the same name about 370 miles (600 kilometers) northwest of the capital Tehran.” http://t.uani.com/rmDvWx

Foreign Affairs

UPI: ”Copies of the Koran printed in China and imported into Iran have been found to be littered with spelling mistakes, an Iranian official says. Import companies should refuse to bring the error-ridden copies of the Muslim holy book into the country from China, Ahmad Haji-Sharif, director of the Department of Evaluation on Publication of the Holy Koran, said in Tehran Monday. He said customers should prefer to purchase an Iranian product with better quality and bearing no mistakes, the Mehr news agency reported. Iran enjoys high-quality printing presses, he said, with almost 1,000 Koran publishers working in the country, ‘so why should we send our publications outside Iran?’”http://t.uani.com/npQr1d

Opinion & Analysis

Karim Sadjadpour in CFR: ”Iran’s close ties to Syria mean that if the government of President Bashar al-Assad were to fall after months of opposition and a brutal crackdown, ‘it would be a tremendous blow to the Iranian regime,’ says Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour. Syria is the country that allows Iran to supply its ‘crown jewel’ in the Middle East, the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, Sadjadpour explains.  He also says despite comments by Iran’s foreign minister suggesting that Syria should consider the views of the protest movement, Iran is doing everything in its power to ensure the survival of the Assad regime and is likely counseling the Syrian government that to give in to protestors ‘doesn’t alleviate the pressure, but it projects weakness and might invite even more pressure.’ | How is Iran reacting to the upheavals in the Arab world?  They would like to influence as much as possible the power vacuums taking place in various Arab countries. Their influence in a place like Libya is limited. Their influence in Egypt is also somewhat limited given ties to Hamas. They do have some ties to the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, but overall, in a country with virtually no Shiite population, Iran’s influence is limited. Iran welcomed the Arab awakening until it arrived in Syria. The Assad family in Damascus has really been Iran’s only regional ally since the 1979 revolution. If the Assad regime fell, it would be a tremendous blow to the Iranian regime. And, in particular, the crown jewel of the Iranian revolution is Hezbollah in Lebanon. If the Assad regime were to be succeeded by a regime in Damascus that was no longer interested in continuing Syria’s patronage of Hezbollah, or was not interested in maintaining the Syrian-Iran alliance, it would be very difficult logistically for Iran to continue its patronage of Hezbollah.” http://t.uani.com/pfAeO8

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