A US-Iran Package Deal.

The chances of war or a package deal between the US and Iran now are 50-50. But, despite Ahmadi-Nejad's frequent ranting, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his conservative allies are concerned - judging by the pattern of their behaviour behind the scenes - that a war would be far more damaging to his nation than to the US. The geo-strategic advantages of winning a war against Iran, to the US, relate to the future of China and other powers which have the potential of challenging American leadership in world affairs in the next decades.

Khamenei's concerns can be seen from the less publicised movements of key officials from the SNSC, such as Larijani's visit to Saudi Arabia, a more recent visit to Washington by one of his deputies, quiet talks in Moscow between Iranian and Russian experts in nuclear technology, etc. (see news17-ArabIPOsReformsIranApr24-06).

Iran's pragmatists, including Rafsanjani, would welcome a US pledge not to press for regime change or to attack, if Tehran agrees to shelve its military nuclear programme, and to stop preaching Israel's destruction and embracing terror. A deal would recognise that Iran has the right to civilian nuclear power, but only under UN safeguards and with fuel supplied from Russia and other partners. And it would reopen the door to Iran-US trade.

Khamenei will first have to silence Ahmadi-Nejad, who sparked outrage in the US, Europe and Israel last year by calling for Israel to be wiped off the face of the Earth. He told a Tehran conference for Palestine on April 13: "Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading towards annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm".

Rowhani's Intervention: Hassan Rowhani, Iran's former top security official and a protege of Rafsanjani, has called for "more balance, more reason, and less emotion" in Tehran's approach to the nuclear crisis. His remarks, reported on April 20 by the official ISNA news agency, were unusually direct in advocating negotiations with the West and in criticising Iran's policy since Ahmadi-Nejad won last June's presidential election. Such candour reflects concern among pragmatic conservatives as the UNSC's April 28 deadline approaches for Iran to suspend all nuclear activities.

Rowhani led Tehran's nuclear negotiations with the EU for two years before stepping down in 2005 as secretary of the SNSC. Rowhani, still a heavyweight in Iran's ruling elite, sits on the SNSC along with Ali Larijani, who replaced him as SNSC secretary. Rowhani was part of Rafsanjani's delegation Syria and Kuwait.

Rowhani said: "Unfortunately, with the new [Ahmadi-Nejad] administration, nuclear policy and tactics were changed. Although these tactics had some success, we still had to pay a hefty price". Rowhani was apparently referring to Iran resuming nuclear research in January, which prompted the showdown with the UNSC. But he attacked the general approach of Ahmadi-Nejad and new security officials, criticising those who "never want to sit with foreigners because they feel if we do, we will [always] be deceived".

In reviewing the state of talks with the EU when Ahmadi-Nejad became president, Rowhani said negotiations had reached the point where the Europeans "accepted our activities in Isfahan and Natanz". The FT on April 21 said Rowhani probably meant that the EU was ready to accept Iran converting raw uranium into feeder gas, done at Isfahan, and its nuclear pilot plant at Natanz in return for Iran agreeing long-term suspension of industrial-scale enrichment. The EU have always publicly denied this.

While not mentioning the US by name, Rowhani reflected the pragmatists' view that direct talks with Washington might be needed to resolve Iran's concerns, including the nuclear issue. He attacked "those who consider getting close to foreigners to be like getting close to Satan", a term parallelling Iran's depiction of the US as the "Great Satan". This key division within the conservative camp was shown in March when hardliners opposed Iran's agreement to talk to the US over Iraq.

Rowhani and Larijani are the two SNSC representatives of the Supreme Leader - which reflects Ayatollah Khamenei's desire to keep both conservative factions involved and his pivotal role in deciding how Iran should manage the looming crisis.

Another US View On Using Nuclear Bombs: The following is an article by Michael Levi, a fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations and a co-author of "The Future of Arms Control", published on April 20 by The New York Times:

"There has been a lot of debate over reports that the US is exploring the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. Setting aside the question of whether military action is wise - and there are strong arguments for focusing on non-military options - one thing is clear: The nuclear option makes little sense.

"Discussion focuses on Natanz, where Iran is building laboratories to enrich uranium, ostensibly for nuclear energy but also useful for making a nuclear bomb. Those plants are buried underground, leading many to conclude that only a nuclear weapon could destroy them. That conclusion is wrong.

"In general, there are three intertwined reasons military planners might consider using nuclear weapons against an underground target: uncertainty about the target's location, concern that the depth makes conventional weapons impotent, and a need to destroy the target near-instantaneously. None of these apply in the case of Iran.

"If an underground lab were bored into a mountain, or involved a labyrinthine tunnel system, its location may not be well known. Military planners might then argue - as some did in considering a tactical nuclear attack on the Libyan chemical weapons facility at Tarhuna in 1996 - that only the broad blast of a nuclear weapon could guarantee destruction. But the precise locations of the underground chambers at Natanz are well known - they were built in open pits, visible to American satellites, before being covered with concrete, rock and dirt. (And the only building at Natanz where we know Iran has enriched uranium thus far is above ground). If anyone wants to bomb Natanz, they will know where to aim.

"The second concern is that if an underground laboratory is deeply buried, that can also confound conventional weapons. But the depth of the Natanz facility - reports place the ceiling roughly 30 feet underground - is not prohibitive. The American GBU-28 weapon - the so-called bunker buster - can pierce about 23 feet of concrete and 100 feet of soil. Unless the cover over the Natanz lab is almost entirely rock, bunker busters should be able to reach it. That said, some chance remains that a single strike would fail. That leads to the third factor.

"Advocates of nuclear weapons normally plan on using them in a time-sensitive scenario: An enemy is about to launch an attack on the United States, and the only way to immediately stop it is to employ nuclear arms, taking out the enemy base in a single strike. This is weak as a generic argument, and it is patently unsound in the case of Iran.

"Natanz poses no imminent threat - the worst-case prediction is that, in several years, the Iranians might produce enough material for a nuclear bomb, but we Americans do not worry that any weapons there endanger us now. The United States could repeatedly bomb the plant, if it wished, drilling down until it reached the underground chambers. Even if that took days, it would set back the Iranian program just as decisively as a nuclear attack.

"In the end, the nuclear option makes little sense - and flirting with it undermines the US stance against nuclear proliferation. Taking nuclear weapons decisively off the table would reinforce the taboo against the bomb, and make American actions to oppose proliferation more effective".

Why Iran & USA Need Each Other For Iraq: The following are extracts from an article published on April 20 by The Boston Globe: "Each day's news from Iraq highlights a veiled reality: that American and Iranian interests overlap there significantly. Iran, which has influence on the main Shi'ite factions in Iraq, has declared it will take part in talks with the US about ways to bring stability to Iraq. Yet neither Iran nor the Bush administration is eager to acknowledge publicly that they need each other to help prevent a full-scale civil war in Iraq.

"Nonetheless, this need explains the pirouette the two governments had to perform when they agreed to discussions about Iraq. ...US Ambassador...Khalilzad...has had to declare that the agenda will be confined strictly to Iraq and that instead of engaging in a negotiator's give-and-take, he will simply demand that Iran cease arming Iraqi Shi'ite militias and transporting al-Qaeda operatives into Iraq. Obviously, if this were the exclusive content of the talks, there would be no talks.

"[Tehran]...does not need a direct encounter with Khalilzad to discover what it is about their meddling in Iraq that displeases Washington. An American-Iranian dialogue about Iraq can only have meaning if it is premised on the need for reciprocal actions. The starting point for such a co-operative rescue operation in Iraq must be an overt admission that the sectarian civil war now brewing there portends a nightmare for both Iran and the US.

"In the past month, more than 100 Iraqis a day appear to have been victims of blind revenge killings - Shi'ites being murdered simply for being Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs for being Sunni. President...Bush already seems a feckless sorcerer's apprentice to much of the world because of the radical disorder his blunders have helped induce in Iraq. But the current sectarian purging of neighborhoods and villages could yet turn much worse. In the extreme case, the government Khalilzad is trying to help knit together would not be able to prevent a complete dissolution of the Iraqi state.

"And, as Khalilzad has warned, Iraq's neighbors would then be sorely tempted to intervene, if not with uniformed armed forces then with irregular proxies. This prospect would not only signify a complete collapse of Bush's much-trumpeted vision of democratization in Iraq and the surrounding region, it would bring a regional war between Shi'ites and Sunnis to Iran's doorstep. The Americans can go home when that war starts. Iran cannot.

"So no matter how spiteful Iran's leaders may be toward the US, it is in their vital national interest to help the US save Iraq from the disasters that now threaten".