Iran Doesn’t Deserve Any Concessions, Israel Tells Germany
Israel’s president has addressed the German parliament, urging the legislators to stop the looming deal with Iran that threatens Israel and denies the Holocaust.
Israel’s president has addressed the German parliament, urging the legislators to stop the looming deal with Iran that threatens Israel and denies the Holocaust.
During his speech in the Bundestag on Tuesday, Isaac Herzog called the Islamic Republic “ineligible for concessions, under any circumstances,” and warned of “dark forces of hate, led by Iran” that threatens both Israel and stability in the Middle East, calling on the international community to stand on the “right side of history.”
Iran is behind “radical forces sowing terror, grief and devastation and seeking to menace everyone in the world,” he added, saying, “The possession of weapons of mass destruction by a UN member state that calls on a daily basis for the annihilation of another UN member state is simply inconceivable. Threats and endeavors to annihilate Israel are inconceivable.”
Following his meeting with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin, Herzog said “Iran is openly striving for Israel’s destruction, and the international community must treat it severely, firmly and assertively. Toothless and watered-down accords and sweeping benefits will not stop Iran.”
Reiterating that Iran “has proven that it cannot be trusted,” he said that Israel “will stand up and assertively and powerfully defend its citizens and Jewish communities all around the world. We expect our allies to stand firmly by our side at this hour.”
Germany is one of the main world powers currently negotiating the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal as an agreement is seen likely in the next few weeks despite persistent gaps between Tehran and Washington.
Economist Mehdi Pazouki says, "The government of President Ebrahim Raisi has been put at the disposal of the Imam Sadeq alumni who have no executive experience." Imam Sadeq University is known for its more than usual religious orientation.
Pazouki added in an interview with the centrist daily Ham Mihan on September 2 that "economic managers of the early years after the 1979 revolution had a far better performance than the current officials."
Meanwhile, the moderate news website Rouydad24 quoted Pazouki as having said in the interview that no foreign investment is likely to be made in Iran without solving the Islamic Republic's problems with the JCPOA and FATF. The economist was hinting that Iran needs to improve its ties with the West by reaching a nuclear deal and accept the terms of FATF, an international financial watchdog.
The Financial Action Task Force, whose evaluations of a country’s financial regulations can impact it ability to interact with the international financial system has black listed Iran and demanded legislation to improve transparency and a ban on financing of terrorism.
Pazouki added that the government's economic team behaves like an organized religious organization. "When you hand over a government ministry to someone whose only accreditation is having studied at the Imam Sadeq University and has no background in executive work, you will obviously leave the government face to face with economic problems," he said.
Journalist Zaynab Ghobayshavi writing in Rouydad24 quoted critics who say Raisi's economic team cannot step up to its job and his aides lack coordination and a teamwork mentality.
Pazouki told Rouydad24 that Raisi’s economic ministers have yet to present an economic plan, but they lack a strategy. Nonetheless, the Raisi administration claims that the budget bill for the current year has been formulated based on the country's sixth development plan that was made under former President Hassan Rouhani while the new administration has been constantly criticizing its predecessor’s economic policies.
"If Rouhani's plans are bad, why are you still following them as your own policy?" Pazouki asked.
During the election campaign in 2021, Raisi had said that he has a 7000-page economic plan, but no one has ever seen even seven pages of that plan, the economist said. He then argued adding that lacking a plan, the Raisi Administration made one of the biggest mistakes in the history of the Islamic Republic, that is increasing the minimum wage by 57 percent overnight while the country was suffering from an inflation rate more than 40 percent. It also increased employment in the government sector by 38 percent.
Even some of Raisi’s political allies, such as hardline conservative politician Hedayatollah Khademi have charged that Raisi's ministers are not fit for their jobs and the President should fire them and demand operational plans from the remaining ministers.
Khademi went on to say that Raisi's ministers failed to meet any one of the nation's expectations during the past 13 months, and even if Iran reaches an agreement with the West, the current ministers will not be able to solve any of the country's problems.
In another development, lawmaker Somayeh Rafiei has also said that after 13 months in office, there is no coherence and coordination visible in Raisi's economic team.
Iranian lawmakers have repeatedly threatened to impeach Raisi's economic team, and tabled motions for their impeachment, but Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf have so far stopped every motion, waiting for Raisi to fire them.
In September 2021, Truss, just appointed foreign secretary, sat down quietly with her Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly. Truss reportedly assured Amir-Abdollahianthat London was serious about repaying the £400 million debt owed by Britain since the 1970s for undelivered weapons.
Truss had told senior civil servants on promotion to the foreign office days earlier, moved by Prime Minister Boris Johnson from international trade secretary, that her “number one priority” was securing the release of three Britons detained in Iran – Nazanin Zeghari-Ratcliffe, Anoosheh Ashoori and Morad Tahbaz.
Richard Ratcliffe, husband of Zeghari-Ratcliffe who was freed along with Ashoori March 2002, praised Truss in a July newspaper article. “Despite me camping angrily on her doorstep, and our sometime fractious relationship, she delivered on her promise to us to get Nazanin home,” Ratcliffe wrote. “After five foreign secretaries, that matters. She did the one thing everyone knew would work: she paid the UK’s debt.”
Not everyone was pleased. Mike Pompeo, who as secretary of state under President Donald Trump launched maximum pressure as the US left the 2015 Iran nuclear deal condemned the £400 million ($460 million) payment as “blood money.”
Truss has a long record of pragmatism. President of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats when a student, she was opposed the UK leaving the European Union (EU) during the 2016 referendum but later became a ‘Brexiteer.’
‘Not dealing with a perfect world’
Pressed in a House of Commons committee in June, Truss fielded a question on human rights in the Arab Gulf states. “We are not dealing with a perfect world,” she said. “We are dealing in a world where we have to make difficult decisions…”
As foreign secretary, Truss has worked along with the Biden administration in line with the British and European policy of reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Along with French and German counterparts, she has increasingly placed the onus to Iran to make compromises as the talks have become US-Iran contacts, mediated by the European Union, since Vienna multilateral meetings between Iran and six world powers paused in March.
Hopes for the talks have risen and fallen in recent weeks. In comments made Monday to reporters in Brussels, Josep Borrell, head of EU foreign policy, said he was “less confident today than 28 hours before on the convergence of the negotiation process,” and that without convergence, “the whole process is in danger.”
Borrell: Nuclear talks ‘in danger’
While France and Germany, and the European Union, may look to Truss to hold the UK’s current position, Monday’s news that Truss had been elected leader of the British Conservative Party and therefore prime minister designate, prompted celebrations among many conservative commentators.
“To leave the past few years of Chamberlain Conservatism and reclaim Churchill’s mantle, Truss must act boldly from day one to break the FCO’s [foreign office] hold on No 10 [the prime minister’s residence],” tweeted Richard Goldberg, senior advisor to the Federation for Defense of Democracies. In calling Johnson an ‘appeaser,’ Goldberg referred to Neville Chamberlain, British prime minister 1937-40, who explored options for stopping Nazi Germany short of war.
‘No need to tread on eggshells’
Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom at Heritage Foundation and frequent contributor to Fox News, wrote August 31 that Truss would challenge the Biden administration over aspects of US foreign policy, “such as its weakness on Iran.” Truss, wrote Gardiner, would “not be afraid to take on the liberal establishment at home and abroad.”
The Daily Telegraph ran a leader August 28 headlined ‘Truss must bloc Iran deal,’ which it said was “likely to offer at best nothing more than a trivial delay to the ayatollahs’ atomic ambitions, even as it unlocks cash likely to fund attacks against the very Western governments which sign up.” With Zeghari-Ratcliffe freed, the paper opined, “there is no need to tread on eggshells.”
Towards the end of the Conservative leadership election, United Against Nuclear Iran speculated in the US that her rival Rishi Sunak’s “domestic emphasis on Britain’s finances might sway him toward a pro-trade rationale and attendant support for the JCPOA…A Sunak government would suggest a continuation of his former boss’s [Boris Johnson] Iran policy: ongoing support for the JCPOA as a ‘least bad’ option to restrain and possibly moderate Iran in the long term.”
Among other JCPOA opponents, Israel Prime Minister Yair Lapid congratulated Truss as “my new friend, a true friend of Israeli.” The Jerusalem Post, highlighting Lapid and Truss overlapping as foreign ministers, cited “sources close” to the Israeli prime minister that Truss “has shown an understanding of the threat Tehran poses to the Jewish state and is closer to Israel’s view on Iran’s prevarications in the talks.”
