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JUDY WOODRUFF: The United States and Iran have been at odds for 37 years, a standoff that continues even as President Obama signed on to a deal this past summer that sharply limits Iran’s nuclear development. Read More »

By: Jim Lobe

On the news that Donald Trump has asked Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to be his national security adviser, I decided to look up Flynn’s testimony on Iran before the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa on June 10, 2015. That was just a month beforethe P5+1 and Iran concluded the the Iran nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). What I found was pretty shocking and deserves wide dissemination. I knew that Flynn was pretty much of an Islamophobe, but I didn’t know to what extent he appears also to be an Iranophobe as well. The testimony is 16 pages long, so I will confine this post to selected excerpts. But one really has to read the whole thing to get the full flavor of this man’s state of mind on the subject. Read More »

By nasser karimi, associated press

Iran’s two top leaders — its president and the country’s supreme leader — both sought Wednesday to calm concerns in Iran over the future of Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers in the wake of Donald Trump’s election for U.S. president

President Hassan Rouhani said the country will remain committed and loyal to the deal, regardless of the outcome of the U.S. election.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran was indifferent to the result of the U.S. vote, insisting the Iranian nation was “not worried” about the future and was ready for any fallout from the U.S. election.

Trump’s much publicized criticism of the nuclear deal and his campaign vows to renegotiate the terms and increase enforcement of the deal that put off the threat of Tehran developing atomic weapons has sent jitters across Iran.

“If a president is changed here and there, it has no impact on the will of Iran,” Rouhani said in a speech broadcast live on state TV from the city of Karaj, where he was visiting. “Based on the deal, we implement our commitment.”

Without mentioning Trump by name, Rouhani said that “the world is not under the will of a single individual and party. The reality of the world will impose many things on extremists.”

“Nobody should imagine it is possible to play with Iran,” he added.

The deal, which went into effect in January, forced Iran to pull back from the brink of nuclear weapons capacity in exchange for an end to many of the U.S. and European sanctions that crippled Iran’s economy.

Iran has denied that the sanctions affected its economy in any way.

It has been largely respected despite undiminished U.S.-Iranian tensions throughout the Middle East, including their support for rival sides in Syria and Yemen’s civil wars.

Trump’s exact plans on the nuclear deal are vague but any renegotiation would be difficult — Iran has no incentive to reopen talks over a deal it is satisfied with. And none of the other countries in the seven-nation accord has expressed interest in picking apart an understanding that took more than a decade of stop-and-go diplomacy and almost two full years of negotiations to complete.

Iran’s supreme leader, who has final say on all state matters in Iran, said in remarks on state TV that Iran was indifferent to Trump’s election victory.

“We neither mourn nor cheer because it makes no difference to us. We do not have any judgment on the election,” Khamenei said. “We are also not worried. And we are ready for any possible incident.”

“The Unites States is the same country and over the past 37 years any of the U.S. major parties that came to power brought us no good, while their evil was always directed toward the Iranian nation,” Khamenei added.

Iran and the U.S. have had no diplomatic relations since 1979, when militant students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, took 52 Americans hostage and held them for 444 days after Washington refused to hand over Iran’s toppled shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, for trial in Iran.

by:Jessica Schulberg

John Bolton, Top Contender For Secretary Of State, Calls For Regime Change In Iran

WASHINGTON ― John Bolton, a top candidate to serve as President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of state, is publicly calling for the U.S. to help overthrow the existing government in Iran.

“The only long-term solution is regime change in Tehran,” the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily on Thursday morning. “The ayatollahs are the principal threat to international peace and security in the Middle East.”

The call for regime change is very much in line with past statements from Bolton, a hyper-hawkish Bush administration official who stands by the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. He has repeatedly urged the U.S. to help Israel bomb Iran or do it alone. Even as Iran was in the final stages of negotiating an international agreement that requires it to dramatically scale back its nuclear infrastructure, Bolton recommended a military attack.

Thursday’s remark suggests that he has no plans to tone down his adventurist foreign policy views, which run counter to Trump’s repeated promises to focus resources domestically and to avoid unnecessary entanglements abroad.

The Trump campaign has struggled to outline a cohesive foreign policy vision. But to the extent that the president-elect has a worldview, it seems to lean non-interventionist. He has said he would require U.S. allies to shoulder more of the burden for their own security, even suggesting that some non-nuclear nations could obtain nuclear weapons to defend themselves without help from Washington. He speaks aggressively about “destroying” the Islamic State but hasn’t offered a plan to match his rhetoric. Instead, he’s suggested that he might let Russia, which is backing Syrian President Bashar Assad, take charge of outside efforts to help resolve the civil war in Syria.

One of Trump’s first calls with a foreign leader after the election was with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia is allied with Iran in the Syrian conflict, making Bolton’s comments about Iran that much more awkward.

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump slammed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for being too quick to intervene militarily. At every opportunity, he brought up her vote for the Iraq War and her push for NATO airstrikes in Libya ― even though he had backed both operations at the time.

Bolton said Thursday that he finds the debate between interventionism and non-interventionism “unproductive.”

“To me, it’s like saying, ‘Do you prefer a spoon or a knife?” he said. “And the immediate next question is, ‘Well, for what?’ That’s how I view interventionism and non-interventionism. These are the tools in the country’s toolkit and you do what’s appropriate.”

Yet Bolton often prefers the knife of intervention, no matter what the occasion. Much like the proponents of the Iraq War who said the 2003 invasion would be a straightforward undertaking welcomed by the Iraqis, Bolton said Thursday that Iranians want regime change. He also hinted that such regime change could involve the U.S. arming opposition groups.

“I don’t think the regime is popular, but I think it has the guns. I think ― there are ways of supporting the opposition. It does not involve the use of American military force. It does involve helping the opposition to get a different kind of government,” Bolton said.

He did not respond to requests from The Huffington Post for clarification on how regime change in Iran might take place without direct U.S. military intervention.

In the Breitbart interview, Bolton criticized President Barack Obama for not doing more to support the Green Movement protests in Iran in 2009. But he has also supported more extreme opponents to the regime. Bolton has attended rallies in support of Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian dissident group that the U.S. classified as a terrorist organization until 2012.

The obvious disconnect between the worldviews of Trump and Bolton makes it hard to grasp why the president-elect is considering Bolton to be his top diplomat. But lacking any foreign policy experience himself, Trump is easily swayed in this area by the advice of those close to him, multiple sources with knowledge of the transition told The Huffington Post.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, likes Bolton, the sources said, in part because of Bolton’s extreme anti-Iran stance and his related unconditional support for Israel. Billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, Trump’s largest financial backers during the campaign, have been heavy supporters of Bolton as well.

Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

While Trump has called the Iran nuclear agreement a “disaster” and the “worst deal ever negotiated,” he hasn’t urged overthrowing the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as an alternative. At times during the campaign, Trump said he would rip up the nuclear accord, but more frequently, he made vague promises to “renegotiate” the terms of the deal and extract more concessions from Iran. He said he would “enforce it like you’ve never seen a contract enforced before.”

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee ― who has also been floated as a possible secretary of state ― said Wednesday that it’s more likely that Trump will seek to build consensus among U.S. allies that Iran is violating the agreement than move to tear up the deal immediately.

Ryan Grim contributed reporting.

By: RICK GLADSTONE NOV. 14, 2016

Seventy-six national security experts urged President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday to reverse his hostility to the nuclear agreement signed with Iran last year and to use it as a tool to ease other tensions with the country. Read More »

by:Dr Majid Rafizadeh

When it comes to the Middle East, the Islamic Republic of Iran is the linchpin and epicenter of many tensions and conflicts across the region. As an Iranian official stated, Iran dominates four Arab capitals. Countering Iran’s military would lead to significant changes reducing the regional conflicts. Read More »

By James Phillips

Donald Trump’s election as president has discomforted many foreign leaders, especially in Iran.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani claimed Wednesday that there is “no possibility” for the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran to be overturned by Trump, despite Trump’s threat to do so. Read More »

By Parisa Hafezi | ANKARA

Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election is likely to empower hardliners in Iran who are pushing for global isolation and discourage already wary foreign investors.

Republican Trump said during the election campaign that he would abandon the nuclear deal reached between Tehran and six world powers in 2015 that curbed Iran’s nuclear program in return for the removal of international sanctions. Read More »

By Richard Stone Sep. 14, 2016

“Can you write me a thesis?” asks the woman, who has called a number from a flier taped to the main gate of Iran’s prestigious University of Tehran. The woman, an actress, is posing as a botany graduate student from Islamic Azad University (IAU), Abadeh, in Fars province. Her topic is the flora of the Khuzestan region, she explains with a Fars accent to the salesman at the other end of the line. He obligingly lays out a schedule for delivery of thesis chapters. “If your subject doesn’t need lab work,” he says, the cost will be a mere 1.8 million tomans ($600), plus another $400 if she desires a paper, published under her name in a reputable journal. Read More »