This is potentially very good news for Iran, although I’ve raised a few (so far) unanswered questions below. If readers know the answers, please fork them over. ; )
From iranpress.com, Nov 29, 2019
“Six other European countries have joined the INSTEX financial mechanism to fulfill the E3 countries’ (Germany, UK, France) commitments to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden announced in a joint statement that they are in a process of attaching the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) for helping the E3 countries, the European party of Iran’s nuclear deal or JCPOA, to facilitate legitimate trade between Europe and Iran.
The six European countries’ statement was published on Friday in Finland’s Foreign Ministry website.” [snip]
“With the US scrapping JCPOA, the E3 countries promised to compensate for the unilateral exit of the US through the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX).
INSTEX was set up to try to enable legitimate trade with Iran to continue without falling foul of US sanctions.
After a series of negotiations between Iran and EU officials to implement INSTEX, Iran declared that E3 can’t secure Iran’s interests in the economic frameworks and no practical measures have been undertaken to launch the mechanism.
Iran, then, notified its remaining partners in the deal that it would suspend the implementation of some of its commitments as a “wake-up call” to spur the European signatories to honor their end of the bargain.”
Nov 30, 2019: ‘US slams Europeans over joining EU-Iran financial trading mechanism’, iranpress.com/en:
“The United States ambassador to Germany Richard A. Grenell has criticized the joining of six European countries to the INSTEX trade mechanism, enabling business with Iran, saying the action is ‘disrespectful‘ to US policies.
The US ambassador to Germany tweeted: “Terrible timing – why fund the Iranian regime while its killing the Iranian people and shutting off the internet? You should be standing for human rights not funding the abusers,” Iran Press reported.
Grenell is known for his extremist views against Iran and is the most controversial US ambassador in Europe.” [snip]
“Norway’s ambassador to Iran, Lars Nordrum, tweeted that “Today announced that we join INSTEX with the E3 to facilitate trade with Iran and preserve the JCPOA.”
RT.com had featured Grouchy Grenell’sTweet:
XXXXX
Also Nov. 30, 2019: ‘New IAEA chief says he wants ‘constructive’ relation with Iran’, tehrantimes.com
“Rafael Grossi, the new director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said that he wants to develop a constructive relationship with the Iranians.
In an interview with NHK published on Saturday, he said he will take a fair stance on Iran.
Rafael Grossi is set to take office as director general of the UN nuclear watchdog on Tuesday. The agency’s board appointed him to the post in October, following the death of the previous chief Yukiya Amano in July.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said on October 31 that Iran is ready to expand cooperation with the IAEA based on “mutual trust” and adoption of a professional approach by the UN nuclear body.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to maintain and expand constructive interaction and cooperation with the agency based on mutual respect and professional precision and neutrality of this institution,” he said in a message, congratulating appointment of Grossi as the director general of the IAEA.
Mousavi expressed hope that Grossi would fulfill his international duties professionally and with adopting an independent position.
“What I think is important is that I give my member states and the international community the guarantee that I am absolutely independent and impermeable to pressure,” he said.
Now given that Saudia Arabia had been given a seat on the Board of Governors of the IAEA, I admit I’d figured that since the US seemed to have a heavy hand in the choice of the Director General, it might have been someone like Israeli Tzipi Livni, not Argentine Grossi, although the Wiki says that:
‘From 2002 to 2007 he was Chief of Staff of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. While working for the United Nations, Grossi visited North Korea’s nuclear facilities and participated in several meetings with representatives of Iran to reach an agreement to freeze its nuclear program.
On 28 October, 2019, the IAEA Board of Governors held its first vote to elect the new Director General, but none of the candidates secure the two-thirds majority in the 35-member IAEA Board of Governors needed to be elected. The next day, 29 October, the second voting round was held, and Grossi won 24 of the 23 needed votes required for Director General Appointment, and became the first Latin American to held the organisation.’
So yes, we hope he will indeed be ‘absolutely independent and impermeable to pressure.’ There are those who claim that Yukiya Amano refused to submit to pressure, and was assassinated for his…non-compliance with pressures. (Conspiracy Theory…or Coincidence Theory?
Now given this: “Iran declared that E3 can’t secure Iran’s interests in the economic frameworks and no practical measures have been undertaken to launch the mechanism”, I did poke about to discover more about INSTEX, and found this confusing explanation on ‘Business with Iran Through INSTEX: The Viability of Europe’s New Economic Trade Mechanism’, the practicality, feasibility, etc.. One brief outtake:
“Take for instance E.U. Company X, who wants to buy goods from Iranian Company Y. Instead of dealing directly with Iranian Company Y and making risky transactions that may violate sanctions, E.U. Company X pay what is owed through INSTEX SPV. That transaction is then ‘mirrored’ by INSTEX SPV Iran, which pays Iranian Company Y for the goods.
This way, technically speaking, no payments go through Iranian hands and no payments have to pass through international payments systems like SWIFT or vulnerable banks.”
And given that FM Javad Zarif has long responded on Twitter to the heavy sanctions on Iran, I looked to see if he’s given any indications or this news, including whether or not Iran would cease further enrichment as a ‘wake-up call’ to the EU, but this is his latest missive from three weeks ago:
Javad ZarifVerified account @JZarif Nov 11 “To my EU/E3 Colleagues 1.”Fully upheld commitments under JCPOA” YOU? Really? Just show ONE that you’ve upheld in the last 18 months 2.Iran triggered-& exhausted-dispute resolution mechanism while you were procrastinating We’re now using para36 remedies Look at my 6/11/18 letter”
As per the statement above was by Abbas Mousavi, the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, is Zarif ill or otherwise indisposed?
Relevant to Grenfell’s Tweet above: Sharmine Narwani’s ‘Western Media Excited About ‘New Iran Revolution’, but Polls Tell a Different Story About Protests’, Nov. 29, 2019, ahtribune.com (She opens with):
“On November 15, angry Iranians began pouring onto the streets to protest sudden news of a 50% fuel price hike. A day later, peaceful demonstrations had largely dissipated, replaced instead by much smaller crowds of rioters who burned banks, gas stations, buses and other public and private property. Within no time, security forces hit the streets to snuff out the violence and arrest rioters, during which an unconfirmed number of people on both sides died.
Western commentators tried in vain to squeeze some juice out of the short-lived protests. “Iranian protesters strike at the heart of the regime’s legitimacy,” declared Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution. France 24 asked the question, is this “a new Iranian revolution?” And the LA Times slammed Iran’s “brutal crackdown” against its people.
They grasped for a geopolitical angle too: protests in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq that were based almost entirely on popular domestic discontent against corrupt and negligent governments, began to be cast as a regional insurrection against Iranian influence.
And despite the fact that the internet in Iran was disabled for nearly a week, unverified videos and reports curiously made their way outside to Twitter accounts of Iran critics, alleging that protestors were calling for the death of the Supreme Leader, railing against Iran’s interventions in the region and calling for a fall of the “regime.”
Also from ahtribune.com, Nov. 24, 2019: ‘Iran Unrest: Protests and Provocations’, Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich (I won’t bring outtakes; this OP is long enough aready,)
And for the sheer beauty and glory of it: Iranian northwestern national parks share incredible biodiversity’ November 20, 2019, tehrantimes.com
Kantal National Park, East Azarbaijan province
‘The very center of your heart is where life begins – the most beautiful place on earth.’
~ Rumi
(cross-posted at caucus99percent.com)
davidly
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café babylon 
Well, I don’t trust anything any of them say on this. This could be “accepted” by the global elite, who knows. Money talks, bullshit walks, and Iran and it’s 75 million people is money. Whatever, it won’t stop relative to Iran, the war is and has been on, it’s just not a military invasion which is totally out of the question and everyone with a brain knows that. Which is why Gabbard and some others are allowed to voice opposition to an Iran war. One thing always very telling is no mention of Israel. Any talk by the elites and our politicians about the JCPOA that doesn’t include Israel is disingenuous at best and deceitful at worst. It’s also a big indicator of what Gabbard and Sanders are really about.
absolutely: killing sanctions means ‘war by other means’, which is why i’d brought the competing stories about about the astroturfed ‘revolution in iran’.
well, i’d add saudi arabia to israel, but yes. client state of amerika, BFFs, partners in peace.
yes, and gabbard’s been all over the map on iran and the jcpoa, but ‘no war’ as her bottom line. wanna regional nuclear war? rid the world of some of the surplus population? the cia/us/oas putch against evo morales? i’d just run into bernie’s weasel words by tweet. bet he’d signed the guardian’s creepy petition along with the other 804 ‘public figures’.
Relative to Saudi Arabia vs Israel, I was referring to the fact that Israel has evidently well over 100 nukes, illegally internationally, while everyone is all over Iran for trying to do something, develop nuke weapons, which they’ve never even intended to do. The entire JCPOA is a false premise so those supporting it without equivocation regarding Israel, are showing their true colors and supporting the imperialist narrative and in effect the Zionist agenda. And if they support the imperialist narrative with that, everything else they say is just bullshit.
excellent framing. you may be interested in this piece from wsws whose author, joseph shilton) has an interesting take on obomba’s motives. he of course has to diss iran along the way, but tht’s boilerplate for wsws:
‘Imperialist powers intensify pressure on Iranian regime in wake of protests’, 30 November 2019
“French Foreign Minister Jean Yves Le Drian announced this week that Paris is considering triggering a mechanism in the Iran nuclear accord that would facilitate the imposition of United Nations sanctions on Tehran. The provocative declaration is the latest example of a concerted drive by the imperialist powers to intensify pressure on the bourgeois nationalist Iranian regime following the outbreak of protests against fuel price hikes earlier this month.
“Every two months, there is another dent (in the deal by Iran), to the point where today we ask ourselves, and I’m saying this very clearly, about the implementation of the dispute resolution mechanism that exists in the deal,” stated Le Drian during a parliamentary hearing. The French foreign minister was referring to steps taken by the Iranian regime to reduce its compliance with the 2015 nuclear accord—steps that have been provoked by Washington’s abandonment of the deal and the European powers’ refusal to abide by trade and investment commitments they made as part of the agreement.
Le Drian also cited unsubstantiated claims that Iran has sponsored attacks on Saudi interests in the region, an apparent reference to the as yet unexplained attacks on a series of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf this past summer and the firing of missiles by Houthi rebels from war-ravaged Yemen at Saudi oil infrastructure.
[aramco]
The reality is that the escalation of tensions with Iran arises from US imperialism’s reckless drive to consolidate its control over the world’s most important energy-producing region. Over the past 30 years, US imperialism has laid waste to entire societies across the Middle East and Central Asia, from Iraq to Syria and Afghanistan, in a desperate effort to offset its global economic decline with military force.
Far from being a peaceful move, the Obama administration’s support for the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 was aimed principally at bullying Tehran into submission while maintaining Washington’s right to launch provocations and outright military attacks at any time. Obama himself admitted that the only alternative to the agreement was war.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/30/iran-n30.html
“US planned to break Iran nuclear deal years before signing it” You’ve probably heard of the Brookings Institution’s “Which Path to Persia”, where they basically laid out this plan to reach an agreement with Iran such that they supposedly would break it thereby justifying to the public and the world a war against Iran. Tony Cartalucci of Land Destroyer Report was probably the first to uncover that a good number of years ago. I’ve been reporting on it for years after seeing it there. It’s also shows how Trump is doing exactly what the next steps have always been for the president after Obama and why he hired Bolton and Pompeo and others, rabid Iran war hawks. All the progressives and liberals lauding Obama for the agreement didn’t know what the hell they were talking about and were simply buying into and supporting the imperialist narrative that an agreement had to be made to prevent Iran from building nukes. The big surprise to me has always been Iran’s agreement to agree to a deal in the first place. They should have said shove it, but I suppose that’s how the geopolitical ball rolls. Evidently they didn’t read that Brookings report. I bet they have by now.
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/search/label/iran?updated-max=2018-07-11T08:47:00-07:00&max-results=20&start=14&by-date=false
And that’s why Gabbard is so dangerous.
‘Tulsi Gabbard v. Bernie Sanders on Iran and Venezuela;, Stephen Lendman
https://stephenlendman.org/2019/04/tulsi-gabbard-v-bernie-sanders-on-iran-and-venezuela/
he missed a bit re: tulsi and VZ, as in signing the ro khanna letter to pompeo…
but i added this a bit ago over yonder, but haven’t read it yet: ‘Speech, Press, Academic Freedoms Threatened in West: American Expert, An American political expert described the US and other Western powers as “fantasy democracies” and said speech, press, and academic freedoms are threatened in these countries. (an interview w/stephen lendman)
https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2019/12/02/2151219/speech-press-academic-freedoms-threatened-in-west-american-expert
this might be good, can’t say yet, even though we know it’s so: ‘CIA behind Recent Unrest in Iran: Paul Craig Roberts; Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former US assistant secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Ronald Reagan in 1981, said the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) orchestrated the recent riots in Iran over fuel price hike’, December, 02, 2019
https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2019/12/02/2151331/cia-behind-recent-unrest-in-iran-paul-craig-roberts
lord luv a duck; i’d forgotten all about it. and yes, you’ve provided his exposé many times, and i’ve used one or two iterations of it myself. shiton’s obviously read it. thanks sooooo much for the reminder!
“The big surprise to me has always been Iran’s agreement to agree to a deal in the first place. They should have said shove it, but I suppose that’s how the geopolitical ball rolls.”
well yeah, and to avoid getting the crap bombed out of them.
p.s. sipri had said KSA has no nukes, at least known, no atomic reactors, etc., but digging a bit further:
” In February 2019, a U.S. Congressional report indicated that Trump administration officials had pursued a nuclear reactor construction deal with Saudi Arabia. The deal attracted controversy for allegedly bypassing the 123 Agreement process stipulated by the Atomic Energy Act, which requires Congressional approval for sensitive transfer of nuclear technologies to non-U.S. countries. [4]
No credible evidence suggests that Saudi Arabia has ever pursued a nuclear weapons program. Nonetheless, high-ranking Saudi officials have hinted at the desirability of possessing nuclear weapons, usually in the context of countering the nuclear ambitions of Saudi Arabia’s chief regional rival, Iran. In 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly stated, “If Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.” [5] Although Saudi Arabia expressed qualified support during the Obama administration for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which allows intrusive monitoring into Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, Saudi officials praised the Trump administration’s pullout from the agreement in 2018. [6]
https://www.nti.org/learn/countries/saudi-arabia/
none of which precludes the possibility that israel hasn’t already ‘gifted’ KSA some of theirs (bibi’s). ‘partners in peace and democracy™’, yanno.
cripes; again…: