New figures published late Thursday
indicate that Iran will bust through caps on crude exports set by the
interim Joint Plan of Action (JPA) for the seventh month in a row - with
the exported amounts in May, ostensibly limited to 1 million barrels
per day (bpd), actually increasing over April's output - as the State
Department was pressed for the second time in three days on how the
administration is addressing the Iranian violations. Iran has exceeded the allowed amounts every single month since the JPA was announced in November, but administration officials have categorically insisted
that the Islamic republic's output would soon crash so precipitously
that by the end of the JPA's six-month enforcement period the total
exports would average out to 1 million bpd's. Last week Timothy Wilson, a
visiting fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), assessed that such a scenario was now mathematically impossible, promoting journalists
to query State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki on the issue on
Tuesday. Psaki promised to "talk to [State's] team and see what their
view is," and today - in response to
followup questions - declared that "it’s way too early to make [the]
conclusion" that Iran won't eventually somehow reduce output to such an
extent that it will meet the JPA's limits. Meanwhile Steve H. Hanke, a
professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
revealed new numbers showing that
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has managed to pull the country "out
of its [economic] death spiral" even as the economic conditions for
average Iranians remained stagnant. At stake are increasingly pitched worries
that the P5+1 global powers, which are seeking to secure a
comprehensive deal over Iran's nuclear program in the coming weeks, lack
sufficient leverage to coerce Tehran into putting its atomic program
verifiably beyond use for weaponization.
Palestinian
Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday officially asked
sitting Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah to lead a planned government
agreed to by the rival Fatah and Hamas factions, as analysts expressed
deepening worries that the terms of the unity deal would lock in an
unprecedented arrangement fundamentally altering the status of
Palestinian governance. Reuters noted that
Hamas has an interest in the unity pact, which would allow the terror
group to make progress in its "struggle[] to prop up the [Gaza Strip]
economy and pay its 40,000 employees." Such concerns - under which Abbas has been described as throwing a lifeline to Hamas amid what has otherwise been a downward spiral - have been one of at least three dynamics that observers have found troubling. Abbas has also been blasted
for risking the financial viability of any Palestinian government,
inasmuch as moves to embrace Hamas risk running afoul of blackletter
American conditions on financial assistance. The economy in
Fatah-controlled portions of the West Bank would collapse without
outside aid. Recent days have also seen increasing focus on the security
arrangements of the unity agreement, which will allow Hamas to maintain
control over its security forces and its arsenal of tens of thousands
of Iran-supplied rockets and missiles. The arrangement had already been dubbed
a "Hezbollah model" by analysts. On Wednesday Matthew Levitt and Neri
Zilber - respectively the director of The Washington Institute's Stein
Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence and a visiting scholar at
the Institute - assessed that
"Hamas is likely following the well-worn and successful path of...
Hezbollah... likely trying to negotiate an arrangement in which it
retains its arsenal and independent "resistance" militia even as its
members participate in the unity government -- similar to Lebanon, where
Hezbollah ministers serve in government."
Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Thursday
conveyed reports that forces loyal to Syria's Bashar al-Assad regime
had "rain[ed] barrels bombs on Aleppo" over the course of the day, part
of what the wire described as "a campaign against rebels in the northern
city where dozens have been killed this week." The anti-regime
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights did not immediately release numbers
of dead and wounded from the attack, though the organization had
already tallied 58 civilian deaths due to barrel bombs on Tuesday and
Wednesday, including 15 children. The use of the helicopter-deployed,
shrapnel-packed IEDs - which can level entire buildings with a single
explosion - has been condemned as "barbaric" by Secretary of State John Kerry and as a "war crime" by British Foreign Secretary William Hague. Meanwhile The Hill reported that
the United Nations has admitted that the regime will fail to meet the
June 30 deadline under which it was supposed to turn over its chemical
weapons (CWs), part of a deal hammered out last year to avert what had
widely been expected to be impending Western strikes. The conventional
and nonconventional dynamics have converged as the Syrian war has begun
to reemerge as a proxy for the administration's foreign policy
credibility. TIME Magazine’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Michael Crowley assessed last Friday
that the issue seems set to "again test [President Barack Obama's]
credibility, and renew talk of U.S. military action in Syria." A
Wednesday speech given by the president was broadly criticized for being insufficiently clear regarding Washington's stance toward the over three-year war.
English-language Arabic media outlets on Thursday conveyed reports
that Saudi Arabia had officially implemented the Kingdom's first
financial sanctions against Hezbollah, months after the Saudis - along
with allies inside the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) - had designated the Iran-backed terror group and committed to moving against its financial assets. Assessments at the time had broadly held
that Gulf countries had the ability to financially suffocate
Hezbollah's base country of Lebanon should it choose. The move is one of
several recently taken by Arab states, as they orient themselves
against what has become a 'new normal' in the region: a Shiite bloc
stretching from Iran to the Levant
opposite a camp of the U.S.'s traditional Arab and Israeli allies
opposite a camp made up of Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood, and more
often than not Qatar. Earlier this week Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates announced the creation of a "supreme committee" that would
confront what a statement from the parties described as "regional
challenges." That announcement had come only a few weeks after the GCC
formally invited Jordan and Morocco to integrate themselves into a
conventional military alliance, which would see the Gulf states trade
aid for up to 300,000 new troops that would contribute to collective
efforts. The Obama administration has faced sustained criticism
for declining to forthrightly side with its traditional allies against,
on the one hand, the Muslim Brotherhood and, on the other hand, forces
that are seen as promoting Shiite expansionism.
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