Mediaboss Marketing

Missiles on display in northern Tehran in 2014. A reported missile test by Iran on Sunday has led some American officials to accuse the country of violating a U.N. resolution that accompanied the 2015 nuclear deal. Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Missiles on display in northern Tehran in 2014. A reported missile test by Iran on Sunday has led some American officials to accuse the country of violating a U.N. resolution that accompanied the 2015 nuclear deal.

U.S. officials say Iran test-fired a ballistic missile on Sunday, the first known test since President Trump took office which could provide an early assessment of how the new administration will interpret and enforce the terms of the international deal to curb Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities.

In a statement to the media on Monday, Iran's foreign minister insisted that Iran's missile program is not part of the nuclear agreement, even as he declined to confirm or deny the missile test. NPR's Peter Kenyon reported that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad-Zarif said the missile program is purely defensive.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released a statement calling the test a violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution passed as a side agreement to the 2015 nuclear deal. The statement did not provide any additional information on the reported test, instead linking to a Fox News article quoting unnamed U.S. officials.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Monday that he did not know the "exact nature" of the test, including the type of missile used.

On Monday, the U.S. mission to the United Nations wrote in a statement, "In light of Iran's January 29 launch of a medium-range ballistic missile, the United States has requested urgent consultations of the Security Council," AFP reported.

The meeting is expected to take place Tuesday afternoon, NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.

The nuclear deal between Iran and six countries, including the U.S., was reached in July 2015, and required Iran to scale back its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.

The specific issue of ballistic missile tests came up during the nuclear negotiations. A U.N. Security Council resolution in 2010 had expressly prohibited Iran from "any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches."

In the final days before the nuclear deal was reached, the biggest remaining obstacle was Iran's desire to have U.N. weapons and missile sanctions rolled back, as The Two-Way reported.

Then-Secretary of State John Kerry eventually agreed to a missile-specific side agreement to the nuclear accord. In place of an outright prohibition on missile tests, the agreement stated that Iran was "called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology."

A recently released status report on the nuclear deal and missile program from the International Crisis Group think-tank described the missile language as "non-binding," and concluded:

"Controversy and concerns over issues outside the nuclear accord, mainly Iran's growing regional posture and ballistic-missile tests, have often overshadowed that the [nuclear accord's] two key components restricting and rigorously monitoring Iran's nuclear program and sanctions relief are working and delivering concrete results."

Acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner told The Associated Press on Monday that the U.S. was looking into whether Sunday's reported missile test violated the side agreement, and that the U.S. would "hold Iran accountable" if it did.

The disagreement about what is and isn't allowed under the agreement cuts both ways. After the nuclear deal lifted many sanctions on Iran last year, the U.S. government imposed new sanctions specifically targeting the country's ballistic missile program, as we reported.

"Iran and the U.S. disagree over whether such penalties violate the nuclear accord," NPR's Camila Domonoske reported at the time. Iranian officials warned the U.S. that financial penalties would be viewed by Iran's leader as a violation of the nuclear deal, but U.S. officials contended that non-nuclear missile program sanctions fell outside the accord.

President Trump has attacked the nuclear deal. Addressing the pro-Israel group AIPAC in March during the presidential campaign, he said, "My No. 1 priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran."

Later, however, Trump advocated for renegotiating some parts of the deal or treating it as he would a bad business contract, "policing that contract so tough that they don't have a chance," Peter Kenyon reported last fall.

See the article here:
Reported Missile Launch Is Early Test For Trump Administration's Approach To Iran - NPR

New York Times

Iran Warns US Not to Escalate Missile Dispute New York Times The warning, made by Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, came a day after American and Israeli officials accused Iran of having conducted a missile test that they said had violated a United Nations Security Council resolution. The United ... Iran will not use ballistic missiles to attack any country: foreign ministerReuters Trump-Travel Ban-The LatestYahoo News Iran will not use ballistic missiles to attack any country, says country's foreign ministerEconomic Times Aljazeera.com -Press TV -The Times of Israel all 220 news articles »

Read more here:
Iran Warns US Not to Escalate Missile Dispute - New York Times

Iran President Hassan Rouhani give a speech inside the Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak office during official visit in Putrajaya, Malaysia, on Oct. 7, 2016Mohd Samsul Mohd SaidGetty Images

Zeinabs son Bahman has been studying for a PhD in Virginia since 2014. So when the chance came to visit him this January, she leapt at it. She applied for a visa at the U.S. consulate in Dubai via a travel agency in Irana common way to obtain documentation.

That's where her passport was, ready to be processed, when Donald Trump's executive order temporarily banning Iranians and nationals of six other majority Muslim countries from the U.S. was signed. Her dreams of seeing her son have vanished. "I was so, so happy and now I am so, so sad," says the 60-year-old, who now faces separation from her son until he finishes his studies in two years. "Everyone always said America was the beacon of freedom, but after this I'm not so sure."

Thousands like Zeinab who did not want to give her last name for fear of impacting her son's status in the U.S. feel personally targeted by Trump's order, especially as relations between the two countries had experienced an uptick since the nuclear deal in 2015 between Iran and 6 major world powers including the United States.

Now those improved relations are under threat, as Iran's conservatives see the order as an opportunity to score political points with only months to go before a presidential election. Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, an MP and part of the loosely knit coalition of hardliners and conservatives called Principalists, said it violated the terms of the nuclear deal he and others like him are highly critical of. Any action by America that prevents the creation of appropriate political and trade relations after the nuclear deal is a direct violation of it, he was quoted as saying by the Tasnim News Agency on Monday.

Irans moderate President, Hassan Rouhani, who is seeking re-election, took a more cautious approach and only reminded everyone of the futility of building walls between nations perhaps mindful of the fragility of a nuclear deal which he has staked his presidency on, but that Trump has promised to tear up:

Rouhanis muted response prompted his political opponents to take swings at his moderate international policy, which was based on his campaign promises of rapprochement with Western powers. Mr. Rouhani, Trump wont understand your metaphors on walls, I propose you speak to him as roughly as you speak to your internal critics, said Ezzatollah Zarghami, the former head of Irans state TV during Ahmadinejads presidency and a critic of Rouhani.

This government had promised to bring back honor to the Iranian passport, not only has that not happened but America is treating Iranians as a colonized nation, Akbar Ranjbarzadeh, another MP from the Principalist faction, said according to the semi-official Fars News Agency on Jan. 26.

Rouhani swept to a victory in the 2013 elections on a platform of upheaving the economy and better relations with the world. He had hoped that the nuclear deal, which led to the lifting of stringent sanctions imposed on Iran, would help him achieve both but the average Iranian has yet to see a meaningful effect from the deal on their livelihoods.

Now, he's trapped between a rock and a hard place. His foreign minister Javad Zarif has promised reciprocal measures, but should Rouhani do so too harshly he runs the risk of Trump moving to nullify his most significant achievement in office.

This executive order is an insult to Iranians, the government must definitely respond to this act, says Mohammad Marandi, a political analyst and professor at Tehran University, But it is important that the world sees that Iran, unlike the Trump administration, is behaving in a responsible and moral manner.

The nuclear deal , with its promise of roaring global trade and international investment in Iran as well as the sight of Iranian officials meeting and negotiating as equals with their American counterparts after 37 years of non-existent relations, was expected to help Rouhani cruise to a victory in his re-election bid in May.

But with the visa ban in place now and more hostile actions by the Trump administration highly possible, the elections seem wide open. In many instances Rouhani has not achieved the results he had hoped for and promised in his first term and Trumps actions will certainly have a detrimental effect on this, Marandi said.

Even as Iranians like Zeinab come to terms with being denied entry to the U.S., perhaps few will feel as personally targeted by the order as the country's President.

More:
Iran's Rouhani Left Exposed by Trump's Travel Ban - TIME

Iran Refuses to Confirm Conducting Missile Test New York Times TEHRAN, Iran Iran's foreign minister on Tuesday refused to confirm whether his country recently conducted a missile test, saying the Iranian missile program is not part of the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. The White House said on Monday that ... and more »

Read more from the original source:
Iran Refuses to Confirm Conducting Missile Test - New York Times

There are many things that could be said about Trumps travel ban, and most of them have already been said in multiple venues, including by TACsown Daniel Larison. I just want to highlight again one item: nearly half of those affected by the ban come from Iran, a country that is not experiencing Islamist violence, that is not producing large numbers of refugees, and from which we have no particular reason to suspect terrorists might be planning to sneak into America.

I can think of legitimate reasonswhy Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan were not included (all major regional allies whose cooperation we need), as well as Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK and Russia (at that point, you might as well ban the world), all of which have produced home-grown Islamist terrorists who might travel to America or already have. Those reasons do tend to undermine the argument that, even if it had been rolled out in a more prudentand less gratuitously-cruel manner, the ban was a sensible way to protect American security but letsgrant that being extra cautious about people coming from a war zone isnt obviously crazy, and that we should be able to argue like civilized people about how to balancehelping people facing death versus protecting ourselves from wolves who may be hiding among the sheep.

But it seems to me that anyone arguing with a straight face that the ban was about protecting America from terroristsshould be arguing among other things that Iran doesnt belong on the list. Yet this is the only mention of Iran in David Frenchs defense of Trumps order (which is probably the best defense Ive read so far):

[T]he order imposes a temporary, 90-day ban on people entering the U.S. from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. These are countries either torn apart by jihadist violence or under the control of hostile, jihadist governments.

Thats it. Iran is a hostile, jihadist government so we shouldpresume all Iranians are a security risk.

This is whyIm going to continue to assume that a primary reason for the ban in the first place was to provoke Iranian retaliation,with the ultimate goal that poisoned relations will eventually provide a pretext for war.

Regular readers know I was very clear in calling out the Democratic candidates enthusiasm for conflict with Iran. I have zero reason to trust that this administration is any less enthused, and I interpret their actions accordingly.

Originally posted here:
Why Is Iran Part of the Ban? - The American Conservative