Whether wrapped in a shawl for a televised debate, sitting on a dirt floor with a shopkeeper, or thundering over speakers in a dust storm, Ashraf Ghani, the most educated and Westernized of Afghanistan’s presidential candidates, is shaking up the campaign before Thursday’s election in unusual ways.
A former finance minister with a background in American academia and at the World Bank, Mr. Ghani, 60, says he is trying to change politics in Afghanistan. Using television and radio, Internet donations and student volunteers, as well as traditional networks like religious councils, he is seeking to reach out to young people, women and the poor, and do the unexpected: defeat President Hamid Karzai.
Mr. Ghani’s national support is hard to gauge — one recent poll put it at just 4 percent — and he probably remains an outsider in the race, trailing Mr. Karzai and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, both of whom have much larger power bases. [continued…]
Amidst a presidential slate now culled to 36 contenders, Ghani, a non-aligned independent, is currently in third place, according to the polls, a Ghilzai Pashtun (that’s good) undercut by a perceived poor grasp of the country’s internecine tribal politics, with no traction among the kingmaker warlords (that’s bad).
He can be acerbic and provocative, berating the administration of President Hamid Karzai at every turn as corrupt and incompetent. (Karzai declined to participate in yesterday’s debate – which aired live on national radio – but called a press conference a few hours later to unveil his wide-ranging manifesto for Afghanistan.)
Ghani’s resume bona fides include introducing a new Afghan currency during his finance ministry tenure, initiating the extraordinarily successful National Solidarity Program that has dispersed $500 million (U.S.) in World Bank aid to 23,000 villages and overseeing the private sector launch of competitive telecom companies – 7.5 million cellphones now in use, generating $1 billion in tax revenues for the government. Even poor goatherds in rural Afghanistan have cellphones.
The numbers are blinding. But in a country where 70 per cent of the citizenry is illiterate and big-picture macroeconomics incomprehensible, this is not the stuff of populist appeal. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Funny how the Western media, clearly enamored with Ghani’s Western enculturation, is now happy to promote his “Gandhi” image. It makes you wonder whether his campaign adviser, James Carville — to whom the differences between Afghan and Indian culture probably mean little — couldn’t resist making a connection between Ghani and Gandhi on the silly basis that they are just one letter apart.
A series of secret ceasefire deals have been agreed with Taliban commanders to ensure that voting can go ahead in Afghanistan’s volatile south during next week’s presidential elections.
Under the deals, brokered by Ahmed Wali Karzai – the controversial brother and campaign manager of the president, Hamid Karzai – individual Taliban commanders will agree to pull back on election day and allow the Afghan army and police to secure the polling centres.
A Nato spokesman confirmed that a number of deals between the Afghan government and insurgents were in the pipeline, saying: “We support any initiative that enhances security and enables the people of Afghanistan to vote.”
The US embassy has given its blessing to the plan, which was discussed last week at a joint meeting of the country’s national security chiefs. [continued…]
Obama administration officials say the U.S. will largely leave the [opium poppy] eradication business and instead focus on giving Afghan farmers other ways of earning a living.
The new $300 million effort will give micro-grants to Afghan food-processing and food-storage businesses, fund the construction of new roads and irrigation channels, and sell Afghan farmers fruit seed and livestock at a heavy discount. The U.S. is spending six times as much on the push this year as the $50 million it spent in 2008.
“We’re trying to give the farmers alternatives so they can move away from the poppy culture without suffering massive unemployment and poverty,” says Rory Donohoe, the U.S. Agency for International Development official leading the drive. “The idea is to make it easier for farmers to make the right choice.” [continued…]
In the face of mounting pressure from hawks in Washington and the continued threat of military action from Israel, the Barack Obama Administration has been taking a harder line in its latest pronouncements about Iran.
Recent media reports have suggested that the administration is leaning toward an end-of-September deadline for Tehran to respond to U.S. diplomatic outreach concerning its nuclear programme, at which point it will consider stepping up sanctions against the Iranian energy sector.
This course would cut against the advice of a growing number of Iran analysts, who have cautioned both that the Tehran regime is in no position to negotiate at the moment and that sanctions are likely only to solidify the power of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Barack Obama has crossed a politically dangerous threshold: from actor to reactor. It’s going to be hard reversing the trend.
In the next few weeks, suppose “the Iranians” — a collective noun that should at this point only appear in quotes since no one actually knows exactly who this refers to — suppose “the Iranians” come back with this as their response to Obama’s offer of talks:
We’re ready, but clearly you aren’t. Push your healthcare plan through Congress by the end of September and then we can talk. We can’t talk to you now — you’re administration is too weighed down by domestic political issues.
How dare “the Iranians” try and dictate American affairs, everyone in Washington would scream. Indeed, the idea that a complex piece of legislation could be advanced under arbitrary external pressure would be seen as absurd.
Meanwhile, Washington appears to have picked up Michael Ledeen’s favorite mantra: “faster, please!”
Israeli media reports that visiting National Security Adviser General Jim Jones and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have told the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop complaining about Iran because the US is preparing to take action “in eight weeks” demonstrate that even when everything changes in Washington, nothing changes. President Barack Obama has claimed that a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a high priority but the Israelis and their allies in congress and the media have been able to stonewall the issue. Israel has made no concessions on its settlement policy, which is rightly seen as the single biggest obstacle to eventual creation of a Palestinian state, and has instead pushed ahead with new building and confiscations of Arab homes. Obama has protested both Israeli actions but done nothing else, meaning that Israel has determined that the new US president’s policies are toothless, giving it a free hand to deal with the Arabs. Vice President Joe Biden’s comments that Israel is free to attack Iran if it sees fit was a warning that worse might be coming. If the Israeli reports are true, it would appear that the Obama Administration has now bought completely into the Israeli view of Iran and is indicating to Tel Aviv that it will fall into line to bring the Mullahs to their knees. In short, Israel gets what it wants and Washington yet again surrenders. [continued…]
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday that the United States did a lot “behind the scenes” to show support for demonstrators contesting Iran’s disputed presidential election results.
“We did not want to get between the legitimate protests and demonstrations of the Iranian people and the leadership,” Clinton said in an interview with CNN broadcast on Sunday.
“And we knew that if we stepped in too soon, too hard… the leadership would try to use us to unify the country against the protestors.”
“Now, behind the scenes, we were doing a lot,” Clinton said. “We were doing a lot to really empower the protestors without getting in the way. And we’re continuing to speak out and support the opposition.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — If the Iranian revolutionary court recently trying protesters in Tehran had been able to subpoena Hillary Clinton to testify on behalf of the prosecution, this is what they would have wanted her to say: “behind the scenes, we were doing a lot.”
This is not what President Obama should want his chief diplomat to be saying. What the hell was she thinking?
There is one thing that movers and shakers (while they’re doing all their moving and shaking) find almost impossible to grasp: there are times when doing nothing is better than doing something.
Tell the Iranian people: we’re with you in spirit and we’re rooting for you, but this is your fight. The best we can do is to do nothing that will empower those who want to oppress you.
Given how influential the lobby is, it’s easy to forget that the airtight relationship between Israel and the United States, and between Zionism and American Jews, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Support for Israel, financial and political, is a crucial component of mainstream American Judaism. But that wasn’t always the case.
American Jewish donations to Israel actually fell throughout much of the 1960s. In 1961, when Commentary published a symposium of Jewish intellectuals contemplating Jewish identity, Israel often seemed like an afterthought, and many respondents professed a skepticism of Zionism that would be anathema to the magazine today. “The support of Israel by American Jews should … not be sentimental and uncritical support, but should be given only in a way that exerts a more liberal, internationalist, and humanitarian influence on Israeli politics,” wrote one New York University philosophy professor. “I believe Israel can effectively represent the historic mission of the Jewish people only when it sacrifices its national interests for the sake of world peace and social justice.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Goldberg notes the growing divide between American Jews who, as Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of J-Street, puts it have an “emotional understanding that there’s always got to be some place for the Jews to go” and those American Jews who purportedly lack such an “understanding”.
The article concludes in this way:
Ben-Ami, who loves Israel even if he abhors many of its policies, mourns this growing estrangement, and fears that liberal young people might drift away from the Jewish community altogether. “One of the motivations of J-Street is a deep worry not only about Israel but really about the American Jewish community and the extent to which the Israel issue becomes a reason why younger American Jews disconnect from the community,” he says. “The very same young Jews who don’t have that gut understanding that my grandparents may have had about why there’s a need for an Israel, they also can’t relate to values they’re being brought up with — either the way the situation is playing out on the ground in Israel or advancing within the Jewish community.”
Meanwhile, Orthodox Jews have grown progressively more hawkish on Israel over the years. Thus it’s possible that, should other Jews fall away, they could come to dominate the major American Jewish organizations — resulting in an even greater rift between the values most Jews hold and policies espoused by those who purport to speak for them. “I don’t know that there’s a clear generational happy ending to this story,” Ben-Ami says.
In 1948, the year of Israel’s birth, Hannah Arendt warned that a continuing conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine would result in a fundamental rift with the Diaspora. Under the pressure of constant conflict, Palestinian Jews would degenerate into a Spartan “warrior tribe,” she wrote. “Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large numbers of Jews lived. Palestinian Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people.” This dire prediction hasn’t quite come true yet. But Jews in the United States and those in Israel are evolving in a wholly different direction, and Arendt’s analysis seems more relevant every day.
I hear the angst in a community that fears division, but if I was Jewish and not a Zionist, I would find it patronizing to be told that my lack of support for Israel was a result of my lack of understanding about why there’s “a need” for Israel.
Maybe I don’t understand the nature of this “need” but if it’s the need for a place to which Jews can flee in the event of a dangerous rise in global anti-Semitism, the image of Israel as safe haven seems utterly fanciful.
If on the other hand, the need for Israel is based on the need for the protection of Jewish heritage in a Jewish homeland, then the emerging divide among Jews appears to quite simply be a divide between Zionists and non-Zionists. This division is being obscured, however, by what I will dub the faux Zionists.
Faux Zionists have a passionate believe in the Jewish people’s need for Israel while demonstrating through their own choices that they feel no personal need to live there. Faux Zionists defend Israel in principle yet have turned away from it in practice and within that contradiction lies one of the most potent fuels for their passion.
Is the Israeli lobby in the United States in panic mode? The Obama administration hit the ground running when it took office in January, quickly appointing George Mitchell as a special envoy to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, and making it clear that President Barack Obama himself would devote time and energy to the goal of a comprehensive peace.
Not surprisingly, an American-Israeli disagreement on Israel’s settlements in occupied Arab lands materialized quickly, and may well expand into a full blown showdown. The US says it is making equal demands of Arabs and Israelis, while Israel and its zealot-like allies and proxies in the US argue that Washington is putting undue pressure on Israel alone.
The unknown wild card in this is the pro-Israel lobby in the US, a combination of American formal organizations and individual politicians who argue Israel’s case so strongly that they are often seen as putting Israeli interests ahead of their own American interests. It remains unclear how the pro-Israel lobby will kick into action to shield Israel from the increasingly vocal demands in the US that Jewish settlements and the Zionist colonization enterprise in occupied Arab lands must stop in order to allow a peace negotiation to start. Continue reading →
The secret CIA program halted last month by Director Leon E. Panetta involved establishing elite paramilitary teams that could be inserted into Pakistan or other locations to capture or kill top leaders of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, according to former U.S. intelligence officials.
The program — launched in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — was never operational. But officials said that as recently as a year ago CIA executives discussed plans to deploy teams to test basic capabilities, including whether they could enter hostile territory and maneuver undetected, as well as gather intelligence and track high-value targets. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Who would have anticipated that Guantanamo would turn out to possess a dark virtue?
Had the Bush administration quickly unleashed CIA death squads, we might never have have been provided with such stark evidence of the limitations of counter-terrorism. A prison roll filled with men who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is a graphic testament to the limits of American power.
But to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and cross paths with a death squad (or a predator drone) means that life and innocence can be simultaneously erased. No wonder the drone attacks continue.
The death squads on the other hand would have entailed other forms of political liability. Sooner or later, operatives would have gone missing. The severed heads of CIA agents would have featured on Jihadist videos. Ugly mistakes would not have been buried under rubble and dust — they would have made their way on to the front pages of Pakistan’s newspapers with bloody images of the bullet-ridden bodies of families who got slaughtered in the sleep.
Most likely, the death squads never went operational not for legal or ethical reasons but simply because sober analysis calculated that the cost was likely to exceed the reward.
Amid suggestions to defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi to establish a political party, an influential Principlist figure steps up to endorse the idea.
A senior member of the Islamic Coalition Party and leading Principlist figure, Habibollah Asgaroladi describes the move as a ‘favorable’ one, saying, “Establishing a party to voice one’s ideas and political perceptions is a wise move.”
“To clarify political actions and to show respect for the collective intellect, politicians need to come together in a political formation,” Asgaroladi added.
Last week, the Reformist Etemad-e-Melli daily broke the news about Mousavi’s plans to launch a political party to pursue his goals.
The daily said that the party was expected to be established before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s inauguration. [continued…]
How much has changed for Iran in one occasionally breathtaking month. The erratic uprising is becoming as important as the Islamic revoluti on 30 years ago — and not only for Iran. Both redefined political action throughout the Middle East.
The costs are steadily mounting for the regime. Just one day before the June 12 presidential election, the Islamic republic had never been so powerful. Tehran had not only survived three decades of diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions but had emerged a regional superpower, rivaled only by Israel. Its influence shaped conflicts and politics from Afghanistan to Lebanon.
But the day after the election, the Islamic republic had never appeared so vulnerable. The virtual militarization of the state has failed to contain the uprising, and its tactics have further alienated and polarized society. It has also shifted the focus from the election to Iran’s leadership. [continued…]
Empire of bases By Chalmers Johnson, New York Times, July 14, 2009
The U.S. “Empire of Bases” — at $102 billion a year already the world’s costliest military enterprise — just got a good deal more expensive.
As a start, on May 27, we learned that the State Department will build a new “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed — only $4 million less, before cost overruns, than the Vatican City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad.
Whatever the costs turn out to be, they will not be included in the already bloated U.S. military budget, even though none of these structures is designed to be a true embassy — a place, that is, where local people come for visas and American officials represent the commercial and diplomatic interests of their country. [continued…]
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, has called for UN recognition of a Palestinian state in the event that the two parties fail to reach an agreement before a proposed internationally imposed deadline passes.
In a speech delivered in London on Saturday, Mr Solana said that a resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict “remains central to a more stable and peaceful Middle East.”
He said: “There will be no solution without an active Arab contribution. The Arab Peace Initiative is key. Maybe it has to be made more operative. Its binary character – all or nothing – has to be nuanced. But having the Arab countries reacting in a positive way, with concrete actions, to every step will contribute immensely to success.
“The next ingredient for success is a real mediation. The parameters are defined. The mediator has to set the timetable too. If the parties are not able to stick to it, then a solution backed by the international community should will be put on the table.
“After a fixed deadline, a UN Security Council resolution should proclaim the adoption of the two-state solution. This should include all the parameters of borders, refugees, Jerusalem and security arrangements. It would accept the Palestinian state as a full member of the UN, and set a calendar for implementation. It would mandate the resolution of other remaining territorial disputes and legitimise the end of claims.” [continued…]
The British Government has reacted to Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza last January by barring further exports of components used in naval gunships which took part in the three-week operation.
Britain has officially told Israel’s embassy in London that it is revoking five licences for exports of equipment used in Saar 4.5 vessels because they violate UK and EU criteria precluding military sales which could be used for “internal repression”. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — “Internal repression” is not something that democracies engage in. Israel’s policies and actions of internal repression have been evident for decades, yet its allies have allowed it to be shielded behind a democratic facade. That facade is now crumbling.
If I were Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas I would be deeply insulted by the negotiations U.S. President Barack Obama is conducting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over building permits in the settlements. Who authorized the Americans – this administration or the previous one – to do business with Palestinian land?
If I were Netanyahu I would be very worried by Israel’s image in the Arab world as a client of the United States in the “natural growth” affair. How is it possible that the proud Jewish government is begging the non-Jews (“Rome” in Netanyahu’s discourse, according to senior adviser Uzi Arad), to allow it to build a kindergarten in Ma’aleh Adumim?
If I were Obama I would tell Netanyahu that if the settlers’ children are so close to the prime minister’s heart, let him ask the Palestinian Authority to take their crowded living conditions into consideration. After all, even according to Israel’s official position, Ma’aleh Adumim does not belong to us but is considered disputed territory – a dispute with the Palestinians, not the Americans. [continued…]
Seven years after construction work began on the West Bank separation fence, the project seems to have run aground. Work has slowed significantly since September 2007, and today, after the state has spent about NIS 9.5 billion, only about 60 percent of the more limited, revised route has been completed.
With fierce opposition coming from the United States, Israel has halted work on the “fingers” – enclaves east of the Green Line that were to have included large settlement blocs such as Ariel, Kedumim, Karnei Shomron and Ma’aleh Adumim, within the fence. The military has, in practice, closed up the holes that were to have led to these “fingers.” But giant gaps remain in the southern part of the fence, particular in the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, in the Etzion bloc and in the Judean Desert. [continued…]
Naomi Chazan leaned forward in the arched lobby of Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel. “If we want to chart the decline of the Israeli left, we should take 1992 as the starting point,” she said. In the years since, the Labor Party has lost 31 of its 44 seats in Israel’s 120-member Knesset, and the historically pro-peace Meretz is down from twelve seats to three.
Chazan should know. One of the founders of Meretz, and later one of its leading Knesset members—from 1996 to 2003 she was a deputy speaker of the Knesset—she still serves as the chair of Meretz’s party congress. Wearing another hat as president of the New Israel Fund, she has watched the decline of Israel’s progressive and pro-peace movement from close at hand.
I spoke with Chazan in early March. At the time, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu was in the middle of the inter-party negotiations usually needed to form a governing coalition in Israel. Later that month he convinced Labor leader Ehud Barak to serve as defense minister, despite the fact that the hard-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, which had won fifteen seats by campaigning for mandated loyalty oaths from Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, was already firmly inside Netanyahu’s coalition. Barak’s decision caused further tensions inside Labor, pounding yet another nail into the coffin of the party that until 1977 dominated the country’s political scene. But even before he joined Netanyahu’s conservative government, Barak stood accused by leaders of Israel’s peace movement of bearing considerable responsibility for the movement’s decline. In their telling, the betrayal started in early October 2000, when Barak emerged from the ruins of the last-minute peace talks at Camp David and announced that Yasser Arafat had quite gratuitously turned down Israel’s “generous offer.” Israel, he reported, had “no partner for peace.” [continued…]
Add this to the Bush administration’s sordid legacy: a refusal to investigate charges that forces commanded by a notorious Afghan warlord — and American ally — massacred hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war in late 2001.
According to survivors and witnesses, over a three-day period, fighters under the command of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum stuffed surrendering Taliban prisoners into metal shipping containers without food or water. Many suffocated. Guards shot others to death. The victims are believed to be buried in a grave in the desert of Dasht-i-Leili in northern Afghanistan.
Although the deaths were previously reported, The Times’s James Risen has now detailed repeated efforts by the Bush administration to discourage any investigation of the massacre — even after officials from the F.B.I. and the State Department, along with the Red Cross and human rights groups, tried to press the matter. Physicians for Human Rights, which discovered the mass grave in 2002, says the site has since been tampered with. Satellite photos seem to bear this out. [continued…]
President Obama has ordered national security officials to look into allegations that the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001.
“The indications that this had not been properly investigated just recently was brought to my attention,” Obama told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an exclusive interview during the president’s visit to Ghana. The full interview will air 10 p.m. Monday.
“So what I’ve asked my national security team to do is to collect the facts for me that are known, and we’ll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all of the facts gathered up,” Obama said. [continued…]
For the book I’m writing about unemployed Americans, I had no trouble finding accountants, brokers, cashiers, or die casters. Admittedly, I had to go out of town to interview the die casters. But when I arrived, alphabetically, at unemployed editors, I had only to look in my address book.
Financiers were further from my life experience than either die casters or editors. Yet the “do you know anyone who…?” method still proved an effective way of turning up unemployed hedge-fund analysts and bank loan officers — and within a week at that. It was only when I refined my search to ferret out unemployed financiers who had actually handled those infamous “toxic assets” that I hit the proverbial brick wall.
Since mortgage-backed securities and the swaps that insure them had been the downfall of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and the giant insurance company AIG, packs of bankers who worked on them must, I assumed, be roaming free on the streets of Manhattan. Yet I couldn’t find a single one.
Finally, I phoned a law firm representing Lehman Brothers employees in a suit for the pay they were owed when the company shut down without notice. I asked the lawyer if he could possibly inquire among his unemployed clients for someone, anyone, who used to work with mortgage-backed securities and might be willing to talk about how he or she was getting by today. “I don’t have to use real names,” I assured him. Many of the unemployed people I’d already interviewed felt so lost and ashamed that I had decided not to use their real names. Unemployed bankers deserve anonymity, too.
But the lawyer made it clear that that wasn’t the problem. “Most of them were snapped up immediately by Barclays,” he said. He represents other financial plaintiffs as well, and he seemed to think that the kind of person I was looking for hadn’t remained unemployed very long. [continued…]
A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.
The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn’t clear, and the CIA won’t comment on its substance.
According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.
In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn’t clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — The discussions “tapered off” evokes a curious imagine. Did the proponents of assassination become disenchanted with the idea, bored or distracted? Or was it simply that in this particular instance the White House lawyers simply couldn’t devise a method for circumventing the law?
If an assassination program had been put into operation, it seems unlikely that it would have met much public opposition.
The word “assassination” has all sorts of connotations – the ruthless, uncompromising intent of the assassin; stealth; daring; meticulous planning; the ability to find a chink in the armor of a visible yet protected target. What we don’t picture an assassin doing is hunting down an innocent target.
In Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the film attempted to expose the moral traps in a government-sanctioned assassination program. What the film inexplicably left out was that the culmination of Israel’s “Operation Wrath of God” was the murder of a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway – a man who had nothing to do with the Palestinian Black September Organization, yet ended up being killed in front of his pregnant wife.
If, as this Wall Street Journal report implies, the plan that Cheney wanted to keep secret was a program that in its earliest iteration would have involved tracking down and killing members of al Qaeda, then what this would have entailed was the use of death squads. Who they actually ended up killing and what would have happened to the bodies, would have remained as closely a guarded secret as the program itself
In an implicit rebuke to Iran’s ruling elite, a conservative presidential candidate warned Sunday that the political and social rifts opened by the disputed June 12 vote and subsequent crackdown could lead to the nation’s “disintegration” if they were not resolved soon.
The candidate, Mohsen Rezai, made his warning in a long statement about the election and its bloody aftermath, in which he called for reconciliation and spoke about the danger of “imprisoning” the legacy of the Islamic Revolution in divisive and shortsighted politics. The statement was posted on his Web site.
Although his message was largely nonpartisan, Mr. Rezai hinted that the government response after the election had been unfair, and he urged protesters to continue their work in legal and nonviolent channels.
Like the three other opposition candidates, Mr. Rezai, a former chief of the elite Revolutionary Guards, initially said he believed that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory involved ballot-rigging. Mr. Rezai later withdrew his legal challenge to the results, citing the need for unity. [continued…]
For months, the reports percolated in Washington and other capitals. Iran was constructing a major beachhead in Nicaragua as part of a diplomatic push into Latin America, featuring huge investment deals, new embassies and even TV programming from the Islamic republic.
“The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned in May. “And you can only imagine what that’s for.”
But here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy.
Nicaraguan reporters scoured the sprawling tropical city in search of the embassy construction site. Nothing. Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce chief Ernesto Porta laughed and said: “It doesn’t exist.” Government officials say the U.S. Embassy complex is the only “mega-embassy” in Managua. A U.S. diplomat in Managua conceded: “There is no huge Iranian Embassy being built as far as we can tell.” [continued…]
Maziar Bahari is a Newsweek reporter, a documentary filmmaker, a playwright, author, artist and, since June 21, a prisoner being held in Iran without formal charges or access to a lawyer. The Iranian state press has attached Bahari’s name to a “confession” made in vague terms and conditional tenses about foreign media influence on the unrest in Iran that followed the declaration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection on June 12.
Some in the government of Iran would like to portray Bahari as a kind of subversive or even as a spy. He is neither. He is a journalist; a man who was doing his job, and doing it fairly and judiciously, when he was arrested. Maziar Bahari is an agent only of the truth as best he can see it, and his body of work proves him to be a fair-minded observer who eschews ideological cant in favor of conveying the depth and complexity of Iranian life and culture to the wider world. Few have argued more extensively and persuasively, for instance, that Iran’s nuclear program is an issue of national pride, not just the leadership’s obsession. [continued…]
The British Embassy in Tel Aviv confirmed Monday that the United Kingdom has revoked a number of arms export licenses to Israel following the Gaza war, but insisted that the move did not constitute a partial embargo.
“There is no partial U.K. arms embargo on Israel,” the embassy said in a statement to Haaretz. “U.K. policy remains to assess all export licenses to Israel against the consolidated EU and national arms export licensing criteria.”
The statement came in response to a Haaretz report that Britain had indeed slapped a partial arms embargo on Israel, refusing to supply replacement parts and other equipment for Sa’ar 4.5 gunships because they participated in Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip earlier this year. [continued…]
In May 27, journalist Jesse Rosenfeld and I set out on the streets of Tel Aviv to probe the political opinions of young local residents. We started the day filming at Tel Aviv University, where a group of Jewish and Palestinian Israeli students gathered to protest a proposed law that would criminalize public observance of the Nakba, or the mass expulsion and killing of Palestinians by Zionist militias in 1948. There, we interviewed Palestinian Israeli students about the rising climate of repression, then spoke to another group of students who gathered nearby to heckle their Arab classmates and demand their deportation. A few hundred meters away, two genial business students expressed support for the so-called Nakba law, remarking to us, “If you want to keep democracy, you can’t let people protest against the independence of the country.”
That evening, Jesse and I took our camera to central Tel Aviv, where thousands were taking part in the annual all-night festival known as White Night. Some revelers took an intermission from the partying to express to us their hatred for the Iranian people. And a group of teenagers launched into a virtually unprompted diatribe against Barack Obama, referring to him as a Nazi, a Muslim, and a “Cushi,” which is Hebrew slang for “nigger.” [continued…]
A television advert for an Israeli cellphone firm showing soldiers playing soccer over the West Bank barrier has sparked cries of bad taste and prompted Arab lawmakers on Sunday to demand it be taken off air.
The jaunty commercial for Israel’s biggest mobile phone company Cellcom makes light of Palestinian suffering and shows how far Israelis fail to understand their neighbors, critics said. The company stood by the ad, however.
It shows a ball falling on an Israeli army jeep from the far side of a towering wall. A game ensues, back and forth with the unseen Palestinians after a soldier dials up “reinforcements,” including two smiling women in uniform, to come and play.
The advertisement made by McCann Erickson, part of U.S. Interpublic Group, ends with the upbeat voiceover: “After all, what are we all after? Just a little fun.”
Since the ad went out last week — as Palestinians marked the fifth anniversary of a World Court ruling that Israel’s walls and fences in the West Bank were illegal — some Israelis have taken to blogs and social networking sites to voice dismay. [continued…]
There is a hint of an older Baghdad in old Baghdad. You might call it more of a taunt. It’s there at the statue of the portly poet Marouf al-Rusafi, pockmarked by bullets, who gives his name to an untamed square. Around him revolves a city, storied but shabby, that American soldiers have finally, ostensibly, left.
The past is here. A turquoise dome, fashioned from brick and adorned in arabesque, peeks from beneath a shroud of dust. A stately colonnade buttresses British-era balconies and balustrades. A forlorn call to prayer drifts from an Ottoman mosque.
But few can see the dome. A spider web of wires delivering sporadic electricity obscures the view. You can’t navigate the colonnade. Blast walls block the way. And rarely does the call to prayer filter out from a deluge of car horns.
“It’s all become trash, broken windows and crumbling buildings,” complained Hussein Karim, a porter looking out from his perch atop a flap of cardboard on the statue’s granite pedestal. “Baghdad,” added his friend, Hussein Abed, “has become a shattered city.” [continued…]
A series of attacks in Afghanistan has left four U.S. Marines and eight British soldiers dead in recent days, stoking concern among U.S. and allied forces over a surge in battlefield deaths, as thousands of troops pour into the country.
The mounting deaths have contributed to harsh criticism of the war in a handful of NATO countries that have lost soldiers in recent months, including Canada, Germany and France. It has been an especially divisive issue in Britain, which has lost 15 soldiers in the past 11 days, including the eight killed Friday. Those deaths have brought Britain’s total losses to 184, a tally that now exceeds the 179 British military personnel killed in Iraq.
So far this year, 192 foreign soldiers have been killed, including 103 Americans — a 40% jump from the same period last year, and a 75% increase from 2007, say U.S. military officials. That figure doesn’t include the latest U.S. casualties. [continued…]
The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites.
Earlier this year Meir Dagan, Mossad’s director since 2002, held secret talks with Saudi officials to discuss the possibility.
The Israeli press has already carried unconfirmed reports that high-ranking officials, including Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister, held meetings with Saudi colleagues. The reports were denied by Saudi officials.
“The Saudis have tacitly agreed to the Israeli air force flying through their airspace on a mission which is supposed to be in the common interests of both Israel and Saudi Arabia,” a diplomatic source said last week. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Let’s suppose that the Sunday Times reporter and former Israeli military intelligence officer, Uzi Mahnaimi, broke a major story here. What are we to understand? That Israel secretly clinched a crucial deal with the Saudis and then thought this would be a great way of applying pressure on Iran if leaked to the media?
I don’t know — I suppose this could all be part of a clever campaign to keep the Iranians guessing. Maybe this “tacit agreement” is a kind of don’t-ask-don’t-tell and the Israelis feel confident that the Saudis will maintain an absolute silence. I’m inclined to believe, however, that if the Israelis really did have a secret understanding with the Saudis on this, this would be the most closely guarded secret imagineanable. We wouldn’t be getting a preview through one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers.
Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading opposition candidate in last month’s disputed election, released documents Saturday detailing a campaign of alleged fraud by supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that assured his reelection, while an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader accused Mousavi of treason.
Hossein Shariatmadari, a special adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accused Mousavi of being a “foreign agent” working for the United States and a member of a “fifth column” determined to topple Iran’s Islamic system of governance. The accusation of treason was the highest and most direct issued by an Iranian official since the June 12 election.
Many in Iran say that government forces are laying the groundwork for arresting Mousavi, who has not been seen in public in more than a week.
In a 24-page document posted on his Web site, Mousavi’s special committee studying election fraud accused influential Ahmadinejad supporters of handing out cash bonuses and food, increasing wages, printing millions of extra ballots and other acts in the run-up to the vote. [continued…]
The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.
A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible.
“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.” [continued…]
The English-language cousin of the Qatar based news channel Al Jazeera launched yesterday in the Washington D.C. area after signing its first major U.S. cable deal with non-commercial MHz Networks last week.
The MHz deal means 2.3 million subscribers will now have access to the channel, adding to the 140 million households currently receiving Al Jazeera English worldwide.
Al Jazeera English is available in 40 countries, including Israel, but it’s the first time Al Jazeera English (AJE) has entered such a large US market, generally acknowledged as the world’s most important English-language cable market.
Previously, AJE had been available only in two U.S. markets – Burlington, Vermont and Toledo, Ohio, and cable networks in the U.S. had historically refused to carry the channel because of its association with Al Jazeera’s Arabic language news channel. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Great news that America’s Berlin Wall for the media is starting to crumble — though needless to say, there’s nothing to read about this in the US media. Are all the TV producers and news editors praying that if they keep quiet enough, Al Jazeera will die a quiet death in DC and never threaten the myopia and complacency that allows American journalism to operate so smoothly?
For those who contemptuously view AJE is some kind of news upstart that doesn’t need to be viewed too seriously, it’s worth noting that they already have 69 news bureaus around the world — more than the BBC or CNN! And they’re just about to add ten more.
The furore over Iran’s election has imperilled prospects for a diplomatic engagement between Tehran and Washington, on both sides of the equation. And as long as the White House remains under pressure from hawks in Washington and Israel to force an end to Iran’s uranium enrichment programme by any means possible, the weakening of prospects for diplomatic engagement raises the risk of war.
Barack Obama, to his credit, largely rebuffed calls to talk tough on Iran, recognising that empty rhetoric would only assuage feelings of impotence in the US while making things worse for the Iranian opposition. He maintained a realist’s disciplined focus on the key issues in the US-Iranian relationship: those where he may be in a position to influence the outcome, unlike the fate of the Iranian opposition, about which he can do little. Regardless of who wins Iran’s power struggle, Mr Obama will have to deal with them, first and foremost on the nuclear issue. [continued…]
Just before midnight on a Friday evening a week before Iran’s much-disputed June 12 election, the initial tremors of the earthquake that has shaken the country to its core were palpable deep in south Tehran, a gritty, working-class section of the city with a reputation for being a stronghold of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Past shuttered shops and empty, debris-strewn sidewalks, a late-night stream of cars, trucks and motorcycles, engines revving, horns honking, roared along the wide boulevard. From open car windows emerged shouts and cheers, raised fists and hands brandishing posters of opposition contender Mir-Hossein Moussavi’s bearded, smiling visage. In the traffic ahead of us, a ramshackle open-air panel truck transported at least two dozen Ahmadinejad supporters clad in T-shirts, jeering at their opponents. As I traveled north from sprawling Imam Khomeini Square up to Ferdowsi Square and on the miles-long Vali Asr Street, the scene was similar. In a country not known for street politics, the tableau was stunning. My Iranian companion, an older man with years of experience in his country’s affairs, smiled and shook his head. “This is something new,” he said. [continued…]
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can in one instant appear the diplomatic equivalent of damaged goods and in the next a confident leader whose bellicose speeches leave the West wondering how to deal with him and his perplexing nation now that he’s won a much-disputed reelection.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev publicly greeted Ahmadinejad at a recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but did not grant him a private meeting as he had the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Belarus, the Iranian leader was met not by President Alexander Lukashenko, but by the speaker of the upper house of parliament. [continued…]
After a months-long deadlock and half a dozen inconclusive votes, the world’s atomic energy watchdog on Thursday elected as its leader a Japanese diplomat described as colorless by foes and competent by allies.
Yukiya Amano, formerly Japan’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, will serve as director-general of the United Nations agency when Mohamed ElBaradei, an outspoken Egyptian diplomat, retires this year. [continued…]
If Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari were not being held in a Tehran prison without formal charges, without access to a lawyer, without being allowed to see even his mother, there would be no one better to tell the story of an Iranian like him and the tragedies that his family has suffered in the last few years.
“I don’t know when these terrible things are going to stop happening,” 83-year-old Molouk Bahari said, amazed, angry, and agonizing after Maziar was arrested at the family home in Tehran early on the morning of June 21. He is the last real emotional support left in her life. “He was doing nothing wrong. He was doing his job,” she said. “There is no reason for him to be held like this.” [continued…]
Most people, even in the Palestinian territories and in Israel, had never heard of Khaled Meshaal until Israeli Mossad agents attempted to assassinate him in Jordan one day in September, 1997.
The agents, bearing falsified Canadian passports, bungled the job and created an international incident. Outraged that the attack was carried out on his soil, King Hussein of Jordan responded by demanding, among other things, that Israel supply the antidote to the poison they had used.
In the aftermath, the world focused on the man at the centre of all the attention, who was then a senior figure in the militant Palestinian Hamas movement and is now at its helm.
Few Palestinians even today have met Mr. Meshaal, because he has lived outside the territory where he was born for 42 of his 53 years. But they are seeing more of him on television now, talking with Israel about a truce after the recent Gaza invasion, talking with the rival Palestinian Fatah party about reconciliation and – as of last week – talking to the Arab world about the future of the peace process. [continued…]
With Iran’s hard-line mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unmistakably back in control, Israel’s decision of whether to use military force against Tehran’s nuclear weapons program is more urgent than ever.
Iran’s nuclear threat was never in doubt during its presidential campaign, but the post-election resistance raised the possibility of some sort of regime change. That prospect seems lost for the near future or for at least as long as it will take Iran to finalize a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.
Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. Israel is undoubtedly ratcheting forward its decision-making process. President Obama is almost certainly not. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — As John Bolton watched events unfold in Iran over the last three weeks, one thought couldn’t escape his mind — in fact it’s the only thought that seems to inhabit his mind: now’s a good time to bomb Iran.
What he somehow managed to miss was that perceptions of Iran have not only changed around the rest of the world but also inside Iran-fearful Israel. As Zvi Bar’el wrote in Haaretz recently in an article ironically headlined “Which Iran would Israel bomb?“:
Suddenly, there appears to be an Iranian people. Not just nuclear technology, extremist ayatollahs, the Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad, and an axis of evil. All of a sudden, the ears need to be conditioned to hear other names: “‘Mousawi’ or ‘Mousavi,’ how is it pronounced exactly?”; Mehdi Karroubi; Khamenei (“It’s not ‘Khomeini’?”). Reports from Iranian bloggers fill the pages of the Hebrew press. Iranian commentators – in contrast to Iranian-affairs commentators – are now the leading pundits. The hot Internet connection with Radio Ran (the Persian-language radio station in Israel) is the latest gimmick. And most interesting and important is that the commentary on what is taking place in Iran is not being brought to the public by senior intelligence officers, but via images transmitted by television.
Israel is now gaining a more intimate, accurate familiarity with the Iranian public. The demonstrations have made quite clear that there is not one Iran or even two, but rather a number of Irans. There is the Iran that belongs to those who screamed, “Death to America and to Israel,” and there is the Iran that screams, “Down with the dictator.”
So for Israelis Iran has evolved beyond pure nemesis.
Even so, let’s humor Bolton’s imagination a little and suppose that the Israeli strike he’s picturing goes stunningly well and Iran’s nuclear program is crippled with minimal loss of life. What happens then inside Iran? How much traction is Bolton’s public diplomacy campaign going to get — that is, the message that the bombs were aimed at the regime, not the people?
The answer is simple: the regime will have its own public diplomacy campaign. Do you support your nation or are you in sympathy with the Zionist-entity and its American supporters?
An are-you-for-us-or-against-us? campaign worked well enough for George Bush and Dick Cheney, even though those of us who rejected their rallying cry had little fear of being jailed, beaten up or shot for simply protesting. For Ayatollah Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, equipped as they are with crude but effective means to enforce the same message, its acceptance — heartfelt or otherwise — is sure to be near universal. The Iranian government will be rewarded by spectacular displays of national solidarity. The rifts that are now open wide will not be healed but they will most effectively be buried.
Whether an Israeli strike would be successful in crippling Iran’s nuclear program is debatable; that it would profoundly undermine Iran’s reformist movement should be beyond question.
And then there’s another small detail that Bolton forgot to mention: Is an Israeli government that regards itself as being under “withering pressure” and is “being driven to its knees” by the Obama administration on the issue of settlements, about to turn around and bomb Iran? Not unless it gets a green light from the White House. And that’s the one thing Bolton is realistic enough to understand is not about to happen.
Israel’s ready to bomb Iran? Only in your dreams Mr Bolton.
We are accustomed to seeing Afghans through bars, or smeared windows, or the sight of a rifle: turbaned men carrying rockets, praying in unison, or lying in pools of blood; boys squabbling in an empty swimming-pool; women in burn wards, or begging in burqas. Kabul is a South Asian city of millions. Bollywood music blares out in its crowded spice markets and flower gardens, but it seems that images conveying colour and humour are reserved for Rajasthan.
Barack Obama, in a recent speech, set out our fears. The Afghan government
is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people. The economy is undercut by a booming narcotics trade that encourages criminality and funds the insurgency . . . If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can . . . For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralysed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people – especially women and girls. The return in force of al-Qaida terrorists who would accompany the core Taliban leadership would cast Afghanistan under the shadow of perpetual violence.
When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.
It conjures nightmares of ‘failed states’ and ‘global extremism’, offers the remedies of ‘state-building’ and ‘counter-insurgency’, and promises a final dream of ‘legitimate, accountable governance’. The path is broad enough to include Scandinavian humanitarians and American special forces; general enough to be applied to Botswana as easily as to Afghanistan; sinuous and sophisticated enough to draw in policymakers; suggestive enough of crude moral imperatives to attract the Daily Mail; and almost too abstract to be defined or refuted. [continued…]
The assassin struck shortly after morning prayers, storming into a room at the compound where Qari Zainuddin was staying and opening up with a volley of fire. The militant leader was rushed to a nearby hospital but declared dead. Meanwhile, the gunman – apparently dispatched by Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud – escaped in a waiting car.
The following day, in a cemetery of Muslim and Christian graves encircled by fields of maize, the 26-year-old, who in recent months had pitched himself against Mr Mehsud, was buried. The militant leader’s funeral was notable for two things. Firstly the town was filled with checkposts manned by both Taliban and Pakistani security personnel. Secondly, when the dead man’s brother, Misabhuddin, vowed to reporters that he would take revenge against Mr Mehsud, he also let slip something else. “Jihad against America and its allies in Afghanistan will continue as well,” he said.
The killing last week of Mr Zainuddin, who had been staying in a compound provided by the country’s ISI security agency, has opened a window on a complicated, controversial and perilous element of the battle against militants inside Pakistan. Mr Zainuddin, himself a Taliban leader who supported al-Qa’ida and jihad against Western troops in Afghanistan, had recently been recruited by the Pakistani authorities to join their battle to kill Baitullah Mehsud, who has emerged as the country’s deadliest militant. In essence, Islamabad is recruiting anti-American fighters to bolster a joint US-Pakistani operation.
The arrangement underlines the competing strategic priorities in the region for Pakistan and the US, even as their leaders opt in public for the language of common interests and shared enemies. “Pakistan just wants to concentrate on the Pakistani Taliban. They do not want to go after the Afghan Taliban,” said Giles Dorronosoro, a regional expert at the Carnegie Endowment. “The US wants to put the Pakistan-Afghanistan border under control. They have totally different goals. And the issue is not resolvable.” [continued…]
He swept to power with the support of 78% of American Jews. But has Barack Obama become the bane of Israeli Jews?
A gulf between American and Israeli Jews was evident even before Obama moved into the White House. Just a third of Israelis would have endorsed him had they been allowed to vote, polling indicated, while almost half would have chosen John McCain.
In recent weeks, several public opinion surveys have suggested that Obama’s popularity has dropped far below this already low point. A Jerusalem Post-commissioned poll released on June 19 reported that only 6% of Jewish Israelis consider his views pro-Israel.
To Rafi Smith, head of the polling firm that conducted the survey, it is clear what is happening. Israelis, he said, see Obama “as the opposite of George Bush, who was perceived as the biggest friend of Israel. Obama is seen as a 180-degree turn.” [continued…]
Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.
Hussein, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.”
Former president George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. Administration officials at the time also strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. [continued…]
The U.S. Empire of Bases — at $102 billion a year already the world’s costliest military enterprise — just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27th, we learned that the State Department will build a new “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed, only $4 million less, if cost overruns don’t occur, than the Vatican-City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad. The State Department was also reportedly planning to buy the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel (complete with pool) in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to use as a consulate and living quarters for its staff there.
Unfortunately for such plans, on June 9th Pakistani militants rammed a truck filled with explosives into the hotel, killing 18 occupants, wounding at least 55, and collapsing one entire wing of the structure. There has been no news since about whether the State Department is still going ahead with the purchase.
Whatever the costs turn out to be, they will not be included in our already bloated military budget, even though none of these structures is designed to be a true embassy — a place, that is, where local people come for visas and American officials represent the commercial and diplomatic interests of their country. Instead these so-called embassies will actually be walled compounds, akin to medieval fortresses, where American spies, soldiers, intelligence officials, and diplomats try to keep an eye on hostile populations in a region at war. One can predict with certainty that they will house a large contingent of Marines and include roof-top helicopter pads for quick get-aways. [continued…]
The revolution will not be digitized By Farhad Manjoo, Slate, June 25, 2009 What happened in Baharestan Square on Wednesday? According to a woman who called in to CNN, Iranian security forces unleashed unimaginable brutality upon a few hundred protesters gathered in central Tehran. “They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood, and her husband, who was watching the scene, he just fainted,” the anonymous caller screamed into the phone. “This was—this was exactly a massacre. You should stop this. You should stop this. You should help the people of Iran who demand freedom. You should help us.”
Clips of the phone call ricocheted across the Web and cable TV. The message was corroborated on Twitter, where a post by @persiankiwi brought horrific news from Baharestan Square: “we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat – blood everywhere – like butcher – Allah Akbar.”* News organizations around the world told of a brutal crackdown—Iran’s Tiananmen. But at the same time, other reports suggested the rally was a far tamer encounter. A reader on the New York Times’ Lede blog wrote in to say that the protest had been cleared by security forces with minimal violence. The blog of the National Iranian American Council, which has been closely following all the news out of Tehran, published a report from a “trusted source” who said that while the rally was “tense,” it didn’t match the CNN caller’s account. “The moment we stood in one place, they would break us up,” the source wrote. “I saw many people get blindfolded and arrested, however it wasn’t a massacre.”
Over the last couple of weeks, those who believe in the transformative powers of technology have pointed to Iran as a test case—one of the first repressive regimes to meet its match in social media, the first revolution powered by Twitter. Even in the early days of the protest, that story line seemed more hopeful than true, as Slate’s Jack Shafer, among many others, pointed out. Since last week, though, when the state began to systematically clamp down on journalists and all communications networks leading out of the country, hope has become much harder to sustain. The conflicting accounts about what happened at Baharestan Square are evidence that Iran’s media crackdown is working. The big story in Iran is confusion—on a daily basis, there are more questions than answers about what’s really happening, about who’s winning and losing, about what comes next. The surprise isn’t that technology has given protesters a new voice. It’s that, despite all the tech, they’ve been effectively silenced. [continued…]
One leading conservative ayatullah declared, during Friday prayers at Tehran University, that people protesting Iran’s election are waging war on God. Ayatullah Ahmad Khatami demanded that those calling for demonstrations be “ruthlessly and savagely” punished. Yet, just a day earlier, one of the country’s most senior mullahs, Grand Ayatullah Hussein-Ali Montazeri — a longtime liberal critic of the regime — branded the authorities’ response to the electtion protests un-Islamic. And a second leading conservative theologian, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, called for the dispute over the election to be resolved through “national conciliation.”
To an outside world accustomed to viewing Iranian politics as a conclave of like-minded mullahs, the current turmoil within Iran’s political and religious establishment defies explanation. The conflict between two regime insiders, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has created the most profound political crisis in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history. Both men proclaim their fealty to the ideals of the 1979 Islamic revolution; both claim the backing of senior clergy; and both appeal to Iranians’ sense of Shia justice to rally support.
The fact that such discord is possible among factions who all claim allegiance to the principle of guidance by the clergy is rooted in the distinct nature of Shi’ite Islam. Shi’ism differs from the Sunni tradition in a handful of important ways — not only in its belief in who was the legitimate heir to the Prophet Muhammad’s leadership of the community of the faithful after his death, but also in its attitudes toward political authority and devotion. But one of the most important differences is the Shi’ite tradition’s unique practice of ijtihad — the use of independent reasoning to pass new religious rulings. While Sunni Islam effectively abandoned ijtihad in the tenth century, the practice remained an essential core of Shi’ism. The result is that virtually every aspect of Shi’a doctrine, from the principle of clerical rule to minute matters of religious observance, is open to differing interpretation, and has been debated throughout history. [continued…]
Reliable sources in Iran are suggesting that a possible compromise to put an end to the violent uprising that has rocked Iran for the past two weeks may be in the works. I have previously reported that the second most powerful man in Iran, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the Assembly of Experts (the body with the power to choose and dismiss the supreme leader) is in the city of Qom—the country’s religious center—trying to rally enough votes from his fellow assembly members to remove the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from power. News out of Iran suggests that he may be succeeding. At the very least, it seems he may have gained enough support from the clerical establishment to force a compromise from Khamenei, one that would entail a runoff election between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main reformist rival Mir Hossein Mousavi. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — The rumor that the Assembly of Experts might play a decisive role in forging a compromise or even unseating Khamenei has been floating around for some time.
…do really think that members of the Council of Experts, who have had to pass through the extreme filter of the Guardian Council, particularly the exceptionally harsh filtering that is exercised in case of the Council of Experts, have the ability or courage to question the competence of the supreme leader? Given how brutally they [the coup makers] have been able to crackdown on everyone under current circumstances, with such a high turnout in the elections, what do you expect from a few senile men without any serious public backing?
After days of relative quiet, the candidate defeated in Iran’s disputed presidential election launched a broadside Thursday against the nation’s leadership, an indication that the country’s political rift is far from over.
In his statement, Mir-Hossein Mousavi issued a rare attack on supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accusing him of not acting in the interests of the country, and said Iran had suffered a dramatic change for the worse. [continued…]
The White House sought for the first time Thursday to answer basic questions about a key player in President Barack Obama’s approach to what the administration is calling the “Central Region” of foreign policy, a vast tract of the globe spanning from Pakistan to Israel.
The National Security Council announced that Dennis Ross would serve as its senior director, and as a special assistant to the president, with responsibility for developing a coherent strategy across a region whose dynamics have been scrambled by the violent aftermath of a contested election in Iran.
Some of Ross’s more hawkish allies suggested that his arrival at the White House implied a rightward turn for the administration, but several government officials suggested that the shift is more subtle, and that Ross’s main addition will be a clearer sense that the broad region’s many problems are deeply connected. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — An earlier report by Time said: “With his proximity to the President, Ross will probably supersede special envoy George Mitchell as the most powerful voice in the Administration on Middle East peace talks.”
Politico‘s sources indicate otherwise, saying that Mitchell’s stance on pressuring Israel will continue to “hold sway.” “Mitchell’s much closer to the president on the subject matter than Dennis is,” the White House official said.
This month, both at Cairo University and from the Oval Office, President Obama has called on the Israeli government to stop the expansion of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. He should send the same message to the Americans who are funding and fueling them.
There are more than 450,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to Peace Now, an Israeli organization that opposes the settlements. Some of them are Americans. And some of the most influential, militant figures in the settler movement have been Americans, too. Among them were Baruch Goldstein, the doctor from Brooklyn who fired 100 shots at worshiping Muslims in Hebron in 1994, killing 29; Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Kach party, which was banned in Israel in 1988 on the grounds that it was racist; and convicted terrorist Era Rapaport, a member of the Land Redemption Fund, which coordinates the acquisition of Palestinian land in areas targeted for settlement expansion.
Before the settlers were removed from Gaza in 2005, I visited a group of them while shooting my last film. Some of the settlements’ most passionate advocates spoke about their deep roots in the Gaza Strip even though they were actually Americans. Years earlier, while working as a human rights advocate, I had received reports from colleagues who had been threatened or physically attacked by young settlers as they tried to protect Palestinian farmers during harvest. The attackers often included North American Jews, my colleagues said. [continued…]
The Israel Project hired pollster Stanley Greenberg to test American opinion on the Middle East conflict — and got a big surprise. In September 2008, 69% of Americans called themselves pro-Israel. Now, it’s only 49%. In September, the same 69% wanted the U.S. to side with Israel; now, only 44%.
How to explain this dramatic shift? Greenberg himself suggested the answer years ago when he pointed out that, in politics, “a narrative is the key to everything.” Last year the old narrative about the Middle East conflict was still dominant: Israel is an innocent victim, doing only what it must do to defend itself against the Palestinians. Today, that narrative is beginning to lose its grip on Americans.
Well, to be more precise, the first part of the old narrative is eroding. Nearly half the American public seems unsure that Israel is still the good guy in the Middle East showdown. But the popular image of the Palestinians as the violent bad guy is apparently as potent as ever. The number of Americans who say they support Palestine remains unchanged from last September, a mere 7%. And only 5% want the U.S. government to take such a position. [continued…]
Mohamed Sharkawy bears the scars of his devotion to Egypt’s democracy movement. He has endured beatings in a Cairo police station, he said, and last year spent more than two weeks in an insect-ridden jail for organizing a protest.
But watching tens of thousands of Iranians take to the streets of Tehran this month, the 27-year-old pro-democracy activist has grown disillusioned. In 10 days, he said, the Iranians have achieved far more than his movement has ever accomplished in Egypt.
“We sacrificed a lot, but we have gotten nowhere,” Sharkawy said. [continued…]
For reasons best not explained, I’ve come to know a former member of the Revolutionary Guards really well.
He’s done some pretty dreadful things in his life, from attacking women in the streets for not wearing the full Islamic gear to fighting alongside Islamic revolutionaries in countries abroad.
And yet now, in the tumult that has gripped Iran since its elections last week, he’s had a change of heart.
He’s become a backer of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist candidate who alleges fraud in the elections. He’s saved up the money to send his son to a private school abroad, and he loathes President Ahmadinejad.
Security was tight around the bare grave of Neda Agha-Soltan on Thursday. Militiamen and police stood nearby, witnesses said, and it was difficult for visitors to hold a conversation within sight and hearing of the glaring officers.
But the visitors come nonetheless to pay their respects to Agha-Soltan, who was fatally shot by an unknown assailant during the protests Saturday over Iran’s disputed presidential election. Her dying moments were captured in a video that made its way onto the Internet and the international airwaves.
“I read the news on the Web, and I saw the picture of the grave,” said one man, hovering near the burial site. “I figured out the location of the grave and came.” [continued…]
Lebanon took the first step yesterday towards forming a new cabinet with the re-election of Nabih Berri to his fifth term as speaker of the parliament in a vote that showed widespread political support for the opposition figure from the majority.
Mr Berri and his Amal Movement played a large role in the opposition’s unsuccessful attempt to unseat the majority in elections this month, but his close ties to some majority parties – not to mention a dearth of alternatives acceptable to Lebanon’s Shiite community – all but ensured his re-election. Under an unofficial tradition that divvies up power among Lebanon’s various confessions, the speaker must be a Shiite Muslim, while the president is Christian and prime minister a Sunni.
Mr Berri saw some opposition from Christian parties in the majority, who argued that his role in the political battles that paralysed the most recent parliament should exclude him from returning, but with the endorsement of Saad Hariri, the Future Movement MP and the man many expect to be named prime minister tomorrow, he was able to win 90 of 128 votes. A total of 28 MPs from the Christian majority parties refused to vote in the election, only offering blank ballots. [continued…]
You don’t overthrow Islamic revolutions with car headlights. And definitely not with candles. Peaceful protest might have served Gandhi well, but the Supreme Leader’s Iran is not going to worry about a few thousand demonstrators on the streets, even if they do cry “Allahu Akbar” from their rooftops every night.
This chorus to God emanated from the rooftops of Kandahar every night after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 – I heard it myself in Kandahar and I heard it last week over the rooftops of Tehran – but it no more stopped the Russians in their tracks than it is going to stop the Basiji or Revolutionary Guards. Symbols are not enough.
Yesterday, the Revolutionary Guards – as unelected as they are unrepresentative of today’s massed youth of Iran – uttered their disgraceful threat to deal with “rioters” in “a revolutionary way”.
Everyone in Iran, even those too young to remember the 1988 slaughter of the regime’s opponents – when tens of thousands were hanged like thrushes on mass gallows – knows what this means.
Unleashing a rabble of armed government forces on to the streets and claiming that all whom they shoot are “terrorists” is an almost copy-cat perfect version of the Israeli army’s public reaction to the Palestinian intifada. If stone-throwing demonstrators are shot dead, then it is their own fault, they are breaking the law and they are working for foreign powers. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Many of the equations Fisk is making here are off target. The basij may be as brutal as the IDF, yet as we have witnessed on several occasions, when their adversaries have been injured the demonstrators are willing to assist their fellow Iranians. Likewise, to point out that the Soviets were unmoved by the cries of “Allahu Akbar” from the rooftops of Kandahar does not imply that Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard are similarly impervious to the calls from what for them — unlike the Soviets — are fellow Muslims.
Where Fisk is absolutely on target is to label this uprising an intifada — an awakening.
A Republican effort on Tuesday to cut off U.S. loans to some companies doing business with Iran will bring Congress deeper into the fray over the U.S. response to the Iranian elections.
The amendment to the draft fiscal 2010 State and foreign operations appropriations bill will give members their first chance to vote on binding Iran policy since that country’s presidential election June 12.
Rep. Mark Steven Kirk , R-Ill., said the amendment was aimed at Reliance Industries, a large energy company based in India that reportedly has provided Iran with as much as a third of its refined petroleum. He will offer the measure when the House Appropriations Committee takes up the draft bill on Tuesday…
Kirk worked Monday with Nita M. Lowey , D-N.Y., chairwoman of the State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, to draft language they both could support. Final details were unclear, but Kirk aims to block the U.S. Export-Import Bank from extending loan guarantees to companies that supply gasoline to Iran.
Although Iran is a large exporter of oil, it lacks refining capacity and must import as much as 40 percent of its gasoline, a situation those arguing for tougher sanctions have sought to exploit.
“As they’re shooting kids in Tehran, this is not the time to provide taxpayer funding for a facility helping [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad ease his gas shortage problem,” Kirk said.
The Export-Import Bank provides loan guarantees for companies overseas to buy U.S. goods and services. The bank has provided Reliance with two loan guarantees totaling $900 million, including a $500 million guarantee to build the world’s sixth-largest refinery in Jamnagar, India.
Kirk said the company’s role in providing a large share of Iran’s refined petroleum makes it a target. “We think it would be good for Reliance just to choose not to do business with Iran,” he said.
Opponents say the language would do little to block gasoline imports and would end up hurting both America’s image in Iran and U.S. companies that would be penalized by the measure. Bechtel Corp. and Dow Global Technologies are involved in the refinery’s construction.
“It struck me as a little strange that we’re going to hamstring American companies in the middle of the worst recession in decades,” said Patrick Disney, legislative director at the National Iranian American Council.
The funds for the Jamnagar project have already been disbursed, but if the amendment is retroactive it could apply to that and other past transactions and potentially undermine confidence in the Export-Import Bank, critics say.
The new refinery would not provide gasoline to Iran, according to the bank, but Kirk waved that issue aside. “I think nuances like that fall on deaf ears as the situation has come apart in Iran,” he said.
He offered another reason to back his plan: “Our amendment is a go because AIPAC supports it,” he said, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a leading pro-Israel lobby. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — The Jewish Telegraph Agency was quick to point out that “sanctions are even being endorsed by demonstrators in Iran.” How many such demonstrators there are is unclear. Interestingly, CNN succeeded in hooking up with one pro-Israel demonstrator in Tehran whose concern right now is that Iran’s nuclear program be halted. The only thing he didn’t say was, “Bring back the Shah.”
Looking past their fiery rhetoric and apparent determination to cling to power using all available means, Iran’s hardliners are not a confident bunch. While hardliners still believe they possess enough force to stifle popular protests, they are worried that they are losing a behind-the-scenes battle within Iran’s religious establishment.
A source familiar with the thinking of decision-makers in state agencies that have strong ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said there is a sense among hardliners that a shoe is about to drop. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — Iran’s savviest political operator and an arch-enemy of Ayatollah Khamenei’s — has kept out of the public spotlight since the rigged June 12 presidential election triggered the political crisis. The widespread belief is that Rafsanjani has been in the holy city of Qom, working to assemble a religious and political coalition to topple the supreme leader and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“There is great apprehension among people in the supreme leader’s [camp] about what Rafsanjani may pull,” said a source in Tehran who is familiar with hardliner thinking. “They [the supreme leader and his supporters] are much more concerned about Rafsanjani than the mass movement on the streets.”
Ayatollah Khamenei now has a very big image problem among influential Shi’a clergymen. Over the course of the political crisis, stretching back to the days leading up to the election, Rafsanjani has succeeded in knocking the supreme leader off his pedestal by revealing Ayatollah Khamenei to be a political partisan rather than an above-the-fray spiritual leader. In other words, the supreme leader has become a divider, not a uniter. [continued…]
President Obama condemned Iran’s aggressive response to the mass protests that have swept the country after its contested elections, saying that the United States and the international community “have been appalled and outraged” by the violence against peaceful demonstrators.
“I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of Iran,” he said. “But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people, and we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.”
He also said that comments by Iranian officials blaming the United States, Britain and other Western nations for inciting the protests were “patently false” and a “tired strategy to use other countries as scapegoats” that will not work. “Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history,” he said. [continued…]
Iran’s supreme leader’s second son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has emerged as one of the driving forces behind the government’s crackdown, diplomats and observers said .
Mojtaba is an ally of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the disputed president, and was credited with winning his father’s endorsement for the then Tehran mayor in the 2005 elections, leading to Ahmadinejad’s shock second round victory.
Mojtaba is an austere figure, generally seen as more hardline than his father and has become a gatekeeper for access to the beit-e-rahbari, the supreme leader’s home, and the supreme leader himself. [continued…]
They are known mockingly as the “Joojeh Basiji” — the “chicken Basiji.” These are the militia scarcely old enough to manage more than a feeble beard. Teenagers, brainwashed from early childhood, they have been ferried into the capital in large numbers, given a club and a shield and a helmet and told to go to work.
I saw them throughout downtown Tehran on Sunday, seated in the back of grey pick-ups. I saw them, sporting sleeveless camouflage vests, in clusters on corners, leaning on trees, even lolling shoeless on the grass in the central island of Revolution Square.
They were far from alone in a city in military lockdown. Elite riot police with thigh-length black leg guards, helmeted Revolutionary Guards in green uniforms and rifle-touting snipers composed a panoply of menace. The message to protesters was clear: Gather at your peril. [continued…]
Despite efforts by Iran’s leaders to keep photographers off the streets during post-election protests this month, many vivid images have emerged. The one posted here, above, is the one I found most chilling, poignant and evocative.
By now, many outsiders can identify the man whose picture is on the right-hand side of this protest sign. He is Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reported loser in this month’s presidential election. The elderly gentleman in the other picture is unfamiliar to most non-Iranians. He and his fate, however, lie at the historical root of the protests now shaking Iran.
The picture shows a pensive, sad-looking man with what one of his contemporaries called “droopy basset-hound eyes and high patrician forehead”. He does not look like a man whose fate would continue to influence the world decades after his death. But this was Muhammad Mossadeq, the most fervent advocate of democracy ever to emerge in his ancient land.
Above the twinned pictures of Mossadeq and Mousavi on this protest poster are the words “We won’t let history repeat itself.” Centuries of intervention, humiliation and subjugation at the hand of foreign powers have decisively shaped Iran’s collective psyche. The most famous victim of this intervention – and also the most vivid symbol of Iran’s long struggle for democracy – is Mossadeq. Whenever Iranians assert their desire to shape their own fate, his image appears. [continued…]
The first word came from abroad. An aunt in the United States called her Saturday in a panic. “Don’t go out into the streets, Golshad,” she told her. “They’re killing people.”
The relative proceeded to describe a video, airing on exile television channels that are jammed in Iran, in which a young woman is shown bleeding to death as her companion calls out, “Neda! Neda!”
A dark foreboding swept over Golshad, who asked that her real name not be published. She began calling the cellphone and home numbers of her friend Neda Agha-Soltan — who had gone to the chaotic demonstration with a group of friends — but Neda didn’t answer.
At midnight, as the city continued to smolder, Golshad drove to the Agha-Soltan residence in the Tehran Pars section in the eastern part of the capital.
As she heard the cries and wails and praising of God reverberating from the house, she crumpled, knowing that her worst fears were true. [continued…]
Iran’s revolution has now run through a full cycle. A gruesomely captivating video of a young woman — laid out on a Tehran street after apparently being shot, blood pouring from her mouth and then across her face — swept Twitter, Facebook and other websites this weekend. The woman rapidly became a symbol of Iran’s escalating crisis, from a political confrontation to far more ominous physical clashes. Some sites refer to her as “Neda,” Farsi for the voice or the call. Tributes that incorporate startlingly upclose footage of her dying have started to spring up on YouTube.
Although it is not yet clear who shot “Neda” (a soldier? pro-government militant? an accidental misfiring?), her death may have changed everything. For the cycles of mourning in Shiite Islam actually provide a schedule for political combat — a way to generate or revive momentum. Shiite Muslims mourn their dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, and these commemorations are a pivotal part of Iran’s rich history. During the revolution, the pattern of confrontations between the shah’s security forces and the revolutionaries often played out in 40-day cycles. [continued…]
* The photograph above, circulating on Twitter, is said to be Neda’s passport photograph.
Editor’s Comment — It seems tragically fitting that images of a dying young women will become the icon of what in so many ways is a women’s revolution.
Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the most important living cleric in Iran, and one of the most outspoken foes of the conservatives and hard-liners, has issued a statement about the attacks of the security forces on the demonstrators and the resulting casualties.
In the name of God
We all come from Him and will go back to Him
The great and dignified Iranian nation:
With much sorrow I was informed that, during peaceful rallies to defend their lawful rights, the great Iranian people have been attacked [by the security forces], beaten, and bloodied, and killed. While expressing my condolences for this painful event and the losses, and feeling the pain of the nation, I declare Wednesday [June 24], Thursday and Friday days of national mourning. I express my strongest support for the Muslim nation [of Iran] in their defense of their rights in the framework of the Constitution that recognizes republicanism [direct and free elections, and respect for the votes] as one of the pillars of the [political] establishment, and declare that any action that would harm the republicanism of the system is not permitted [is against religion]. Every one of our religious brothers and sisters must help the nation in defending its lawful rights. Based on this principle, any resistance in this direction [against people who are defending their right], particularly use of violence, beating, and killing of [the people of] the nation is acting against the Islamic principle that the nation must decide its own fate and path and, therefore, I declare it to be religiously haraam [the worst sin].
In a statement issued on Saturday the Assembly of Experts expressed its “strong support” for the Supreme Leader’s statements on the presidential elections on Friday.
The 86-member assembly stated in the statement that it is hoped that the nation would realize the current condition and by sticking to the Leader’s guidelines preserve their patience and manifest their unity.
The Qom Seminary Teachers Society also issued a statement on Saturday declaring strong support for the guidelines of the Supreme Leader. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment – updated — Readers at Huffington Post point out that this statement only bears one signature: that of Mohammad Yazdi, a rival of Rafsanjani. Whether or not statements from the assembly generally have multiple signatures I have no idea.
If, as has been suggested by various commentators, former President Rafsanjani has in recent days been lobbying the body that he chairs to mount some form of opposition to Khamenei (the Assembly of Experts has the authority to replace the Supreme Leader), then that effort appears to have failed. A key unanswered question remains: where does Rafsanjani stand? He has yet to break his silence or reveal his location.
The Los Angeles Times provides some additional perspective on Rafsanjani from Iran scholar Mohsen Milani:
Some Western commentators have made much of the apparent divisions among Iran’s ruling clerics. Milani is more cautious, saying Khamenei signaled in his Friday sermon that he might be willing to bring prominent moderate and former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani back into the fold.
“In the past, I have seen how cracks have been created and then repaired,” Milani says. “What I am watching for is whether there is a permanent division between Rafsanjani and Khamenei . . . I am not convinced there is.”
Asked whether the opposition movement would persist without its current figureheads, he says, “I believe this is one of the reasons that Rafsanjani has not made up his mind. He knows on the one hand that Ahmadinejad is determined to undermine him. Ahmadinejad has made that very clear. On the other hand, the strategic decision that Rafsanjani has to make is if he does not join the Islamic regime that is in power today, then his fate is locked with the fate of the (opposition) movement . . . He is waiting I think to see where is the center of gravity in these unfolding events, and then he will decide where to go.”
Mousavi calls day of mourning for Iran dead By Dominic Evans and Fredrik Dahl, Reuters, June 17, 2009 Defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi urged supporters to stage protests or gather in mosques to mourn those killed after disputed elections that set off Iran’s worst unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory against the reformist Mousavi sparked demonstrations and bloody street battles in Tehran which killed at least seven people on Monday while other protests flared up in cities across Iran.
“A number of our countrymen were wounded or martyred,” Mousavi said in a statement on his website posted on Wednesday.
“I ask the people to express their solidarity with the families … by coming together in mosques or taking part in peaceful demonstrations,” said Mousavi, adding that he would also take part in the day of mourning planned for Thursday. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — By once again rallying his supporters both in defiance of the government and in the name of mourning those who have been killed, Mousavi is rekindling the spirit on the 1979 revolution. Through 1978, demonstrations following a 40-day mourning cycle — each time mourners gathered, more would be killed — became the engine of the revolution. Mousavi is not going to be constrained by the 40-day tradition, but he is tapping into mourning as perhaps the most potent and unifying sentiment among Shiites.
At this point, it appears that the rubicon has been crossed — Iran is in a revolutionary situation. For many analysts, this is something they appear to have a hard time grasping. After all, Mousavi, Rafsanjani, and Katami are mainstays of the regime. Their intentions have merely been to usher in reform or simply a reapportioning of power — not stir up another revolution.
But although this might not be a revolution in a traditional sense, since it follows no ideological blueprint and lacks a revolutionary leadership, if events continue along their current trajectory (which at this point bears every mark of being unstoppable) then the reformists will find themselves accidental revolutionaries.
As Joe Cirincione succinctly put it, when describing how in the space of three days he’s cast aside the realist perspective: “This is no longer Khamanei’s Iran.”
Each time a demonstration gets banned and the ban doesn’t hold, Iranians and the world witness the fact that the regime is no longer in control. Ironically, the thuggish behavior of the Basij, although it is widely regarded as demonstrating the ruthlessness of Iran’s leaders, is actually less extreme than we could expect in response to similar expressions of defiance elsewhere in the region. In Egypt or Syria, the demonstrations would have been crushed well before they had a chance to reach a critical mass.
The fate of Iran rested last night in a grubby north Tehran highway interchange called Vanak Square where – after days of violence – supporters of the official President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at last confronted the screaming, angry Iranians who have decided that Mirhossein Mousavi should be the president of their country. Unbelievably – and I am a witness because I stood beside them – just 400 Iranian special forces police were keeping these two armies apart. There were stones and tear gas but for the first time in this epic crisis the cops promised to protect both sides.
“Please, please, keep the Basiji from us,” one middle-aged lady pleaded with a special forces officer in flak jacket and helmet as the Islamic Republic’s thug-like militia appeared in their camouflage trousers and purity-white shirts only a few metres away. The cop smiled at her. “With God’s help,” he said. Two other policemen were lifted shoulder-high. “Tashakor, tashakor,” – “thank you, thank you” – the crowd roared at them.
This was phenomenal. The armed special forces of the Islamic Republic, hitherto always allies of the Basiji, were prepared for once, it seemed, to protect all Iranians, not just Ahmadinejad’s henchmen. The precedent for this sudden neutrality is known to everyone – it was when the Shah’s army refused to fire on the millions of demonstrators demanding his overthrow in 1979. [continued…]
Supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main rival in the disputed presidential election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, massed in competing rallies Tuesday as the country’s most senior Islamic cleric threw his weight behind opposition charges that Ahmadinejad’s re-election was rigged.
“No one in their right mind can believe” the official results from Friday’s contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi’s charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers “in the worst way possible.”
“A government not respecting people’s vote has no religious or political legitimacy,” he declared in comments on his official Web site. “I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to ‘sell their religion,’ and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God.” [continued…]
(I checked with a Farsi-speaking friend about the lyrics in this song — they have nothing to do with Mousavi or the election. Still, I like the spirit!)
In the wake of the election debacle, questions are being raised [regarding the military and Khamenei] about who controls whom. But over the years, Ayatollah Khamenei gradually surmounted expectations that he would be eclipsed.
“He is a weak leader, who is extremely smart in allying himself, or in maneuvering between centers of power,” said one expert at New York University, declining to use his name because he travels to Iran frequently. “Because of the factionalism of the state, he seems to be the most powerful person.”
But many analysts say the differences between factions have never been quite so pronounced nor public as in the past few days. Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, once a close Khamenei ally who helped him become supreme leader, sent an open letter to him in the days before the election warning that any fraud would backfire, Mr. Milani noted. If he allowed the military to ignore the public will and to destroy senior revolutionary veterans, the decision would haunt him, Mr. Rafsanjani warned: “Tomorrow it is going to be you.”
Everyone speaking of Ayatollah Khamenei tends to use the word “cautious,” a man who never gambles. But he now faces a nearly impossible choice. If he lets the demonstrations swell, it could well change the system of clerical rule. If he uses violence to stamp them out, the myth of a popular mandate for the Islamic revolution will die. [continued…]
If the regime had hoped to quell Iran’s powerful democratic stirring with a massive show of force since last Friday’s vote, it failed to do so.
For the first time, in that crowd, it seemed to me that the forces of change, the deeper Iran of civility and courage that I first encountered several months ago, might prevail. Seldom has silence been more eloquent or potent.
Sunday had been a different story, full of violence and confrontation. Out in the streets, a doctor, Mahdi Alizadeh, had stopped to tell me about the bravery of President Ahmadinejad, his glorious electoral victory, and how Iran was “the most democratic country in the world,” when a woman named Yassamin approached and demanded: “If your side won, why are you doing this?”
“This” meant the beatings. She said she had just seen women and children being struck by the baton-wielding police. I had, too. The image of a slender woman outside Tehran University, her face contorted in pain, clutching her upper arm where the blow fell, had lodged in my mind. There’s nothing more repugnant than seeing women being hit by big men armed with clubs and the license of the state. [continued…]
Gary Sick on his blog said that the remark he wanted to add at the end of this interview was that “the situation is certainly not a revolution at this point, but the main players are faced with the decision of whether to push things to the brink, realizing that it could run out of control and perhaps bring down the entire system of Islamic government. In the past, opposition forces have recoiled at that prospect and retreated. It is very likely they will do so again, but they are perhaps closer to the line today than they have been in the entire 30 years of the post-revolutionary experience.”
Dennis Ross, the Obama Administration’s special adviser on Iran, will be leaving his post at the State Department to become a senior adviser at the National Security Council (NSC) with an expanded portfolio, Administration officials told Time.
The new White House position puts him closer to the center of foreign policy power, placing him in the top ranks of Obama’s in-house aides, said an Administration official. “He is closer to being able to provide advice to the President.” But Ross’s exact duties remain unclear. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Sounds like Ross just got “promoted” to something like “minister without portfolio” – lots of scope with no authority.
Only one in five Israeli Jews believes a nuclear-armed Iran would try to destroy Israel and most see life continuing as normal should their arch-foe get the bomb, an opinion poll published on Sunday found.
The survey, commissioned by a Tel Aviv University think tank, appeared to challenge the argument of successive Israeli governments that Iran must be denied the means to make atomic weapons lest it threaten the existence of the Jewish state.
Asked how a nuclear-armed Iran would affect their lives, 80 percent of respondents said they expected no change. Eleven percent said they would consider emigrating and 9 percent said they would consider relocating inside Israel. [continued…]
The turmoil following Iran’s disputed presidential election intensified today, after the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered an investigation into claims of vote rigging and an opposition protest rally was cancelled amid fears protestors would be fired upon.
The government declared on Friday that the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won in a landslide victory, a claim disputed by his rivals headed by the moderate Mir Hossein Mousavi, whose supporters took to the streets and clashed with police.
Iran’s leaders spent the weekend urging people to accept the result but today Khamenei ordered an investigation into claims of vote-rigging and fraud.
Iranian state television said Khamenei had told the guardian council, the clerical body that oversees elections, to examine Mousavi’s claims of widespread vote rigging in Friday’s poll.
The guardian council was reported to have said it would take no more than 10 days to hand down its ruling, following complaints from Mousavi and another candidate, Mohsen Rezai. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Some of the headlines are describing this as a “stunning reversal”. It could be. It could mean there’s a counter-coup in the making. Much more likely though is that Khamenei is following the well-practiced tradition employed by democratic governments around the world: use an inquiry to deflect pressure from the opposition. Once the critics have lost their political momentum, the inquiry can then absolve the government. Ten days should probably be long enough for all the protests to fizzle out.
I AM UNDER EXTREME PRESSURE TO ACCEPT THE RESULTS OF THE SHAM ELECTION. THEY HAVE CUT ME OFF FROM ANY COMMUNICATION WITH PEOPLE AND AM UNDER SURVEILLANCE. I ASK THE PEOPLE TO STAY IN THE STREETS BUT AVOID VIOLENCE
The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin — greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — A lot happened in the three weeks between this poll and the election. Mass rallies for Mousavi, the makings of a color revolution and the impact of the internet might not have tipped the balance but it’s hard to over-estimate how much the population could have been swayed by witnessing Ahmadinejad get trashed in live televised debates. That was the point at which the Revolutionary Guard stepped in and warned that a “velvet revolution” would get “nipped in the bud.”
Trained as a graphic artist, Anousheh makes an unlikely political activist. She lives with her parents. She stayed home on election day, unlike her brother and parents, who voted for moderate candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who has accused Ahmadinejad of vote fraud. But she believes Mousavi should have won.
“I don’t accept any of them,” Anousheh, who asked that her last name not be published, says in steady voice. “None of them can do anything.”
She’s driven, she says, not by politics but by a heartfelt sense of the injustice of it all, and a strong commitment to her country, her city and her neighborhood, called Jordan, among the Iranian capital’s most urbane districts.
Jordan was a target of the Islamic revolutionaries who took control of Iran in the late 1970s, a symbol of all that was decadent about the toppled regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Authorities re-designated Jordan Boulevard, named after American educator Samuel Jordan, who established a high school here, Africa Boulevard in a showy sign of solidarity with the Third World, and a slap to the district’s cosmopolitan pretensions.
Analysts sometimes describe a great rift in Iran between rich and poor, between the pious downtrodden masses and the wealthy Westernized elite. But many say Iran’s divide is more about culture than class, more about cool than cash.
Plenty of the bazaar merchants who bankrolled the ayatollahs and became fundamentalist pillars of the Islamic Republic were rich, and many of the young working stiffs in menial jobs in wholesale districts listen to made-in-L.A. Persian pop music and sip homemade vodka with their friends on weekends.
And among the so-called north Tehran elite are many of modest means: government employees or teachers who treasure the arts, travel abroad and, above all, believe in a good education for their children.
The revolutionaries were resentful of the north Tehranis not so much for their money but for their schooling and worldliness, for what they viewed as a pretension that they could meld East and West instead of just being content with Iran’s traditions.
The late intellectual Ali Shariati, who once inspired Iranian revolutionaries, came up with a term for it: gharb-zadeghi, meaning struck or poisoned by the West. [continued…]
The defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi today launched a formal appeal against the election result as his supporters took to the streets of the capital again, raising the prospect of more violent clashes.
Mousavi, who claimed his defeat by the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was manipulated, said in a statement on his website that he had appealed to the ruling guardian council to overturn the result, and urged his supporters to continue protests “in a peaceful and legal way”.
“We have asked officials to let us hold a nationwide rally to let people display their rejection of the election process and its results,” said Mousavi…
Mousavi’s newspaper, Kalemeh Sabz, or the Green Word, did not appear on news stands today. An editor speaking anonymously said authorities had been upset with Mousavi’s statements. The paper’s website reported that more than 10m votes in Friday’s election were missing national identification numbers similar to US social security numbers, which made the votes “untraceable”. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Tehranbureau (an expat Iranian site that appears to be struggling to handle the traffic right now) says that Mousavi has called on all Reformist supporters to take part in a peaceful march and mass demonstration in 20 cities across Iran on Monday and for a general strike on Tuesday.
My contact predicted serious violence at the highest levels. He said that Ahmadinejad is now genuinely scared of Iranian society and of Mousavi and Rafsanjani. The level of tension between them has gone beyond civil limits — and my contact said that Ahmadinejad will try to have them imprisoned and killed.
Likewise, he said, Rafsanjani, Khatami, and Mousavi know this — and thus are using all of the instruments at their control within Iran’s government apparatus to fight back — but given Khamenei’s embrace of Ahmadinejad’s actions in the election and victory, there is no recourse but to try and remove Khamenei. Some suggest that Rafsanjani will count votes to see if there is a way to formally dislodge Khamenei — but this source I met said that all of these political giants have resources at their disposal to “do away with” those that get in the way.
He predicted that the so-called reformist camp — who are not exactly humanists in the Western liberal sense — may try and animate efforts to decapitate the regime and “do away with” Ahmadinejad and even the Supreme Leader himself.
I am not convinced that this source “knows” these things will definitely happen but am convinced of his credentials and impressed with the seriousness of the discussion we had and his own concern that there may be political killing sprees ahead.
This is not a vision he advocates — but one he fears. [continued…]
I’ve also argued that, although repressive, the Islamic Republic offers significant margins of freedom by regional standards. I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.
“Here is my country,” a young woman said to me, voice breaking. “This is a coup. I could have worked in Europe but I came back for my people.” And she, too, sobbed.
“Don’t cry, be brave,” a man admonished her.
He was from the Interior Ministry. He showed his ID card. He said he’d worked there 30 years. He said he hadn’t been allowed in; nor had most other employees. He said the votes never got counted. He said numbers just got affixed to each candidate.
He said he’d demanded of the police why “victory” required such oppression. He said he’d fought in the 1980-88 Iraq war, his brother was a martyr, and now his youth seemed wasted and the nation’s sacrifice in vain. [continued…]
Clearly, the anti-Ahmadinejad camp has been taken by surprise and is scrambling for a plan. Increasingly, given their failure to get Khamenei to intervene, their only option seems to be to directly challenge — or threaten to challenge — the supreme leader.
Here’s where the powerful chairman of the Assembly of Experts, Mousavi supporter Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, comes in. Only this assembly has the formal authority to call for Khamenei’s dismissal, and it is now widely assumed that Rafsanjani is quietly assessing whether he has the votes to do so or not.
It may be that the first steps toward challenging Khamenei have already been taken. After all, Mousavi went over the supreme leader’s head with an open letter to the clergy in Qom. Rafsanjani clearly failed to win Khamenei’s support in a reported meeting between the two men Friday, but the influential Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, who heads the vote-monitoring committee for Mousavi and fellow candidate Mehdi Karroubi, has officially requested that the Guardian Council cancel the election and schedule a new vote with proper monitoring.
The implications for Washington’s agenda, meanwhile, could be extensive. Although the United States is pursuing diplomacy with Iran in its own self-interest, electoral fraud (or the perception of fraud) complicates this strategy. And if political paralysis reigns in Iran, valuable time to address the nuclear issue through diplomacy will be lost. The White House’s posture thus far is a constructive one — while it cannot remain indifferent to irregularities in the elections, it must be careful never to get ahead of the Iranian people and the anti-Ahmadinejad candidates. [continued…]
Back on the streets, there were now worse scenes. The cops had dismounted from their bikes and were breaking up paving stones to hurl at the protesters, many of them now riding their own motorbikes between the rows of police. I saw one immensely tall man – dressed Batman-style in black rubber arm protectors and shin pads, smashing up paving stones with his baton, breaking them with his boots and chucking them pell mell at the Mousavi men. A middle-aged woman walked up to him – the women were braver in confronting the police than the men yesterday – and shouted an obvious question: “Why are you breaking up the pavements of our city?” The policeman raised his baton to strike the woman but an officer ran across the road and stood between them. “You must never hit a woman,” he said. Praise where praise is due, even in a riot.
But the policemen went on breaking up stones, a crazy reverse version of France in May 1968. Then it was the young men who wanted revolution who threw stones. In Tehran – fearful of a green Mousavi revolution – it was the police who threw stones.
An interval here for lunch with a true and faithful friend of the Islamic Republic, a man I have known for many years who has risked his life and been imprisoned for Iran and who has never lied to me. We dined in an all-Iranian-food restaurant, along with his wife. He has often criticised the regime. A man unafraid. But I must repeat what he said. “The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad.”
My guest and I drank dookh, the cool Iranian drinking yoghurt so popular here. The streets of Tehran were a thousand miles away. “You know why so many poorer women voted for Ahmadinejad? There are three million of them who make carpets in their homes. They had no insurance. When Ahmadinejad realised this, he immediately brought in a law to give them full insurance. Ahmadinejad’s supporters were very shrewd. They got the people out in huge numbers to vote – and then presented this into their vote for Ahmadinejad.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — “The outcome of the June 12 elections in Iran show the immense popularity of Iran’s policy,” read a statement by Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum. “Ahmadinejad’s victory proves his success in sponsoring and maintaining the people’s interests and hopes and protecting them from the global threats,” he added.
I don’t know exactly when that statement was released, but it might have been prudent to have waited 24 or 48 hours. Right now, Hamas (and Hezbollah) look like they are positioning themselves glaringly on the wrong side of history.
And in Tehran, though one might have expected a brutal and effective clampdown on protests, it has certainly been brutal but not clearly effective. In these protests on Valiasr street today, the marchers are on the advance and the Basij seem to be on the retreat.
And in this video the Basij end up getting caught and rescued by bystanders. How long will it be before battons and tear gas get replaced with live fire? How many of its citizens can the security forces kill before governance becomes untenable?
On June 5, when several hundred Israelis marched from Tel Aviv’s Yitzhak Rabin Square to the Israeli Defense Ministry to protest the anniversary of the Six Day War, I was able to meet some of the country’s most vociferous cheerleaders of Barack Obama. In complete contrast to the characters who appeared in my video report, “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem,” those I interviewed at the demonstration (organized by the Israeli left-wing party Hadash) were invigorated by Obama’s speech in Cairo, and excited by the prospect of an American president who would pressure Israel into making meaningful concessions towards peace. As one demonstrator remarked to me, “[Obama] must save us from ourselves.”
Whether the two-state solution Obama proposes is possible is another story. Israelis view Obama’s policies towards Israel with extreme negativity, and consider him biased towards the Palestinians, though they simultaneously believe Benjamin “Yahoo” Netanyahu should bend to Washington’s will.
“You see how few we are,” said a demonstrator holding a sign reading “Obama, Yes-U-Can.” “This is about all the Israelis who really oppose the Occupation — it’s very small. Most of the Israelis don’t care about the Occupation and what goes on in the Occupied Territories and about the suffering of the Palestinians. I think it must come from the — the pressure must come from the outside… From here, there’s not enough.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — The Dahaf poll that Max links to here needs to be carefully parsed. First comes the progressive headline: majority of Israelis support Obama’s demand for a settlement freeze. 56% say Netanyahu should acquiesce to Obama’s demands. The problem is, 54% support “natural growth” in settlements. The headline should really be: Israelis think they can have their cake and eat it. They think they can make Obama happy and allow the settlements to grow. They can carry on with business as usual — a settlement freeze that’s melting at the edges.
There should be something instructive for America’s “pro-Israel, pro-peace movement” about witnessing the realism of peace protesters in Tel Aviv. The protesters have no illusions about the sentiment of most Israelis. They don’t pretend they’re speaking for a silent majority. Their blunt message is that Israel can’t save itself. They know that if there remains any possibility that a two-state solution will get implemented, it’s not going to happen by gently coaxing Israel in the right direction. If it’s going to happen, there’s going to be a lot of kicking and screaming and maybe even worse violence.
When an Israeli cabinet minister proposes that his country impose sanctions on the United States, his government is clearly in a state of distress. Pressure from the Obama Administration to freeze Israeli settlement construction and move toward a two-state peace with the Palestinians has reportedly spurred Minister-without-Portfolio Yossi Peled (who belongs to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Likud party) to recommended that Israel shop outside the U.S. for aircraft and military hardware, sell sensitive technology to clients disapproved of by Washington, and invite America’s rivals to play a greater role in the Middle East. And if that sounds like chutzpah given the continued U.S. direct aid to Israel — $2.5 billion in military aid this year alone — two Israeli newspapers reported Wednesday that Peled had even proposed that Israel use its influence with some Democratic donors in the U.S. as leverage against Obama’s positions. [continued…]
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in his first interview since being named the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said his front-row seat for the wars there and in Iraq has altered the view of combat he has held since training as a Green Beret to kill enemies quickly and stealthily.
After watching the U.S. try and fail for years to put down insurgencies in both countries, Gen. McChrystal said he believes that to win in Afghanistan, “You’re going to have to convince people, not kill them.
“Since 9/11, I have watched as America tried to first put out this fire with a hammer, and it doesn’t work,” he said last week at his home at Fort McNair in Washington. “Decapitation strategies don’t work.” [continued…]
One of the most senior Democrats in Washington has dismissed a key element in the west’s long standing strategy on Iran’s nuclear programme as “ridiculous”. His comments throw open the debate about how far the US and its partners should go in seeking a compromise with Tehran after on Friday’s presidential election.
John Kerry, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee and the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee, told the Financial Times in an interview that Iran had a right to uranium enrichment – a process that can produce both nuclear fuel and weapons grade material.
The US and the world’s other big powers have repeatedly demanded that Tehran suspend enrichment – a policy pioneered by the former Bush administration that has since been given the force of international law by successive United Nations Security Council resolutions. [continued…]
American officials say they are seeing the first evidence that dozens of fighters with Al Qaeda, and a small handful of the terrorist group’s leaders, are moving to Somalia and Yemen from their principal haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas. In communications that are being watched carefully at the Pentagon, the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency, the terrorist groups in all three locations are now communicating more frequently, and apparently trying to coordinate their actions, the officials said.
Some aides to President Obama attribute the moves to pressure from intensified drone attacks against Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, after years of unsuccessful American efforts to dislodge the terrorist group from their haven there.
But there are other possible explanations. Chief among them is the growth of the jihadist campaigns in both Somalia and Yemen, which may now have some of the same appeal for militants that Iraq did after the American military invasion there in 2003. [continued…]
A former Pentagon analyst who pled guilty to passing secret information to two former AIPAC staffers had his sentence drastically reduced.
Larry Franklin was sentenced to probation and 10 months of “community confinement,” or a halfway house, along with 100 hours of community service. In 2005, he had received a sentence of 12 and 1/2 years in prison but was free pending his cooperation with prosecutors in the case against the two formers AIPAC staffers, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.
The charges against those two men for passing classified information were dropped by federal prosecutors last month who said that restrictions the judge had placed on the case made the government unlikely to prevail. [continued…]
The new American commander in Afghanistan has been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans, as he moves to carry out an ambitious new strategy that envisions stepped-up attacks on Taliban fighters and narcotics networks.
The extraordinary leeway granted the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, underscores a view within the administration that the war in Afghanistan has for too long been given low priority and needs to be the focus of a sustained, high-level effort.
General McChrystal is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — When Gen McChrystal told senators last week that “the measure of effectiveness will not be the number of enemy killed. It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence,” these were lines surely delivered in the spirit that he would simply tell his audience exactly what it wanted to hear. It was a salable statement happy to be bought by the Senate and the New York Times. And if any skeptics remained before his confirmation vote passed, it turned out that they could easily be steamrolled by the melodramatic claim that the general was “literally waiting by an airplane” ready to head off on his mission.
That a general of whom it is said that “his nature isn’t to be second fiddle to anyone” now appears to have been granted unprecedented power, is disturbing in and of itself. But that that power is likely to be exercised in secrecy should be of even greater concern.
The mystique of secrecy may come to shroud all public inquiry about Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are questions to be answered, however.
One is framed on page 380 of Bob Woodward’s book The War Within, in which the author describes a top-secret operation in 2006 that targeted and killed insurgents with such effectiveness that it gave “orgasms” to Derek Harvey, a top aide to Gen. David Petraeus and longtime tracker of Iraqi dissidents. The secret program was led by McChrystal, then a lieutenant general, using signals intercepts, informants and other tools of what McChrystal calls “collaborative warfare” through Special Access Programs (SAPS) and Special Compartmented Information (SCI.) McChrystal, according to the New York Times, conducted and commanded most of his secret missions at night. These missions were consistent with the proposals of Petraeus’s top counterinsurgency adviser at the time, David Kilcullen, to revive the discredited Phoenix Program used in South Vietnam.
This expanding secret war is crucial to understand for three reasons. First, according to Woodward’s claim, it was “more important than the surge” in reducing insurgent violence in Iraq. Second, the Special Ops units served as judge, jury and executioner in hundreds of extrajudicial killings. The targeted victims were from broad categories such as “the Sunni insurgency” and “renegade Shiite militias” or other “extremists.” Third, and most important, the operation was kept secret from the American public, media and perhaps even the US Congress.
They’re calling it the “green tsunami,” a transformative wave unfurling down the broad avenues of the Iranian capital. Call it what you will, but the city is agog at the campaign of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the reformist candidate seeking to unseat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 10th post-revolution election.
Iran, its internal fissures exposed as never before, is teetering again on the brink of change. For months now, I’ve been urging another look at Iran, beyond dangerous demonization of it as a totalitarian state. Seldom has the country looked less like one than in these giddy June days.
I wandered in a sea of green ribbons, hats, banners and bandannas to a rally at which Ahmadinejad was mocked as “a midget” and Moussavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, sporting a floral hijab that taunted grey-black officialdom, warned the president that: “If there is vote rigging, Iran will rise up.” [continued…]
In a makeshift campaign war room in north Tehran, two dozen young women clad in head scarves and black chadors are logging election data into desktop computers 24 hours a day, while men rush around them carrying voter surveys and district maps.
This nerve center in the campaign to unseat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s hard-line president, is not run by any of the three candidates who are challenging him in a hotly contested election on Friday.
Instead, it is part of a bitter behind-the-scenes rivalry that has helped define the campaign, pitting Mr. Ahmadinejad against the man he beat in the last election, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a two-term former president and one of Iran’s richest and most powerful men. [continued…]
For years, AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has helped to stonewall the Middle East peace process by building a solid wall around the Israeli government, protecting it from criticism in the US. Senators and representatives have feared the wrath of AIPAC come Election Day, even in states and districts where the Jewish vote is negligible. Whatever they may have thought privately about Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, they’ve remained silent.
I got a first-hand glimpse of the process shortly after last year’s election, when I talked to an aide of a newly elected House member. The new member, who represents a district with hardly any organized Jewish community, knew very little about the Middle East when the campaign began. The representative had been “educated” on the issue, the aide told me, by a handful of wealthy Democrats – none from the member’s district, all generous contributors to the campaign, and all staunch supporters of the AIPAC line. That’s how it works, all over the country.
Or at least that’s how it used to work. Now, for the first time, there are signs of a crack in AIPAC’s vaunted political edifice. The wedge issue is the Obama administration’s public demand that Israel stop all new construction in its West Bank settlements, including what the Israelis call expansion to accommodate “natural growth.” [continued…]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will attempt to narrow a growing divide with the Obama administration when he delivers a major policy speech in the coming days, his aides say _ perhaps even endorsing the concept of a Palestinian state at the risk of alienating his hawkish coalition.
In one curious twist, Netanyahu’s message _ and his room to maneuver _ could be at least partially linked to the outcome of Friday’s election in Iran.
Painted into a corner by his right-wing coalition and an American president bent on progress toward peace, Netanyahu is facing a moment of truth when he will have to decide between the two. For now, it seems his all-important American allies will be the focus of his efforts, though it’s unclear if he will go far enough for Washington. [continued…]
The Arab world translates Obama’s Cairo speech as a change in American policy, and so does Hamas.
Hamas Political Bureau Director Khaled Mashal: “Hamas will not be an obstacle to a peace agreement in the 1967 borders, Hamas will be a positive element helping to reach a solution that is fair to the Palestinians and will enable them to realize their rights.”
In response, high-ranking Hamas figure Salah Bardawil told Makor Rishon-Hatzofe, “Mashal disclosed the first details of Hamas’s new policy, as a factor that will act in the framework of a Palestinian government, after there is Palestinian unity, and in the framework of the Mecca agreement.” [continued…]
Over the past month, a rumor made its way around journalistic circles here in Beirut: last Sunday’s parliamentary vote in Lebanon would be former President Jimmy Carter’s last stint as an election observer. It sounded plausible enough—after all, Carter is getting on in years and, through his organization, the Carter Center, he has participated in dozens of elections around the world.
And yet, last night, at a farewell reception for the Center’s observers at the Hotel InterContinental Phoenicia, Carter was looking enthused and animated, a glass of white wine in his hand, as he greeted friends and fellow observers. The rumor of his retirement from retirement, he said with a grin, was bunk.
“I hope it’s not the last one. I’m eighty-four-years-old, and I may be coming to my, you know…” he said. “But I hope I can have another one in Palestine in January. And I’ll be going to Bolivia in December.” [continued…]
George Mitchell is due to arrive in Syria on Friday for what promises to be a crucial visit. Syria wants a place in any emerging Obama peace plan for the region. Washington would be short sighted not to include Damascus. The Lebanon has been a leading factor in Syria’s isolation and Washington’s dominant concern in the Levant for five years very much to Syria’s detriment. Because of the election results, Lebanon can now take a back seat to other regional considerations.
The Lebanon elections produced results confirming the political status quo among Lebanon’s competing factions. The Doha, power-sharing agreement that resolved the Lebanon question last year – or something closely approximating it – is likely to be reformulated for the new government. All sides seem to be in agreement about the general outlines of a new government, eliminating the temptation on the part of all sides, including the US and Syria to renegotiate the regional balance of power. Lebanon has effectively been placed in deep freeze.
Obama has yet to speak the word Syria. He has spoken clearly and emphatically about the Palestinian track in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, but not about the Syrian track. [continued…]
To the prisoners at Guantánamo, Mohammed Ahmed Abdullah Saleh was simply known as Wadhah al-Abyani (Wadhah meaning ”one who clarifies” and Abyan the place where he came from in Yemen). Last week, it was announced that he had apparently committed suicide in his cell. After almost eight years in U.S. custody, Wadhah came home to his native Yemen in a coffin. He was no more than a few months older than I. He was born in 1978. Coincidentally, he was numbered 078 by the U.S. military.
At 5’10” in height, his weakened body weighed no more than 104 pounds the last time I saw him. Wadhah had, like many prisoners still held in Guantánamo, been on a hunger strike before I left, protesting the conditions, abuses and absence of justice we were all subjected to.
We were force-fed together, transported to the chair willing or unwilling, strapped to it according to the doctors orders. A sympathetic-looking nurse would ask which nostril we would like to have the tube inserted in. While the 25-inch of hard tube is forced through your nostril down to your stomach, your eyes swell with tears and run down your cheeks. It’s always comforting to hear the nurse say, ”Oh don’t worry. It’s OK, that happens to everyone,” as she wipes off your tears for you. And as the tube goes through the throat, you get the sensation of choking. Coughing is a norm but some start vomiting blood. With the years of hunger-striking, very few can keep what’s being pumped into them down. [continued…]
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hether wrapped in a shawl for a televised debate, sitting on a dirt floor with a shopkeeper, or thundering over speakers in a dust storm, Ashraf Ghani, the most educated and Westernized of Afghanistan’s presidential candidates, is shaking up the campaign before Thursday’s election in unusual ways.
midst a presidential slate now culled to 36 contenders, Ghani, a non-aligned independent, is currently in third place, according to the polls, a Ghilzai Pashtun (that’s good) undercut by a perceived poor grasp of the country’s internecine tribal politics, with no traction among the kingmaker warlords (that’s bad).
— If the Iranian revolutionary court recently trying protesters in Tehran had been able to subpoena Hillary Clinton to testify on behalf of the prosecution, this is what they would have wanted her to say: “behind the scenes, we were doing a lot.”
ou don’t overthrow Islamic revolutions with car headlights. And definitely not with candles. Peaceful protest might have served Gandhi well, but the Supreme Leader’s Iran is not going to worry about a few thousand demonstrators on the streets, even if they do cry “Allahu Akbar” from their rooftops every night.
ran’s revolution has now run through a full cycle. A 
“He is a weak leader, who is extremely smart in allying himself, or in maneuvering between centers of power,” said one expert at New York University, declining to use his name because he travels to Iran frequently. “Because of the factionalism of the state, he seems to be the most powerful person.”
he new American commander in Afghanistan has been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans, as he moves to carry out an ambitious new strategy that envisions stepped-up attacks on Taliban fighters and narcotics networks.