Iran Affairs

CFR's Iran nuclear forum - more propaganda framing

The Council on Foreign Relations has set up an invitation-only "forum" for the "experts" to discuss Iran nuclear issues. Gary Samore has set the agenda for the "forum" by raising the old "Iran is seeking breakout capability" red herring, and has invited other experts to discuss things. 

Now, after 8 years of watching the digusting mess in Iraq, it should be clear that 99% of the "experts" are in fact professional propagandists and mouthpieces pushing an agenda.

Secondly, note that they steadfastly refuse to publicly acknowledge their concern regarding Iran's nuclear program - which is really about controlling and monopolizing nuclear fuel technology, and not really about nuclear weapons proliferation (which is nothing more than a convenient pretext)

For the last 30 years, there has been an intense, raging international diplomatic conflict between the few nuclear nations that are trying to monopolize nuclear fuel production under the pretext of fighing weapons proliferation, versus the developing nations that have been resisting such efforsts. However, you would never know such a conflict exists by reading only these sorts of fake "debates" and "forums" by the so-called "experts" since their job is not to inform but to propagandize. This latest CFR forum is just another example of how they perpetuate the favored framing of issues.

The U.S. Military Delves into Cultural Intelligence in Iran

Apparently the US Marines have been investigating Iran's cultural conflicts as a potential source of leverage in a war. Their report is available here.

Iran FM publishes book on nuclear issue

Iran's Foreign Ministry's Center for Printing and Publication has published a book on the country's nuclear issue, the official IRNA news agency reported on Tuesday...

Very nice. But, they should be publishing a website not a book, and this should have happened years ago. The only people who will see this book are members of the foreign ministry itself.

Iran, Al-Qaeda connection debunked by Bush official

Contrary to McCain's and the pro-Israeli Right's claims about Iran backing Al-Qaeda...

James F. Dobbins, the Bush administration's chief negotiator on Afghanistan in late 2001, said that Iran was "comprehensively helpful" in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack in working to overthrow the Taliban and collaborating with the United States in installing the Karzai government in Kabul.

Read more.

Interview with Iranian FM Mottaki on nuclear issues

Great interview with Iran's FM Mottaki. He makes clear that controlling the nuclear fuel cycle is a strategic concern for Iran

Q: Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, reportedly said today that Iran would consider suspending its uranium enrichment program if the international community assured it a supply of nuclear fuel. Does that mark a shift in Iran's policy?

A: Most probably this was a misinterpretation or misunderstanding. The reason we are engaged in producing fuel has everything to do with our need for fuel.

For 51 years, we have experimented with different contracts [to bring in foreign energy assistance] —contracts signed with different foreign parties. Our 51-year experience tells us you cannot trust foreign parties when it comes to this issue. [Fifty one years ago] we signed our first nuclear contract with the U.S. The U.S. party obliged itself to help with the production of 23,000 mega watts of power through nuclear plants. Later, 30 some years ago, we signed another contract with the German company Siemens for the establishment of nuclear power plants in Iran. And [with] a number of other countries we used to have contracts for nuclear cooperation. None of them honored their contract. With this in mind, we arrived at the fact that self-sufficiency when it comes to nuclear fuel is a fundamental need.

This is also interesting:

Q: Can you respond to the recent reports from IAEA members that concluded Iran has done work on the Shabab 3 missile to make it capable of carrying a nuclear payload? This is something that U.S. and critics of Iran can point to as further evidence that Iran's motives are not pure and that you're looking to build a nuclear weapon.

A: This is not in the agency's report.

Q: So are you saying it's not true?

A: This is not a claim being made by the agency. Rather, American officials are making such a claim. When it comes to our peaceful nuclear program, the U.S. has said many untruthful claims, including this one.

He's quite right on this point. The media were attributing these claims about missles to the IAEA -- but in fact the IAEA was simply repeating the allegations provided by the US. The IAEA wasn't making the allegations itself, but the media reports were quite deliberately confusing. There is a habit of putting words in the IAEA's mouth, and falsely attributing views and conclusions to the IAEA.

This is how it works: the US gives some documents to the IAEA. The IAEA presents the documents at a meeting.  The media then claims that the IAEA has presented evidence condemnign Iran. The US representative to the meeting then says "tsk tsk how awful of the Iranians".

In short, they're just laundering bullshit to make it sound more credible.  

The New Islamophobia

Richard Silverstein reports on how the rightwing Zionists seeking to influence US elections have put out a new Islamophobic movie:

For those of us who lived through the 1950s and remember the horrible TV shows and movies (i.e. I Married a Communist, I Was a Communist for the FBI, etc.) depicting American Communists insinuating themselves into the very fabric of American life in order to subvert and destroy it–Third Jihad will give you a sense of deja vu all over again (to quote Yogi Berra allegedly). Something there is in a human being which loves a bogeyman, someone to fear, someone who represents almost pure evil. I don’t quite understand this primeval urge that lurks within us. But it is there.

Silverstein compares this campaign of promoting Islamophobia with the 50's Red Scare. However, speaking of "primeval urges" to create bogeymen, I noticed that it sort of mirros the "New Anti-Semitism" campaign.

After all, it was the same sort of far-Right zionists who (apparently lacking sufficient examples of real anti-Semitism) embarked on a campaign to decry what they claimed was a wave of "New AntiSemitism" which was supposedly sweeping the world. This form of anti-semitism supposedly differs from the older version in that it is couched in "leftist" language of anti-Zionism.

So in short, "New AntiSemitism" boils down to a PR campaign to smear anti-Zionists as AntiSemites, thus further moving criticism of Israel into a zone outside of "polite conversation". The manufacturing of bogeyman is in this case not due to some primeval urge -- it is a deliberate political ploy.

And yet, while anti-Semitism has in fact died down and is universally decried except by some in the margins, Islamophobia is mainstream and poses a very real danger and threat to millions of innocent people who are discriminated against, harrassed, arrested, and even legally tortured for no reason other than their religious background/ethnicity.

So ironically, if anyone has to complain about waves of intolerance and bigotry sweeping the globe, its not the Jews as much as the Muslims! And as films like "Obsession" or "The Third Jihad" show, it is even more ironic that some of the people who claim to be potential victims of bigotry and hatred are themselves perpetuating bigotry and hatred against others. Except that this form of Islamophobia is different from the traditional version -- which portrayed Islam and Muslims as something exotic and faraway -- by smearing your neighbors and co-workers.

They are among us! BOO!

Israel's Holocaust guilt trip on Germany over Iran ties

The Jerusalem Post reports that the Israelis are doing their best to use the Holocaust to force Germany to cut off ties with Iran:

 In talks between Israeli and German diplomats, the former will use German historical responsibility towards the state of Israel as a tool to move the German government into action...it is not uncommon to hear Israeli officials saying to their German counterparts: "Germany, gas, Iran, Ahmadinejad - what will people think, how will it look? Are these the morals that German exports are based on? Have you already forgotten the past?"

Actually Germany has a much newer history of killing people with poison gas -- Germany was the major supplier of Saddam's chemical weapons industry. There's Iranian blood on the hands of Germans. Germany's giving away of submarines to Israel, to be used for nuclear weapons launches against Iran can't be overlooked either.

See, there's a reason why there's a Holocaust Industry - it serves as a never-ending source of political capital for Israel to draw upon and brow-beat others with. In general, the theme of little Israel facing a sea of "implacable hostility" has served a convenient propaganda purpose for Israel but is simply not supported by the historical facts. See for example Ilan Pappe or Avi Shlaim's books on the matter.

Ahmadinejad warneds that Germany was allowing Holocaust Guilt to determine their policies with Iran (and that the Palestinians shouldn't be made to suffer for the Holocaust either) -- but he's hardly the only one. Arnold Toynbee suggested that British Christians had sympathy for Zionist aspirations because (in part) of a sense of guilt stemming from subconscious anti-Semitism. Truman apparently considered the creation of Israel in part as a reaction to the guilt factor resulting from the Holocaust.(1) Holocaust-guilt has been relied upon by pro-Israeli lobbyists to promote US support for Israel.(2) George Ball(3) and more recently Michael Scheuer(5) have both opined that the Holocaust, and more specifically the Holocaust Museums in the US, have been used to promote loyalty and support for the state of Israel -- and others share this view and that the
memorialization of the Holocaust has been turned into a supplement to loyalty to Israel and a rationalization of Israeli practices with respect to the Palestinians.(6)

-------------

1. Securing the Covenant: United States-Israel Relations after the Cold
War, by Bernard Reich; Praeger Publishers, 1995, p. 9

2. Foreign Policy and Ethnic Interest Groups: American and Canadian Jews
Lobby for Israel by David Howard Goldberg; Greenwood Press, 1990, p. 24

3. CSPAN Booknotes Transcript Air date: May 23, 1993, Author: George Ball
(and Douglas Ball)  Book Title: The Passionate Attachment: America's
Involvement with Israel, 1947 to Present.

4.
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/in_the_media/in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=267237

5. Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York City's
Holocaust Museum, by Rochelle G. Saidel; Holmes & Meier, 1996 pp 29-30.

Those CRAZY Iranians!

European tourists discover what it is really like to walk through Iran:

"In Iran it was crazy, it was impossible," Laetetia explains. "You could not walk down the road without people saying, 'Come on. Come to my home and stay with us.'"

Oh my goodness -- they certainly deserve to be bombed!

"Nuclear Iran" -- the narrative conflict

I've been participating in an online debate over at the Gulf2000 Project over Iran's nuclear program -- no surprise there -- with the usual accusations flung against me of being an "apologist" for the Iranian government, etc. It is interesting as a case study of argumentation and narration in in international affairs.

The Argument:

The debate is over whether Iran is seeking a "breakout capacity" as it is often claimed. Here, the "break-out capacity" theory is put forth as an argument for two possible scanarios that Iran is supposedly following: first, that Iran currently secretly intends or plans to make a nuclear weapon with the enriched uranium it is accumulating. Or, second, that Iran seeks to keep open the option of building nukes in the future even if has not decided to do so currently (and merely keeping the option open is itself treated as a form of being nuclear-armed - "virtually" - since theoretically there isn't much difference between having nukes and the "capability" of having nukes - or so the argument claims.) These are both essentially variations of the same argument.

So, if we buy this argument that Iran seeks breakout capacity, then we can proceed on questions of whether Iran seeks this breakout capacity as merely a deterrent or for aggressive purposes, and whether the the Iranians are "rational" etc. And a lot of people are buying the argument without thinking, as evidenced for example by all the op-eds from the anti-Neocons who argue that Iran is merely seeking nuclear weapons as a deterrent, thus implicitly taking it for granted that Iran is in fact seeking nuclear weapons in the first place.

As an argument, we're trying to convince each other of the liklihood of these scenarios happening, by engaging in a debate using the rules of inference and logic, relying on evidence and rhetoric. As with most arguments, there is no provable "right" answer since no one can see into the future nor guess at the supposedly hidden intentions of the Iranian, and no amount of IAEA inspections can prove or disprove things either way since the IAEA can't see into the future either. This is particularly convenient for Iran's accusers, because by framing the argument as one of Iran's future intentions and capabilities, they can conflate Iran's legal and overt nuclear enrichment program with "building nukes". Note how everytime the IAEA reports come out verifying that IRan's enrichment program is continuing under safeguards, the media rush over to David Albright of ISIS whose function seems to be to give "expert" crebility to the breakout scenario argument by calculating how many pounds of of Iran's low-enriched uranium can theoretically be turned into weapons-grade Uranium and how fast. The media then claim that turning the weapons grade uranium into an actual bomb can be done in a matter of months, and like magic, supposition is built on supposition to conclude that Iran is "on the path to the capability of making nukes" which then is dumbed down in screaming headlines to "Iran is just months from the bomb" and so naturally it "must be stopped". In short, this is classic application of the prolepsis device to the argument - "a figurative device by which a future event is presumed to have already occurred" - thus entirely skipping over the question of whether Iran is seeking breakout capacity or not.

I keep pointing out in this debate that simply assuming that Iran seeks breakout capacity ignores contrary evidence -- for example, the fact Iran's many nuclear compromise offers would make it impossible (to any practical extent possible, short of giving up enrichment) for Iran to build nukes, and that Iranian assertions that nuclear weapons would not help them as a deterrent objectively make sense. In short, I argue that the other side is committing a fallacy by simply taking Iran's desire for breakout capacity for granted and demanding that Iran disprove the assumption, thus violating the basic rules of argumentation.

The other side responds that the Iranian offers are treated as lies, and I am personally attacked as an "apologist" for the Iranian regime for refusing to go along with the 'conventional wisdom' created by the constant, repetitious media hype. This of course is the old ad hominem tactic. It is a predictable reaction to messengers of inconvenient facts in any argument, and people (like me, again) who doubted the claims about WMDs in Iraq were given the same treatment back then too.  

And so the argument goes on and on.

So the debate we're having is at its lowest level an argument about the degree to which we take for granted that Iran is seeking a breakout capacity. But at the same time, there's a bigger picture.

The Narrative Context

The same issue can be seen as a classic contest of narratives. Narratives are basically stories and usually it have a start, middle, and end. They have protagonists, antagonists, and agon (a conflict between them) as well as a narrator (speaker who tells the story, and so imparts his own reliability or point-of-view to it.) A good story delivers a satisfying closure, but only after a bit of suspense. And a satisfying closure is usually that which normalizes the narrative so it corresponds to metanarratives that are culturally ingrained.

The car ad which shows how a young man who decides to drive a particular car ends up with the pretty girl, is a narrative. So is the story of how Moses led the Jews out of Israel. Science consists of narratives: first came the fishes, then the reptiles, then monkey and now man. Politics is also full of stories -- the best example is the national foundation myth: for example how America was founded by Puritans who came to these shores in search of religious freedom, and so we conclude that freedom was a foundational value of America.

So cut things short, the conflict over Iran's nuclear program can be seen as a case of conflicting narrative:

The US narrative is that of an evil country led by a crazy leader who seeks to bring about Armageddon through a nuclear holocaust, and so it is up to the Good to stand up to Evil and save humanity. How many times have you heard that plot line before? Often -- it is a classic metanarrative, after all, found in most Hollywood movies. 

The Iranian narrative is one of small, weak country seeking to assert itself in the face of aggression and bullying by foreign powers who seek to deprive the country of her natural rights and keep her down. Again, a common enough narrative (see the narrative of the American Revolution.)

So the question is, which narrative wins, and how. I'm not going to get into that in detail since this isn't my area of expertise, I don't have time, and it requires more boring typing. But in short, my point is arguments occur in the context of narratives, and so the narrative context makes some arguments more convincing. The Iranians have to fundamentally change the narrative and IN THE US MEDIA (not just presstv.) By simply participating in the argument by denying the allegations against them (an argument which Iran can never "win") they are ignoring the bigger narrative conflict. Its no use to simply deny the allegations when the US has shiften the burden of proof onto Iran, since that requires Iran to disprove a negative which is impossible. Instead of trying to do so fruitlessly, Iran has to fundamentally change the narrative context, and THEN it can win the argument.