Iran Affairs

Iran 2010 Prediction

This is my prediction for Iran affairs in 2010:

We'll start out of course with more sanctions and leaked "secret documents" and testimony from "defectors". The crescendo will come at the end of the year: Look for an all-out propaganda assault by the pro-Israelis to get the US to attack Iran. This is the year that they want to get this done.

On Kuperman and the march to war on Iran

I'm not quite sure what the hoopla about Kuperman's op-ed in the NY Times is all about -- this is hardly new stuff. Perhaps other writers of the same ilk have been a bit more circumspect in openly endorsing a war on Iran, preferring for now to couch things in more politically-palatable terms of "biting sanctions," whilst knowing full well that such sanctions are 1- probably ineffective by themselves, but 2-in their view, even ineffective sanctions are preferable to any real engagement and negotiation with Iran (which could lead to -- gasp! -- a rapprochement) and 3-such sanctions will still serve adequately as an incremental step towards their ultimate goal of an overt conflict (after all, they hardly hide what they expect must come after the sanctions have proven to be as ineffective as widely predicted.)

One can easily identify the common "talking points" in all such pieces. For example, the most obvious common denominator is the way in which Kuperman and the rest employ the False Dilemma fallacy, according to which sanctions backed by threats of bombings are supposedly the "only" alternative to acquiescing to a nuclear-armed Iran, thus conveniently excluding a range of compromise solutions that would allow Iran to keep an enrichment program, or even the notion that Iran isn't actually working on nukes at all. Note that no one has ever really engaged the Iranians on their offers to place additional limitations on their enrichment program beyond their legal obligations, or to open their program to multinational participation. Dr Sick pointed out that Iranian offers weren't even considered in the simulated negotiations in which he participated. Acknowledging these offers is simply verboten and "off the table," whilst bombing is apparently always "on the
table." (See Zarif's list of Iranian compromise offers at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/opinion/05iht-edzarif.html )

To see the False Dilema at work, in addition to Kuperman's piece, see for example:

- The Economist article entitled "An Iranian nuclear bomb, or the bombing of Iran?" which concludes: "So which will it be: a war with Iran, or a nuclear-armed Iran?" 

- A NY Times wrote editorial of June 28 2008 according to which, "The European Union’s decision [to enforce unilateral sanctions] reinforces the *only* strategy that might — might — have a chance of *peacefully* persuading Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions." (emphasis mine.)

-  A press release issued by the New America Foundation about speech by Gary Samore on the subject of "Countering a Nuclear-Armed Iran", which states:

"Unless significantly greater sanctions are applied...we will eventually face a choice between acquiescing to Iran obtaining a nuclear weapons break out option or using military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities."

The utility of the False Choice being presented is precisely in that it excludes an outcome that the hawks detest: any deal by which Iran keeps even a symbolic enrichment program, or which does not result in a war on Iran. The continued insistence on "zero enrichment" is where the Obama administration is following in lock-step with the Bush administration - and is getting the same results.

Other common talking points:

1- Iran is set to get a nuclear weapon. The automatic assumption that Iran is making nukes is simply not open to question. (Again, see the Economist's repeated reference to "Iran's nuclear weapons programme") and is on the very verge of doing so (as it has been for the last 20 years.)

2- Diplomacy has either failed or simply can never succeed, as proven by Iran's supposed "rejection" of Obama's uranium swap offer.

3- Any Iranian compromise offers are to be ignored or dismissed, but if acknowledged must be considered as simply a disingenuous ploy by them to "buy time" for making nukes. 

4- Any real negotiations with Iran not only consitutes appeasement of the Evil Ahmadinjead (who isn't really in charge of Iran's nuclear program anyway) but will also "hurt the opposition" in Iran (nevermind that the "opposition" is perhaps even more vehemently supportive of Iran's nuclear program than Ahmadinejad.)

5- Once Iran gets the bomb, it will inevitably attack or at least threaten its neighbors and Israel in particular.

6- Iran cannot be contained and Iranians are too irrational and messianic to be deterred by MAD.

7- Israel has a right to launch attacks on Iran's civilian, IAEA-monitored nuclear sites (unless the US does so first) - and such attacks are to be automatically labelled A "pre-emptive" too.

8- The consequences of bombing Iran are less worse than not bombing Iran.

We have seen these same points repeated over and over ad nauseum in all the mainstream press outlets, until they have become accepted without question. Whay? What this is, is a process of creating conventional widsom through repetition, and thus "manufacturing consent" for a policy decision which appears to have already been taken. We have all seen this process at work before.

Montazeri, Gorbeh Nareh.

The western press is falling over itself lionizing Montazeri in various obits but interesting how quickly we forget that the same Montazeri was once ridiculed as "Gorbe Nareh" (literally, male cat -- a cartoon character once popular in Iran) along with Rafsanjani who was labelled as "Kooseh" (shark, because he has thin facial hair)

Document proves Khamenei and Iran regime authorities set to escape to Russia

I laughed so hard at this that my morning coffee almost shot out of my nose. I just love it when "secret documents" like this one come along. After a chummy "Salam aleykum" it  states that the Iranian revolutionary guards have prepared and done a "check up" on a secret airplane to take Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei and other high ranking officials out of Iran to Russia in case the situation there "gets of out control" -- all on official government letterhead, mind you! It even uses the word English word "checkup" spelled out in Farsi - apparently those Revolutionary Guards are very hip!

This reminds me so much of those bad spy movies in which the Evil Genius explains how he plans to execute a captured James Bond in an excessively elaborate manner (usually involving some sort of imaginative machine) in excrutiatingly unnecessary detail. Naturally James Bond naturally manages to somehow escape the death machine and frustrate the Evil Genius' plans to take over the world.

Reuters flubs facts on NCRI terrorist group

Retuers has published a "factbox" on the MEK/"National COuncil of Resistance" to go along with their article on how the MEK is supporting sanctions on Iran (big surprise) which contains many errors:

1- The piece starts out claiming that the National Council of Resistance is an umbrella group which includes the MEK as its "main faction". The MEK likes to promote this view of itself so as it pretend that the NCRI has broad-based support amongst exile groups. However, this was never really true, the NCRI was always just a front for the MEK which tried to dominate and control other member groups that initially joined. As the FBI report I posted previously on the MEK states:

For politically expedient reasons, the MEK presently assumes various titles. Some of the most commonly used ones include: The MEK, the Organization of the Peoples Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI), The NCR, Iran Relief Fund (IRF), and the Muslim Iranian Students Society (MISS). In the same vein, the MEK has also misrepresented itself as ideologically akin to the Muslim Afghan Mujahedin freedom fighters.

2- THe Reuters article claims that the US added the MEK to the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list in 1997. This is yet another MEK spin that Reuters is repeating mindlessly in the US media.The implication is that the late listing was not really deserved, but was only a gesture of appeasement to Khatami by the "spineless" Clinton administration, thus suggesting that it wasn't  deserving of the terrorist label but was only designated as such for political reasons.

In 1997, a terrorist list went into effect pursuant to the AntiTerrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The MEK was on the new list as a charter member. Futhermore, the MEK was listed as a terrorist group long prior to 1997 too. The
State Department’s online versions of the annual report on "Patterns of
Global Terrorism" list the group as a terrorist organization in 1994, for
example.

In any case, the terrorist nature of the MEK is self-evident by their conduct and history which includes assassination of Americans and collaboration with Saddam -- which to its credit the Reuters article does mention -- and anyway people of Iran hardly need the US to tell them who are terrorists or not, so the issue is moot. After all, this video speaks for itself.

3- THe Reuters article totally fails to mention how some NeoCons are backing the terrorist NCRI and how the NCRI still operates fronts and lobby groups in the US, and has attracted the support of various US congressmen and officials including John Ashcroft as well as the NEoCons such as Richard Perle, the former Bush administration Attorney General -- despite being listed as a terrorist organization. As the Washington Post reported:

For a group officially designated by both the Bush and Clinton administrations as a "foreign terrorist organization," the People's Mujaheddin of Iran has been remarkably active in the United States.

Other groups on the State Department's terrorism list -- such as al Qaeda and Hamas -- have been relentlessly hunted down, their assets confiscated, their supporters thrown into jail. By contrast, the Iranian group has established a substantial political presence in Washington -- lobbying Congress, holding news conferences and raising funds to finance an armed uprising against the Islamic government in Tehran.

4- The Reuters article totally fails to mention that the MEK is considered to be a cult, with the usual cult-like practices, which has been criticized by human rights organizations for abusing its own members, and pressuring them to engage in acts such as self-immolation. 

5- The article claims that the MEK "exposed" Iran's nuclear program in 2003. This is baloney. First of all, US intelligence already knew about the program, and secondly Iran's nuclear program was barely a secret anyway (as I mentioned previously, the program was started under the Shah. After the revolution, the Iranians had openly announced plans to enrich uranium in the early 1980s and were trying to cooperate with the IAEA on the program until the US stepped in and prevented that in 1984, they announced the discovery of uranium on national radio, and later invited IAEA inspectors to visit their uranium mines in 1994, and declared their uranium conversion facility to the IAEA in 2000. Is that really a "secret" uranium enrichment program?)

6- IN addition to assuming various names, the MEK assumes various ideological guises when convenient, and tries to "horn in" on other Iranian exile movements by hiding their identity (most recently, the so-called "Green Movement"). Once Marxist-Islamist, it now claims to be democratic and liberal. It now favors the generic Iranian "Lion and Sun" symbol instead of its sickle and red star symbol.

Anyway, those are just a few errors in the Reuters piece. Now that I got that off my chest I am too bored to continue. I was ambivalent about writing anything about it as the MEK is hardly worth paying attention to (they are the best opposition the IRI could hope for) but I get a kick out of deflating the journalists and their "conventional wisdom" created through mere repetition of nonsense (like popping the bubbles in plastic bubble wrap, it is mild obsessive compulsion which I find mildly pleasing and addictive.)

CIA secret intelligence was fraudulent

Often, there's a lot less to "secret intelligence" than meets the eye...

A long and highly entertaining Playboy article explains that in 2003, 50-year-old Dennis Montgomery was chief technology officer at Reno, Nevada-based eTreppid Technologies. The firm began as a video compression developer, but Montgomery took it in new and bizarre directions.

He reportedly convinced the CIA that he had software that could detect and decrypt "barcodes" in broadcasts by Al Jazeera, the Qatari news station

The Company was apparently impressed enough to set up its own secure room at the firm to do what Montgomery called "noise filtering". He somehow produced "reams of data" consisting of geographic coordinates and flight numbers.

In December 2003, it's claimed CIA director George Tenet was sufficiently sold on Montgomery's data to ground transatlantic flights, deploy heavily armed police on the streets of Manhattan and evacuate 5,000 people from the Metropolitan Museum of Art..

Iran's "second revolution" - again

Regimes come and go as none can last, but hype and wishful-thinking about the imminent collapse of the regime in Iran has always been with us:

Is Iran nearing point where revolution is spent?
Geoffrey Godsell.
The Christian Science Monitor July 30, 1980

Political infighting in Iran casts doubt over future
of revolution. John Kifner.
The New York Times Feb 9, 1981

Renewed unrest in mullah-ruled Iran – is a second
revolution beginning? Ralph Joseph.
The Christian Science Monitor August 25, 1981

Iran regime’s staying power is debated by observers
after new bombing attack. David Ignatius.
The Wall Street Journal Sept 1, 1981

In revolutionary Iran: rising discontent: food and
freedom are in short supply as Muslim change and war
take a toll. Claude van England.
The Christian Science Monitor Oct 6, 1982

War could threaten long-term stability of Iran regime.
Claude van England.
The Christian Science Monitor Feb 27, 1985

Iran regime suffering its worst crisis; war, economy,
succession void plague nation. William Tuohy.
Los Angeles Times July 10, 1988

Discontent with revolution emerges in post-Khomeini
Iran. Patrick E. Tyler.
The Washington Post July 16, 1989

Painful rise in prices stirs discontent in Iran.
The New York Times August 3, 1991

Iran’s revolution grows old; after 14 years, Islamic
rules faces apathy, discontent, infighting. Caryle
Murphy.
The Washington Post Feb 12, 1993

Inflation fuels discontent against Iran’s government.
The New York Times Nov 20, 1994

In Iran, the revolution unravels. (economic conditions
in Iran) Robin Wright.
Los Angeles Times Dec 2, 1994

The revolution erodes in rural Iran. (growing
disenchantment with religious rulers) Kayaton Ghazi.
The New York Times Feb 18, 1995

Second revolution brews in Iran; the crucial support
of the poor and merchants is being undercut by
economic reforms. Lamis Andoni.
The Christian Science Monitor April 12, 1995

Youthful cravings are aging Iran’s revolution; As
ideology dies, voices of dissent grow louder. John
Daniszewski.
Los Angeles Times March 26, 1996

Iran discontent rises as oil-based economy falls.
(International Pages) Douglas Jehl.
The New York Times Dec 13, 1998

Time is running out for Tehran regime. (pro-democracy
movement in Iran is growing)(Column) Sandra Mackey.
Los Angeles Times July 23, 1999

Discontent Simmers in Iran. (Editorial)
Los Angeles Times June 12, 2001

Iran: Soccer or politics or both? (800 arrested during
rioting after Iran lost World Cup)(International
Pages)
The New York Times Oct 23, 2001

In Iran, an angry generation longs for jobs, more
freedom and power. (International Pages) Amy Waldman.
The New York Times Dec 7, 2001

Iran’s next revolution. (need for US support to help
Iranians fight government’s repressive
measures)(Column) Michael A. Ledeen.
The Wall Street Journal June 5, 2002

Iran’s third wave. (the third generation in Iran is
expected to begin another revolution)(Column) Thomas
L. Friedman.
The New York Times June 16, 2002

The coming revolution in Iran. (influence of the
Shiite theocracy and the mullahs will soon crumble
The Wall Street Journal July 29, 2002

In Iran, a ’second revolution’ gathers steam; Ten days
of pro-democracy protests spur militants to counter
with a show of conservative force in the streets.
(WORLD)
The Christian Science Monitor Nov 29, 2002

Iran’s failed revolution. (Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini)(Editorial)
The New York Times Feb 10, 2003

Iran: Ripe for Revolution? (EDITORIAL)
The Christian Science Monitor June 16, 2003

Pending Regime Change in Iran. EDITORIAL
The Christian Science Monitor Jan 13, 2004

Iran’s revolution at 25: out of gas; Wednesday’s
silver anniversary marks a peak of political
disillusionment. (WORLD)
The Christian Science Monitor Feb 11, 2004

People ask me why I don't really cover the demonstations in Iran on this blog. As I have said before, this blog is not a news agency, and it is limited to my own interests which happen to be foreign affairs specifically the nuclear issue. However, if you're curious what I think about the events in Iran, the answer is... meh. I'm not overly excited. For one thing this is really an internal conflict between factions of the same regime, and secondly, the hyped reporting about a "second revolution" is hardly new as seen above. A regime is a creation of Man, and as such is never ever-lasting. Even if there is a "second revolution" in Iran, Iran's foreign policy won't chage, just as things didn't fundamentally change when the Shah was replaced by the IRI. No Iranian government can afford to give up their nuclear program, and no Iranian government can afford to be seen laying down for Israel.

Iranain-of-the-day: Nazli Parvizi

For the Iranian-of-the-day, I nominate Nazli Parvizi and her recipie for Persian jewelled rice as featured in the NY Times today.

AS the head of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s Community Affairs unit, Nazli Parvizi says her job requires her to “be a good listener who gets yelled at a lot.” ...

Some news today:

The Iranian defense minister announced that Iran will be unveiling a new generation of national satellites under the name of "Tolu" (means daybreak or sunrise.)

Taiwan's Central News Agency reports that the Taiwanese Bureau of Foreign Trade (BOFT) concluded a probe into reports that a Taiwanese firm may have illegally sold components to help Iran with its nuclear programme. According to the probe, the deal did not breach international rules on the proliferation of nuclear arms because the 108 pressure transducers to Iran in March were not included on a list of strategic high-tech commodities (SHTC) in Taiwan at the time.

The director-general of Iran's Central Bank has said that three or four zeros will definitely be removed from the country's currency unit.

The privately-owned Aswat al-Iraq news agency website in Iraq reported that according to the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Iranian forces did not occupy the disputed oil well at al-Fakkah, and the matter would be resolved by a joint Iran-Iraq commission. Background: "The well were discovered in 1974 by Iraqi-Iranian commission and was sealed until the demarcation of borders and after one year we signed an agreement with Iraq and the joint committees started their work but everything stopped after the war between the two countries during the former regime...Agreements signed between the two countries will remain as they are despite wars and changing governments."

Osama Bin Laden's family stranded in Iran

Al-Sharq al-Awsat website, London, in Arabic 23 Dec 09/BBC Monitoring/(c) BBC

Text of report by Saudi-owned leading pan-Arab daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat website on 23 December

[Report by Muhammad al-Shafi'i in London: "Usamah Bin-Ladin's Daughter Seeks Refuge in Saudi Embassy in Tehran. Her Brother Umar to 'Al-Sharq al-Awsat': She Telephoned my Brother Abdallah from Iran and she Was With Five of my Brothers and Sisters and my Stepmother. Charge d'Affaires to 'Al-Sharq al-Awsat': We Have Been her Host for More Than 25 Days"]

Iman Bin Ladin, the daughter of Al-Qa'idah leader Usamah Bin-Ladin, has sought refuge in the Saudi Embassy in Iran after succeeding in escaping from the guards accompanying her. Iman disclosed in a telephone contact with her brother Abdallah who lives in Syria that she and five of her brothers and sisters have been detained by the Iranian authorities since the US invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2001.

The 29 years old Umar Bin Ladin told Al-Sharq al-Awsat that his sister Iman, five of his brothers and sisters, and his stepmother (Umm-Hamzah) are held by the Iranian authorities and appealed to the government in Tehran to release them. Umar, who lives in Qatar, said in a telephone call and an email received by Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the Bin Ladin family of his first wife Najwa, a Syrian living in Damascus, did not know that her daughter Iman and her other brothers and sisters had been alive all these past years until she contacted her family one month ago. He added that it is the fist time since the 9/11 attacks that the whereabouts of his brothers and sisters, the children of Bin Ladin, can be definitely ascertained: There are five in Saudi Arabia and three in Syria. He pointed out "we did not know even four weeks ago the whereabouts of these brothers and sisters who are Sa'd who is now 29 years old, Uthman who is 25, Fatimah who is 22, Hamzah who is 20, Iman who is 17, and Bakr who is 15."

According to Umar, Usama's fourth son who is younger than Abdallah who lives in Saudi Arabia, Abd-al-Rahman who lives in Syria with his mother Najwa, and Sa'd who is detained in Tehran with his other brothers and sisters, Iman contacted her brother Abdallah who asked her to seek refuge in the Saudi Embassy immediately, adding that contacts have been going on since that time to allow her to leave Iran but to no avail. He told Al-Sharq al-Awsat that his sister "Iman has been living inside the Saudi Embassy for 25 days in a room provided for her by the officials there who welcomed her. We are working to complete the paperwork for allowing her to travel to Saudi Arabia or Syria. It must be said that Syria was generous with my mother and my brother. Two of my brothers are living there."

Fu'ad Qassas, the Saudi charge d'affaires in Tehran, confirmed to Al-Sharq al-Awsat that Iman has been in the Saudi Embassy for more than 25 days and talked about the "embassy's diplomatic efforts to send her in dignity to her family and relatives." On welcoming her, he said: "This is our duty. She is primarily a Saudi citizen and we offer this duty to any Saudi citizen who comes asking for help."

Umar Bin Ladin sent Al-Sharq al-Awsat photos of his detained brothers and sisters who are held in Tehran and said they have not received any education since their detention in 2001 and want to return to their family in Saudi Arabia or Syria, adding that his sister Iman fled from the guards accompanying her and her stepmother (Umm-Hamzah) Mrs Khayriyah during a shopping trip. She said the Iranian authorities allowed them out on a shopping trip once every six months.

Bin Ladin's son went on to say: "Despite reports that Sa'd was killed a year and a half ago in the tribal strip in an American missile attack by a drone and that he was involved in terrorist operations, I can confirm the opposite of this." He explained that his mother (Najwa) left her children before the 9/11 attacks when she decided to leave Afghanistan but she is deeply regretting this and crying over the fate of her children she had left behind. He added that he was concerned about his sister's health and mental condition after the failure of all the attempts to let her leave the embassy. He talked about the intervention of Saudi officials to solve the crisis but said their attempts have so far failed because of the tension in the countries' relations.

He pointed out in his telephone contact with Al-Sharq al-Awsat yesterday that it was mere coincidence that made him know the fate of his five brothers and sisters. An Iranian young man let his brother Uthman use his cell phone a month ago to contact and tell him that all of them were alive. He said Uthman was 17 years old at the time of 9/11 attacks but was able to escort his wife and baby son, his brother Sa'd and his wife and baby son, and the other brothers and several members of the Arab families to the Iranian borders where they were put up in a residential compound under heavy guard in the capital Tehran. The families were at first separated with the males in a residential annex and the females in a separate remote one. To protect them, they were not allowed to leave the compound at all but were allowed to mix after some time and provided with television sets. The Iranian Government was generous in caring for them and providing them with everything they needed but the Iranian authorities probably did not know what to do with this large group of Arab families who are not wanted by any side. Bin Ladin's son reiterated his thanks to the Iranian Government for what it has provided for his brothers and sisters "but now and after eight and a half year, the changes in the situations, and since there are several places where they wish to move so as to be with their families and mothers, we want to reunite the family and need to rally together the efforts by several parties so as to fulfil this dream." He added: "I appeal to the Syrian Government to intervene due to its good relationship with Iran, particularly as my brothers and sisters are innocent and had nothing to do with the others' disputes with our father." He said: "We lived in Afghanistan because it was normal for children to live where their parents lived."

He went to point out that "we wrote to Amnesty International to act for my brothers and sisters, wrote to the United Nations, and corresponded with the Madrid club of 70 heads of state as to intervene for their release. All my brothers and sisters detained in Iran were born in Saudi Arabia. I have today 11 nephews and nieces who were born in Afghanistan or Iran but I have not seen them."

Credit: Al-Sharq al-Awsat website, London, in Arabic 23 Dec 09

Salvaging the nuclear deal with Iran, part II

Dr. Kaveh Afrasiabi writes about salvaging the nuclear deal with Iran:

Lest we forget, the absence of a nuclear deal coupled with increased pressure on Iran in the form of sanctions and other punitive measures is a recipe for escalation of the nuclear crisis in an undesirable direction that does not serve anyone.

Oh yes it does serve the purpose of some people who DO want to see the issue escalated, and the Obama administration is powerless to stop them even if it wanted to do so.

R.K. Ramazani on Obama's approach to Iran's nuclear program

R.K. Ramazani, widely considered the dean of Iranian foreign policy studies in the United States, is Edward R. Stettinius Professor Emeritus of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia - writes:

In trying to resolve this dispute through negotiation, the United States should realize that Iranians of all political stripes view outside pressure, sanctions, intimidation and threats of military strikes as foreign aggression. Such efforts will be resisted in the future as in the past...

Iranian citizens have risen bravely and indefatigably for the first time since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to demand the freedom promised by the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is important to understand that to the Iranians freedom has always required protecting national independence first.

Iran - the other sanctions on the other dictator

Well, I'm off for the Christmas vacation for the next week or so. And, it appears that some buy in Africa wants to give me $15 million. So I may not be back.

"I am Mr.Nadi Ibrahim and happily married and i am an Executive Director of African Development Bank Burkinafasao ,in charge of the International Remittance department.I will need you to assist me in executing a business project from our bank worth US$15 Million...."

Obama plays Good-Cop/Bad-Cop on Iran with China

I was reading this article about how Obama supposedly warned China that he couldn't keep Israel from bombing Iran indefinitely in order to get China's support for sanctions, and I was reminded of a question that I had wondered about a few months ago:

What is the Farsi equivalent of "Good Cop/Bad Cop"??

As in this case the US is playing the role of the Good Cop and the Israelis are the bad cop, and the Chinese are in the chair, shivering at the thought of having all their beautiful oil contracts with Iran blown to bits: "You better support what we want, or else those nasty Israelis will be unleased -- and you wouldn't want THAT, would you, China?"

Of course, this report itself comes from an Israeli source so God only knows if this ever happened or if it is self-flattery by the Israelis who like to think the Presidents of the United States and China really take all their whining about "IRan's an existential threat" seriously, when other Israeli officials privately don't feel particularly threatened by Iran despite their public stance.

I suspect that the Chinese have seen this movie before, and know that any sanctions they support will only serve as an increment to the same war that Obama pretends he's avoiding.

Those smart Iranians!

Gosh those IRanians are so smart!

They have learned how to make virtually every bolt and switch in a nuclear weapon, and they can break into secret video feeds for multimillion dollar drones using $26 shareware.

And that was just last week!

Before that, the Iranians were capable of exploding an EMP device over the US and to wipe out all electronics over the US, and they even managed to trick the US into invading Iraq.

The media promotes lies about Iran just as they did about Iraq

How the media creates conventional wisdom about justifications for war:

In the case of Iraq...

“Among those knowledgeable about Iraq there are few, if any, who believe he is not hiding such weapons. It is a given." (Woollacott, The Guardian, January 24, 2003)

versus

“If anyone had cared... to study what UNSCOM [arms inspections in Iraq from 1991-1998] was saying for quite a number of years, and what we [UNMOVIC] were saying, they should not have assumed that they would stumble on weapons.” (Hans Blix, Arms Control Today, June 16 2003)

 
ANd repeated in the case of Iran....

"Mr Ahmadinejad's fiery talk goes down well at home, and the stand-off with the United Nations, and in particular with the United States, over Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme continues." ( A winter of Iran’s discontent? Economist, UK, Jan 18, 2008)

versus

"I don't see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this," Yukiya Amano told Reuters in his first direct comment on Iran's atomic program since his election, when asked whether he believed Tehran was seeking nuclear weapons capability. (Amano, Reuters, Fri Jul 3, 2009)

Some news (usual bullshit) on Iran

At any point in time, there are a lot of half-baked, unsubstatiated news article circulating in the media that I don't bother addressing, mostly because 1- there are no real facts to talk about, and 2- there are too many such items to bother with - and they're just boring. On the other hand I get regular emails asking me about my opinion on these articles. So I've decided to try to deal with them all at one time, in a single posting:

FOr example - remember the "missile parts shipment from North Korea to Iran" that, um, contained no missiles parts , and may not have really been going to Iran...?

Then there is yet another "secret document" that supposedly proves that Iran is continuing to work on nuclear weapons, supposedly. Again, there are no facts to back any of it up -- why has the IAEA not found anything to support these claims? Where did the document come from? Who disclosed it? Why now? None of these questions are answered in the reports. As far anyone knows, I could have typed up the document and faxed it to the Sunday Times myself. Normally, news organizations would not run an article which is so flimsy on facts -- but as we've seen again and again, when it comes to Iran, no such standards apply. Remember the 45-minute claim about IRaqi WMDs -- which turned out to have come from a taxi driver in Baghdad? (the funniest part of this news item about the "secret document" is that the US has said it will investigate it -- as if the US wasn't the source of the document? LOL!)

Finally, Britain's Channel 4 interview with a "Basij defector" who claims that demonstrators were rounded up into cargo holds and raped, and ballot boxes made to disappear, etc etc... and yet Channel 4 themselves say they haven't verfied any of his statements (and instead we're told we should believe it all since he seems really "disressed") and furthermore, there is an obvious disregard for the potential bias in the statements of someone seeking refugee status to manufacture stories justifying his refugee status claims.

This particular story reminds of another Iranian I knew who claimed refugee status because she supposedly converted to Christianity while visiting the US and would therefore suffer harm if sent back to Iran...She even went to church a few times and started carrying the bible around with herself. The immigration authorities in the US who hear hundreds of such stories regularly were wise to such tricks and rejected her claim; she went back to Iran, where she's living and working in peace. I even heard of some people claiming to be gay in order to get refugee status. There are of course human rights abuses in Iran but that doesn't mean that the media should just run with any old story they find based simply on the fact that the person "seems so distressed". Similarly distressed storytellers from, say, Palestine, would not be getting similar coverage nor would the journalists violate basic principles of ethics by personally vouching for their honesty.

Burning Khomeini's picture in Tehran -- the contradiction

I don't get it -- we have several pundits and experts claiming that the demonstrators in Iran which started against thealleged voterigging are now becoming more radicalized , no longer under control of Mousavi and Karroubi, and want to fundamentally overthrow the system there -- and yet the defiling of Khomeini's photos must have been staged and could not have possibly been done by the same demonstrators, and quote the same Mousavi and Karroubi to that effect.

Seems like people are reading their own agendas onto the events in Iran, as usual.

Presidents get ugly gifts

In the spirit of the Christmas gift-giving season, I was perusing the website of the Museum of Presidential Gifts in Iran and had a few chuckles at some of the absolutely horrific gifts that various Iranian presidents have received. Some of the gifts are cool, some others...well....

The Arab countries give "over the top" jewels and jewel-encrusted daggers and swords. The Pakistanis  dispensed with the girly jewelry stuff and went straight for pistols and submachine guns. Much more practical.

My vote for the ugliest gift -- a very difficult choice -- goes to multicolored hunk of stones given by an anonymous Russian President, followed by a close second, this platter from Armenia, third worst is this statute of "tow" birds given by the "Embassador" of South Korea (the typos are apparently due to the fact that the cataloger of gifts had by then torn his own eyeballs out of their sockets, so as to not have to see the ugly anymore.) The coolest present is the Girls Karate championship medals and trophy. 

Not sure what some of the other gifts are. This one, I think, is supposed to represent God or Death giving advice to Simon Bolivar, the liberator of Latin America. Why the Malaysian President would be giving gifts of Bolivar for the President of Iran is beyond me.

I guess I need to explain this to my non-US readers: One of the secrets of the Christmas gift-giving season in the West is what to do with the really ugly and terrible gifts we're given. Thankfully, in the US, it is normal though still a little gauche for gift recipients to return their gifts to the stores where they were purchased, in exchange for something better.  More gauche is to "re-gift" your gifts -- to pass them along next year to someone else (some gifts are passed around for years in this way, occasionally ending up back in the hands of the original purchaser!)

However, when it comes to diplomatic gift-giving, there is no such option and you're left stuck with whatever you've received. Yikes!

The alleged role of Iran in Yemen doubted by the US

Compare and contrast:

The US

"Many of our friends and partners have talked to us about the possibility of outside support to the Houthis (rebels) and we have heard the theories about Iranian support to the Houthis," U.S. Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman told a regional security conference in Bahrain. "To be frank, we don't have independent information about this," he said.

Versus

But Ali Mohamed al-Anisi, chairman of Yemen's national security agency and head of the presidential office, said Sanaa has proof of Iran's involvement.

"There are indeed signs, proof of Iranian interference, but we say we can't elaborate on what these indications and their details are to the media," he said on the sidelines of a security conference in Bahrain.

THe actual foreign interference is from Saudi Arabia, but hey, why mention facts?

Neocons and Iranian opposition manipulate human rights issues

Grace Nasri on how both the NeoCons and the Iranian opposition figures are using the issue of human rights as a convenient tool to promote their own agendas and thwart US-Iran negotiations:

If history is any guide, behind the neo-cons' newfound concern for human-rights and democracy promotion in Iran lies an agenda not of behavior or even regime change, but system change in the Islamic Republic - a change that could potentially allow the West increased control over a strategically located and oil-rich country.

Human rights are becoming an instrument with which to push for military action or other confrontation under the guise of moral outrage. Preferring system change to regime change in Tehran, the neo-cons are raising an issue close to the heart of liberals - human rights - in a final attempt to persuade the Barack Obama administration to increase pressure on Tehran over its nuclear program.

Iranian opposition leaders are employing the same tactics. Seeing the hardline Mahmud Ahmadinejad regime open to negotiations with Washington, the Iranian opposition's leadership fears further talks will give legitimacy to and solidify control of a regime many Iranians see as illegitimate.

In an attempt to draw support for their leadership from other groups in Iran, and for their goal of regime - not system - change, opposition leaders have taken up a cause dear to the conservatives in Iran - Iran's nuclear rights - in a similar attempt to stall negotiations between Tehran and Washington. As such, opposition factions in both the US and Iran are working to thwart negotiations.

Iran's uranium exchange compromise offer summarily rejected by the US

The Bush administration rope-a-dope game with Iran continued under Obama. So Iran explicity says that it is willing to allow an exchange of its uranium, but wants guarantees that it will receive reactor fuel -- and the US flatly refuses, proving that the US never intended to live up to its own end of the bargain, and that the US offer was simply meant to be rejected by the Iranians. This is part of long series of Iranian compromise offers that would have addressed any real concern of nuclear weapons proliferation -- such as Iran's offer to open its nuclear program to multinational participation, and to place additional limits on its centrifuges -- but which have been simply ignored. El Baradei himself said this too:

I have seen the Iranians ready to accept putting a cap on their enrichment [program] in terms of tens of centrifuges, and then in terms of hundreds of centrifuges. But nobody even tried to engage them on these offers. Now Iran has 5,000 centrifuges. The line was, "Iran will buckle under pressure." But this issue has become so ingrained in the Iranian soul as a matter of national pride.

So basically: same old story as the Paris Agreement tactic, repeated again. And as usual the NY Times, acting as the propaganda mouthpiece it has repeatedly proven to be, speculates (via a spkesperson for the Wisconsin Project for Arms Control, which has proven itself to be a pro-war front) that Iran has only made this compromise offer because it wants to "divide" the powers against Iran. The NY Times naturally doesn't similarly speculate on why this offer (as well as all the other Iranian compromise offers) has been so summarily rejected -- no, everything the US says is taken as the absolute truth automatically, everything Iran says is subjected cast with suspicion. But like I said, the whole US offer was a scam and a farce -- it was an offer that was intended to be refused, so as to paint Iran as the "intransigent" one, part of  the Dennis Ross plan to make a war more palatable.

Here's the bottom line: Israel wants to dominate the Mideast, and Iran stands in the way. This is a zero-sum game. If the US and Iran get along, who needs Israel? If Israel cannot continue to expand and dominate the region, it will remain a small, weak state constantly riven by internal and external strife. It has to dominate and expand and create external enemies to survive - typical of a fascist state. Israel does not want to see a strong Iran that gets along with the US and certainly not one that has any economic power (of the sort that comes from having 15 nuclear reactors and strong international relations) and so no amount of Iranian concessions on the nuclear issue will ever suffice until Iran becomes an impovrished vassal state to Israel, much like Egypt and Jordan are now. So anyone who thinks that any of these talks are ever going to resolve anything, are simply naive. Sorry but this isnt going to be resolved until the underlying conflict is resolved, one way or another, no matter how many IAEA inspections Iran allows or even if Iran gives up its nuclear program entirely (some new excuse will be cooked up then.) Until then the rope-a-dope game with Iran will continue.

Yet again, Iran opposes the peace process...Wait...huh?

Haaretz: "U.S. not opposed to Israel pumping more funds into settlements."

And they say that Iran is "opposed to peace process."

Obama continues Bush, Bolton's warmongering policies

SOmeone should start keeping track of the ways that the Obama administration has continued pushing Bush's war-mongering. I already covered how Obama is following Bush's footsteps in legalizing torture and preventing accountability war crimes.

Now it seems that the Obama administration is also seeking to undermine the Biological Weapons Convention, just as Bush didm by refusing to abide by the treaty's inspection mechanism. 

In doing so, Obama is following John Bolton's policy, Bolton who in 2001 undermined six years of negotiations on a verification system to strengthen the 1972 treaty, by unilaterally declaring that the US would not agree to the inspection mechanism and then withdrew from Bioweapons treaty conference.  And yet ironically, the same John Bolton then also falsely accused Cuba (and Sudan and Iran and Syria) of having secret bioweapons programs -- claims that even the CIA and the US State Department refused to support. As the Arms Control Association noted:

Bolton’s initial call for biological weapons inspections in Cuba is particularly striking, given that only months earlier he had led the Bush administration’s effort to reject a verification and enforcement protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The administration contended that the protocol, which had been negotiated over a six-year period, was insufficient to ensure compliance and could harm U.S. commercial and national security interests.

So in short, on one had Bolton was making wide-ranging accusations that Cuba and Iran and Sudan etc. had bioweapons program, and on the other hand Bolton was trying to deliberately make it impossible for international organizations to check his claims, or to  verify that the US itself was not secretly violating the same treaty.

And this wasn't the only time - in addition to the Bioweapons Convention, the US has sought to undermine the Chemical Weapons convention too, specifically by illegally pressuring the removal of Jose Bustani, the head of Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in 2002, three years prior to the end of this term. As far as I have seen, the only paper to fully & directly deal with this at the time was the Guardian, in an article by George Monbiot – though theAP reported on it much later:

This was the first time that a head of an international organization was removed from office before the conclusion of his term. Bustani had fallen out of favor with the Bush administration (and John Bolton) for a number of reasons, chiefly because he had insisted that the US be subject to the same chemical weapons inspections as other signatories, refused to play along with the accusations of an Iranian chemical weapons program, and
more significantly, because he had nearly convinced the Iraqis to sign on to the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – which would have meant that OPCW inspectors would have been able get into Iraq and presumably disprove US allegations of "vat-loads" of anthrax etc.

Incidentally, for those who may be interested: Bustani filed suit against the OPCW before the International Labour Organization – and won. The ILO Tribunal ruled that the dismissal occurred under US pressure for political reasons.

Iranian intelligence agent captured in Canada

The Canadians reportedly had caught a former member of the SAVAK, the Shah's US- and Israeli-trained intelligence agency, trying to enter the country using a false passport. However, he has apparently asked for refugee status since then, and is name is not being released by the Canadians -- which unfortunately seems typical of the Canadian double-standard on torture and complicity in human rights abuses.

Canada is a cold place. Perhaps he should have gone to South Florida instead.

So who was this guy? Mansour Rafizadeh, last I heard, was running a farm in NY.

Blaming Iran for the US invasion of Iraq

As the British whitewash investigation into the reasons that Blair supported Bush's invasion of Iraq continue, and as I have pointed out in the past how no one can really explain why the US invaded Iraq. To make up for that, there were efforts to blame the invasion -- and the subsequent failures -- onto a scapegoat. Hmmm....if you want to blame something that happened in the Mideast on someone, whom do you naturally chose ? Why, Iran, of course. It was IRAN'S FAULT that the US invaded Iraq, don't you know?

THere were three theories as to how Iran was really responsible for the US invasion of Iraq:

 First, we had the "Double Agent Chalabi" justification: Iran, acting through Iranian double-agent Chalabi, had provided false WMD intelligence to the US, and so the Bush administration, being a bunch naive dupes who just fell off of the turnip truck, invaded Iraq and toppled Iran’s nemesis for them.

Second, the "Saddam was bluffing to deter Iran" justification: Saddam pretended to have WMDs in order to deter an aggressive Iran, but did this so well that he accidentally ended up  inadvertently convincing the US that Iraq really had WMDs, which led to the US invasion of Iraq (nevermind that Saddam filed a 12,000 page report with the UN showing that he didn’t have WMDs – and was promptly vilified by Sec of State Rice for filing such a voluminous and detailed report.)

Third is the most convoluted justification: The NeoCons were dupes of Iranian intelligence: According to this justification for the US invasion of Iraq, "questions are raised" by a Senate report about whether "Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq" as Pentagon officials (Rhodes, Ledeen, Hadley, and Franklin, if I remember right) who met with Ghorbanifar may have been "used as agents of a foreign intelligence service to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government."

Oh those poor, innocent, gullible NeoCons that were so easily tricked by Iranian intelligence into pasing off that "bogus intelligence" from Iran about IRaqi WMDs!

Of course, it is just as possible (if not infinitely more so) that the "foreign intelligence service" that supposedly did this could have been Israel’s, since according to Israeli general Shlomo Brom, Israeli intelligence was "exaggerating the Iraqi threat" to push the US into attacking Iraq.

Or, the "foreign intelligence service" could have been Italy’s, since US intelligence agencies received several reports from the Italian intelligence service SISMI of a supposed agreement between Iraq and Niger for the sale of yellowcake uranium.

In fact, the whole idea that Bush was misled by "bogus intelligence" into invading Iraq is itself bogus — the "Uranium from Niger" documents were known to be crude forgeries, but were cited by the administration as a reason for the war anyway.

Obama to defend human rights for Iranians?

So is this the Obama you want to lecture Iran about human rights?

Questions immediately arose about how it could be possible that three detainees kept in isolation and under constant and intense monitoring could have coordinated and then carried out group suicide without detection, particularly since the military claimed their bodies were not found for over two hours after their deaths.  But from the beginning, there was a clear attempt on the part of Guantanamo officials to prevent any outside investigation of this incident....

There is one way that a meaningful investigation could be conducted into what happened to these three detainees:  a lawsuit filed in federal court by the parents of two of the detainees against various Bush officials for the torture and deaths of their sons -- who had never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any wrongdoing (indeed, one had been cleared for release).  By itself, discovery in that lawsuit would shed critical light on what was done to these detainees and what caused their deaths.

The problem, however, is that the Obama DOJ has been using every Bush tactic -- and inventing whole new ones -- to block the lawsuit from proceeding. 

More here and here.

Some more old articles for your enjoyment :

War crimes trial for Saddam could reveal details of past U.S. help

Associated Press Sat Jan 24, 2004

WASHINGTON (AP) _ Saddam Hussein’s loyalists may not be the only ones edgy
about the prospect of a war crimes trial for the former Iraqi leader.

Vexing questions also could surface about how much the United States
helped Iraq during its eight-year war with Iran _ and whether it tried to
stop Iraqi atrocities.

Among the questions that could arise in any such trial:

_What did U.S. officials know about products shipped to Iraq that could
have been used for weapons? What intelligence did they provide Iraq that
could have been used for chemical attacks?

_How hard did Donald H. Rumsfeld try to persuade Saddam Hussein to stop
using chemical weapons against Iran? Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, met
with Saddam and other top Iraqi officials during visits to Baghdad in 1983
and 1984, when he served as President Reagan’s envoy.

Saddam and officials from his government could describe their dealings
with Americans as they defend themselves from charges stemming from the
Iran and Kuwait wars and the repression against Kurds and other Iraqis.
The Iraqi Governing Council is creating a tribunal and some international
jurists have called for a U.N. court.

“I don’t think there’s going to be much there that a leading Iraqi is
going to be able to say, `Hey, we had significant, witting cooperation
from the United States government in our program of weapons of mass
destruction,”’ said Richard Murphy, head of the State Department’s Near
Eastern affairs bureau in the 1980s.

But testimony could provide embarrassing new details about American
assistance to Iraq, what U.S. officials knew about Iraqi atrocities and
what they did _ or didn’t do _ to stop them.

“I think there will be a dramatic embarrassment factor for the U.S.
government,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security
Archives, a foreign policy research center. Blanton and other analysts
said the embarrassment could be even worse for countries with closer
relations to Iraq, such as France.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Saddam’s pursuit of
weapons of mass destruction, support of terrorists and human rights abuses
became grounds for war. But in the 1980s, the United States had a more
pressing concern: Iran.

After the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, U.S. and Arab
leaders feared that if Iran defeated Iraq, Iran could threaten other
countries in hopes of spreading its strict form of Islam.

Iraq was seen more favorably even though it started the war and Saddam was
clearly a dictator. It was a secular nation, influential among Arab
states. It had vast oil reserves and offered lucrative opportunities for
U.S. businesses. The United States also wanted to prevent Iraq from
becoming too close to the Soviet Union.

Many details about the U.S.-Iraqi relationship are already known through
congressional investigations, court proceedings and declassified
documents.

“I think most of the embarrassing stuff has already come out,” said
Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council specialist on Iraq under
Reagan.

But the historical record isn’t complete. Questions remain about
Rumsfeld’s visits, which came at a time when the United States already was
well aware of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons.

Declassified documents indicate that Rumsfeld did not raise the issue with
Saddam in their December 1983 meeting, although Rumsfeld said he did raise
it during a one-on-one meeting with foreign minister Tariq Aziz.

Rumsfeld returned to Iraq in March 1984 to try to smooth relations after
the United States condemned Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. He was
instructed to stress U.S. interests in preventing an Iranian victory and
in improving relations with Iraq, despite the condemnation. What he told
Aziz is unknown because notes of the meeting remain classified.

Aziz is now in U.S. custody.

David L. Mack, who held various top Middle East positions in the State
Department in the 1980s and ’90s, said he doubts Iraqis would have heeded
any warnings not to use chemical weapons.

“In general I think there is a high degree of exaggeration about the
degree to which we could have done anything about Iraqi bad behavior,” he
said.

During the war, the Reagan administration worked aggressively to prevent
other nations from shipping arms to Iran, but did little to prevent
conventional arms from going to Iraq.

Questions have been raised about whether the United States not only
ignored foreign arms shipments to Iraq, but actually encouraged or even
arranged them. A former National Security Council official, Howard
Teicher, said in a 1995 court affidavit that the CIA made sure Iraq
received weapons from non-U.S. manufacturers.

The affidavit was filed in the case of a company accused of illegally
exporting to Chile material used in Iraqi cluster bombs. A defendant
claimed the CIA had arranged the deal, but the court rejected the argument
after viewing classified documents.

While prohibiting U.S. arms sales to Iraq, the Reagan administration
allowed exports of products that could be used for civilian or military
purposes. Questions remain about whether pesticides or helicopters were
used to make or spray chemical weapons.

Questions also linger about whether the United States may have
inadvertently helped Saddam’s biological weapons program. U.S. officials
have acknowledged that in the 1980s, the government and private companies
sent to Iraq strains that could be used for biological weapons, including
anthrax and the West Nile virus. Iraq claimed the samples were for medical
research, but they were sent to sites believed to be part of Iraq’s
biological weapons program.

Perhaps the most sensitive issue is intelligence sharing.

U.S. officials have acknowledged providing intelligence on Iran, but what
information they provided isn’t clear. Teicher claimed in the affidavit
that the United States provided strategic military advice to Saddam. In
one example, he alleged that Reagan used then-Vice President George H.W.
Bush to send a message that Iraq should step up its bombing of Iran.

Blanton said the biggest question is whether the United States provided
intelligence that could have been used for chemical attacks against Iran.
Top officials from that era deny that happened.

The Economist as pro-war-on-Iran propaganda outlet

As you know I am not a fan of the Economist's blatant lying and bullshit on Iran's nuclear program. In their latest blatherings, they're foisting the old "false choice fallacy" in dealing with Iran, according to which the only options available are "An Iranian nuclear bomb, or the bombing of Iran" that concludes:

So which will it be: a war with Iran, or a nuclear-armed Iran?

More about this false choice fallacy on Iran here and here.

Have an Osama-Claus Chrismas, morons.

Here America, here are some cute US posal stamps that I designed, thanks to the "customized postage" service offered by the US Post Office. The first one is "Osama-Claus", and the second is of "Tortured Jesus in Abu Ghraib." I am an artist, after all.

 Send me your address via email (iranaffairs@yahoo.com) and I'll send you 1 stamp each, first come first served, as long as they last. Free. They're totally valid stamps which can be used to mail real letters.

Hope these ruin your Christmas.

See, I've decided to intrude on your little world, and piss you off a bit by ruining your Christmas, reminding you of things you'd rather forget (or have already forgotten, because after all, you have the memory of a lobotomized ant) as you wonder about in your Zombie-like Christmas shopping haze, totally ignorant of the fact that innocent people are dying because of you while you sing jingle bells and buy more crap for your spoiled brats.

You know why? I'm pretty pissed off that we've been "at War" for 8 years (twice as long as it took to finish off Hitler's Third Reich, Mussolini AND the Japanese  combined), that we invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, for reasons that no one can still adequately explain, that we have no clue where Osama is hiding, that we've spent a trillion dollars and more which could have fed starving people... all just to fight a bunch of lightly-armed, semi-literate, cave-dwelling goat-herders -- mostly by using billion-dollar weapons systems to uselessly mass murder civilians, allies and wedding parties -- that we've starved hundreds of thousands of children; that we've legalized torture and massive government civil liberties violations - and we're still losing this war, with no end in sight ...oh, and not a single person has been held responsible for ANY of that -- and instead we're being fed the same lies by the same sort of people who want yet another war, and you're just moronic enough to buy it all again.

So may your Xmas be rotten, if that's what it takes to get you to get up and take notice, and to prevent this from happening yet again.

What's really going on with Iran's nuclear program and Obama

So the US made an offer to iran that was designed to fail, refused Iran's perfectly reasonable compromise solution, and is now pressing for sanctions on Iran, with pundits claiming that it was Iran that has "refused to negotiate". 

Hmmm ... this sounds like a familiar scenario...

The newly released book by Dennis Ross, President Obama’s special adviser on Iran, reads like a how-to manual for launching a war on Iran, marketing the war successfully, and making sure the Iranians cop all the blame for it.  Ross will have none of Bush’s incompetent warmongering on flimsy pretenses of democracy and WMD’s; when Ross launches his illegal war on Iran, it will be stage-managed to within an inch of its life.

“Tougher policies – either militarily or meaningful containment – will be easier to sell internationally and domestically if we have diplomatically tried to resolve our differences with Iran in a serious and credible fashion,” writes Ross.

Note that there is no way to read this sentence but to see that the goal is to attack Iran.  America trying to diplomatically resolve its differences with Iran is not a goal in itself; it is merely a means to more easily sell war and sanctions.

And, then, of course, we get the special Dennis Ross brand of peacemaking-as-warmongering—Ross’s signature dish: derailing negotiations while making it appear to be the other party’s fault.

“Such an approach may build pressures within Iran not to forgo the opportunity that has been presented, while also ensuring that the onus is put on Iran for creating a crisis and also for making conflict more likely.”

The goal, of course, is not just to bring about a military conflict, but also to make sure that it appears that it was the Iranians who brought about this conflict.

Iran is India...on the Daily Show

So the Daily Show has a segment on the Mumbai bombings which supposedly shows a reporter based in India. But I think the background image will be more familiar to Iranians as the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan (which is a masterpiece of tilework -- literally breathtaking.)

I of course like the Daily Show. Can't blame them for confusing Iran with India, or not caring. After all, it is a comedy show. And, lets face it, the Average viewer isn't going to know the difference anyway. The fact is that most Americans get their news from late night TV shows, and amongst them, the best informed turn out to be viewers of the Daily Show.

Ironic, eh?

No wonder there is an effort by Muslims in the US to become comedians.

wars, terrorism, etc. Its all just a joke. A big joke.

Israel bribed Russia against Iran with drone plane deal

So did the Israelis agree to sell drone planes to Russia in order to pressure Russia to not honor their contract to provide an anti-aircraft defense system to Iran? UPI says so:

In the first UAV sale to Russia in June, the Israelis withheld the most advanced UAV variants after several Russian officials publicly stated that the main reason they wanted the UAVs was to purloin their technology.

But the Israelis understood that it was vital to be able to influence Moscow, Iran's main arms supplier, to block the delivery of S-300PMU air-defense missiles to the Islamic Republic.

J Street is AIPAC on Iran and many other points

People have been asking me about what I thought of J-Street's endorsement of sanctions on Iran. They think it is controversial. I think it was utterly predictable. J Street is at best just AIPAC-lite. It is a PR front meant to attract younger, more liberal followers.

Iran defends developing countries' rights to nuclear power

I have written in the past about how the conflict with Iran is not really about nuclear weapons, but is in fact part of a much bigger conflict between developing and developed states in who gets to control the nuclear fuel cycle -- the process of making reactor fuel, the sole energy source of the near future -- and how the pretext of "nuclear weapons proliferation" is being used to create a monopoly on nuclear reactor fuel production technology.

Since then people have often written requests for more information on this topic - because naturally the US media doesn't like to talk about any North-South, Developing-vs-Developed States conflict, and instead promotes the "nuclear weapons proliferation" framing set by the government.

Look people, it is very simple:

Many potential recipients, mostly from developing countries, remained either indifferent or voiced fears that a new “cartel” might be created. Many of them based their positions on the “inalienable right” of nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty states-parties to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Iranian Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh in his statement to the general conference echoed these sentiments by warning “that the developed countries are seeing to create a monopoly” on uranium enrichment.

  6 countries -- and specifically the US and Russia -- are trying to create a division in the world where they produce nuclear fuel, and everyone else buys it from them. Sure sure, they say that the fuel will be placed in "uranium banks" that will ensure against "cutoffs" (note that cutoffs are not the same thing as price increases) and will be supposedly administered fairly by the IAEA (as if the IAEA is immune to political pressure - it is not, as we have clearly seen in its illegal demands on Iran to give up enrichment.) 

And the IRanians aren't the only ones who think this is a bad idea.

Iran solar energy

In order to meet its demand for power, Iran is investing in developing solar energy as well as nuclear power. According to the Middle East Economic Digest:

Algeria, Morocco,/ran and Egypt are all working towards building the world's first integrated solar combined-cycle (ISCC) power plants. Three such schemes are due for completion in 2010 (see table), with a further project in Iran to be tendered this year.

ISCC plants work by combining solar power with a waste heat recovery system attached to a gas turbine plant to increase the efficiency of steam turbine electricity generators.

Projects under way in the region range in capacity from 140MW in Egypt to 470MW at Ain Beni Mathar in Morocco. Solar power, through the inclusion of a solar field, where thousands of mirrors concentrate heat from the sun, contributes about 10-15 per cent of the electricity generation capacity of these plants. Iran has the greatest solar contribution, with 67MW, equating to 16 per cent of generating capacity, at the 430MW Yazd power plant.

"Shahzadeh" Abolfath Mirza Mahvi

Excerptof the obituary for Abolfath Mirza Mahvi, a Qajar dynasty descendant: As a reminder that Iran's nuclear program started under the Shah, with the encouragement and support of the same countries that today are demanding that Iran give up its nuclear program:

Throughout his career, Shazdeh Mahvi orchestrated some of Iran's biggest international business partnerships with companies such as Amerada Hess Oil, Airbus, Bechtel, Bendix, Boeing, Bowden Drilling, Bristow Helicopters, CSC Corp, EDS, Flour, Fokker Aircraft, Fromatom, GE, Honeywell, Hughes Aircraft, KWU, Litton Aero, McDonald Douglas, Northrop, Ralph Parsons, Rockwell International, Spie Batignolles, Standard Oil of Indiana, Siemens, Thyssen, and Westinghouse.

He was instrumental in setting up Pan American International Oil Company in Iran and served as its managing director there until 1967. Mahvi also created Iran's only military aircraft service company by forming a partnership between Northrop and Israeli Aircraft Industries into a new monopoly called Iran Aircraft Services Inc., or IASI, which serviced the IIAF military aircraft. He formed ISIRAN (Information Systems Iran), a joint venture with Honeywell, which serviced the Iranian Armed Forces data processing needs until he sold it to the government in 1972.

Perhaps most significantly, in 1974 Mahvi spearheaded Iran nuclear energy program at the Shah's request. Mahvi founded INECO, Iran Nuclear Energy Company, and partnered with Siemens / KWU in order to build the two, 1200MW power plants in the gulf region.

Iran and the Uranium industry -- an update

As you know I have been keeping an occasional eye on the uranium industry and commodities market. To call uranium a commodity is sort of a fallacy since it can’t really be traded as easily as other commodities due to all sorts of technical, economic and political restrictions, and there is no real “uranium exchange” either. But in any case here are my observations:

First, theme for the uranium “market” has been further consolidation as more governments and companies have been rushing to lock down the worldwide supplies of uranium (which are becoming more limited.) It is pretty well acknowledged that uranium supplies are insufficient to meet demand (indeed there is already some speculation in the industry about a “uranium peak theory” akin to the “oil peak theory.”) According to the IAEA, by 2030, world demand for uranium will double, and:

To fuel this expansion, annual uranium requirements are anticipated to rise to between 94,000 tonnes and 122,000 tonnes, based on the type of reactors in use today. The currently identified resources are adequate to meet this expansion

and so the players are anxious to obtain secure supplies.  For example, the Russian state-owned nuclear company Rosatom recently obtained 17% share of Canada’s Uranium One, and also entered into a long-term supply agreement in exchange for 50% share in Kazakhstan’s Karatau uranium mine. Also, Rio Tinto spun off its US -based coal operations (Cloud Peak) but held on to its uranium operations, and entered into a contract to mine uranium with Mongolia. Australia has a agreement with China to supply uranium.

Second, Canada is a big player. Canada recently announced plans to resume exports of uranium to India, which it hadn’t done since India exploded a “peaceful nuclear device” in 1974 -- and is also a blatant violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty Last year, India and France’s Areva also did a deal to supply uranium to India (which has 14 new reactors planned. Now you know why India keeps voting against Iran at the IAEA.) Other Canadian companies to watch are Cameco, Crosshair Exploration, and Denison Mines. Uranium Investment Corporation (UIC), a uranium-focused commodities fund, recently issued an IPO. Australia is also a big player (BHP Billiton of Adelaide has the world’s largest uranium reserve.)

Third, governments are taking additional steps to ensure that the supplies of uranium resources and technologies remain secure. For example, Canada has recently amended laws that prohibited or restricted foreign ownership of shares in uranium companies. Forsys Metals Group, based in Ontario and the operator of a uranium project in Africa, for example, was blocked by the Canadian government from selling to Forrest Group International -- even though the company’s uranium production sites were solely in Africa, not Canada. More recently, Atomredmetzaloto, a Russian nuclear company, has launched a takeover bid for a Toronto-based uranium mining company called Khan Resources. Whether the Canadian government will allow the deal to go through remains to be seen.

And in the middle of all this investing by developed countries and their rush to lock down uranium supplies, the governments of the same countries are trying to ensure that developing countries remain suppliers of raw materials & do not develop the technological know-how to compete with their uranium industries, and remain forever reliant on foreign imports. Naturally, the developing countries are not accepting this arrangement.

 

So in short, yes, uranium is a precious resource, as well as the legal right to exploit it. And yes, Iran would be giving up something quite valuable if it gave up the right to use its own resources and technology to power its own energy requirements.

Iran's response to the IAEA resolution -- analysis

I recommend reading Iran's latest submission the IAEA on the Board of Governors resolution against Iran. Three points are particularly interesting:

First is about the Workplan (aka the Modalities Agreement) and how Iran resolved all the "outstanding issues" listed on it by the IAEA: the IAEA's latest report has disregarded the plan that they had drafted with Iran, listing items that had to be resolved -- which were in fact resolved -- and now has put the "alleged studies" have magically become an "outstanding issue" even though according to the explicit terms of the Workplan, the iAEA was supposed to provide Iran with full documentation about these allegations before Iran is able to refute them  (note also: the  "Alleged Studies" are no longer referred to by that name by the iAEA in its reports, but are instead now referred to as "studies into militarization," leaving out the "alleged" nature of these studies. This didn't happen accidentally.)

Second is about the Fordow site. Leaving aside the dispute between Iran and the IAEA over when Iran should have declared the site (a largely irrelevant issue anyway, since the IAEA inspectors have visited the site and plainly state that there's nothing there but a "big hole in the mountain side") note how the IRanians again state that the purpose of the site was to act as an anti-bombing shelter. However, the "experts" in the West continue to insist -- without any evidence, of course -- that this was a "secret enrichment facility" that was actually intended to be part of a parallel enrichment program. They are creating "conventional wisdom" about the site and its supposed "real" purpose out of nothing except speculation and circular citation.

Finally, as the Iranians clearly state, they are under no legal obligtion to abide by the Additional Protocol's more stringent inspections requirements -- even though they did so for more than 2 years and no sign of any weapons program was found and even though they have offered to ratify the Additional Protocol once their nuclear rights are recognized. This is not just Iran's position -- the Argentinians and the Brazilians, both of which have a new nuclear program that "could be used to make bombs" have also refused the AP. Egypt, which was recently caught conducting secret nuclear experiments and has unexplained traces of highly-enriched, weapons-grade uranium, has also refused to sign the Additional Protocol, calling it a "voluntary thing".

So why won't the US just recognize Iran's nuclear rights so Iran will implement the AP? Because the issue is not about Iranian nukes nor about stringent inspections -- all those things are merely pretextual. It doesn't matter what IRan does -- even if it give s up enrichment entirely, they'll cook up some new accusation. This whole conflict is not driven by the facts about Iran's nuclear program but by another agenda entirely, and when the bloggers get distracted by the arcane technical details about Iran's nuclear program and US responses to it (how much LEU do they have? Can they weaponize it in 6 mos? Will sanctions work? etc.) they're simply missing this bigger picture.  

Iran's student demonstration and human rights double standards.

Funny - Greece is in the second day of being rocked by rioting youths on the anniversary of the shooting death of a teenager there, with rioters smashing bank windows, overturning trash bins and setting them alight as they hurl rocks and fire crackers at riot police, and yet the NY Times has a page dedicated to the minute-by-minute events in Iran, but not Greece. That's called a double-standard. They're using human rights as a propaganda tool. Human rights abuses in some countries are given a pass, if they're US allies. You don't hear much about human rights abuses in places like Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan or Jordan, or even Iran under the Shah. Ah, but as soon as there's a government in one of those countries that doesn't get along with the US, suddenly people are pounding their chests and pulling out their hair over human rights there.

Of course, to say that human rights concerns are cynically-deployed propaganda tools, isn't to say that the concern about human rights is not itself justified and justifiable.  

Afghanistan and Naploleon

Amazing how a bunch of ragged, lightly-armed, cave-dwelling goat herders have thus far managed to make fools of the combined armies of the worlds top military powers in all their majesty, dragging them into an endless quagmire of blood, with no real prospect of "winning" or even withdrawing whilst at least saving some face. It occurs to me, as the US sends tens of thousands of more troops to add to the hundred thousand or more already there to deal with what were told are about 2000 actual Taliban fighters, that the same way Russia could rely on it's winters to defeat invaders (Napoleon and Hitler) the Afghans can rely on their poverty and failed-state status. In the end, no invaders can really pacify that country, and the only question is how much positive spin the US can place on it's eventual defeat there. Some of you may know that the British landed troops on Iranian soil in the Persian Gulf region on two (3?) occassions when Iran under the Qajars tried to regain Herat, which was historically a part of Iran (Herat was the second Safavid capitol) the last being in 1857 when the Brits - who wanted to keep Afghanistan as a buffer against a Russian threat to their colony in India- shelled Abadan. There are still some British graves in Southern Iran from those days. Anyway , acting under pressure of the Brits, Iran signed the Treaty of Paris in 1857 and gave up claims to Herat. We live with the consequences.

Media ignore US support for Saddam in "Halabja survivor" story

There are several media reports about a Iraqi Kurdish young man named Ali Pour who survived the Halabja poison gas massacre by Saddam Hussein being reunited with his relatives in Iraq after being adopted by an Iranian family. Good for him and good for Iran for supporting and help raising him.

But note how all of these reports completely leave out the fact that when Saddam was gassing the Kurds in places like Halabja, the US was backing Saddam, Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam's hand, and the US was trying to shift the blame for the massacre onto Iran. Iran tried on several occasions to get a condemnation of Iraq's chemical weapons use at the UN - and each time the US blocked Iran. In 1982, the US even removed Iraq from the US State Department's list of terrorist nations so as to ease the transfer of "dual use" technology to Saddam's regime.

Fake Iran atrocity film

As I like to dig through old news clippings, and am a fan of Dario Argento's horror movies...

(Just to be clear, Dario Argento didn't have anything to do with this movie. He just happens to be an Italian movie director, like the guy mentioned in this article.)

Iran awarded $400,000 in damages over film showing fake atrocities

01/31/1987  Orange County Register

By Uli Schmetzer, Chicago Tribune.

An Italian film company has been ordered to pay $400,000 to the government of Iran after a local court found that film sequences showing atrocities allegedly committed by Iranian soldiers were fakes.

The ruling ended a three-year battle by the Iranian Embassy in Rome against Racing Film and Titanus Film, producers and distributors of the 1983 documentary "Sweet and Barbaric."

Racing Film, the producer, was ordered to pay the damages within 60 days.

The film was widely publicized for a scene in which Iranian soldiers used two Jeeps to pull the arms off an Iraqi prisoner of war. Another scene showed a close-up of an Iraqi prisoner being executed by an Iranian soldier with a pistol shot in the neck.

Stills from the film were widely used by newspapers and magazines around the world. Iraqi officials produced them on many occasions as evidence that the Iranians were maltreating their prisoners of war.

But six court experts, aided by blow-ups of the crucial scenes, found that the filmmakers had used actors who not only staged the atrocities but reappeared in different roles, both in Iraqi and Iranian uniforms.

The film director, who had previously gained some success with second-rate horror movies, made some basic mistakes. For example, he mixed genuine 16mm newsreel film with staged scenes on 35mm film.

Still photographs from the film shown in court clearly revealed the weapons held by the actors were made by an Italian manufacturer, of a type not issued by the Iranian army. And the actor whose arms were torn away could be clearly seen with his arms strapped to his body beneath his uniform in the courtroom blow-ups.

It was pointed out in court that while "blood" -- probably colored water -- spurted from his shoulder, no blood was dripping from the severed arm shown in one sequence.

In 1984, soon after the false documentary was screened in Italy, Judge Roberto Preden of Rome, acting on a complaint by the Iranian ambassador, prohibited showings of the film.

"After the film was shown in Iraq , angry Iraqi soldiers maltreated Iranian prisoners of war in retaliation, according to information we received from our prisoners," Mahmood Mohammadi,  a senior diplomat at the Iranian Embassy in Rome said.

The Iranian Embassy had asked the court for $800,000 in damages.

The companies argued they had been duped by the film director into believing the sequences were genuine and had been shot secretly at two prisoner-of-war camps in Iran .

The companies still face criminal proceedings for fraud.

 

=============

''Faked film'' of Iranian ill-treatment of Iraqi PoWs

BBC Summary of World Broadcasts April 25, 1985, Thursday

Tehran television in English 1300 gmt 22 Apr 85

"The head of Iran's war information HQ has presented evidence to prove forgery and falsehood in an Iraqi propaganda film called Sweet and Barbaric, which depicts Iranian soldiers killing Iraqi prisoners of war. Before screening the film yesterday [21st April] Mr Kharrazi presented photographs contradicting the Iraqi claims. Then the film, an Iraqi-Italian coproduction, was screened for a number of Iranian and foreign diplomats and reporters. Iran has already filed suit against the Italian company involved in the production of the faked film, Mr Kharrazi said. The film was screened in slow motion to show that the Iranian soldiers depicted are shown carrying Italian submachineguns which have never been used by the Iranian forces today. The soldiers' uniforms were also different from that of real Iranian combatants. . . [Other discrepancies] On the basis of similar evidence, an Italian court barred the film from screening in Italy, added Mr Kharrazi.At the end of this meeting, Mr Kharrazi said: Screening of the film in European countries might be a pretext for obstructing world attention from the atrocities taking place against Iranian PoWs in camps inside Iraq. He added: Iraq wants to make the world public opinion forget its use of chemical weapons in the Persian Gulf war. "

 

"Internal political disputes" in Iran and US

I am amused by articles which insist that the Iranian government's position on the nuclear issue is merely the result of "internal disputes", that the nuclear issue is trumped up by Ahmadinejad (who actually isn't even in charge of the program) as a way to distract opponents, etc.  thus ignoring the fact that Iran's nuclear program has massive popular support across the board. Surely there are internal disputes in Iran but they pale in comparison to the Right-Left divisions in the US and the resultant pressure on Obama's administration in performing basic functions such as deciding whom to appoint to top level policy positions.

If you want just a taste of the vehemence and McCarthy-ite fascistic nature of the Right in the US especially when it comes to Israel policy, just look at this sites such as MuzzleWatch.com or, more broady, my favorite site DiscovertheNetworks.org -- and the various dossiers they have on individuals and organizations on their enemies list (I aspire to make the list one day): feminists, environmentalists, civil rights proponents, "fifth columnists" etc.

Their "individuals" list includes former UN head Kofi Anan, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, musician and activist Harry Belafonte, Cher, international law professor Richard Falk -- along with Kim Il Jong, Yasser Arafat, Barak Obama, the founders of Hamas and Hezbollah, and of course anyone who has ever remotely expressed any anti-Zionist sympathies of has criticized Israel (Juan Cole, Sam Husseini etc) and even officials of Human Rights Watch.  

This is the sort of kookiness that is shaping US foreign policy, folks. And you thought the apocalyptic Reverend Hagee and his AIPAC backing was a thing of the past, eh? No, sorry, they're just the tip of the lunatic iceberg.

The issue of dealing with Iran is now part of the ground-zero in this long-standing and highly polarized debate betwen the left and right in the US, and is exaccerbated by the fact that it also involves another hot topic: the US support for Israel. This means that the issue is highly polarized and driven by agendas that fall well outside of anything that actually has to do with Iran. And, it may only be "resolved" when the underlying debates/conflicts between the right and left in the US are resolved -- which is never.

This is unfortunate, of course. But for all pratical matters, here's the bottom line: You can't deal with these people. Even if Obama may be personally well-intended, he's a trapped player in the same systematic conflict that Bush was a part of. You can't negotiate with them, you can't expect them to have rational policies, you can't expect them to stick to commitments. The Iranians would be fools to do so.

Newsweek on Hoder and MEMRI

Newsweek's Christopher Dickey has a piece on Hossein Derakhshan aka Hoder which makes him sound like a double-agent or something silly. 

I interacted with him and he was a fan of IranAffairs.com -- often sending me quite a bit of traffic from his popular blog. I also read his posts on Gulf2000. He was simply not a fan of the Neoconservative agenda on Iran, and also refused to join the mindless demonization of Ahmadinejad, arguing that AN had more support and popularity than his opponents (whether inside or outside of Iran) wanted to acknowledge. He also defended Iran's nuclear program. And yet he also was a critic of the regime in Iran too, and did in fact travel to Israel (a deliberate poke in the eye to Iran's legal system). 

In the sort of highly polarized environment of the debate over Iran, it becomes easy to paint people who insist on careful, nuanced thinking as "Agents of the IRI" or "Spies for the West" etc. I can't help but hope that he will be free soon, raising shit and being "maddeningly mercurial" some more.

Anyway, as a sidenote, I should mention that Christopher Dickey is being a little dishonest in how he represents MEMRI as simply "translating politically-sensitive articles". MEMRI is obviously an Israeli front organization in their propaganda war, as other journalists have noted, which deliberately concentrates on translating articles that are inflammatory and present a false view of the Mideast but which, purely by coincidence, corresponds to the NeoCon view. (Note also that MEMRI doesn't bother translating the inflammatory stuff from the Israeli media.) While Christopher Dickey notes that Yigal Carmon is a "former" Israeli intelligence agent, he forgets to mention that another founder of MEMRI is Meyrav Wurmser, a central figure in the NeoCon cabal in Washington and who along with Carmon are far-rightists opposed to peace with the Palestinians, and that the other staffers at MEMRI are also "former" Israeli intelligence agents or far-right associates of the pro-Israeli lobby in the US. Juan Cole noted MEMRIs bias too, (which resulted in a laughable lawsuit threat by MEMRI):

"On more than one occasion I have seen, say, a bigoted Arabic article translated by MEMRI and when I went to the source on the web, found that it was on the same op-ed page with other, moderate articles arguing for tolerance. These latter were not translated."

So how dishonest is Christopher Dickey being in presenting MEMRI as just some benign translation service? Well, I always try to play a little mind game as a test of intellectual honesty: imagine if the tables were turned, and MEMRI was headed by a former Iranian intelligence agent who, acting in league with current and former Iranian officials and intelligence agents, made a point of translating only inflammatory, bigoted and Islamophobic articles from the Israeli or US press -- how would Chris Dickey characterize such an organization? As simply a translation service? I think you get the picture.

Arnold's Middle East Reality on the iran uranium swap deal breakdown

I recommend reading Arnold Evans' blog entry on the breakdown of the uranium swap agreement with Iran.

Israeli espionage at the United Nations?

Interesting article  (Google translation here ? ) on espionage carried out at the Geneva offices of the United Nations -- from a Swiss newspaper (you will look in vain for a translation or even acknowledgment in the US media) There are bets that the Israelis were behind it.

Anyway, this reminds me of how four Mossad agents are arrested for attempting to install bugs in the Iranian Embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus back on April 24, 1991. Another bug was found in Iran's London consulate a few years ago too. I can't find the link right now. This sort of thing is routine.

Killing civilians in war, then blaming the victims

"We don't do body counts." - General Tommy Franks

More on how our warmongering officials and pundits, and subservient media, tend to blame the victims for killing civilians and rhetorically downplay our responsibility by adulating our war technology. I wrote this in a discussion about how "smart bombs" had "technical glitches", which incoveniently ended up mass murdering Afghan civilians:

"Nasty Dictators forced us to kill the civilians" is a very old rhetorical ploy used to assuage the conscience when there are disproportionate civilian casualties. . .

The intentional NATO bombing of Serbian TV stations in 1999 which resulted in about a dozen civilian casualties of reporters and station employees was similarly justified as the fault of a Nasty Dictator (the stations constituted the "brains of Milosovic" according to NATO.) There are many examples of this spin in the Mideast in particular, such as the alleged "Arab irregulars dressed as women" who were used as a post-facto justification for the Deir Yassin village massacre by Israeli forces in 1948.

We are all familiar with the justification for the 300,000 child deaths resulting from the sanctions on Iraq: all the fault of Saddam, don't you know. And who can forget the official State Dept. press release which stated quite openly that the downing of Iran Air 655 was actually the fault of the Iranians themselves (who had "permitted" the plane to fly near the Vincennes -- which was illegally inside Iranian territorial waters, a fact conveniently omitted from the press release and not disclosed for another 4 years.)

Sometimes, the Blame-the-Dictator spin turns into the Blame-the-Civilian-Victims. For example, during the buildup to Persian Gulf War II, some on the Right blamed the suffering of the civilians in Iraq under the sanctions on the Iraqis themselves, because they had "failed" to rise up and topple Saddam (in fact the Shia did rebel against Saddam after the first Gulf War -- and were abandoned to their fate by Bush Senior.)

Ironically, this blame-the-Civilian-victim spin has seen a lot more use lately, in proportion to the rise in civilian casualties resulting from the deployment of regular dumb bombs and the "smart bombs" which turn out to be not-so-smart. And so now it we have a Blame-the-Bomb version of this spin too.

In Afghanistan alone, smart bombs have been dropped on wedding parties, pickup trucks full of pro-US civilians, a few mosques, US forces and allies, and even Red Cross food distribution centers (bombed twice.) Something like 60-70% of the bombs used in Afghanistan were of the smart variety (compared to 3%
used in Persian Gulf War I and 30% in Yugolsavia) and yet according to two studies the proportion of civilian casualties per bomb has actually increased along with the increased smartness of the bombs. (See Operation Enduring Freedom: Why a Higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties)

Of course we can say that the problems are not with the bombs themselves but with minor technological glitches in the particular bomb. But all of these are just distinctions without a difference to the civilians who are bombed, and miss the point: The function of these spins is to absolve us of any responsibility for the consequences of our actions. If something goes wrong, its not our fault, its the bomb's fault for not being as smart as we thought it was, and its the fault of the Nasty Dictator who forced us to drop the bombs in the first place, etc.

And combined with that, the technological superiority of the weapons are used to further prove the justness of our wars and, by implication, our moral/cultural superiority and righteousness in waging the war. For example, during Persian Gulf War I, the Patriot Missile was practically apotheosized as representing everything good about America -- first-world, modern, patriotic, the great defender of our defensive forces who were defending the defenseless, effective, determined, and accurate -- in short not really a missile but also mom, the flag and apple pie too. The Patriot became the subject of mass adulation and endorsement by the President himself during his subsequent visit to Raytheon's missile factory.

And facing the Patriot, in the other corner of the ring, were the SCUDS, which represented everthing bad about the other side: backwards, technologically obsolete, indiscriminate, inaccurate, unreliable, cheap, ineffective, and third world. (Only later did we find out that in all liklihood, not a single Patriot missile had actually hit its intended target.)

So now here we are marveling at the smartness of our "smart bombs" and speculating about dropping a few of them someplace new. No need to be concerned the legalities or moralities or motivations or even the consequences of such a move--after all our bombs are smart because we're smart and so we're better and so our cause must be just and so there's no real reason to worry about civilian deaths or anything else.

But if perchance some of those smart bombs do kill some conveniently nameless, faceless civilians war "over there" -- their deaths are really the fault of their Nasty Dictators, and whatever failures our weapons had are naturally always simply "accidents" and technological "glitches" like what happened aboard the Vincennes--but certainly nobody's fault, and so no negative conclusions should be reached on that basis about us, our policies, or the superiority of our culture or the justness of our wars. The smartness of our smart bombs and the nastiness of the Nasty Dictators absolve us of any responsibility, not to mention the constraints of international law. But if they kill any civilians -- or even our military personnel or our mercenaries -- its because they're bad people from a bad civilization where "Something Went Wrong."

Obama and Bush on Iran -- same sanctions policy, same outcome.

So apparently the pro-Israeli lobby have continued pressuring US states to divest from companies that do business with Iran.

The funny thing about this "victory" is that it ultimately only hurts the US investors. As the head of Calpers -- California's public employee pension system - explained:

" 'International assets are a fifth of our portfolio,' said Charles Valdes, Investment Chair. 'This [divestment] bill would mean a potential divestment exceeding $8 billion – $6 billion in equity securities and $2 billion in bonds. The costs come in two forms. The first cost is an estimated $100 million to sell these investments, reinvest the proceeds, and reinvest back into those international companies some day. Our staff analysis shows that if we had not invested in some 50 affected companies over the past one, three, and five years, the loss would have been about $725 million,' he said. 'This loss would have to be made up by taxpayers through increased employer contributions.'

Back in December 2004, in an apparent moment of short-lived lucidity, Pres George Bush said of sanctions on Iran: 

We're relying upon others, because we've sanctioned ourselves out of influence with Iran

Well, looks like the Obama administration is following the same tactic of shooting itself in the foot. I heard somewhere that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Congratualtions, Obama!

More sanctions would make sense if they actually had any positive effect but instead they only boomerang :

Interestingly, the effectiveness of sanctions is directly tied to their perceived legitimacy. At a minimum, in order for sanctions to have any prospect of being effective, the general population of the sanctioned country must oppose the policy that is deemed objectionable by the sanctioning parties; the adopted sanctions must cause sufficient pain on the population of the sanctioned country to cause them to force a change in policy or a regime change; or the adopted sanctions must cause sufficient pain directly on the regime until it changes its objectionable policy. The adopted U.N. sanctions on Iran do not even remotely fulfill any of the above conditions, which in turn do not guarantee the success of sanctions. And the council’s actions against Iran’s nuclear program will serve to bolster the Iranian people’s support for the program and regime.

And even US government audit agencies quitely conceed that sanctions are ineffective:

New U.S. audit questions efficacy of Iran sanctions

Reuters Wed Jan 16, 2008

"U.S. officials and experts report that U.S. sanctions have specific impacts on Iran; however, the extent of such impacts is difficult to determine," said the report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, which was obtained by Reuters on Tuesday before its release later this week.

"Other evidence raises questions about the extent of reported economic impacts," it added.

But like I said in the past, the proponents of sanctions don't really care if the sanctions themselves are effective or not. They just want to put more obstacles in the way of any US-Iran rapprochement that would endanger Israel's ambitions in the region. As long as the US is sanctioning Iran, they're not talking to Iran -- making the pro-Israel crowd happy. If the sanctions are ineffective, they'll only pressure to increase and tighten them -- incrementally leading to confrontation, their real goal all along.