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Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday he expected a new UN resolution against Iran to make it toe the line on its nuclear programme, while also refusing to rule out military action. “I firmly believe that the sanctions policy that we are pursuing will work, but I am not one who is going forward to say that we rule out any particular form of action,” Brown said at his first press conference as premier.

“But I firmly believe that the sanctions that we are imposing on Iran are sanctions that are having an effect already,” he told reporters at 10 Downing Street in London. “We are going to have to consider what we do in future, there will probably be a third (UN Security Council) resolution in relation to Iran soon and I believe that that is a way forward that is working and will work,” he said. “And again I appeal to the Iranian authorities to understand the fears that other countries have about the development of a nuclear weapons programme,” he said. The UN Security Council has imposed two rounds of sanctions to get Tehran to cease enriching uranium and stop building a heavy-water reactor in Arak, along with cooperating fully with the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran has since April blocked inspectors visiting the heavy-water reactor. Such reactors produce plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear weapons. The other main atom bomb material is enriched uranium. Iran has rejected any halt in its enrichment work, claiming a right to it under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. On July 13, the United States said it was skeptical of Tehran’s agreement to allow IAEA inspections of the reactor. Iran insists its nuclear programme is a peaceful effort to generate electricity, but the United States and Britain fear it is a cover for developing atomic weapons. Iran and the IAEA are to hold a fresh round of talks in Vienna this week. Source: AFP

Iran is to launch a new crackdown Monday on slack dressing that targets both men and women whose clothing and haircuts are deemed to be unIslamic, police said. “The police will act against those whose trousers are too short, have skin-tight coats, shirts with Western logos and Western hairstyles,” said Ahmad Reza Radan, the head of Tehran’s police force.

“We will ask those arrested where they bought their clothes and where they had their hair cut so those outlets can be closed down,” state broadcasting’s website quoted him as saying. Radan said anyone arrested would receive a warning and have their name added to a list. “If they reoffend, there will be no pardon.” Since the drive began in April, thousands have been warned and hundreds arrested across Iran for failing to adhere to the country’s Islamic dress code, its toughest such crackdown in years. Women in Iran are obliged to cover all bodily contours and their heads but in recent years many have pushed the boundaries by showing off bare ankles and fashionably styled hair beneath their headscarves. Some women still don figure-hugging coats and skimpy headscarves despite the April crackdown. By renewing the drive, it appears the police want to send a message that they are serious about enforcing the dress rules. Many conservatives have applauded the crackdown as important to protect the security of society, but moderates have publicly questioned whether Iran would be better off tackling poverty and crime rather than slack dressing.

Source: AFP

Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times reports. The man in the green uniform at the immigration control counter at Mehrabad airport stamped her passport. Journalist Parnaz Azima said she breathed a bottomless sigh of relief. It was here the intelligence officers often moved in, discreetly guiding visitors to the small office off to the side that every Iranian traveler knows and fears. She met her brother, and they went to gather up her bags and head for the exit. Their mother was gravely ill, and Azima was anxious to see her before she died.

That’s when they heard someone call out: “Mrs. Azima? Mrs. Azima?” A man in a black suit escorted her back to the interrogation room. “You can give me what I want now, or we can search through all of your bags,” the man said, according to Azima, an Iranian American with U.S.-funded Radio Farda who is being barred from leaving Iran on charges of spreading propaganda against the regime. Azima, stripped of her passport that January day, is one of several Iranian Americans swallowed up by their native country’s security institutions. The others are Middle East expert Haleh Esfandiari, sociologist Kian Tajbakhsh and Orange County peace activist Ali Shakeri. Iranian authorities have subjected all four to interrogations and locked up all but Azima. Azima, 59, is free on more than half a million dollars bail. On the advice of her legal counsel, she has taken her plight public, offering a glimpse of the methods of Iranian security forces. Azima’s legal troubles cap a three-year flirtation with Iran, which she left in 1983 after being purged from her job as a government librarian. She was branded a counterrevolutionary after the 1979 Islamic Revolution for failing to wear proper Islamic attire. While she was abroad, her brother called and warned her not to return; the Islamic regime’s enforcers had come several times to her home, he said, and were looking to arrest her. So began decades in exile in Europe and then the United States, where Azima forged a career on the East Coast as a translator and journalist. She became a mother, then a grandmother. Radio Free Europe’s Persian-language section, later renamed Radio Farda, or Tomorrow, recruited her in 1998, and she moved to Prague to work at the 24-hour radio station. She assembled reports about Iranian literature and poetry as well as about human rights for women and minorities. Two years ago, with Iran under the presidency of reformist Mohammad Khatami, Azima received a surprise: an official invitation to come to Tehran and attend the March 1, 2005, dedication of the new Iranian National Library building. Azima, who had jumped at the offer despite her initial concerns, was given the royal treatment during her two-week visit. “They treated me like I was a VIP,” Azima said during hours of interviews conducted recently in Tehran. “They asked me to promote their efforts on the radio.” Reconnecting with family and friends, she decided to return the next year for Persian New Year festivities. By 2006, however, Khatami had retired from office and conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in power. Still, she arrived in Tehran without incident and stayed with her mother for three weeks. But on the day before she was scheduled to head back to the Czech capital, five bearded young men armed with a search warrant and court summons stormed into her mother’s apartment. They went room to room, removing an illegal satellite television receiver and seizing Azima’s Iranian passport. They told her to show up at a special security court. There, she was accused of working for a counterrevolutionary organization. “Isn’t the goal of Radio Farda the overthrow of the Islamic Republic?” the interrogator asked, according to Azima’s recollection. No, she replied. The radio outlet adheres to international journalism standards emphasizing fairness, she said.

Economist reports from Tehran. It is  Friday prayers in Tehran. Several blocks around the university and Palestine and Revolution Squares have been closed to traffic, as they are every week at this time. Throughout the morning lines of soldiers in khaki and Revolutionary Guards in green have been filing into a vast hangar. Knots of civilians stroll up in the sun. From within, loudspeakers squawk sermons and bursts of martial music.

This week happens also to be the 25th anniversary of the liberation of Khorramshahr, a bloody Iranian victory during the eight-year “imposed war” against Iraq. All week footage of the fighting has been broadcast on television, even filling the half-time gap in the European football cup final between AC Milan and Liverpool (which soccer-mad Iranians watched avidly). The Iran-Iraq war cost Iran hundreds of thousands of lives, helping to consolidate the very revolution Saddam Hussein had foolishly attacked. Posters of the martyrs still adorn the streets of Tehran. Inside the hangar tens of thousands of men (the women are screened out of sight) sit in rows on prayer rugs. At the front under a podium is much of the country’s turbaned political leadership.

Also present is General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, which wrested control of the war from what had been left of the shah’s army and has exercised growing influence in Iran ever since. Under the podium a green banner proclaims: “So long as America sticks to its present policy Iran will not have negotiations with it.” Now, before the main sermon, comes the warm-up. A speaker denounces Islam’s foes. “Shame on you Israel, down with Israel,” the seated throng bellows in response, fists pumping in unison. “Death to America.” The prayer leader takes his place behind a lectern. In one hand he holds a gun, to represent the sword of Islam. He then recites in a tremulous voice the lamentation for the Shias’ first-century martyr, Imam Ali. At this the assembled worshippers cradle their heads and sob, shoulders heaving with sudden grief. The preacher then takes a sip of water, signalling that this morning’s main political message—which will be preached at similar meetings in all of Iran’s cities—is about to be delivered. Today’s theme is a forthcoming meeting in Baghdad between Iranian and American diplomats, the first formal direct contact after decades during which neither country has been willing to talk to the other. The preacher is at pains to explain that Iran is not showing weakness.

“That carnivorous wolf is not of the type to enter negotiations,” he says of America. “America is only after securing its own hegemony.” Isn’t America the axis of evil? Wasn’t refusing to talk to America a principle of the blessed Ayatollah Khomeini? There will be no departing from principle, he says. All that has happened is that Iraq’s government has asked for help. And all Iran will do is insist that as Iraq’s occupiers the Americans are responsible for the mayhem there. “We can with most certainty announce today that the United States has become the obvious manifestation of the axis of evil in the region,” he declaims. The seated throng roars its assent. Tehran’s Friday prayers are broadcast all over Iran and around the world. The fiery slogans of the worshippers reinforce the scary fanaticism outsiders have come to associate with the Islamic Republic since Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution more than a quarter of a century ago. And nowhere in the world do Tehran’s morning prayers have a more attentive audience than in the capital of the United States. For all its problems in Iraq, America is also fixated on Iran. In 2005 George Bush promised that he would stop “the world’s most dangerous men from getting their hands on the world’s most dangerous weapons”. That same year a brash former mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, won a surprise victory in Iran’s presidential elections. Since then he has done his level best to look like one of the world’s most dangerous men.

President Ahmadinejad took over from a middle-aged cleric, Muhammad Khatami. As president, the mild, bespectacled Mr Khatami had pushed for liberal reforms at home and talked reassuringly to the outside world about Iran’s desire for a “dialogue of civilisations”. The new president, a former Revolutionary Guard and a Holocaust-denying demagogue, does not do reassurance. Since his election Iran has defied the UN Security Council’s orders to stop enriching uranium, threatened repeatedly to make Israel disappear and declared war on Iran’s internal reformists. Switch to a typical week in Washington, DC, just before those Friday prayers. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy is holding a symposium on Iran’s “unacceptable bomb”. Robert Kimmit, the deputy treasury secretary, tells delegates how America is tightening sanctions on Iran. From Jerusalem by video Shimon Peres, Israel’s elder statesman (and now president), says that if Iran develops nuclear weapons, they may fall into the hands of terrorists. A British diplomat argues that Iran’s nuclear programme threatens “irreparable damage” to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Also in this typical week another think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), unveils a database listing foreign investments in Iran. Journalists are given a CD on which they can look up who is thought to be investing what in Iran. Why? Because, says Danielle Pletka, an AEI vice-president, people need to understand that between (a) doing nothing about Iran and (c) dropping a bomb on it is a third possibility, (b), of inflicting economic pain until the mullahs change their ways. This week too Dick Cheney pipes up from the deck of USS John Stennis, one of the additional aircraft carriers America has sent to the Persian Gulf. The vice-president says America will “stand with our friends” to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons and “dominating this region”. Some say that Mr Cheney is the last hawk standing in the Bush administration. But anxiety about Iran’s nuclear intentions stretches right across American politics. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, claims that America faces “no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran”. And most of the presidential candidates for 2008 are talking equally tough.

Hillary Clinton favours opening a “diplomatic track” with Iran. John Edwards supports a “non-aggression pact”. Barack Obama says it would be a “profound mistake” to start a war. But neither Mrs Clinton nor Mr Edwards nor Mr Obama rules out force if Iran persists with its nuclear plans. For Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front-runner, a military strike would be “very dangerous”, but nuclear arms in the control of “an irrational person” like President Ahmadinejad would be more dangerous still. Would he consider using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran? “You can’t rule out anything.” John McCain recently broke into song, intoning “bomb-bomb-bomb bomb-bomb Iran” to the tune of a Beach Boys song. Alongside the work of the think-tanks and the warnings and ditties of the politicians comes a drumbeat of alarming newspaper articles. In the Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz, a hero of the neoconservatives, concludes in an op-ed piece: “The plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force—any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938.” Is that really where things stand with Iran—a new Hitler and a new 1938? Look again at Tehran’s Friday prayers. One thing a visitor notices at once is how little connection this stage-managed event has with the everyday life of the bustling metropolis around it. Even the audience, squatting in serried ranks beyond the dignitaries, looks untypical. Iran is a young country: two out of three people are below the age of 30. On the streets of affluent north Tehran, young people dress in the latest fashions—even if the jeans-clad women are obliged by law to wear the Islamic headscarf (the hijab). The audience at prayers, however, is older: shabbily dressed men well into their 40s, regime stalwarts who have trekked uphill from the poor southern suburbs. Which is the true Iran—the consumer-oriented young, bored by the slogans of a long-ago revolution and impatient to move on? Or the regime faithful chorusing the familiar slogans at Friday prayers? It is tantalisingly hard to know. With 71m people and a multitude of languages and ethnicities, Iran is a difficult place to read. Although it has elements of democracy, including an elected president and parliament, the state is not ultimately controlled by elected institutions. And even the elected bit of the system is a backstage game of personalities and factions, not a transparent process rooted in political parties. Press freedom is limited, almost no serious independent opinion polling is allowed, and many official economic statistics appear simply to be made up. All this makes the regime’s inner workings elusive. Outsiders can only follow the trend and make a guess.