Rooyesh

Iran’s government announced on Tuesday it was allowing motorists to take extra petrol from pumps over the summer holiday period, two months after imposing a strict rationing plan aimed at slashing consumption. Drivers of private cars will be allowed to take an extra 100 litres (22 gallons) from the pumps, on top of the 100 litres of petrol they are now limited to each month.

The 100 litres of additional petrol appears to be is a one-off gesture by the government to help people travel through the summer holiday period and will not be repeated in subsequent months. It is not clear if the decision met with the wholehearted approval of the oil ministry, whose caretaker minister said just days earlier that it was not possible to give an additional quota for holiday tourism. Iran’s Vice President for tourism Esfandyar Rahim Mashaii said that drivers could claim the extra allowance by providing their details on a special Internet site to be launched in a week. “Whether you have taken your summer holidays or not, you can fill in the form and this quota will be given to you,” he told state television. “Of course some people will not register, this means they do not want the extra quota and thus will help Iran’s economy,” he added. Iranian families are traditionally inveterate travellers over the summer months, driving to resorts along the Caspian Sea and historic cities to escape the worst of the heat. However many have complained this year that their petrol quotas are barely sufficient for travel within Tehran and other cities, ruling out holiday trips by private cars.

The petrol rationing has been implemented through smart cards which drivers use each time they buy petrol and keep track of their purchases. The announcement of the extra petrol comes just ahead of an extended holiday weekend in Iran to celebrate the birthday of the “hidden” 12th imam of Shiite Islam, when hundreds of thousands are expected to take to the roads. Many Iranians will only now be starting their main summer holidays, taking advantage of the cooler September weather and with schools still out for another month. “The aim of this decision is to boost the tourist industry because of the role travel plays in the psychological health of the people,” said the government committee overseeing the plan. But Gholam Hossein Nozari, who became caretaker oil minister following the sacking of Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh earlier this month, said on Friday that “it does not appear we can allocate a special quota for tourism.” “Everyone in this country is interested in tourism and is looking for an excuse to receive petrol for this purpose,” Nozari said, according to the IRNA agency.

Iran, OPEC’s number two oil producer, in late June finally implemented a long-awaited plan to ration petrol to decrease the colossal state subsidies paid for keeping pump prices low. The announcement triggered angry protests, with demonstrators torching petrol stations and yelling slogans against the government, but these rapidly petered out. Despite recent price rises, the subsidies mean Iranian drivers are still paying less for their petrol — 1,000 rials (0.10 dollars) per litre — than for the comparable amount of mineral water. The government has rejected demands from parliament for motorists to make purchases in excess of their quota at much higher non-subsidised prices, meaning that all Iranians have to obey the rationing limits.

Source: AFP

 Hussein Alinejad earns just $217 a month selling fragrant kebabs of chicken and lamb in a steamy shop here, and he knew Iran’s leader couldn’t help but be moved by his plight. So when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to town in December, Alinejad wrote him a letter explaining his circumstances.

He had three children, and a nice piece of land, but no money to build a house. Could he perhaps have a bank loan? Twenty days later, he got a call from the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee, a charity linked to the government: “Come and get the answer to your letter.” When he arrived, someone handed him an envelope with more than a week’s salary inside, his to keep. And his loan application was under review.

But it’s been eight months since the president came through, and Alinejad still hasn’t heard anything about his loan. A friend got one, but couldn’t afford to buy more than a small garden plot with the money.

Across this city and other areas of relatively prosperous Mazandaran province in northern Iran, one of many rural regions where Ahmadinejad has enjoyed enthusiastic support since his election in 2005, there are growing worries that the trickle-down oil revenue the president promised has trickled only so far. As the Islamic Republic increasingly struggles with deep-rooted economic problems, some here are starting to mutter about broken promises.

Ahmadinejad’s domestic popularity has its roots, in part, in his frequent and well-received jaunts to the provinces, armed with promises of low-interest bank loans and “justice” shares in Iranian companies and plenty of reassuring speeches about Iran’s enduring invincibility.

“Justice means that all talents should be developed. All sections of the country should taste development and enjoy its assets,” he said as he arrived here in Mazandaran, a farm-studded greenbelt of 2.6 million people. “Where there is tyranny, poverty and humiliation, it indicates that some have forgotten God, the messages of prophets and people’s love.”

Even with his loan in limbo, Alinejad is a big fan of the president, whose government has drawn criticism among urbane residents of the capital, Tehran, for mismanaging the economy, cracking down on dissent and getting in fights with the West.

“He is perfect in the way he talks to the people,” he said recently. “He tours the country; he has contact with the real people. I admire that a lot. This city has been ignored by every single president, until him.”

But many others here are tired of giving Ahmadinejad the benefit of the doubt.

“People understand that this country has been through a lot, including eight years of war. There were many martyrs, lots of suffering, all that is true. But now we are in the middle of an oil boom. So what is the share of the people?” said Abbas Tabakkal Shahmirzadi, who writes on the economy and social issues for the local newspaper.

“I didn’t bother to go see him, and I don’t think he’s all that popular, personally,” Faramaz Moghimi, a 56-year-old high school physics teacher, said of the president’s visit. “He’s not convincing people that, OK, I’m serious about rebuilding this town.”

Across the country, the government is doling out oil cash as it grapples with more fundamental economic problems stemming from Iran’s international isolation, large numbers of unemployed graduates and steep inflation fueled in part by the government handouts.

Teachers launched protests over low wages in March and April, resulting in hundreds of arrests.

Factory workers have staged similar protests in recent months over unpaid wages, some going back months.

In June, 57 economists issued an open letter warning that “government mismanagement is inflicting a huge cost on the economy,” with the current high oil prices only “delaying the imminent economic crisis.”

“What you need to understand is that every 1% increase in inflation means that 100,000 Iranian people go under the poverty line,” said Saeed Leylaz, a Tehran-based business consultant. “And the most pressure of inflation is not over people in Tehran, it is over the poor people in the provinces. And they are much, much more under pressure than they were two or three years ago.”

In his free-spending trips to the provinces, Leylaz said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad is trying to exchange the oil income of petrodollars into loyalty, in one sentence. But day by day, this is working less and less.”

Ghaemshahr, a city of half a million people about 100 miles northeast of Tehran, was once one of Iran’s most successful industrial towns. Its five textile mills once employed more than 6,000 people in decent-paying jobs, turning out fabrics, uniforms and industrial storage bags that were sold all over Iran.

The city’s troubles long predate Iran’s current government. Like those in failing textile towns around the world, Ghaemshahr’s aging mills found themselves ill-equipped in a globalized world to compete with cheap labor and materials from farther east in Asia. Worse, eight years of war with Iraq in the 1980s saw much of the city’s workforce deployed to the front; afterward, aging skilled workers were often laid off in favor of unskilled war veterans.

In the early years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the government was reluctant to import spare parts from Europe and the U.S. Instead, it insisted on manufacturing inferior replacements inside Iran and, later, on shutting down functioning equipment to provide spare parts for other machines.

Eventually, many of the remaining machines broke down too.Now, only three of the original five factories are still open, and they are producing very little, said Aliasghar Moghaddesi, until recently manager of the Goni Bafi Bag Factory in Ghaemshahr.

“These factories need only two things, I can tell you. One, a healthy management, and two, to be updated,” Moghaddesi said. “But politics and industry cannot be compatible, and slogans from politicians cannot do anything.”

Sitting in his villa on the edge of the city, looking out on the blue-misted foothills of the Alborz Mountains and a lush garden of bitter oranges and figs, Moghaddesi nodded in approval as his gardener shot one of a cluster of marauding magpies and impaled its carcass on a pole, as a warning to the others.

His own factory, he said, fell victim to aging equipment, an increasingly unskilled workforce and the fact that the sturdy jute bags the mill produced for farms all over Iran were undercut by cheaper, more versatile jute- reinforced polyester bags from Bangladesh.

He retired and is supporting his wife and grown children on his pension and savings.

“Two of my children are doing military service. Two of them are university graduates, jobless,” he said.

The Ahmadinejad government announced last year that it was building a $1.3-million technical and vocational training center for women in Ghaemshahr, scheduled to open by 2009.

Such initiatives are welcome here, but many also wonder whether there will be jobs for the women once they graduate.

Zahra Alinia, 30, lives with four of her five brothers at her father’s home in Sayyad Kola, a sleepy village of huts and barns surrounded by emerald rice paddies. Neither she nor her brothers can afford to take a job in town: Renting a house would be too expensive, and bus or taxi fare back and forth also would be prohibitively costly.

“I went in for one of these government loans,” Alinia said. “I intended to get a loan to buy a piece of land or a house, so I could be on my own and earn a living, so as at this age not to have to beg for money from my parents,” she said.

“At the beginning, they said I could have 1 million tomans [about $1,080],” she said. “But when I returned to the bank after two months of red tape, they said no, it will be only half a million tomans.

“And at the beginning, Ahmadinejad said these loans were going to be without interest. But actually, it has 3.5% interest. And the first two installments had to be paid back right away. So at the end of the day, I couldn’t do anything with it, actually.”

She laughed bitterly. “I may one day go and buy a bracelet.”

The president, she said, “only provides empty talk — slogans.”

Her father looked at her sternly. “Ahmadinejad is a good guy,” he interjected. “But his entourage around the administration are not doing his will. They’re not delivering.”

Alinia held her father’s eyes for a long moment. Then he looked away.

Source: The Los Angeles Time

Iran’s Junior National Volleyball Team beat China 3-2 to win the title of 2007 Youth Volleyball World Championship Contests in Mexico. This is the first time Iran has won the title of at any tournaments. Iran won the seminal by defeating France 3-0.

The Shia-led, non-Arab country has not only challenged the United States and its Arab allies throughout the Middle East, but it also has become the biggest beneficiary of U.S. involvement in Iraq, experts say. By eliminating Saddam Hussein — Iran’s sworn enemy — and installing

a Shia-dominated government for the first time in Iraq’s history, the United States strengthened Iran’s clerical regime both in its battle with internal dissidents and in its struggle with Sunni Arab governments.

“Without lifting a finger, the Iranians became the most dominant regional power,” said Diaa Rashwan, a senior researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies in Cairo.

An avowed enemy of Israel and the United States, which accuses Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons, Tehran also has the Sunni-dominated Arab world on edge. Among the concerns: the regional ascendancy of Iran, its nuclear program, its growing influence on the Iraqi leadership and its involvement in other countries with large Shia communities, especially Lebanon.

And the direction of the war in Iraq has heightened the anxiety. “All regimes in the Middle East recognize that America has lost the war in Iraq,” said Marwan Kabalan, a political science professor at Damascus University. “They’re all maneuvering to protect their interests and to gain something out of the American defeat. … Everyone is fighting battles through local proxies. It’s like the Cold War.”

The regional conflict is playing out on three fronts. In Iraq, neighboring Sunni regimes such as Saudi Arabia are backing Sunni militants, while Iran supports Shia militias. In Lebanon, Hezbollah — a Shia militia backed by Iran and its less powerful ally, Syria — has been trying for months to topple a government aligned with Washington and authoritarian Sunni Arab regimes. And in the Palestinian territories, Iran and Syria are supporting Hamas, while the United States and its Arab allies are backing beleaguered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah movement.

“All of the region’s crises are now interconnected, thanks to the war in Iraq,” said Rashwan. “Nothing can be resolved without the Americans finding a way out of Iraq.”

Today, just about anyone associated with the United States is viewed in the Arab world as a traitor, starting with the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. “Even though their leaders are allied with America, Arabs are more angry at America than ever before,” said Mohammad Salah, Cairo bureau chief of Al-Hayat, a pan-Arab newspaper. “They don’t want any more American meddling in the region. … They don’t trust any government that is supported by Washington.”

The Bush administration has become so unpopular in the region that even some of its staunchest allies are trying to publicly distance themselves from it. No Arab regime is closer to Washington than Saudi Arabia, the second largest foreign oil provider to the United States. But at an Arab League summit in March, Saudi King Abdullah for the first time harshly criticized the U.S. military presence in Iraq, calling it an “illegitimate foreign occupation.”

That statement was aimed at appeasing Arab masses angry about the growing bloodshed in Iraq and Arab regimes’ continued alliance with Washington. Abdullah’s comment resonated well in the Arab world, with analysts, newspaper columnists and average citizens praising the kingdom for challenging U.S. policies.

“Saudi Arabia’s rulers view themselves as the rightful leaders of the Muslim world, but Iran is challenging that leadership right now,” said Rashwan. “The Saudis must try to show that they can be independent from America.”

Although Saudi Arabia has a Sunni majority, its rulers fear Iran’s potential influence over a sizable and sometimes-restive Shia population concentrated in the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province. In neighboring Bahrain, another key American ally in the Persian Gulf, the Shia majority is chafing under Sunni rulers, who also fear Iran’s reach.

The Saudis have tried to pursue their own agenda in the Middle East, apart from Washington’s. In February, Abdullah brokered an agreement between Hamas and Fatah for a unity government in the Palestinian territories. By June, the deal collapsed and Hamas took control of Gaza by force, prompting Abbas to dissolve the unity government.

“The traditional powers in the Arab world are working behind the scenes to undermine Iran’s influence,” said Kabalan. “One way they can do that is by showing some progress on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, even if it’s not real progress.”

The Hamas takeover was a victory for Iran, which sent tens of millions of dollars to the militant group since it won Palestinian parliamentary elections in January 2006. “While the Americans and Europeans were trying to isolate Hamas by cutting off all funding to the Palestinians, Iran moved in to help Hamas,” said Salah. “The West gave Iran this opportunity to increase its influence.”

Arab leaders are not worried that Iran will export the cultural and theological aspects of Shiism; rather, analysts say, they’re afraid of political Shiism spreading to the Arab world through groups like Hezbollah. The Shia militia’s strong showing against a far superior Israeli military during last summer’s war in Lebanon has electrified the Arab world, and Hezbollah’s actions offer a stark contrast to Arab rulers cooperating with the United States.

“Iran has been successful in its support of Hezbollah and Hamas,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, an expert on the Shia and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “Arab regimes now fear that their Sunni populations will be seduced by Iran and Hezbollah’s message of challenging the United States and empowering the dispossessed.”

There is a historical precedent for this. The 1979 Islamic Revolution, a popular uprising led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against the U.S.-backed shah, inspired revolutionary zeal among nationalists throughout the Arab world. The revolution’s aftershocks were felt for a long time in the Middle East, helping, indirectly, to give rise to some militant Sunni movements and inspiring Shia communities in Lebanon and Iraq. Nowhere was that influence more deeply felt than in Lebanon, where Iran helped create Hezbollah after the Israeli invasion of 1982.

Fearful of this new challenge from Shias to become the torch-bearers of Arab nationalism, the Saudis are trying to reassert their role as leaders of the Arab and wider Muslim world. In his speech at the Arab summit, Abdullah insisted that only when Arab leaders unite will they “be able to prevent foreign powers from shaping the region’s future” - a reference to both the United States and Iran.

“The Middle East is at a historical juncture,” said Rashwan. “It’s not simply the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but events in Iraq and Iran that will have a profound impact on the future of the Arab world.”

Q&A

What are the historical roots of the split between the major sects of Islam (Sunni and Shia)?

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, there was a dispute about who should succeed him as leader (or caliph) of the Muslim community. One faction (which later became the Sunnis) argued that the prophet’s closest companion, Abu Bakr, should become caliph. Another faction (which became the Shias) argued that succession should be hereditary and that the most fitting successor was the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali. They argued that Muhammad had designated Ali to succeed him. Ultimately, Abu Bakr was chosen as caliph by a vote of Muslim leaders.

In 656, Ali became the fourth caliph of Islam. Shortly afterward, a civil war broke out among Muslim factions and Ali restored order by reaching a compromise with his enemies. That infuriated some of his most hardline supporters. In 661, as he prayed in a mosque near the Iraqi city of Kufa, Ali was assassinated by a former follower. He was the first of 12 Shia imams, or successors to Muhammad, whom Shia believers regard as divinely motivated and infallible (although they do not view them as prophets).

Nineteen years after Ali’s death, two of his sons, Hussein and Abbas, were killed in battle in the Iraqi city of Karbala. The violent deaths of Ali and his sons became the defining factor in the split between Shia and Sunni sects. They also made martyrdom one of the most important tenets of Shiism.

What are the differences between the sects?

The distinctions between Shia and Sunni Islam are similar to those between Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity, involving style of ritual and philosophical orientation rather than fundamental pillars of faith. Both sects follow Islam’s five basic pillars: the profession of faith in God, daily prayers, giving alms, fasting during the holy month of Ramadan and making a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca at least once in a lifetime.

Sunnis and Shias follow different schools of Islamic law, which deal with marriage, divorce and rules of inheritance. The Shia clergy is more hierarchical, and Shias generally choose an ayatollah to emulate.

What are the sources of modern conflict between the two sects?

Today, the vast majority (about 85 percent) of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims are Sunnis. The rest are Shias, with under 1 percent comprising smaller sects.

In some countries - Iran, Iraq and Bahrain - Shia are a majority. In Lebanon, they are the largest sect, making up about 40 percent of the population. In several oil-rich Persian Gulf countries - notably Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - the Shia are a sizable minority ruled by the Sunni majority.

Many Sunnis criticize the Shia for developing rituals not mentioned in the Quran or Sunnah, a collection of the sayings and actions of Muhammad. These rituals include veneration of Shia imams, frequent pilgrimages to Shia shrines and slight variations in daily prayers. In many countries, the conflict between Sunnis and Shias is largely over political power. In Iraq, for example, the Shia majority was suppressed during Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated rule. While the majority of Sunnis accept Shias as Muslims, some extremist Sunnis regard them as heretics who should be killed.

 by Mohamad Bazzi, The Newsday

French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned Monday that it would be “catastrophic” to resort to military force in confronting Iran over its suspect nuclear program. “For me, Iran having a nuclear weapon is unacceptable,” Sarkozy said in his first major address on foreign policy, but he stressed that he opposed an attack on the Islamic regime and urged that the West rely on diplomacy.

He said Iran can choose between dialogue with the international community or more U.N. sanctions. “This tactic is the only one that allows us to escape from a catastrophic alternative: an Iranian bomb, or the bombing of Iran,” he said. Sarkozy also said Iran is entitled to use nuclear power for civilian needs, such as generating electricity. If countries like Iran run out of fossil fuels, and “if they don’t have the right to the energy of the future, then we will create conditions of misery and underdevelopment, and therefore an explosion of terrorism,” Sarkozy said. In other areas, the new president signaled a shift in tone from his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, casting himself as a “friend of Israel” and taking a tougher line on Russia and China. But despite his admiration for the United States, Sarkozy said Chirac was right to oppose the war in Iraq, which he called a mistake. Sarkozy took over from fellow conservative Chirac in May pledging to boost France’s international stature. The energetic new leader quickly scored a few high-profile diplomatic coups, such as helping secure freedom for six Bulgarian medical workers jailed in Libya for nine years on charges of deliberately infecting children with AIDS. Yet the sdiplomatic agenda he outlined Monday was relatively modest. He proposed, for example, a committee of great minds to reflect on the future of the European Union — an unassuming proposal for the EU, which Sarkozy nonetheless called France’s “absolute priority.”

He also eased his opposition to Turkey’s bid for membership in the EU, which he previously vowed to block. On Monday, Sarkozy said he would not oppose new talks with the Muslim state, while adding the discussions should examine the idea of a weaker alliance than membership. “A few months after taking the presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy is realizing that he has limited room for maneuvering,” said Philippe Moreau-Defarges of the French Institute for International Relations. Sarkozy’s tough language about China and Russia set him apart from Chirac, who was often criticized for too-cozy ties with authoritarian leaders. Sarkozy warned Russia against exercising its energy exports with “brutality.” And he said China was “transforming its insatiable quest for raw materials into a strategy of control, notably in Africa.” While France has a history of close ties with the Arab world, Sarkozy said: “I have the reputation of being a friend of Israel, and it’s true. I will never compromise on Israel’s security.” Despite that, he said, the many Arab leaders who have visited him since his election know they can count on his friendship. Sarkozy, who spent his summer holiday in New England and whose affection for the U.S. earned him the nickname “Sarko the American,” sent his foreign minister to Iraq last week to smooth over ties that were strained when Chirac opposed the U.S.-led invasion. But friendly relations do not mean there cannot be differences of opinion, Sarkozy said Monday. “France was, and still is, hostile to the war,” he said, calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops.

Though he criticized the U.S. over Iraq, Sarkozy showed his commitment to the security effort in Afghanistan by pledging more troops to train the Afghan army — following months of speculation about France’s commitment to that international force. Closer to home, Sarkozy reiterated his proposal for a “Mediterranean Union” to bridge the divide between Europe and North Africa. The idea echoes a concept dear to Chirac, who called for a “dialogue of cultures” to counteract the forces of extremism. Francois Heisbourg, a leading expert on French strategic and foreign policy, said that even when Sarkozy was sending a message of continuity, his style differed dramatically from Chirac’s oratory flourishes. Sarkozy is “clear talk — no punches pulled, no dancing around words. This was very deliberate,” Heisbourg said. “It’s a message to the Iranians, but it’s also a message to the Russians and the Chinese — that is, that if you want us to have a serious chance to try to avoid getting … into this awful alternative, you’d better be serious in the Security Council.” Source: The Associated Press

THE head of Iran’s judiciary is a confident man. Despite foreign attempts at slander, Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi recently declared, his country has presented a fine image to the world of Islamic law at work.

If news were limited to such mercies as the recent release, on bail, of Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old Iranian-American academic, after six months in jail on charges of espionage, or the amnesty granted to 4,000 other prisoners on the occasion of the birthday on August 20th of Imam Hussein, a revered Shia martyr, Mr Shahrudi’s confidence might be justified. But these welcome developments come against a darkening backdrop, as the administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intensifies a campaign to reimpose the moral fervour, and xenophobic zeal, of the 1979 Islamic revolution’s early years.

The rest of the world may be more concerned about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But for many Iranians, the issue that has begun to outweigh other troubles, such as poverty, unemployment and the danger of war with America, is human rights.

This is not surprising. Recent months have seen the largest crackdown on civil liberties since the 1980s. Purges of suspected liberals have decimated university faculties, and repeated closures have all but silenced the once-vociferous opposition press. Ms Esfandiari was the best-known of four Iranian-American scholars incarcerated earlier this year for alleged ties to American intelligence. Her colleagues remain in prison. But since the spring a wave of arrests has targeted everyone from women’s-rights advocates to student leaders, trade unionists and critical journalists, packing the country’s prisons so tight that police are commandeering other buildings as makeshift lock-ups.

Political activists are not the only ones at risk. Security officials boast that their campaign against “bad hijab”, which includes the warning, booking or detaining of women deemed insufficiently clad, but extends also to youths sporting “Western-style” haircuts, rock-music fans, shopkeepers selling indecent garments, and unmarried couples, has alone netted more than 500,000 offenders since April. And unlike previous dress-code enforcements, which tended to relax after a few weeks, this one appears to be growing stricter. Signs have appeared outside public hospitals declaring that only women wearing the head-to-floor chador, and not merely the headscarf, will be helped.

As much as the scale of the crackdown, its severity is raising eyebrows. Much of the police action has been accompanied by complaints of brutality, and in many cases by documentary evidence such as graphic footage of beatings, posted on dissident websites. Despite prison crowding, punitive use of solitary confinement appears to have grown more common. The number of executions nearly doubled last year, to 177, bringing Iran the unsavoury distinction of being the world’s heaviest user of capital punishment per head of population. This year has seen not only a further jump in the number of judicial killings but a return of mass public hangings, which are sometimes broadcast on state television.

Such harsher treatment, say rights activists, is partly a product of the paranoid atmosphere generated by a government that has deliberately associated any form of civil disobedience with alleged foreign plots. Recent remarks by the country’s chief of police made this link explicit. Once they had dealt with “propagators of moral decay”, he said, his forces would turn their attention to those who “theorise on corruption”, such as critics whom he tied to foreign conspiracies aimed at a “soft overthrow” of the Islamic Republic.

The dissent within

But foreign spies and decadent liberals are not the regime’s only critics. Mr Shahrudi, the chief judge, has himself voiced dismay over the government’s policies. In July he condemned the stoning to death of a man accused of adultery, and sponsored this month’s mass amnesty in what was seen as a sign of discomfort with police excess. He has also joined a broad range of former officials, economists, oil executives and businessmen in attacking Mr Ahmadinejad’s erratically autocratic economic policies, which have included forcing banks to slash interest rates, splurging on costly infrastructure projects and replacing respected technocrats with cronies.

Many establishment figures agree that, rather than American bluster, it is these policies that endanger the country. To paraphrase Mr Shahrudi in a recent interview, if Iran wishes its revolution to be a model, a good start would be to get its economy in order. Another way might be to treat its people better.

Source: Economist

On many early mornings in Tehran, my uncle Ali would bang on our door to deliver large heaps of mammoth mushrooms from the mountain of Shemiran. Every summer and early autumn when I saw thunderstorms gathering in the sky, I knew we would have giant bunches of wild, tasty mushrooms the following day. My uncle believed that the storms pushed the mushrooms up from beneath the mountain’s numerous stones. Mushroom hunters like Ali would wake up early the next morning to go after those fresh, juicy mushrooms and cut off their heads.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Jordan Awan As a journalist and writer in Iran, I have often compared myself, and many of my colleagues and friends at other Iranian newspapers, to those mushrooms. In 1992, when I started working in Tehran, I was very careful about what I would report. That is, until right after the election of Mohammad Khatami, the reformist president, in 1997. Then I, like so many other journalists, quickly went to work for the country’s leading reformist papers. Moderate clerics began using those newspapers as conduits for challenging religion-based laws, like the restrictive dress code and death by stoning. President Khatami brought reform to the political system and exposed the involvement of Iranian intelligence agents in the murder of a number of intellectuals. Every day, Iranian journalists, with the encouragement of the Iranian people, disclosed news or challenged the system. We trusted that the changes that had come about would remain and that we would be protected by the government we had elected.

The last newspaper I worked for in Iran — Zan — was closed by the judiciary in the spring of 1999. I was in the United States at that time, and as soon as I returned to Tehran, I was arrested. The government held me in solitary confinement for three months, and during that time I confessed to crimes I never committed and did whatever a human being could do to save his or her life. I now wonder if all the opportunities we had seen for reform were really illusions created to trick us. Did the Iranian government encourage a fleeting era of reform in order to identify its opponents so as to come after them? Was President Khatami’s election the thunderstorm that ultimately allowed the government to hunt us down? This storm drowned not only us but also those expatriate Iranian intellectuals and scholars who had begun to visit Iran again after President Khatami traveled abroad with his famous message of “Iran for all Iranians.” Many academics started to travel back and forth to Iran after this historic announcement. But recently some of them have been arrested too.

Ramin Jahanbegloo, who is an Iranian-Canadian scholar, spent four months in an Iranian prison last year. He “confessed” on Iran’s national public media that at conferences outside Iran he “got acquainted with” many Americans and Israelis, some of whom were “intelligence figures.” Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photographer, died under interrogation while in detention in Tehran. And, of course, Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American academic who directs the Middle East program at the Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, spent more than 100 days in Evin Prison before being released on bail on Tuesday. She, too, made a statement on television, which Iranian officials cast as an admission that she was associated with a “velvet revolution” against the regime in Tehran. The situation in which Dr. Esfandiari finds herself today is the same one that has repeatedly been endured by Iranian citizens who have dared to think differently and who have sought to progressively influence the country’s youth. The message being sent to Iranian scholars abroad is the same one being given to intellectuals at home: “You are not welcome here anymore.”

Those who have had a taste of Iran’s jails and interrogation — including scholars and writers of my generation who work for reformist media in Iran, and the British sailors who were recently detained by the government — know what I am talking about. They, too, have endured psychological torture and false charges. In prison, all you have left is to pray for your freedom so that you can leave the country for good and never return. This is what the regime really wants: for any writers, scholars or academics who could have some sort of intellectual influence over the Iranian people to leave Iran for good and be too afraid to return. It is still not clear whether Ms. Esfandiari will be allowed to leave Iran soon. I would not be surprised if she is now promising herself to never visit her mother or her homeland again, and to advise other Iranians to do the same.

Source: New York Times

Camelia Entekhabifard is the author of “Camelia: Save Yourself by Telling the Truth — a Memoir of Iran.”

William D. Hartung of the Nation writes under the guise of promoting a “security dialogue” in the Persian Gulf, the Bush Administration has proposed $63 billion in arms transfers to the Middle East over the next ten years. As is so often the case, team Bush seems to prefer to let the weapons do the talking, even when it claims to be engaging in diplomacy. The foundation of the deal is a pledge to sell $20 billion worth of high-tech arms to Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing states in the Gulf.

Items in the package reportedly include upgrades to Riyadh’s US-supplied fighter planes, satellite-guided bombs and combat ships. To ease any concerns about the Gulf buildup, the plan calls for increasing military aid to Israel and Egypt to $3 billion and $1.3 billion per year, respectively. That’s $43 billion in US taxpayer support over the next decade.

Why pour more weapons into the region now? The principal rationale appears to be to send a message to Iran that it must bend to US pressure to end its nuclear program, stop the flow of Iranian weapons to Iraqi insurgents and cease its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Otherwise, the argument goes, not only will Tehran face the prospect of US military action but it will also be surrounded by neighbors armed with top-of-the-line US weaponry. The arms package will be seen as even more provocative by Iran in light of the latest move in the Bush Administration’s campaign to turn up the pressure on the regime: the recent decision to label its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization.

Threatening Iran with military strikes and arms sales to potential adversaries is more likely to spur Tehran to add to its own arsenal while being less open to talks on its nuclear program. If the Bush Administration is looking for a new designated enemy to stand in for the late Saddam Hussein, this approach will work just fine. But if it wants to solve the security problems of the region, it would be hard to come up with a more counterproductive policy.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have tried to paper over the real intent of the deal by arguing that it will promote “stability” by bolstering moderate regimes. This is a strange assertion, especially as regards Saudi Arabia. Not only are funds from Saudi sources supporting insurgents in Iraq, but they are financing Islamic extremism around the world. The Saudis also operate one of the most repressive regimes on the planet, in direct contradiction of the Administration’s continuing claims to be promoting democracy. The State Department’s latest human rights report on Saudi Arabia contains this upbeat passage: “Religious police harassed, abused and detained citizens and foreigners of both sexes.” The most recent Human Rights Watch Saudi report points out that “the government undertook no major human rights reforms in 2006, and there were signs of backsliding in issues of human rights defenders, freedom of association, and freedom of expression.” Sending more weapons will not reverse these trends, which does not bode well for long-term stability in the Saudi kingdom.

In Egypt, decades of US aid have had no positive impact on human rights or democracy. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak runs a quasi-Stalinist regime that won 88 percent of the vote in the last national elections while jailing numerous democracy advocates. As the State Department has acknowledged, torture is still widely practiced in Egyptian prisons, while Cairo’s overall human rights record is described as “poor.” Rewarding the Egyptian government with an increase in US military aid is tantamount to condoning these repressive practices–practices that are producing a popular backlash that could eventually lead to the end of the regime. If that happens, whatever government comes to power next will inherit huge stockpiles of US-supplied weaponry.

As for Israel, more military aid is the last thing it needs. In recent times Tel Aviv has used its military in ways that have undermined its own security as well as that of its neighbors. From the ongoing attacks on Gaza to last summer’s invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli government has unintentionally offered aid and comfort to hard-line forces, both among the Palestinians and in Lebanon. Israel has plenty of weapons; what it needs is a return to genuine diplomacy, ideally prodded by its closest ally, Washington.

Sixty years of arms racing has repeatedly undermined prospects for Middle East peace. Why should this latest round be any different? The only clear beneficiaries of this mega-deal will be US arms makers. Already gorging on expenditures for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, companies like Boeing, General Electric and General Dynamics can anticipate ten years of lucrative foreign sales if the deal goes forward. The arms lobby can be expected to vigorously support the deal if it is challenged on Capitol Hill.

Thankfully, there has been early opposition in Congress. Representative Anthony Weiner has pulled together a group of 114 House members opposed to the deal. Now the foreign affairs committee chairs in the House and Senate, Representative Tom Lantos and Senator Joe Biden, need to move from skepticism to opposition. They should hold hearings as soon as Congress comes back in September. And Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama need to join their rival John Edwards in roundly denouncing the deal. If there is a significant public debate about its likely impacts, it won’t withstand even minimal scrutiny.

Mideast stability can’t be promoted with arms, any more than democracy can be imposed through the barrel of a gun. Stopping or scaling back the Bush Administration’s Mideast arms package would be a step toward learning this lesson.

Police in Tehran have closed two dozen barbers and hairdressers in a fortnight in the latest phase of a “morals” crackdown aimed at enforcing Islamic dress codes among young Iranians. The businesses were shut after being identified as purveyors of decadent “western” culture. Eleven women’s hairstylists were told to stop trading for offering tattoos. Tattooed eyebrows - in which the hair is shaved and replaced with elaborate patterns - are popular with many young Iranian women.

One women’s salon was shut when authorities discovered one of its employees was a man. It is against Iran’s Islamic law for men to work in women’s salons. A further 13 barbers were closed for giving customers excessively eye-catching haircuts and plucking men’s eyebrows. Many young Iranian men wear their hair in a gelled-up bouffant that would look outlandish even in some western countries. The closures were imposed by Amaken-e Omoomi, a police body for regulating businesses such as shops, restaurants and hotels, after it inspected more than 730 hairdressers in Tehran. They follow a concerted summer campaign to stamp out widespread flouting of Iran’s Islamic dress code by younger people. Since last May, thousands of women have been arrested or warned for wearing hijab - or headscarves - that reveal too much hair.

Women have also been detained for wearing overcoats deemed too figure-hugging and for short trousers that reveal too much skin. Police officers have been deployed in Tehran and other cities to identify transgressors. The arrested men have been forced to identify their barbers and get fresh haircuts. They have then had to return to police stations for officers to decide whether their hairstyles are acceptable. Mohammad Ali Najafi, head of Amaken-e Omoomi, told Fars news agency that police officers would accompany trade inspectors in future visits to barbers and hairdressers. Those breaking the law would be closed immediately, he said. The morals clampdown has come amid a broader law-and-order offensive which the government says is aimed at increasing “social security”. Large numbers of “thugs” and “hooligans” have been arrested in police raids.

The campaign has coincided with a crackdown on political dissent that has seen the arrests of academics, students and women’s rights activists. Officials have accused those arrested of fomenting a “soft revolution” against the Islamic regime. In the past five weeks, more than 30 offenders have been hanged - some publicly - for crimes including murder, rape, armed robbery and drug trafficking.

Source: Guardian

Somalia, 1993: During the darkest days of the American military intervention, when US troops were taking casualties from drug-addled gunmen wearing flip-flops, US officials pointed to a familiar nemesis. It was Iran, warned Madeleine Albright, then-US envoy to the United Nations,

 that had forged a “tactical alliance” with a Somali warlord and “terrorists” in Sudan. Intelligence sources for the first time spoke of smuggled Iranian weapons. In Mogadishu, journalists were told that Iranian agents were training Somalis to make car bombs. But no proof was ever presented.

US charges against Iran’s role in Iraq are mounting. But analysts say that a history of unsubstantiated US claims against Iran should serve as a cautionary tale. The lesson to be drawn is not that Iran is guiltless in Iraq, they say, but one of restraint as a familiar drumbeat sounds.

The latest step in the Bush administration’s intensifying campaign to depict Iran as a disruptive force in Iraq is a decision to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard force a “terrorist” group. That label, and a push for more UN sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, and continued charges of training, funding, and supplying anti-US militants in Iraq, experts say, could harm Iraq security talks between US and Iranian diplomats in Baghdad.

“The Americans are blaming Iran for everything that goes wrong, even if it’s not Iran’s fault, and Iran does the same with the US,” says Trita Parsi, the Washington-based author of the forthcoming “Treacherous Alliance: Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US.”

“Decisionmakers in Washington are by-the-minute limiting their own maneuverability in how to deal with Iran, [thereby] making it more difficult to put the relationship on a positive track,” he says.

The US case against Iran

This week, the US commander of central Iraq claimed that 50 officers of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Qods Force were in Iraq, training militants.

Top US officers also charged this month that lethal roadside bombs called explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) from Iran were used in 99 attacks in July and caused one-third of US combat deaths, an “all-time high,” Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, deputy US commander in Iraq, told The New York Times.

General Odierno claimed the “Iranians are surging support” to Iranian-trained cells to influence US decisions about the Baghdad troop surge. “Over the past three to four months, [Iran's support] has picked up in terms of equipment, training and dollars,” Odierno told the Times.

Some US charges appear to stick. US forces earlier this month captured homemade video of preparations for two Shiite militant attacks on a US base southeast of Baghdad on July 11 and Aug. 5. The footage showed 50 fresh-from-the-box 107-mm rockets being lined up on metal stands in daylight, to fire upon the base.

Intelligence officers told Fox News that there was “no doubt” the rockets – still with some packing grease and English lettering for export, the year 2006, and color-coded – were made in Iran. How they got to Iraq, and carried by whom, they could not say. Fourteen of those rockets were fired at the base, killing one soldier; 36 others were found primed, but their timers failed. Three more larger rockets were fired Aug. 5.

Still, other charges have not stuck and some have been retracted. US intelligence sources claimed in Baghdad in February, for example, that the sophisticated manufacture of EFP parts led them to believe that they could only have been made in Iran and that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would almost certainly have been aware of it.

Shortly afterwards the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Peter Pace, said that he could not confirm that Iran’s government “clearly knows or is complicit.” US forces have also raided numerous EFP workshops inside Iraq and found such explosives ; they are often used in the oil industry.

Likewise, initial speculation by US officials pointed to “Iranian-trained operatives” in a January attack in Karbala, in which militants dressed as US soldiers and speaking English drove into a US base, kidnapped US troops, and killed five. Months later, the top US general in Iraq denied finding any tie to Iran.

Still, headlines linking Iran to the Karbala killings emerged again in early July, after a US general said that two captured operatives, a Lebanese Hizbullah member, and an Iraqi group leader, said that Iran’s Qods Force “knew of and supported planning” for the attack. But in late July, Time magazine reported – based on an internal US Army investigation and interviews with US and Iraqi witnesses – that details “suggest” an inside job by the Iraqi police.

The result of this buildup of US allegations of Iranian involvement in Iraq could also prove to be a prelude to war: “If you can make the case that Iranians are actually killing Americans, that makes it extremely difficult for those opponents of military action to depict the administration as warmongering,” adds Parsi, also the head of the National Iranian American Council.

Iranian officials deny undermining US efforts in Iraq, though senior officers note that US forces throughout the Gulf and in Iraq and Afghanistan are often within Iranian missile range. Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi vowed this week that “America will receive a heavier punch from the guards in the future.”

Some hard-liners in Iran, who today exert strong influence over every power center in the Islamic Republic, welcome the steady drumbeat from Washington as proof of US ill intent, says Hadi Semati, a political scientist in Tehran.

“I haven’t seen this level before [of] a systematic [US] propaganda campaign, partly disinformation, partly probably true, but exaggerating it … to blame Iran for everything,” says Mr. Semati, who recently spent three years at think tanks in Washington. “It reinforces the idea that people have in this town [Tehran] that any discussions on Iraq are purely tactical, and that the Americans are not serious.”

The Iraq effort “is already a failure,” says Semati. “Blaming Iran serves a purpose of partially, or even mostly, from the perspective of hard-liners in Washington, making the situation look better.”

The Halabja example

Such episodes echo past hostile US-Iran allegations, as in Somalia, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Few examples are as clear-cut as that of Halabja, the Kurdish town in northern Iraq gassed by Saddam Hussein’s troops in 1988 in a strike that left up to 5,000 civilians dead.

Iraq increasingly received the backing of the US and the West in its 1980s war against Iran. So US officials, to cast doubt that Iraq was solely responsible for such a war crime, began suggesting that Iran was also to blame.

“There is a rush to judgment [against Iran today], and this should be questioned, given the past and the outright dissembling that occurred [in 1988] when it was convenient to accuse the Iranians because the American ally Iraq was doing something totally embarrassing to the Reagan administration,” says Joost Hiltermann, author of the recently published “A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja.”

“These people have learned the lesson that this kind of lying works and will do it again,” says Mr. Hiltermann, the Istanbul-based Middle East director for the International Crisis Group.

The charge against Iran took root so effectively in the media – this newspaper also published notable, unattributed examples of “good intelligence” that cited Iran’s role – that until recently, references to the “Iraqi” gassing of Halabja yielded letters of complaint from readers, pointing out the Iranian role, and offering US government documents as proof.

The Halabja case suggests “an exceptional attempt at naked deception,” says Hiltermann in his study, noting that 18 tons of Iraqi secret police and intelligence documents seized in northern Iraq in 1991 make frequent reference to Iraqi use of chemical weapons, but none about any chemical use by Iran.

Growing antipathy toward Iran

If anything, the level of antipathy toward Iran is higher today than two decades ago.

“We are confronting Iranian behavior across a variety of different fronts on a number of ‘battlefields,’ if you will,” US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said last week. “We confront them on the ground in Iraq. Our military is doing that. We are confronting Iran diplomatically … with respect to their nuclear program.”

“This administration has a track record of doing what it thinks is right, and doing it regardless [of the facts]…. The debate is far less about ‘Can it be true?’ or ‘Can it not be true?’ ” says Parsi. The bigger picture, he says, is a regional power struggle between a strengthening Iran and an America weakened by debacle in Iraq.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor