In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August.
One afternoon early in May this year, a Kafkaesque drama unfolded in the normally placid east Tehran suburb of Seyed Khandan Bridge. Four burly men in plain clothes entered a block of flats, telling residents that they were police officers pursuing an armed robber.
They went to the first-floor flat of Shamsolmoluk Tajik and banged on the door, forcing their way in by violently barging her aside when she answered. They were looking for her nephew Ehsan Mansouri, who often stayed with her. They ransacked the house and scoured the cellars, but Mansouri was not there. So the men left with Tajik, who was by this time screaming hysterically to attract her neighbours’ attention.
They pushed the terrified woman into a waiting car and drove away, but stopped when they spotted their quarry, Mansouri, walking along the street. Seeing the men jumping from the car, Mansouri tried to make a run for it. A gunshot rang out, prompting the fleeing man to look back and see one of his pursuers training his gun on him. Fearing he was going to be shot, Mansouri decided to surrender and lay on the ground. Seconds later, the chasing pack pounced and started beating him mercilessly around the head and neck with rubber batons.
Releasing Tajik, the gang handcuffed Mansouri, bundled him into the back of the car and continued assaulting him. They took him to Evin prison, a sprawling and intimidating facility in northwest Tehran. When they arrived, Mansouri was bleeding so profusely that prison authorities refused to admit him. They eventually relented only on the condition that Mansouri would be examined by a doctor, who would then submit a document listing his injuries to those who had delivered him for their signatures.
The incident showed how ruthless Iran’s security forces could be in pursuit of a wanted man. But Mansouri was no armed robber. He was a 22-year-old mathematics student at Amirkabir University, one of Iran’s most prestigious seats of higher learning. What had he done to be hunted down so brutally and subjected to such a fearful battering?
The arrest of Mansouri, a prominent student activist, was precipitated by the circulation of four campus publications containing blasphemous references and insulting commentaries on Iran’s Islamic system. These included the incendiary statement that neither the Prophet Mohammad nor Imam Ali, the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law who is the most revered figure in the Shi’ite branch of Islam practised by Iran, were ‘innocent’. It also argued that no figure in today’s Iran - including its supreme leader, a figure normally regarded as above public criticism - should be considered ’sacred’. One publication asserted that the highest number of prostitutes in Iran could be found in Qom, an emblematic shrine city on the edge of the central Kavir Desert that is home to the country’s religious establishment.
In the cloying religious atmosphere of Iran’s ruling theocracy, making such statements can be almost suicidal. Mansouri was one of eight students arrested over the affair. Five were subsequently released. He remains in custody along with two of the others arrested, Majid Tavakoli and Ahmad Ghasaban. Relatives of the three say they have been tortured while in detention in an effort to extract confessions.
A close associate of the men told me they had undergone marathon interrogation sessions lasting up to 48 hours and frequently involving severe beatings. Interrogation teams of up to eight men have subjected the students to physical assaults interspersed with insults and psychological abuse. The students have been made to lie on the floor while interrogators stood on their backs. They are also said to have been beaten with electric cables. When they fainted from stress, the interrogators revived them by throwing cold water over them. Parents of the students have detailed the allegations in a letter to Iran’s judiciary chief, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi.
The men’s families and friends insist that the publications were forgeries produced as a pretext for arresting them as prominent members of Amirkabir’s Islamic Students Committee, which plays a leading role among Iran’s student activist movement. ‘The government wanted to confront the Islamic Students Committee in such a way that other student bodies around the country would be intimidated,’ one activist says. ‘As they couldn’t find any other excuse they produced these publications with the help of the student Basij [a pro-regime volunteer militia]. As soon as we got wind of the publications, we told everyone that they were fakes. They even found four scanned copies of the publications’ logos inside the briefcase of a Basij student.’
It is not an isolated case. Dozens of Amirkabir activists have been expelled, suspended or put forward for compulsory military service in what students say is a concerted government campaign.
It has been instigated, they believe, by Iran’s conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in revenge for a humiliating episode at the university last December, when pro-democracy students staged an audacious and unprecedented challenge to his authority.
The event coincided with one of Ahmadinejad’s most bitterly controversial initiatives, a ’scientific’ conference questioning the Holocaust staged at the foreign ministry’s political and international studies institute in north Tehran. Rather than attend the birth of his own brainchild, however, the president chose that day to visit the Amirkabir campus near the city centre.
It was, in its own way, as provocative a move as holding the Holocaust conference.
The university, commonly known as the polytechnic, has been historically renowned as a hotbed of pro-democratic protest. The secular convictions of its student activists are far removed from Ahmadinejad’s messianic religious beliefs. Many of them were already angry over a series of government-sponsored restrictions, including a stringent disciplinary code, limitations on inter-gender mingling and the demolition of student representative buildings. The president’s visit appeared to show he had neutralised his critics.
The plan began to backfire as he addressed a gathering of Basij students in the sports hall. Dozens of anti-government activists forced their way in and drowned out his speech by chanting ‘Death to the Dictator’. In a characteristically Iranian put-down, they held Ahmadinejad portraits upside down and set them alight. One student displayed a banner reading: ‘Fascist president, the polytechnic is not for you.’
The interruption provoked a furious melee in which punches were thrown and a shoe was hurled at the bemused president. Ahmadinejad was forced to cut his speech short and as he hurriedly left the campus, a member of his security detail fired a stun grenade to disperse angry activists attempting to follow him.
It was a stunning reversal for a politician accustomed to basking in mass audience acclaim during the nationwide roadshows that had become his political trademark. Eye-witnesses described him as looking bewildered and close to tears as the upheaval unfolded. Yet amidst it all, he issued one riposte of lasting resonance. ‘Everyone knows the real dictator is America and its servants,’ he shouted in response to the ‘dictator’ chants. Those present recall him accusing his hecklers of being paid agents of America and warning that they would be confronted.
That response may come to be regarded as one of the most telling moments of Ahmadinejad’s presidency. In the months since, a preoccupation with alleged US plots to topple the Islamic regime has been at the forefront of the government’s agenda. It has also provided the rationale for an intensifying atmosphere of social and political repression, which had been relatively mild in the first 18 months after Ahmadinejad’s election in June 2005.
Less than three weeks after the Amirkabir episode, masked men armed with knives hijacked the car carrying Haleh Esfandiari to Tehran’s Mehrabad airport and stole her bags, along with her US and Iranian passports. The event marked the beginning of a long ordeal for Esfandiari, 67, an Iranian-born scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank, who had returned to Tehran to visit her ailing 93-year-old mother. Esfandiari was placed under virtual house arrest and repeatedly interrogated until May, when she was formally arrested and detained in Evin prison. She was subsequently charged with espionage and endangering national security. This month she returned to the US after being released on bail following three and a half months in solitary confinement.
Esfandiari’s treatment mirrors that of two other US-Iranian academics. Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planner with the New York-based Soros Open Society Institute, faced identical charges after being arrested in May, though he too was released this month on bail. Also in jail is Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California at Irvine, who is still being investigated.
Government officials justified the arrests by referring to the Bush administration’s openly stated desire for regime change in Iran and pointed to $75m of annual US state department funding for pro-democracy projects in the country. Most of the money is allocated for American-backed Farsi language broadcasts, in the form of Voice of America satellite news channel and Radio Farda, which both broadcast into Iran. But the US has not disclosed where the rest goes.
Iran claims it is being used to construct a ‘civil society’ network - consisting of students, women’s activists, trade unionists and so on - that will press for fundamental change to the political system. Officials believe academics are playing a pivotal role in these alleged networks. The final goal, the Iranians claim, is to overthrow the regime in western-backed ’soft’ or ‘velvet’ revolutions like those witnessed in former Soviet states like Ukraine and Georgia. To ram home the point, state television in July screened ‘confessions’ from Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh in a two-part programme, In The Name of Democracy, in which their testimony was interspersed with extensive footage from such revolutions.
The ’soft’ revolution allegation is distinctive for being the only external security threat given credibility in Tehran. While speculation about a US or Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear installations and other facilities has reached fever pitch in the west over recent weeks, in Iran the possibility is publicly dismissed. Senior figures, including Ahmadinejad, confidently assert that American forces are too bogged down in Iraq for the White House to contemplate attacking Iran. Having given up the idea of toppling the regime through military action, the official narrative goes, the US is trying to destabilise it by stealth. It is unclear if this sanguine assessment of American military capabilities is a bluff intended to maintain domestic calm.
Virtually all Iranian activists deny receiving US money. ‘I can tell you that we have not received any of the $75m. We don’t hope for it and we’re not looking for it,’ Abdollah Momeni, spokesman for the anti-regime students’ alumni association, told me earlier this summer. ‘Allocating such a budget can only give the government a pretext to crack down on opposition groups even harder.’
Days after our conversation, Momeni was arrested during a police raid on his office. His family say he was beaten during detention.
Official intolerance has extended to women’s rights groups, already confronting a panoply of discrimination. In July, a revolutionary court sentenced Delaram Ali, 24, to 10 lashes and three years and three months in prison. Ali was among the organisers of a protest rally in Tehran’s Haft-e Tir Square in June of last year that was violently broken up by police. She is also a leader of the One Million Signature campaign, a mass petition demanding an end to a wide range of inequalities against women, including laws depriving them of child custody rights after divorce and entitling them to only half the inheritance and compensation rights due to men. Ali, who has appealed, was so stunned by her sentence that she initially thought it was a mistake. ‘When I read the verdict, I started searching for the word “suspended”,’ she says. ‘It was only later, when I saw others getting similar punishments, that I realised it wasn’t just me.’
Those unfortunates who are arrested after attracting the authorities’ suspicion are taken to Evin prison’s Section 209, reserved for political detainees and supervised exclusively by the intelligence ministry.
Descriptions of the block echo the opening scene of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, The First Circle, when it describes how the central character is subjected to disorientating techniques in a KGB interrogation centre. Former inmates describe being guided blindfold through a labyrinthine network of corridors, and repeatedly ordered to turn left and right and to duck their heads to pass through low doorways. ‘They try to lead you through long corridors so you lose all idea of the dimensions of the building,’ Mohammad Hashemi, 25, secretary of Tahkim-e Vahdat, a student group, tells me. ‘But you never know if they are leading you in a circle or if the turns are genuine. I tried to memorise the route and when I was led through again, I remembered at one point thinking, this is the spot where I should lower my head. But the guide never said anything the second time and we just passed through.’
Suspects are allowed to remove their blindfolds only inside their tiny cells, which are typically six square metres, although some are smaller. The cells have no beds or mattresses and the light is switched on constantly, making sleep difficult. The only reading material permitted is the Koran. All inmates are held in solitary confinement. Many describe it as a crushing ordeal that makes them question their self-worth and previous actions. ‘Solitary confinement in itself is a torture,’ says Hashemi, who underwent 27 days of it after participating in a protest outside Amirkabir University.
The authorities are usually unapologetic about such techniques. But the allegations of abuses committed against Mansouri, Tavakoli and Ghasaban - the three students accused of distributing the insulting publications - have caused disquiet. Publicly, Iranian officials deny practising torture. The parents’ letter to Shahroudi, the judiciary chief, prompted him to order an investigation. Shahroudi is a moderate figure who has openly criticised the current government. But when the parents met last month with Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, he rebuked them and flatly denied that their sons had been tortured. ‘It is for me to say whether they have been tortured and I say we have not yet tortured to know the meaning of torture,’ the parents recalled him saying. He said they would only be released after they had written letters of repentance.
For some perspective, I went to see Shirin Ebadi, whose tireless campaign to improve human rights in Iran earned her the Nobel peace prize in 2003. Ebadi has been representing Esfandiari and the three Amirkabir students, but has been denied access to them. Among the books in the waiting room of her modest basement office in central Tehran’s Yousef Abad neighbourhood is a volume of speeches by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution and the main architect of Iran’s theocratic system.
But this does not amount to an endorsement. ‘I personally believe that politics should be divided from religion so that people’s religious beliefs are not abused,’ she says. ‘But if you have an Islamic system, it doesn’t mean you can abuse people’s rights under the excuse of Islam. Under a proper interpretation of Islam, we can be Muslims and still respect human rights and democracy.’
Ebadi has just written to Louise Arbour, the UN human rights high commissioner, complaining about the systematic discrimination against women in Iran. Before the revolution, Ebadi had been Iran’s first female judge. Afterwards she was reduced to the status of a clerk when the new authorities decreed that women could not be judges under Sharia law, which Ebadi says is used as a pretext to justify myriad abuses.
Ebadi, who is 60, looks weary as a result of working 17-hour days to cope with the growing number of cases coming before her. She has never worked harder, she says. While Iran’s human rights situation has deteriorated to its worst point in years, her Nobel laureate status encourages victims to seek help when before they might have stayed quiet. But there may be an additional reason for her strained appearance. Her international fame has given her a certain protection against state harassment, but not total immunity. ‘I have received many threatening letters and the rightist newspapers, especially Kayhan [which is close to the leadership] are always accusing me of trying to launch a velvet revolution,’ she says. ‘Three times, Tehran’s chief prosecutor has tried to establish a dossier against me so he can summon me to court as a defendant.’
Ebadi is not interested in the government’s reasoning. ‘I’m not inside their minds to give you a reason,’ she says. ‘All I can tell you is that everything they do is illegal. It not only contravenes all international laws, but also the laws they have passed themselves. As for what is called a soft or velvet revolution, we have no crime by that name on our legal code. What has happened in countries such as Georgia is simply the victory of one political party over another. When a political party is active, it tries to achieve power and Iran has always claimed that it gives power to political parties to act. So why should they be so sensitive over this question of a velvet revolution?’
Ahmadinejad’s election ended eight years of relatively benign governance under Mohammad Khatami, a mild-mannered cleric who believed in reform and liberalisation. Khatami’s election in a landslide in 1997 ushered in an atmosphere of social and political relaxation never before seen in the Islamic Republic. Iranian women, long fettered by the restrictions of Islamic dress, felt confident enough to wear more fashionable clothes and colourful hijabs, or headscarves, which they often pushed back daringly to reveal glamorous hairdos. As free speech flourished, dozens of newspapers and magazines appeared, almost all of them demanding greater liberties. The chorus was joined by an emboldened new generation of student activists, too young to remember or identify with the fervour that had produced the revolution which swept away the monarchical rein of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In this intoxicating ‘Tehran spring’, many Western commentators were seduced into believing that Iran stood on the threshold of a new era of freedom.
But it was a false dawn. Long before Khatami had finished his first term, his project had withered under a sustained assault from conservatives and religious hardliners. Reformist newspapers were closed down one after another, initially using pre-revolutionary laws and then under fresh updated legislation. Student activists were brutally suppressed, most notably during a protest at Tehran university halls of residence in July 1999. Khatami was powerless to intervene. His re-election in 2001 was perfunctory rather than triumphant. Conditions were not ripe for his vision. In hindsight, it was too exclusively the preserve of social and intellectual elites.
Yet he had given the population a taste of freedom. The public’s appetite had been whetted and it might one day ask for more.
This prospect alarmed conservatives and radicals proclaiming loyalty to the revolution’s puritanical Islamist spirit. It inspired what has been described as a silent takeover by the most ideological factions of the revolutionary guards, the elite force created by Khomeini to safeguard the revolution. The public face of the takeover was manifested in the election of Ahmadinejad, a former guard commander whose ideology was driven by a zealous adherence to the Shia belief that Mehdi, the hidden or 12th imam - who disappeared more than 1,100 years ago - would one day return to earth and herald a new age of justice. The guards’ tightening grip has been reflected in their increasingly dominant role in the economy. The force’s commercial interests extend into lucrative areas such as oil and natural gas, hotels and civil aviation.
According to Ebrahim Yazdi, leader of the Freedom Movement of Iran, a pro-democratic opposition group, the power seizure was a ‘velvet coup d’etat’ which is now being reinforced by applying a ‘victory through terrorisation’ philosophy. ‘The philosophy is that you terrorise people in order to succeed. Ahmadinejad represents this line,’ Yazdi tells me. ‘To survive you have to continuously create episodes that justify the political repression.’
The development has had the blessing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader and the most powerful figure in Iran. Under the Islamic Republic’s system of velayat-e faqih - a concept of rule by religious jurisprudence devised by Khomeini - Khamenei’s role as supreme jurist gives him the final say over all state matters and command of the armed forces, including the revolutionary guards. But his power has not gone unchallenged. Khamenei, who was appointed after Khomeini’s death in 1989, knew that certain leading figures in the establishment believed his role to be outmoded and in need of revision.
Chief among them was Hashemi Rafsanjani, a veteran cleric and pillar of the revolution, whose colourful political career has included spells as president and parliamentary speaker. Much of his enduring influence stems from having been one of Khomeini’s closest confidants during the Eighties, when Iran fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq. Rafsanjani, I was told, had concluded that the Islamic system in its present form is unworkable. In private, he has reportedly suggested that the supreme leader’s post should be reduced to a ceremonial position akin to a constitutional monarch. Together with his known desire for rapprochement with the US, these sentiments put him on a collision course with Khamenei. According to one version, the two clashed angrily months before the 2005 presidential election, with Khamenei telling Rafsanjani that his conduct risked putting the country ‘in the hands of the Americans’. Apocryphal or not, Khamenei backed Ahmadinejad over Rafsanjani in the election and mobilised state resources to help him win. But Rafsanjani’s influence is far from spent. This month he was elected chairman of the experts’ assembly, a clerical body with constitutional powers to supervise and even dismiss the supreme leader. Rafsanjani has indicated that he plans to use the powers.
It is against this background that Ahmadinejad’s government has rolled back the remnants of the freedoms introduced by Khatami. In recent months, heavy deployments of ‘morals’ police officers have led to thousands of women being warned or arrested for ‘bad’ hijab or other forms of insufficiently Islamic dress. Similar measures have been taken against young men sporting outlandishly spiked or quaffed hairstyles, a surprisingly common sight in Iran. Police have arrested hundreds of ‘hooligans’ and ‘thugs’ in raids on working-class areas purportedly designed to root out violent criminals. Several reformist newspapers and websites have been closed for publishing ‘lies’. At least 64 executions have been carried out since mid-July, more than 20 of them in public, in what seems to be a thinly disguised attempt to create a climate of fear.
The government says its purpose is to increase ’social security’. But after a period of relative freedom, do such repressive policies risk provoking a public backlash?
No, says Amir Mohebian, political commentator of the pro-government Resalat newspaper. Most Iranians, he argues, understand that the government’s actions are a response to US sabre-rattling. ‘When you have a big enemy such as America that has called you the axis of evil, attacked two of your neighbours and says the next target is you, then, of course, the situation isn’t normal,’ says Mohebian, who holds a PhD in western philosophy. ‘In normal circumstances, the government’s actions aren’t reasonable or rational, but the reaction of the people will not be so hard. The government and the people understand each other.’
The hopes of American neoconservatives for a popular uprising that would unseat the regime are sheer fantasy, Mohebian says. ‘Every nation that gathers the energy to stage a revolution doesn’t have the strength for another one for at least 50 years. Iranians used all their energy for the Islamic revolution. Ask ordinary people and they will tell you they don’t want another revolution - one was enough.’
One obvious flaw in this theory may lie in the economy. Contrary to his populist pre-election promises to alleviate poverty and redistribute Iran’s oil wealth, Ahmadinejad has presided over rising inflation, soaring housing costs and high unemployment. His government has dismantled long-established structures hitherto used to run the overwhelmingly state-dominated economy. Last autumn, Ahmadinejad ordered the break-up of the Management and Planning Organisation, which set budgetary priorities. After ordering interest rates last May to be cut to 12 per cent (compared with an inflation rate unofficially estimated at between 20 and 30 per cent), he dissolved the Money and Credit Association, which had the power over important monetary decisions, and ousted the central bank governor, Ebrahim Sheibani, who had disagreed with the reduction. Independent ministers in charge of the industry and oil ministries have also been sacked, as have the heads of several state-owned banks. Ahmadinejad has justified the decisions as essential to overcoming bureaucratic resistance to his social justice agenda. But analysts say they have had the effect of handing greater control over the economy to his backers in the revolutionary guards. The short-term effect has been to plunge economic management and decision-making into chaos.
As the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, Iran has a source of wealth that ostensibly provides the government with a degree of protection against outside economic pressures. Yet years of US sanctions have starved its oil industry of investment and left its infrastructure dilapidated. One consequence is a lack of capacity to refine crude into petrol. That has forced the state to import up to 50 per cent of its domestic petrol supply, which was then sold to consumers at heavily subsidised prices.
Worried about the long-term budgetary consequences and its potential for leaving the Iranian economy vulnerable to a US blockade, the government in June imposed rationing. From being used to considering cheap and unlimited petrol as a birthright, motorists suddenly found themselves restricted to 600 litres over the following six months. The response was an outbreak of nationwide unrest in which dozens of filling stations and some state supermarkets and banks were destroyed and looted. It seemed to indicate that Iran’s social peace was more fragile and conditional than its leaders believed.
‘They are playing very badly with the economy,’ says Ebrahim Yazdi. ‘Governments can play with politics, which is the domain of the intellectuals, but the economy is the everyday life of all citizens. Play around with it and you will have the kickback.’
Yazdi is one of the revolution’s lost leaders. During the Shah’s reign he was exiled in Texas, where he worked as a molecular geneticist while serving as Khomeini’s adviser on US affairs. He resigned as foreign minister in the first post-revolutionary government in November 1979 after radicals took over the American embassy in Tehran and has since acquired dissident elder-statesman status. Ten years ago he was arrested and briefly detained by the authorities, but he was released after an outcry. Still vigorous at 76, his former revolutionary zeal has been replaced by a belief in the inevitability of evolutionary change.
But heading in which direction? Towards democracy, Yazdi insists when I visit him at his spacious house in a quiet lane off Valiasr Street, Tehran’s throbbing main thoroughfare. ‘This is the [present system's] last bus. What its precise destination is, I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But my prediction is that it will end similarly to the old Soviet system. That didn’t end through a revolution - red, orange or velvet - or through an outside military attack. More than anything, it ended because the collective Russian leadership came to the historical conclusion that the continuation of that system was impossible. It will not be a revolution. It will be gradual. But ultimately, it will be democratic.’
Source: The Guardian
Iran’s parliament on Saturday approved a nonbinding resolution labeling the CIA and the U.S. Army “terrorist organizations,” in apparent response to a Senate resolution seeking to give a similar designation to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The hard-line dominated parliament cited U.S. involvement in dropping nuclear bombs in Japan in World War II, using depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, supporting the killings of Palestinians by Israel, bombing and killing Iraqi civilians, and torturing terror suspects in prisons.
“The aggressor U.S. Army and the Central Intelligence Agency are terrorists and also nurture terror,” said a statement by the 215 lawmakers who signed the resolution at an open session of the Iranian parliament. The session was broadcast live on state-run radio.
The resolution, which is seen as a diplomatic offensive against the U.S., urges Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government to treat the two as terrorist organizations. It also paves the way for the resolution to become legislation that — if ratified by the country’s hardline constitutional watchdog — would become law.
The government is expected to wait for U.S. reaction before making its decision. In Washington, the White House declined to comment Saturday.
On Wednesday, the Senate voted 76-22 in favor of a resolution urging the State Department to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. While the proposal attracted overwhelming bipartisan support, a small group of Democrats said they feared labeling the state-sponsored organization a terrorist group could be interpreted as a congressional authorization of military force in Iran.
The Bush administration had already been considering whether to blacklist an elite unit within the Revolutionary Guard, subjecting part of the vast military operation to financial sanctions.
The U.S. legislative push came a day after Ahmadinejad told world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly that his country would defy attempts to impose new sanctions by “arrogant powers” seeking to curb its nuclear program, accusing them of lying and imposing illegal penalties on his country.
He said the nuclear issue was now “closed” as a political issue and Iran would pursue the monitoring of its nuclear program “through its appropriate legal path,” the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog.
Tensions between the U.S. and Iran have escalated over Washington accusations that Iran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons and has been supplying Shiite militias in Iraq with deadly weapons used to kill U.S. troops. Iran denies both of the allegations.
Source: The Associate Press
As the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East was leaving the Al-Jazeera television studios after an interview, one of the station managers shook his hand and joked: “Sir, you just made apartment prices jump in Dubai.” The reason: Adm. William Fallon just said he didn’t believe war with Iran was looming.
These are words the Persian Gulf is desperate to hear — from hungry developers in boomtowns such as Doha and Dubai to jittery Kuwaiti oil executives whose tankers sail within sight of Iran’s coastline. Fallon took on a challenging dual role — part pacifier and part enforcer — as he hopscotched around the region during a trip that ended last week. The U.S. Central Command chief tried to assure nervous allies that the Pentagon was not locked in a collision course with Iran. But he also left no doubt that U.S. forces will come down increasingly hard on suspected Iranian aid to militias in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two-pronged message, some experts say, could be the outline of Washington’s emerging strategy against Iran’s growing swagger and defiance of Western pressure to curb its nuclear ambitions. “It’s all about trying to contain Iran without turning this into a war,” said Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington. Fallon was peppered with questions about Iran at every stop in his trip.
Gulf rulers fretted about how conflict would derail their nations’ galloping growth as malls, villas and skyscrapers — including the world’s tallest in Dubai — sprout in the vanilla-hued sand. Dubai currently hosts about one-quarter of the world’s construction cranes, according to local boosters. The Gulf’s military brass presented their own worries. Most of them were spun around grave scenarios in which an Iran-US war would quickly swallow the entire region and make the Iraq battles seem like a sideshow. In Kuwait — separated from Iran by just a small sliver of Iraqi coast — Fallon was urged to review its defense pact for new contingencies including threats by Shiite militiamen and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Fallon did his best to soothe the anxiety. “This constant drum beat of conflict is what strikes me which is not helpful and not useful,” Fallon said in a half-hour interview with Al-Jazeera television broadcast Sept. 23. “I expect that there will be no war and that is what we ought to be working for,” added Fallon, whose comments were translated into Arabic. “We ought to try and to do our utmost to create different conditions.”
Fallon’s predecessor, retired Army Gen. John Abizaid, had already sketched out a standoff straight from the pages of the Cold War if Iran’s nuclear labs one day produce warheads — as the West fears. Abizaid said the U.S. has the deterrent power to keep Iran in check. The bottom-line: The West could find ways to live with a nuclear-armed Iran just as it did with the Soviet Union, he predicted. Jon Alterman, the Middle East program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the comments by Fallon and Abizaid are “consistent with the president’s position that military action is not the first option, but they’re not going to remove it from the list of possibilities.” “I’ve been hearing military people saying this for quite some time … I don’t think it’s the first choice of many people in government, and it’s certainly not the first choice of many people in the military,” said Alterman. The alternative is sharpening the tools already in place: economic sanctions and attempts at international isolation, said Peter Rodman, who was a top international policy adviser at the Pentagon until earlier this year.
“The purpose of economic sanctions is to exhaust the non-military option,” he said. At the United Nations, the five permanent Security Council nations plus Germany agreed Friday to delay discussions on a resolution to toughen sanctions against Iran. They want to give Tehran until November to answers questions about its disputed nuclear program. But Iran is not an easy country to leverage. It has weathered a U.S. diplomatic and economic cold shoulder since shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution by building ties with Europe and, more recently, Russia and China — all keen on remaining a trading partner in a country with a young and educated population. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is also seeking new friends in what he dubs an “anti-imperialism” coalition. On Thursday, he was given a warm welcome by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez after arriving from Bolivia, where he pledged $1 billion in Iranian investment. Iran can afford to be generous.
It sits on plentiful reserves of oil and natural gas, which brings is a steady flow of cash for the theocracy’s showcase priorities. Among them: a military that likes to show off its independence. Iran has upgraded its Shahab-3 missile to a range of 1,250 miles, capable of reaching Israel and carrying a nuclear warhead. Earlier this month, Ahmadinejad attended a military display that included torpedoes, surveillance drones and what Iran called its new domestically manufactured warplanes. Fallon — a former Navy pilot — scoffed at the jet-fighter. Photos indicated it was an embellished version of an old F-5, which was introduced in the 1960s and sold to Iran’s monarchy before the Islamic Revolution. Fallon mentioned the plane often during his trip, telling allies he believes Iran is not as strong as it portrays itself. “Not militarily, economically or politically,” he said. Still, he expressed frustration at Iran’s apparent ability to funnel weapons to proxy fighters. In Afghanistan, he said Taliban fighters are gaining greater access to metal-piercing roadside bombs — the type that Shiite militias have used to devastating effect against U.S. forces in Iraq.
Later, at a U.S. base in Iraq near the Iranian frontier, he quizzed officers on how to plug holes in border monitoring, which currently pays attention to main roadways but still often leaves the centuries-old smuggling routes uncovered. “And we know they are not carrying these things over in backpacks,” said Fallon. A 240 mm rocket that hit Sept. 11 at Camp Victory in Baghdad — killing one person and wounding 11 — was linked by U.S. officials to Iran as bearing the hallmarks of its Fajr-3 missile that’s more than 15 feet long and weighs about 840 pounds. A similar rocket was fired against a U.S. base south of the capital in mid-August. “America’s main strategy is launching a psychological war against Iran,” said Iranian parliament member Reza Talaei Nik. “Remarks by U.S. politicians have to be viewed within this context.”
Source: The Associated Press
Imagine the scene: As angry protesters march outside, a nation’s unpopular president prepares to address students and faculty at a prestigious university. Introducing the president, the head of the university is bluntly critical of his guest speaker: “You, quite simply, [are] ridiculous.
You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. . . . I doubt you will have the intellectual courage to answer [our] questions . . . I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mind-set that characterizes so much of what you say and do. . . . Your preposterous and belligerent statements . . . led to your party’s defeat in the [last] elections.” Unfazed, the president rises to begin his speech. His sometimes bizarre remarks generate hoots of derision. But he plows on civilly, though he ducks and weaves when faced with critical questions from the audience. When the clock runs out, many are dissatisfied with his answers. But everyone applauds the courageous head of the university, who wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power, and everyone praises the student protesters, who exemplified the democratic values of dissent and free expression. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if something like that could happen in our country? No, no, I mean really happen in our country.
Tuesday’s farce in New York at Columbia University, starring Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Unpopular Presidential Guest and Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger as The Man Who Spoke Truth to Power, doesn’t count because it was just that: a farce. Ahmadinejad was playing to global public opinion, and though he lost some PR points for incoherence and general bizarreness of message (“In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals”), he gained some for coming off as a bit more mature than his prissy, infantile host. (“In Iran, when you invite a guest, you respect them,” Ahmadinejad observed dryly.) Bollinger, meanwhile, was playing to a different audience. After taking a beating for giving Ahmadinejad a forum, he was eager to show the media, alumni, concerned Jewish organizations and a raft of bellicose neoconservative pundits that he was no terrorist-loving appeaser of Holocaust deniers. In a narrow sense, both Ahmadinejad and Bollinger achieved their goals. Ahmadinejad showed that he could be dignified in the face of crass American bullies, which will play well abroad — and may even buttress his dwindling prestige in Iran. And Bollinger showed that he can be a crass American bully, which, in our current political climate, is what passes for “courage.” Bollinger’s tactics went down well with the New York media, anyway: The New York Sun rhapsodized about a “Teaching Moment,” while the New York Times expressed the pious hope that “what Americans and Iranians will remember is that image of professors and students, in a true democratic forum.”
And Bollinger seemed quite pleased with his own performance. The Bollinger-Ahmadinejad Show was “free speech at its best,” Bollinger modestly explained to reporters. Sorry, no. “Free speech at its best” is when someone really does speak truth to power, and power stops blathering long enough to engage with inconvenient ideas. If an Iranian professor, inside Iran, had said what Bollinger said to Ahmadinejad, that would have been brave. Or — stay with me here — if Bollinger had invited President Bush to Columbia and made those same unvarnished remarks to him, and Bush had toughed it out and struggled to answer half a dozen unfiltered, critical questions from an audience not made up of his handpicked supporters . . . . Well, that too would have been free speech at its best. Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of thing you’re likely to see in America. It’s odd, because Bush — like Ahmadinejad — makes plenty of statements that, to paraphrase the eloquent Mr. Bollinger, could be characterized as ridiculous, provocative, uneducated and fanatical. (Take Bush’s repeated suggestion of a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks, for instance.) And as in the case of Ahmadinejad, some of Bush’s preposterous and belligerent statements contributed to the GOP’s defeat in the last elections. But so what? Here in the land of free speech, elites — including those at universities — too often collude to keep our own president in his safe little bubble. (Those who forget to pretend that the emperor is fully dressed, such as Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents Assn. dinner or Jimmy Carter at Coretta Scott King’s funeral, are instantly chastised for being “inappropriate.”) This week, a global audience saw Iran’s “petty and cruel dictator,” as Bollinger called him, courteously parrying questions from hostile students — something viewers won’t see our democratically elected president doing. So fine, let’s congratulate ourselves for showing Iran just how many freedoms we have in America. But when we get done congratulating ourselves on our fancy freedoms, let’s figure out why we can’t be bothered to put them to use.
Source: Rosa Brooks, the Los Angeles Times
The Bush administration, following its own pronouncements as well as House and Senate legislation, is expected to decide soon whether to classify Iran’s most formidable military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a terrorist organization. This would be a serious mistake.
By labeling all 125,000 Revolutionary Guards untouchable “terrorists,” Washington would forgo the possibility of exploiting the organization’s internal divisions and further decrease the likelihood of diplomatic progress with Tehran. Instead of making a disastrous military option more likely, the United States should seek to tip the balance within the guard in favor of pragmatists, rather than hard-liners who thrive in a state of isolation and confrontation. Created shortly after the 1979 revolution whose principles it was tasked with upholding, the guard has arguably eclipsed the clergy as Iran’s most powerful political and economic institution. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and lead nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani have served stints, and alumni outnumber clerics nearly two to one in parliament. As its political clout has grown, so has the guard’s economic prowess: In the past two years alone, guard front companies have been awarded oil contracts worth upward of $10 billion, in addition to the billions they make each year importing, exporting and smuggling such things as gasoline, automobiles and liquor. Washington’s greatest concerns are that the guard is running Iranian foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, where it is probably aiding and arming radical forces that target U.S. soldiers and interests, and that the guard is linked to Iran’s nuclear program.
Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, who headed the guard until last month, once bombastically declared that Iran has a strategy to “destroy the roots of Anglo-Saxon civilization.” The guard certainly has many unsavory characters, but unlike al-Qaeda, it is not a monolith of Islamist radicals. Polls conducted at guard barracks in 1997 and 2001 found that about three-quarters of members supported then-President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist, evidence that the guard is actually more reflective of Iranian society — and its discontents — than was once thought. Mohsen Rezai, who was a longtime head of the guard and is still influential among its members, has advocated U.S.-Iranian reconciliation for years, echoing the sentiments of many mid-ranking members I used to encounter in Tehran. It is not unlike the recent experience in the United States that military men who have faced the horrors of combat are often less likely than their civilian counterparts to favor new military adventures.
The conventional wisdom that the guard is closely aligned with Iran’s president is mistaken. Lacking the popular base that Khatami enjoyed as president, Ahmadinejad has pandered to the guard to project power and influence, not vice versa. Senior commanders were known to have voted in the 2005 presidential election for their former colleague Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a conservative pragmatist — and current mayor of Tehran — who advocates a more conciliatory foreign policy and whose political star seems to be rising as fast as Ahmadinejad’s is falling. Two lessons from U.S. policy experiences are instructive here. First, while Bush administration officials often liken their Iran policy to some of America’s Cold War policies, they ignore a fundamental aspect of the reform processes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: They began to bear fruit when disillusioned communist dons and military personnel became convinced that they and their countries would be better off in a different system. The second lesson is from Iraq. When the Baathist army was disbanded, nearly 300,000 men — few of whom had a strong affinity for Saddam Hussein — were stripped of their livelihoods and made to feel they had no place in Iraq’s future. As a result, many joined forces with the insurgency.
In Iran today the only groups that are both armed and organized are the guard and the Basij militia, its larger but less prestigious affiliate. Successful political reform must co-opt these forces and make them feel they will have some position in a changed Iran. Branding the guard a terrorist entity would make its members feel more, rather than less, invested in retaining the status quo. The United States can and should, however, put pressure on the guard. Actively discouraging foreign companies from working with guard entities and subtly targeting the financial activities of senior commanders and the elite Quds Force would send the right signal. But simultaneously continuing the dialogue about Iraq is imperative. Given the guard’s prominence in Iraq and the nuclear issue, we don’t have the luxury of waiting for liberal democratic interlocutors in Tehran. The goal should be to widen divisions among Tehran’s disparate ruling elites, not to unite them behind a confrontational approach that few want to take. The majority of guard officials may have little affinity for Ahmadinejad’s style, but they aren’t likely to argue for a more conciliatory approach toward a U.S. government that considers all of them terrorists.
Karim Sadjadpour directs the Iran Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Iranian “blogosphere” is full of criticism of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s activities and remarks during his visit to New York City this week.
From both inside and outside Iran, the criticism has been strong. By comparison, conservative Islamist bloggers in Iran who usually support Ahmadinejad have been relatively quiet — posting few details of his appearance at Columbia University, his speech to the UN General Assembly, or the refusal of U.S. authorities to allow him to visit the site of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
One key event that captured the attention of Iranian bloggers was the introduction that Columbia University President Lee Bollinger gave when Ahmadinejad appeared on September 24 at a high-profile academic event there known as the World Leaders Forum.
Bollinger was applauded by the audience when he challenged Ahmadinejad for questioning the Holocaust and for his incendiary remarks about Israel. Bollinger said the Iranian president’s comments signaled that he was either “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”
“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” Bollinger said. “And so I ask you, why have women, members of the Baha’i faith, homosexuals, and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?”
‘Insulting The Iranian People’
Former Iranian Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi maintains a website called “webneveshteha” (written on the web), a Persian-language blog that claims to have some 20,000 regular readers.
Abtahi writes that “one of the most important news developments in the entire world is Ahmadinejad’s trip to New York.” He goes on to say that, “Unfortunately, Mr. Ahmadinejad, instead of trying to find solutions for our main problems and improving Iran’s relations with world leaders, has conducted a propaganda trip. And he was insulted by the media that oppose him.”
Abtahi says that “the president of Columbia University insulted Mr. Ahmadinejad, and these insults are insults to the Iranian people,” adding that “Our nation expected that President Ahmadinejad wouldn’t put himself in a position to be insulted. In the world, political perspectives are different.” Abtahi says he “wishes that Ahmadinejad’s advisers would have helped him to plan his trip and his answers to questions. People expect the Iranian president to help solve their political and economic problems on these trips.”
‘The Evil Has Landed’
An anonymous blogger based in Iran who calls himself “Jomhour” (Republic) informs Iranian readers that CNN described Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University as a “war of words.” But Jomhour says Ahmadinejad’s visit to the university goes far beyond a war of words.
He writes: “Maybe we can consider Columbia University as a sister of Amirkabir, the Polytechnic University in Tehran. There, in the last year, [Iranian] students criticized Ahmadinejad and protested against him. The president of Columbia University mentioned the violations of human rights in Iran, conditions of religious and ethnic minorities, repression against women and youth, and media censorship. He told Ahmadinejad that he expected clear and precise answers to these questions. Ahmadinejad, in response to a question about homosexuals in Tehran, claimed that homosexuality doesn’t exist in Iran. Outside of the university, many people — including Americans, Iranian immigrants, Jews, and human-rights activists — gathered in protest. And most of them chanted slogans against Ahmadinejad. Maybe it should be no surprise that the ‘New York Daily News’ has chosen ‘The Evil Has Landed,’ as the title of their front-page article” about Ahmadinejad’s arrival in the United States.
Another anonymous blogger in Iran who writes in Persian under the title “Khyaban No. 11″ asks readers to imagine U.S. President George W. Bush traveling to Tehran University to make a speech.
Khyaban No. 11 writes: “Can we even imagine that George W. Bush could come to Tehran and criticize the Islamic Republic’s policies? Is it possible for George W. Bush to come to Tehran and say that Palestine should be wiped from the map? Can George W. Bush come to Tehran and talk about exporting democracy to Tehran? Can we even imagine that George W. Bush would have enough security in Tehran to prevent Ansar Hizbullah from attacking him?”
Backing Rejection Of World Trade Center Visit
One expatriate Iranian citizen who is unhappy about Ahmadinejad’s visit to the United States is a blogger who lives in Europe and identifies himself as “Balouch.” He reacted unsympathetically to news that Ahmadinejad’s request to visit the site of the World Trade Center — the location of the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States — was refused by authorities in New York.
Balouch invokes Iranian tragedy and the Khavaran Cemetery where thousands of executed political prisoners were buried in Iran in 1988 to praise U.S. officials’ approach.
Balouch says that “if I were the police, I would have sent this note to him: ‘From the New York Police Department to Mahmud Ahmadinejad: Mr. President, with all due respect, our office cannot accept your request for several reasons. But you can kindly go to Khavaran Cemetery. You don’t need any visa to go there. But in our opinion, forget flowers. Just stop killing U.S. soldiers [in Iraq] with roadside bombs.’”
‘This Coat Is Too Big’
Another expatriate Iranian blogger who is unhappy about Ahmadinejad’s activities in New York this week is a 29-year-old Iranian-born citizen who identifies himself as “Mr. Behi.” Now purportedly living in Libya, Mr. Behi describes himself as a man who “tries to be a person with a free mind” and “a world citizen.”
He writes: “There is a proverb in Persian saying: ‘This coat is too big for you.’ It’s used for someone who pretends to do what he or she is too immature for. Since Ahmadinejad became president, we started having feelings of regret because this proverb started to make sense about him. To me, [Ahmadinejad] is so politically immature that he rarely thinks about what he puts himself into and what future outcome his remarks might have. That or he does think about it but his framework of thinking is so far from reality. He is a simple man for whom the presidential chair is too big — so big that after two years, he still could not come to comprehend his own position and has never learned to abide by the normal diplomatic behavior that is expected from a president.”
Mr. Behi goes on to say that “last year after coming back from the UN, [Ahmadinejad] claimed that during his speech, a rim of light surrounded him. Domestically, he claimed so many unrealistic things as well. I would say that his talk about the Holocaust and wiping Israel off the map are as insignificant as his other statement. As a result, I think comparing [Ahmadinejad] to Hitler is very unrealistic and is truly propaganda to fuel a war. The regrettable fact is, ‘Why has he put himself and his country in such position by talking before thinking?’” Mr. Behi asks, before answering, “We add this question to the tons of others that are left unanswered by the Islamic Republic.”
Source: Radio Farda
The US Senate has called for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to be officially designated a “foreign terrorist organization,” a day after the House of Representatives passed a similar measure.
The Senate on Wednesday voted 76-22 for the non-binding amendment sponsored by Republican Jon Kyl and independent Joseph Lieberman to place the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Pasdaran, on the US terrorist blacklist.
Such a designation if adopted by the US government would open the corps and affiliated companies to economic sanctions.
The measure is a “sense of the Senate” amendment, which means it cannot impact the president’s foreign policy, but is an important symbolic measure expressing will of lawmakers.
It says that senators agree it is in the critical national interest of the United States to prevent Iran turning Shia extremists in Iraq into a “Hezbollah type force.”
The amendment says that senators believe that “inside Iraq” US economic, military, diplomatic economic and intelligence “instruments” should be used to back US policy against the government of Iran and “its proxies.”
US military officials and lawmakers have accused the Revolutionary Guard of arming Shiite militias in Iraq, and supplying sophisticated roadside bombs used to kill US soldiers in the war-torn nation.
The US administration also accuses Iran of seeking to build an atomic bomb under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, a charge Tehran denies.
During a debate among Democratic presidential hopefuls on Wednesday night, the amendment was criticized as helping lay the foundation for President George W. Bush to take possible military action against Tehran.
“I have no intention of giving George Bush the authority to take the first step on a road to war with Iran,” said former senator and presidential hopeful John Edwards at the debate at Dartmouth College.
Long-shot candidate Mike Gravel blasted front-runner Senator Hillary Clinton for supporting the amendment. “And I am ashamed of you, Hillary, for voting for it.”
Clinton defended her vote, saying by designating the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization “gives us the options to be able to impose sanctions on the primary leaders to try to begin to put some teeth into all this talk about dealing with Iran.”
The Bush administration said in August it would designate all or part of the Guard as a terrorist organization.
The US blacklist, which already includes Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, bars named groups from gaining access to the US financial system.
The House of Representatives adopted a similar text on Tuesday against the backdrop of rising tensions between Iran and the United States and a scathing attack on the United States by Iran’s hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, before the UN General Assembly.
The House bill also calls for penalizing foreign companies with US subsidiaries which invest in Iran, particularly in the oil and gas sector.
Iran has been on the US government state sponsors of terrorism blacklist for more than two decades.
Already this year, the US government escalated financial sanctions against Tehran.
The US Treasury and other government agencies have blacklisted and applied asset freezes against at least 15 Iranian entities.
Most, including the Atomic Energy Organization and the Mesbah Energy Company, operate in the nuclear, energy and industrial industries.
Source: AFP
The invitation was on creamy stationery with fancy calligraphy: The Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran “requests the pleasure” of my company to dine with H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The dinner is at the Intercontinental Hotel — with names carefully written out at all the place settings around a rectangular table. There are about 50 of us, academics and journalists mostly. There’s Brian Williams across the room, and Christiane Amanpour a few seats down. And at a little after 8pm, on a day when he has already addressed the U.N., the evening after his confrontation at Columbia, a bowing and smiling Mahmoud Admadinejad glides into the room. This is now an annual ritual for the President of Iran. Every year, during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, he plots out a media campaign that — in its shrewdness, relentlessness, and quest for attention — would rival Angelina Jolie on a movie junket.
And like any international figure, Mr. Ahmadinejad hones his performance for multiple audiences: in this case, the journalists and academics who can filter his speech and ideas for a wider American audience. The format of the evening is curious. In his calm and fluent voice — “dear friends,” he calls us — he requests that we not ask questions, but make statements, so that he can react to them in a form of dialogue. The academics are not shy. They make statements not only about the need for dialogue and reconciliation, but castigate the Iranian government for chilling press freedoms and for arresting Iranian-American scholars who were only trying to foster better relations between America and Iran. Throughout, Ahmadinejad is courtly, preternaturally calm, and fiercely articulate. After an hour, he is ready to respond. He does so first with a half-hour ode to the relationship between man and God that might have been dictated by the Persian poet Rumi.
“I believe that Almighty God created the universe for mankind. Man is God’s most important creation and it is through him that we appreciate the beauties of the universe. God has sent man here on a mission.” That mission, he says, is to pursue love, justice, kindness and dignity. In fact, he repeats those works so often that it begins to sound like a mantra: Love. Justice. Kindness. Dignity. He speaks with the quiet zeal of a not-very-flamboyant televangelist. “The pursuit of justice through love and kindness and human dignity can end all conflicts on earth,” he says. “Inshallah.” When it comes time for him to address the comments, he does so by citing each speaker by name — 23 in all, he notes. In contrast with what he calls the lack of respect and dignity accorded to him at Columbia — where, he says, he found it odd that an academic institution which prizes tolerance would treat him without any — he addresses each person carefully and patiently.
Some highlights: - Iran has not violated any of the rules of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ahmadinejad says. He has proposed a multilateral uranium enrichment program with different nations, and can’t understand why no one has taken up his offer. - The U.S. and Iran can play a positive role together in Iraq. “If the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, good things will happen,” he says. “I believe that the Iraqi people can rule themselves.” - In the Middle East, Ahmadinejad says the world must allow the Palestinians to decide their future for themselves: “That is the human solution to sixty years of instability.” He refers to Israel only as “the Zionist regime” and does not mention the Holocaust. - Ahmadinejad claims there are thirty newspapers published in Iran that are opposed to his government, citing that as evidence of press freedom in Iran. -
In answer to a question about how he viewed Hitler’s legacy, he says, “I view Hitler’s role as extremely negative, a despicably dark face.” - He notes that Americans don’t understand Iranian history, saying that the movie 300 — with which he seems intimately familiar — was a “complete distortion of Iranian history.” Iran, he says, has never invaded anyone in its history. Finally, in response to a question about whether war with Iran was growing more likely, he says, “Mr. Bush is interested in harming Iran. But I believe there are wise politicians in America who will prevent such a war. We hate war. We would not welcome it. But we are prepared for every scenario. Yet I don’t think war will happen.” With that, Ahmadinejad says he has an early morning appointment the next day, and that he welcomes greater dialogue like this evening. And then, still composed, and with the same slightly mysterious smile that never leaves his face all evening, he bows deeply and heads upstairs.
Source: Time
The U.S. House of Representatives has approved legislation to strengthen economic sanctions against Iran over its support for terrorist groups and refusal to halt uranium enrichment.
VOA’s Dan Robinson reports the measure passed with an overwhelming 397 to 16 vote, and contains stinging criticisms of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iran Counterproliferation Act is aimed at tightening the economic screws on Iran, through import and export sanctions, and steps to dissuade foreign governments and companies, including subsidiaries of U.S. companies, from investing in Iran’s energy sector. “Iran today faces a choice between a very big carrot and a very sharp stick,” said Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “It is my hope that they will take the carrot, but today we are putting the stick in place.” Among other things, the legislation expresses a non-binding “sense of Congress” that the U.S. encourage other governments to direct state-owned companies and persuade private entities to stop all investment in Iran’s energy sector and exports of refined petroleum products to Iran.
Other non-binding provisions include a call to prohibit Iranian state banks from using the U.S. banking system, and support for divestment by U.S. federal and state and local pension plans from companies investing more than $20 million in Iran’s energy sector. Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen explains some of the binding changes, which include clarifications in and broadening the scope of existing law. “This legislation under consideration today builds upon that foundation, reiterates the application of the Iran Sanctions Act to parent companies of foreign subsidiaries that engage in activities that ISA would prohibit for U.S. entities,” she said. The measure would also prohibit U.S. nuclear cooperation agreements with countries assisting Iran’s nuclear program or transferring advanced conventional weapons or missiles to Iran. It directs the president to determine whether Iran’s Revolutionary Guards should be designated a terrorist organization, and placed on a list of proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, a step the Bush administration is pursuing.
A separate sanctions-related bill the House approved in August removed legal barriers to state and local divestment from companies investing more than $20 million in Iran’s energy sector, although the Senate has yet to pass its version of that legislation. In approving the measure, the House calls Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s persistent denials of the Holocaust a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Lawmakers directed stinging criticisms at the Iranian leader, comparing him to 20th century tyrants and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin. “The history of the 20th century tells us that genocidal dictators say what they will do and then do what they said,” said Republicans Mark Kirk. Republican Mike Pence said,”This is a man who is on a mis-guided mission, he is a dangerous and deluded leader and we ignore his intents at our peril. “When Mr. Ahmadinejad says he wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and do all kinds of other countless horrific things, he means it,” Democrat Eliot Engel said. In noting that the latest legislation does not authorize use of military force against Iran, House lawmakers nonetheless describe the prospect of Iran achieving nuclear arms as a grave threat to the United States and its allies in the Middle East. They say the U.S. and its allies should do everything possible in diplomatic, political and economic means, to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear arms.
Source: Voice of America
