Rooyesh

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has suffered an embarrassing blow to his prestige after his own party attacked him for adopting a jocular tone towards inflation at a time of rampant price rises.

The Islamic Revolution Devotees Society - a fundamentalist grouping of revolutionary veterans co-founded by Mr Ahmadinejad - has added its voice to a rising chorus of economic discontent by warning the president that spiralling living costs are hurting the poor and undermining his stated goal of social justice.

The society says the government is to blame because it embarked on extravagant projects while failing to control the money supply. “Unrestrained inflation increases the pressure on the weak and leads to the poor becoming poorer as owners of non-monetary assets get richer,” it says in an economic report. “The result is counter to the goals, plans and slogans of Dr Ahmadinejad’s government.” The report also accuses Mr Ahmadinejad and other officials of refusing to acknowledge the problem and of making light of it with inappropriate jokes. It says: “Sometimes some high-ranking government officials deny the growth of prices and deal with them through making jokes.

To deny the current inflation or ignoring it through jokes is totally unacceptable.” Mr Ahmadinejad has frequently dismissed complaints of rising prices as the invention of a hostile media and blamed “secret networks” for rising house prices. This year he responded to MPs’ protests over the rising price of tomatoes by urging them to visit his local greengrocer in Narmak in east Tehran. He also answered recent criticism of his policies by saying he took advice from his local butcher. “There is an honourable butcher in our neighbourhood who knows all the economic problems of the people. I get my economic information from him,” he said.

The latest report implicitly criticises his contemptuous view of economics by describing it as a “specialised science” and says Iran’s inflationary problems cannot be solved by “ad hoc decisions”. That may partly refer to one of Mr Ahmadinejad’s most controversial recent moves in which he ordered banks to cut interest rates to 12% - below inflation, which is estimated at between 20% and 30%. Mr Ahmadinejad is on record as saying, “I pray to God I never know about economics”. That echoes a comment attributed to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, who is alleged to have said that “economics is for donkeys”.

Source: The Guardian

Amid rising international tensions over Iran’s growing influence in Iraq and the Middle East, the United States embarks this week on an effort to slap Tehran with a third Security Council resolution of sanctions over its nuclear program. After top American leaders including President Bush

and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week singled out Iran for its “troublesome” actions in Iraq and the region, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner followed up with a warning that the international community had to prepare for the possibility of war with Tehran – a stark message from which he later backed off slightly. But that tone will pervade a meeting of high-level diplomats from the Security Council’s five permanent members – the US, Britain, France, Russia, and China – plus Germany in Washington on Friday. That meeting – called by Nicholas Burns, undersecretary of State for political affairs – is in preparation for another meeting a week later of foreign ministers of the same countries, who will be in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. The US will argue that because Tehran has done nothing to curtail uranium-enrichment activities, as demanded in two Security Council resolutions passed in March and December 2006, it’s time to turn up the heat.

The March resolution included sanctions and a three-month window, a kind of deadline for the Iranian government, after which the Council was to consider tougher punitive steps. Tehran not only ignored the deadline but publicly proclaimed its advances in levels of uranium enrichment, a process that can lead to the capability to produce nuclear weapons. Now, the US says the Security Council must either increase pressure through additional sanctions or risk being dismissed by Iran’s government. “The 90 days [specified in the March resolution] for Iran to respond or face further action have come and gone, and then some, so we’re working on moving forward on the sanctions,” says Richard Grenell, spokesman for the US mission to the UN in New York. A third resolution is the international community’s logical response to Tehran, he says. Even as Washington ratchets up the pressure on Tehran, it is not clear that the Security Council is ready to go along. As usual, Russia and China are wary of quick action.

That is especially true now, in light of a “work plan” the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) crafted with the Iranian government in August for answering outstanding questions about the country’s nuclear program. At the time, the agency’s director, Mohamed ElBaradei, called the agreement a “significant step” and a conciliatory move by Tehran, which he said appeared to be slowing its enrichment program for political reasons. Many analysts also saw Iran’s willingness to enter into agreement with the IAEA as a political move, but designed to blunt any momentum for further sanctions. That analysis was bolstered when Iranian officials announced days later that its program had installed 3,000 centrifuges for delivering higher levels of enriched uranium.

“The West thought the Iranian nation would give in after just a resolution, but now we have taken another step in the nuclear progress,” said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in announcing the threshold of activity. Officials with knowledge of the diplomatic proceedings say Germany, too, has joined the foot-draggers on additional sanctions. Though not a permanent Security Council member and therefore not a voter on any resolution, Germany is key to the European diplomatic effort with Tehran and would have to sign on to any sanctions the European Union would approve. “We would have to have agreement [for more sanctions] among the EU countries first,” says a senior European diplomat. Why Germany would balk now at further punitive action – after Chancellor Angela Merkel said in February 2006 that “we must take the Iranian president’s rhetoric seriously” – is unclear.

Some analysts cite Germany’s strong and expanding economic ties to Iran. Germany is Iran’s largest trading partner, and much of Iranian industry relies on German engineering and supplies. On the other hand, German banks have recently said they are pulling back on activities with Iran as a result of UN and separate US sanctions. Other experts say at least part of the German diplomatic corps does not want to jump to association with what it fears could become an inexorable path to military action against Iran – led by the US and increasingly given moral support by the French under President Nicholas Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Kouchner. The senior European diplomat, who requested anonymity to more freely discuss the European context for the push for additional sanctions, says the tougher language from French leaders does not mean “they are ready to go for the military option.” But it does indicate France shares the US’s impatience toward Tehran. He says the French are saying, “If we can’t get this [additional sanctions] in the UN, then let’s try outside. We may have to go that route.”

What this looks like is more of the “good cop/bad cop” routine that the international community has tried with Iran for several years, but now the French have joined the US on the “bad cop” side. The result, some observers conclude, could be months of discussions in New York. “I just don’t see anything happening soon,” says one UN official with close knowledge of the Security Council’s workings. The IAEA-Tehran work plan, he says, presents a new wrinkle. The US mission’s Mr. Grenell counters that the “IAEA track doesn’t negate the process of resolutions – and that’s resolutions, plural – with sanctions.” But the UN official says Mr. ElBaradei’s work with Tehran is still likely to have an impact in the Council. “We have to anticipate,” he says, “that it could put things off for a few months.”

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

Tehran has freed an Iranian-American man, Kian Tajbakhsh, who was jailed in May on charges of acting against Iran’s national security.