Rooyesh

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.