Attack on Iran is the next step in divide and conquer of Middle East
Monday, 02 April 2007
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by Daan de Wit
The Dutch in this article was translated into English by Ben Kearney.
The march towards war with Iran continues unabated. As time goes by, the possibility that Iran will be attacked is not lessening, but growing. It will increase the level of chaos in the Middle East, but the question is whether this is an unfortunate consequence or a means to an end.While expansive war games are being conducted off the Iranian coast and new sanctions are being imposed on Iran, the heat is being turned up in other ways as well. Under the headline US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran, The Sunday Telegraph writes: 'In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials. [...] Fred Burton, a former US state department counter-terrorism agent, [...] said: "The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran's ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime." [...] Funding for their separatist causes comes directly from the CIA's classified budget but is now "no great secret", according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph.' The current situation involving Iran and the 15 British Marines is reminiscent of the situation prior to the Vietnam War, when the U.S. was provoking Vietnam by way of Operation 34A. It was then that the American government seized upon an alleged incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in order to demonstrate Vietnamese agression, after which Congress gave President Johnson its approval to attack the country. For more details see this article by DeepJournal. Also see: Fake Maritime Boundaries, written by Craig Murray, former Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
U.S. troop build-up in Persian GulfOn Tuesday of last week 'a high-ranking security source' told the Russian RIA Novosti that 'U.S. Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Col.-Gen. Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Sciences, said last week that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on Iran's military infrastructure in the near future.' Professor A. Richard Norton, advisor to the Iraq Study Group, made a good point back in mid-February in reference to the American show of power in the Persian Gulf: 'Remember that in 1990-91 and then again in 2003 the very fact that the United States assembled a formidable array of forces in the Gulf region became an argument for using those forces and launching wars. The United States will soon have two carrier task forces on station, and perhaps a third carrier task force will soon be deployed. It will be difficult for the United States to step down from its combative perch without Iran accepting some fairly significant concessions. While many leading Iranian officials fully understand the gravity of the situation, it is nonetheless possible to imagine a series of real or contrived clashes that lead, perhaps unintentionally, to a serious aerial and naval campaign against Iran. Or - to put it simply - to yet another U.S. war of choice.' Tony Blair in a speech to the U.S. Congress: 'September 11th was not an isolated event, but a tragic prologue. Iraq; another Act; and many further struggles will be set upon this stage before it's over.'Religious strife Middle East: unintended fire to the flames or means to an end?From the moment he first gained any significance, right up until his death, the life of Saddam Hussein was intertwined with the West, as I wrote previously. Saddam provided his country with the order that the West desired, and together they saw how the country descended into chaos following the overthrow of the Baath regime. There are different viewpoints circulating as to how the Bush administration might be able to create order in Iraq. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh sees what he calls 'the redirection' of the Bush Administration: Out of fear for Shiite Iran, the U.S. would actively support the Sunnis in the region. Previously it were the Iraqi Shiites who received their support, to the detriment of the Sunni minority, which in general is seen as the core of the Iraqi resistance. The question though is whether or not there is any discussion of an adjustment to American plans. On the one hand, the fact that American plans have been frustrated by the resistance could indeed be an explanation for a reevaluation, but it could also be an explanation for the fact that, contrary to all predictions, Iran hasn't been attacked yet (the newest predictions are talking about this month). On the other hand, there are indications that the discord that exists between the two Muslim groups is the result of a preconceived plan: divide and conquer, culminating in an evenly divided future Middle East. And while two dogs are fighting for a bone... If there really is a 'Redirection', then the U.S. will end up profiting from the divisions that it itself brought about which resulted from the decision, often described as a blunder, to dismiss the constituent Sunni elements of the police and army en masse. In response to the Sunni insurgency, the Shiites were supported by the U.S. from the beginning. They received military support via Task Force 121, a team of specialists from Special Operations and the CIA. Additional American support came in the form of the coordination and cultivation of a large Iraqi militia. It may be this group that called itself 'Black Flag' in 2004 and took the fight to the insurgents. The resulting internecine conflict between the two Muslim groups not only divided Iraq, but it also put pressure on the situation in the region. Questions surrounding attack on Golden MosqueA relatively important moment in the fighting between the Sunnis and the Shiites was the attack on the Golden Mosque in February of 2006. Directly following the destruction of the Shiite mosque, 27 Sunni mosques were attacked and three Sunni imams were killed. Hundreds, if not thousands of people have died as a result of the attack. The strike seemed to be a clearcut case, but further examination raises questions as to who the actual perpetrators of the attack were. The suggestion is now being made that Western specialists were involved. Jassem Mohammed Jaafar, at that time Construction minister, said on Iraqi television: '"According to initial reports, the bombing was technically well conceived and could only have been carried out by specialists"', to which he added that the placement of the explosives had to have taken at least twelve hours. Jafaar: '[...] "holes were dug into the mausoleum's four main pillars and packed with explosives." "Then the charges were connected together and linked to another charge placed just under the dome. The wires were then linked to a detonator which was triggered at a distance'. These statements were borne out by the account of the caretaker of the mosque, as noted by The New York Times: 'The night before the explosion, he said, just before the 8 p.m. curfew on Feb. 21, 2006, on the Western calendar, men dressed in commando uniforms like those issued by the Interior Ministry entered the shrine. The caretaker said he had been beaten, tied up and locked in a room. Throughout the night, he said, he could hear the sound of drilling as the attackers positioned the explosives, apparently in such a way as to inflict maximum damage on the dome. [...] I can describe what was done as exactly like what happened to the World Trade Center," he said. "Bad people used this incident to divide Iraq on a detestable sectarian basis."' Journalist Mike Whitney writes: 'Eyewitness accounts verify that American troops and Iraqi National Guard were active in the area throughout the night and that their cars could be heard running "the whole night until next morning". People living around the mosque were told "to stay in your shop and don't leave the area". At 6:30 AM the American troops left, just 10 minutes before the bombs went off.' '"There are forces seeking to prevent democracy and obstruct the peaceful political and economic development of Iraq. They seek to achieve their goals in a number of ways. But, as I said before, promoting sectarian violence is one of them. There's nothing new here"', according to American spokesperson Adam Ereli. Pro-Sunni clandestine operations in and around IranAccording to Seymour Hersh, American foreign policy as it relates to Iran - based as it is on the mutual strife between Sunnis and Shiites - has been completely overturned. In his latest article The Redirection, he writes: 'The new strategy "is a major shift in American policy-it's a sea change," a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said.' He makes the argument that the rise of the Shiites in Iraq, combined with a powerful Shiite Iran no longer held in check by the threat of Saddam's Sunni-controlled army, has sent chills through Sunni countries in the region, such as Saudi Arabia: 'The Sunni states "were petrified of a Shiite resurgence, and there was growing resentment with our gambling on the moderate Shiites in Iraq," he said. "We cannot reverse the Shiite gain in Iraq, but we can contain it."' According to Hersh this fear explains the readiness of the Saudis to contribute financially to the clandestine pro-Sunni support operations: 'The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.' The money comes in part from the Saudis, and the execution of the operations takes place under the guidance of Vice-President Dick Cheney: '[...] former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney. [...] American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence [...]'. Read more about clandestine operations in Iran in part 4 (October 2005) of this DeepJournal series.A new Cold War in the Middle EastThe divisions between Sunni and Shiite groups could be the beginning of a new Cold War in the Middle East. Following the Cold War against communism and during the subsequent War on Terror, a new war could now arise between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. 'Martin Indyk, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration who also served as Ambassador to Israel, said that "the Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War." Indyk, who is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, added that, in his opinion, it was not clear whether the White House was fully aware of the strategic implications of its new policy', writes Hersh. But just as with the Cold War, the War on Terror and the new religious divisions, the question is whether the U.S. is the victim or the perpetrator. Whichever the case may be, both Muslim groups are battling each other while Iran as a target is getting more and more in the picture, just as a relatively safe Israel, surrounded by a patchwork quilt of small and fragmented statelets in an oil-rich region. Influence of the Democratic majority on Bush AdministrationSome are pinning their hopes on the Democrats - who now hold a majority in Congress - to avert a military conflict with Iran. But their recent history doesn't offer much in the way of hope. In the years following the 9/11 attacks, they remained silent while the new media amassed fact upon fact, chipping away at the official conspiracy theory of what happened on and around September 11th. The Democratic party didn't exactly stand in the way of the radical legislation which came in the wake of 9/11 either, and what's more, they used the first hundred hours of their majority in Congress to adopt into law the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, whose findings were taken apart piece by piece by Professor David Ray Griffin in his book The New Pearl Harbor. And as to the question of what the most relevant Democrats are saying about Iran - the answer is disappointing. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama have all made clear that they are not opposed to military action against Iran. DNC Chairman Howard Dean was quite clear at the beginning of last year: '[...] under no circumstances will a Democratic Administration ever allow Iran to become a nuclear power.' One year later he called the Iran of now a greater danger than the Iraq of then. Meanwhile Clinton is making similar statements, but feels that if Bush wants to declare war on Iran he should definitely ask Congress for approval. According to Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, this isn't necessary; under pressure from the Israeli lobby she has introduced legislation ensuring that Bush doesn't have to do this. The Democrats are echoing the rhetoric of the Republican administration. Under the motto 'Don't Let the People Who Brought Us Iraq Define the Questions' Paul Pillar, 'a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, [who] teaches security studies at Georgetown University' is advising first and foremost to ask the right questions, such as: 'If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, how would that change its behavior and affect U.S. interests? In particular, why would deterrence, which has kept nuclear peace with other adversaries, not work with Iran?'In spite of democracy, small group dictatesWith the appropriate questions not being posed, and with the Democrats having begged off and the build-up to the coming war with Iran only now in this late stage getting the full attention of the Western media, it remains as clear as ever that a small group of extremists - an elite of the elite - are once again prepared to take the world one step further on a path above which most people see only dark clouds gathering. Speaking of this small group of people who have no fear of the gathering storm and who see a shiny pot of gold at the end of it, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: 'I am perplexed by the fact that major strategic decisions seem to be made within a very narrow circle of individuals - just a few, probably a handful, perhaps not more than the fingers on my hand. And these are the individuals, all of whom but one, who made the original decision to go to war [with Iraq], and used the original justifications to go to war.' One thing that comes to mind while listening to Brzezinski is a quote taken down by New York Times reporter Ron Suskind that came from the mouth of a White House aide: Suskind writes: 'The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''' Vanity Fair sums up this idea as it translates into the situation with Iran in a long article with a short headline: From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq.Fundamentalist leadership in both U.S. and IranIn his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Brzezinski underscores a view held on the role that the U.S. has played in the rise of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's star: 'Our policy has unintentionally - I hope unintentionally, maybe it was develishly clever, but I think unintentionally - helped Ahmadinejad consolidate himself in power and excercised a degree of influence which actually his position doesn't justify. Most Americans when they say president Ahmadinejad, they think he is the equivalent of president Bush, he is not, he is roughly a third level official, who doesn't even control the military resources of the country.' In comparing Bush and Ahmadinejad, investigative journalist Jim Lobe was compelled to make a side-by-side product comparison which brought him to the conclusion: Bush and Ahmadinejad: separated at birth?One of the similarities between the two leaders lies in their fundamental character. Bush's image, which along with that of the U.S. has taken a beating, is that of the democratic, Christian leader of the free world. That's why he is supported by the Moral Majority in the U.S. The same moral theme can also be seen in Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende. Upon further inspection there are a few things to take note of regarding the exacting image of both gentlemen. Balkenende preaches norms and values, but then does the opposite by refusing to publicly state the reason that The Netherlands sent soldiers to Iraq. Balkenende reconfirms the hypocritical image of fundamentalist Christians. This image is also shaped - alongside the sex abuse scandals in the Church - by George W. Bush, a man who while governor of Texas held the record for death sentences handed out, who now feels that torture is necessary, and who could be held responsible for thousands of American deaths and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi victims. And that's just to name a few. Bush is facilitated by the conservative Christian Erik Prince, director of Blackwater, the most important supplier of mercenaries for Iraq. These leaders of the Moral Majority would nevertheless be nowhere without the Silent Majority, the much more moderate sectors of the population of the U.S. and The Netherlands, for example. While the silence of the Silent Majority and the actions of the Moral Majority keep the wars coming, the conservative Christians, through their active support for Bush and Israel, seem to be eager to bring on exactly that which their guidebook - The Bible - warns against: a great battle in the Middle East which would usher in the End Times. President Ahmadinejad echoes this vision of the so-called 'End Times' held by the millions of Christians who support Bush; just like them, his view of the future is none too gloomy because he also foresees a final battle and above all redemption for mankind: 'French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy has quoted Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad as saying that one should really hope for "chaos" because "there will be God" afterward. [...] Ahmadinejad has also called for the return of al-Mahdi, a messiah-like figure in Shi'ite Islam, whose reappearance is supposed to restore justice before the end of the world', writes AFP. In this way he's on the same wavelength as the millions of readers of the Left Behind series, which foresees a miraculous catching up of all true Christian believers prior to the apocalypse. Influential Christians such as Joel Rosenberg, whose books are recommended on the Left Behind website, interpret what they read in the newspaper the same way they interpret the Bible, and see in the news the fulfillment of age-old prophecies: '[...] what is particularly curious about the emergence of an even stronger Iran-Sudan alliance this week is that it was foretold 2,500 years ago by the Hebrew Prophet Ezekiel in chapters 38 and 39'. To this statement he adds an article from Haaretz, in which it talks about how 'several Orthodox Jewish groups in Israel are currently making preparations to build and outfit the Third Temple', after which he refers to the title of chapter 13 from his book Epicenter: Future Headline: Jews build third temple in Jerusalem. In a recent contribution, Rosenberg writes: 'I've written before that 2007 is the Year of Decision. But is April about to become the "month of decision"?' How dangerous is Iran?The Iranian economy is weak, and as opposed to the U.S. and Israel, Iran has no history of initiating wars (the war with Iraq was the result of an attack by Saddam that was spurred on by the U.S.). Ahmadinejad says that he doesn't want war, and in part 14 of this series it was also shown how he was incorrectly quoted and doesn't want to wipe Israel off the map. While the U.S. is refusing offers of negotiations (1, 2) with Iran, Iran is allowing UN-inspectors to investigate their nuclear program, though they restricted their cooperation recently, and as opposed to the U.S. and Israel, Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the other hand Ahmadinejad did organize a conference to promote research into the Holocaust, and he might be lying about his belief that his faith forbids the production of a nuclear weapon. Depending on which cleric you ask, a nuclear weapon would actually be permitted, so long as it is not used offensively (in contrary to the U.S. view). And then there is Iran's support for Hezbollah. When it comes to the facts, there are different ways of looking at it: 'Iran's control over Hezbollah has been steadily declining since approximately 1996, during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami. Money does continue to come "from Iran" to support Hezbollah, but not the Iranian government. Instead, it's private religious foundations that direct the bulk of support, primarily to Hezbollah's charitable activities. [...] the most important reason for not targeting Iran for the continued fighting in Lebanon is that this conflict is antithetical to Iran's interests. [...] If a state is needed to explain the continued existence of groups like Hezbollah, then Iran is an ideal candidate. Ergo, the connection must exist. Such claims serve to bolster the central, but fallacious, political doctrine for the Bush administration that the Global War on Terrorism really exists', writes Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University, William O. Beeman, author of the book The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
Monday, April 02, 2007
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Nicholas Burns on Charlie Rose 2-23-07 (William O. Beeman)
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Nicholas Burns, appeared on the Charlie Rose show on PBS on February 23, 2007. His appearance was a very revealing insight into what anthropologists call “magical thinking” on his part, and perhaps that of the State Department. The view Burns presented was that U.S. pressure on Iran was creating “cracks” in the Iranian political establishment. The “magical thinking” part of his formulation is to attribute causality to a series of irrelevant actions that have no causal force at all.
The story going around Washington, promulgated by the Bush administration, is that the December U.N. sanctions were more effective than anyone believed they would be, that they have created dissention among the leadership ranks in Iran, and that U.S. efforts to bring financial pressure on Iran has caused the power establishment in Iran to estrange itself from President Ahmadinejad.
In fact, the factional disagreement that Burns wants to take credit for far pre-dates the U.S. actions in December, or even the Presidential elections of 2005. It is as if Burns and company never heard of the reform movement, or listened to original Revolutionary Ibrahim Yazdi. Moreover, the estrangement of the Iranian leadership from President Ahmadinejad began almost instantaneously after his election.
These splits in the Iranian political scene have been growing continually. The real cause for their growth is the change in the Iranian electorate as the voting population gets younger and is more estranged from the original revolution. Certainly U.S. gunboats in the Gulf and the annoyances of silly and ineffective sanctions are going to be a topic of discussion in Iran, but there has been absolutely no sea change in Iranian political life, only a steady growth in divergence of opinion over a much longer period.
These long-term divisions in Iranian political life may seem to have appeared suddenly, but not because they didn’t exist before, but rather because the United States has so long presented Iran as a monolithic dictatorship where no political dissent is possible, and where elections are not “real.” When the truth about the growing diversity of Iranian political thought becomes undeniable, the impression is created that something the U.S. did brought it about.
Mr. Burns and his boss, Condoleezza Rice can delude themselves, and perhaps the American public into thinking that they are creating some kind of cataclysm in Iran through their ineffective diplomacy, but their posturing is simply laughable to anyone who follows Iranian politics with any care.
The real breakthrough will come when the United States decides to pursue mature diplomatic efforts with Iran, and stop demanding preconditions for talking to Tehran that they know Iran will always refuse. The canard that it is the Iranians are refusing to talk to the U.S, which Mr. Burns put forward once again in his appearance, is an absurdity given the numerous overtures made by Iran over the years that have been systematically ignored by the Bush administration.
The story going around Washington, promulgated by the Bush administration, is that the December U.N. sanctions were more effective than anyone believed they would be, that they have created dissention among the leadership ranks in Iran, and that U.S. efforts to bring financial pressure on Iran has caused the power establishment in Iran to estrange itself from President Ahmadinejad.
In fact, the factional disagreement that Burns wants to take credit for far pre-dates the U.S. actions in December, or even the Presidential elections of 2005. It is as if Burns and company never heard of the reform movement, or listened to original Revolutionary Ibrahim Yazdi. Moreover, the estrangement of the Iranian leadership from President Ahmadinejad began almost instantaneously after his election.
These splits in the Iranian political scene have been growing continually. The real cause for their growth is the change in the Iranian electorate as the voting population gets younger and is more estranged from the original revolution. Certainly U.S. gunboats in the Gulf and the annoyances of silly and ineffective sanctions are going to be a topic of discussion in Iran, but there has been absolutely no sea change in Iranian political life, only a steady growth in divergence of opinion over a much longer period.
These long-term divisions in Iranian political life may seem to have appeared suddenly, but not because they didn’t exist before, but rather because the United States has so long presented Iran as a monolithic dictatorship where no political dissent is possible, and where elections are not “real.” When the truth about the growing diversity of Iranian political thought becomes undeniable, the impression is created that something the U.S. did brought it about.
Mr. Burns and his boss, Condoleezza Rice can delude themselves, and perhaps the American public into thinking that they are creating some kind of cataclysm in Iran through their ineffective diplomacy, but their posturing is simply laughable to anyone who follows Iranian politics with any care.
The real breakthrough will come when the United States decides to pursue mature diplomatic efforts with Iran, and stop demanding preconditions for talking to Tehran that they know Iran will always refuse. The canard that it is the Iranians are refusing to talk to the U.S, which Mr. Burns put forward once again in his appearance, is an absurdity given the numerous overtures made by Iran over the years that have been systematically ignored by the Bush administration.
Monday, January 15, 2007
The Forward--Iranian Jews Reject Outside Calls To Leave Push From Israel, U.S. Groups Falls Flat Despite Ahmadinejad--Marc Perelman
Iranian Jews Reject Outside Calls To Leave Push From Israel, U.S. Groups Falls Flat Despite Ahmadinejad
Marc Perelman Fri. Jan 12, 2007
A campaign to convince Iran’s 25,000 Jews to flee the country has stalled, with most opting to stay in their native homeland despite President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial and anti-Israeli speeches.
In recent months, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Israeli officials and some American Jewish communal leaders have urged Iranian Jews to leave. But so far, despite generally being allowed to travel to Israel and emigrate abroad, Iranian Jews have stayed put.
According to the statistics compiled by HIAS, 152 out of 25,000 Jews left Iran between October 2005 and September 2006 — down from 297 during the same period the previous year, and 183 the year before. Sources said that the majority of those who have left in recent years cited economic and family reasons as their main incentive for leaving, rather than political concerns.
At the same time, HIAS workers in Vienna have detected a substantial increase in the number of Iranian refugees from other minority faiths, including Bahais.
Since the August 2005 election of Ahmadinejad, a conservative firebrand, the fate of Iranian Jewry has become part of a broader diplomatic game between Teheran, Washington and Jerusalem.
Ahmadinejad has repeatedly used rabid anti-Israeli rhetoric, threatening to wipe Israel off the map, and has questioned over and over again the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Tehran recently hosted a conference to “assess” the Holocaust, and last year a leading daily newspaper held a contest soliciting Holocaust cartoons as a response to the uproar caused by a Danish caricature contest of Prophet Muhammad.
At times, as international tensions mounted over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, staunch opponents of the mullah regime have launched accusations of religious and ethnic discrimination against Iran in an effort to depict the country as a pariah state.
HIAS declined to comment on its efforts to promote emigration, but some observers claim that the main reason Iranian Jews have chosen to stay is that they are, for the most part, free to practice their faith. “Iranian Jews have a comfortable Jewish life,” said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Middle East analyst now living in Israel.
At a time when Tehran and Jerusalem trade barbs and threats, the 25,000 Jews of Tehran, Shiraz and Yazd attend packed synagogues, send their children to Jewish schools, buy their meat in kosher butchers and are even exempt from prohibitions on alcohol. This modus vivendi is the result of a compact between the leadership of the Jewish community and the Iranian authorities, whereby Jews are permitted to practice their faith as a community on the condition that they remain out of politics and do not speak out in favor of Israel.
Some Iranian expatriates dispute the assertion that Jews are staying because conditions are good. Sam Kermanian, secretary general of the Los Angeles-based Iranian American Jewish Federation, asserted that the majority of Jews remaining in Iran are elderly and only speak Persian, and are naturally less inclined to emigrate.
In the early days after the Islamic revolution in 1979, several Jews were executed on charges of Zionism and relations with Israel. About 80% of the community left the country in which Jews had lived for nearly 3,000 years as descendants of slaves from Babylon saved by Cyrus the Great and enjoyed a “golden age” during the 1960s and ’70s under the Shah.
The situation for Jews improved in the years after the revolution, and Judaism is one of the recognized minority religions in Iran. Jews, Zoroastrians and Christians have rights enshrined in the Islamic constitution, and they each elect their own member of parliament and are entitled to worship freely but not to proselytize.
The State Department’s religious freedom reports have noted that the Jewish community in Iran is closely monitored by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. In other words, Jews, like other minorities, face discrimination because of the inherently Islamic nature of the regime, which prevents them, for instance, from securing government jobs or becoming army officers.
Seven years ago, a group of 13 Orthodox Jews in the southern city of Shiraz were accused of spying for Israel. The case prompted an international outcry that led to the eventual release of the Jewish prisoners after years of quiet diplomacy.
Some criticism of the regime has proved to be unfounded. A few months ago, several conservative media outlets in Canada and the United States published reports claiming that the Iranian government had approved legislation requiring religious minorities to wear a distinctive sign, invoking charged memories from World War II. The reports turned out to be wrong.
“Some people are trying to use the climate created by Ahmadinejad and the nuke issue,” said William Beeman, an Iran expert and professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. “But Iranian Jews have a fairly vibrant communal life, and they can even criticize the regime within the constraints of the Islamic regime.”
Both Maurice Motamed, the Jewish member of the Iranian parliament, and Haroun Yeshaya, longtime chairman of the Jewish Central Committee of Tehran, who have regularly criticized Israel, nevertheless publicly condemned the president’s views, the latter in an unusual letter to Ahmadinejad, sent in February 2006.
Kermanian, of the L.A.-based Iranian Jewish federation, said that “given the situation and the current climate, some Jews there will say things are not too bad, but the totality of the picture is negative.” He said that the recent uptick in antisemitic propaganda in books and the media had stoked fears within the Jewish community in Iran.
The regime’s anti-Zionist propaganda has at times provoked antisemitic incidents. Last summer, a hard-line weekly newspaper, Yalesarat, published photographs of people waving Israeli flags in synagogues to celebrate Israeli Independence Day. The paper falsely asserted that the synagogues were in Iran, prompting an assault on two synagogues. Motamed, the Jewish parliamentarian, described the vandals as “opportunists” in comments to the BBC, and said that the incident was defused by the Iranian security forces.
Several times in recent years, Jewish burial areas were overtaken by local authorities for urban development purposes. A Western diplomat said that while antisemitic intentions played a part in the incidents, another factor was that, in general, burial places are less sacred for Shia Muslims than they are for Jews.
For all his inflammatory rhetoric, Ahmadinejad has been careful not to single out Iran’s Jews, and his office even donated money to Tehran’s Jewish hospital.
“The government goes to extra lengths to differentiate between the government of Israel, with whom they have fundamental issues, and the Jewish people, especially Iranian Jews,” said Amir Cyrus Razzaghi, a Tehran-based commentator who is not Jewish. “There is a genuine interest to keep the Jewish community in Iran to demonstrate to the world that the government is anti-Israel and not anti-Jewish. This is especially important to a government that strives to be not only the leader in the Islamic world, but also a key regional and global player.”
The result is the only Jewish community living under an avowedly Islamic regime. In Tehran, where the majority of the community lives, there are six kosher butchers and about 30 synagogues. In addition, there is the Jewish hospital, which has a Jewish director and is funded by donations from the Diaspora, though the vast majority of its staff and patients are Muslim.
Children attend Jewish schools where they are taught Hebrew and receive religious training. All principals are Muslim, the schools do not close on the Sabbath and the curriculum is supervised by the government.
While Jews are allowed to obtain passports and visas to leave Iran, they have to submit their requests to a special section of the passport office and there are restrictions on families leaving en masse. Iranian Jews travel to and from Israel via a third country with the full knowledge of the authorities. Both sides had kept quiet about such journeys, but recently acknowledged them.
“It might seem strange,” said Javedanfar, the Israel-based expert, “but they can travel to Israel and other places, come back [to Iran] and have a comfortable Jewish life, as long as they keep quiet about Israel.”
Fri. Jan 12, 2007
Marc Perelman Fri. Jan 12, 2007
A campaign to convince Iran’s 25,000 Jews to flee the country has stalled, with most opting to stay in their native homeland despite President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial and anti-Israeli speeches.
In recent months, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Israeli officials and some American Jewish communal leaders have urged Iranian Jews to leave. But so far, despite generally being allowed to travel to Israel and emigrate abroad, Iranian Jews have stayed put.
According to the statistics compiled by HIAS, 152 out of 25,000 Jews left Iran between October 2005 and September 2006 — down from 297 during the same period the previous year, and 183 the year before. Sources said that the majority of those who have left in recent years cited economic and family reasons as their main incentive for leaving, rather than political concerns.
At the same time, HIAS workers in Vienna have detected a substantial increase in the number of Iranian refugees from other minority faiths, including Bahais.
Since the August 2005 election of Ahmadinejad, a conservative firebrand, the fate of Iranian Jewry has become part of a broader diplomatic game between Teheran, Washington and Jerusalem.
Ahmadinejad has repeatedly used rabid anti-Israeli rhetoric, threatening to wipe Israel off the map, and has questioned over and over again the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Tehran recently hosted a conference to “assess” the Holocaust, and last year a leading daily newspaper held a contest soliciting Holocaust cartoons as a response to the uproar caused by a Danish caricature contest of Prophet Muhammad.
At times, as international tensions mounted over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, staunch opponents of the mullah regime have launched accusations of religious and ethnic discrimination against Iran in an effort to depict the country as a pariah state.
HIAS declined to comment on its efforts to promote emigration, but some observers claim that the main reason Iranian Jews have chosen to stay is that they are, for the most part, free to practice their faith. “Iranian Jews have a comfortable Jewish life,” said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Middle East analyst now living in Israel.
At a time when Tehran and Jerusalem trade barbs and threats, the 25,000 Jews of Tehran, Shiraz and Yazd attend packed synagogues, send their children to Jewish schools, buy their meat in kosher butchers and are even exempt from prohibitions on alcohol. This modus vivendi is the result of a compact between the leadership of the Jewish community and the Iranian authorities, whereby Jews are permitted to practice their faith as a community on the condition that they remain out of politics and do not speak out in favor of Israel.
Some Iranian expatriates dispute the assertion that Jews are staying because conditions are good. Sam Kermanian, secretary general of the Los Angeles-based Iranian American Jewish Federation, asserted that the majority of Jews remaining in Iran are elderly and only speak Persian, and are naturally less inclined to emigrate.
In the early days after the Islamic revolution in 1979, several Jews were executed on charges of Zionism and relations with Israel. About 80% of the community left the country in which Jews had lived for nearly 3,000 years as descendants of slaves from Babylon saved by Cyrus the Great and enjoyed a “golden age” during the 1960s and ’70s under the Shah.
The situation for Jews improved in the years after the revolution, and Judaism is one of the recognized minority religions in Iran. Jews, Zoroastrians and Christians have rights enshrined in the Islamic constitution, and they each elect their own member of parliament and are entitled to worship freely but not to proselytize.
The State Department’s religious freedom reports have noted that the Jewish community in Iran is closely monitored by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. In other words, Jews, like other minorities, face discrimination because of the inherently Islamic nature of the regime, which prevents them, for instance, from securing government jobs or becoming army officers.
Seven years ago, a group of 13 Orthodox Jews in the southern city of Shiraz were accused of spying for Israel. The case prompted an international outcry that led to the eventual release of the Jewish prisoners after years of quiet diplomacy.
Some criticism of the regime has proved to be unfounded. A few months ago, several conservative media outlets in Canada and the United States published reports claiming that the Iranian government had approved legislation requiring religious minorities to wear a distinctive sign, invoking charged memories from World War II. The reports turned out to be wrong.
“Some people are trying to use the climate created by Ahmadinejad and the nuke issue,” said William Beeman, an Iran expert and professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. “But Iranian Jews have a fairly vibrant communal life, and they can even criticize the regime within the constraints of the Islamic regime.”
Both Maurice Motamed, the Jewish member of the Iranian parliament, and Haroun Yeshaya, longtime chairman of the Jewish Central Committee of Tehran, who have regularly criticized Israel, nevertheless publicly condemned the president’s views, the latter in an unusual letter to Ahmadinejad, sent in February 2006.
Kermanian, of the L.A.-based Iranian Jewish federation, said that “given the situation and the current climate, some Jews there will say things are not too bad, but the totality of the picture is negative.” He said that the recent uptick in antisemitic propaganda in books and the media had stoked fears within the Jewish community in Iran.
The regime’s anti-Zionist propaganda has at times provoked antisemitic incidents. Last summer, a hard-line weekly newspaper, Yalesarat, published photographs of people waving Israeli flags in synagogues to celebrate Israeli Independence Day. The paper falsely asserted that the synagogues were in Iran, prompting an assault on two synagogues. Motamed, the Jewish parliamentarian, described the vandals as “opportunists” in comments to the BBC, and said that the incident was defused by the Iranian security forces.
Several times in recent years, Jewish burial areas were overtaken by local authorities for urban development purposes. A Western diplomat said that while antisemitic intentions played a part in the incidents, another factor was that, in general, burial places are less sacred for Shia Muslims than they are for Jews.
For all his inflammatory rhetoric, Ahmadinejad has been careful not to single out Iran’s Jews, and his office even donated money to Tehran’s Jewish hospital.
“The government goes to extra lengths to differentiate between the government of Israel, with whom they have fundamental issues, and the Jewish people, especially Iranian Jews,” said Amir Cyrus Razzaghi, a Tehran-based commentator who is not Jewish. “There is a genuine interest to keep the Jewish community in Iran to demonstrate to the world that the government is anti-Israel and not anti-Jewish. This is especially important to a government that strives to be not only the leader in the Islamic world, but also a key regional and global player.”
The result is the only Jewish community living under an avowedly Islamic regime. In Tehran, where the majority of the community lives, there are six kosher butchers and about 30 synagogues. In addition, there is the Jewish hospital, which has a Jewish director and is funded by donations from the Diaspora, though the vast majority of its staff and patients are Muslim.
Children attend Jewish schools where they are taught Hebrew and receive religious training. All principals are Muslim, the schools do not close on the Sabbath and the curriculum is supervised by the government.
While Jews are allowed to obtain passports and visas to leave Iran, they have to submit their requests to a special section of the passport office and there are restrictions on families leaving en masse. Iranian Jews travel to and from Israel via a third country with the full knowledge of the authorities. Both sides had kept quiet about such journeys, but recently acknowledged them.
“It might seem strange,” said Javedanfar, the Israel-based expert, “but they can travel to Israel and other places, come back [to Iran] and have a comfortable Jewish life, as long as they keep quiet about Israel.”
Fri. Jan 12, 2007
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Youth Movement: Iran's New Generation will be more Moderate--William O. Beeman
Article published Jan 14, 2007
Youth movement Iran's new generation will be more moderate
By William O. Beeman
The Providence Journal
The recent election in Iran signals change in the Islamic Republic. The rising generation of Iranian youth, along with the increasingly important population of politically active women, is making itself felt in a dramatic way. It is this combination -- youth and women -- that will lead Iran in the near future.
The new political landscape is not yet at full strength -- that will occur in about five years as the post-revolutionary population matures. If left to its own devices without foreign interference, Iran would undoubtedly be more democratic, more liberal, more secular and more positively disposed toward the West than ever before.
The elections that chose the members of local municipal councils as well as the Assembly of Experts, which monitors the actions of Iran's Spiritual Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, resulted in losses for the extreme conservative elements in Iran's political spectrum and a resurgence of moderate and reformist candidates.
Many commentators have had difficulty interpreting the election results. It becomes easier, however, once the Iranian political landscape has been properly laid out.
The dominant group in Iranian political life is what I call the post-revolutionary hard-line conservatives. This is the group who came to power under the aegis of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The current Iranian spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, and his supporters make up the bulk of this group, which currently dominate the government. Often identified in derogatory fashion as the "mullocracy,'' it is no longer dominated by clerics.
Challenging this establishment for power are three groups. First are a number of moderate conservatives -- individuals and factions who have posts within the conservative establishment who are vying for power. Chief among them is Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a former president who ran for a second nonconsecutive term against current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2006 elections. Hashemi-Rafsanjani currently heads the Expediency Council, which mediates between the spiritual leader and the parliament. Another contender for power is the current mayor of Tehran, Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, who also ran for president.
The second group consists of the Reformers, who, under President Mohammad Khatami, the last president, made strong gains in modifying the hard revolutionary line of the Khomeini conservatives. They were voted out of office by a public disgruntled because they could not take their reforms far enough. They were also prevented from seeking election by the conservatives who, under the constitution, have the right through a body called the Council of Guardians to remove "unsuitable'' candidates from elections. Former parliament Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, who came close to being in the presidential runoff last year, is part of this group.
The third challenger group might be called the revolutionary reactionaries, headed by current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This group is disgruntled for many reasons. Many are veterans of the Iran-Iraq War. They have never achieved real power in government, though they maintain a certain control in local politics. They reject the idea of clerical rule and want Iran to return to the ideals of the original revolution -- particularly in economic reform. They view the current conservative rulers as corrupt and venal. President Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric is aimed at energizing this group and attracting new followers to its philosophy. He is too weak to effect the religious conservative rollback in laws involving public behavior, or in redistribution of the nation's wealth -- one of the hallmark goals of the original revolution.
Unfortunately for both the reformers and the revolutionary reactionaries, they have very little power. President Khatami and those who represent his political stance are regularly vilified in the press and in public rhetoric. Though President Ahmadinejad has the bully pulpit at his disposal to launch whatever attacks he wishes on Israel, the United States or those who oppose Iran's nuclear-energy program, in fact he has very little actual power. Under Iran's governmental system the president has no control over the military, foreign policy or Iran 's nuclear program. Therefore, his words are empty.
Iran, however, does have a real, functioning electoral system, despite denigrating remarks made by the Bush administration. President Ahmadinejad hoped to increase his power by forming a political party and running candidates who would represent his philosophy. The reformers also ran candidates to challenge the conservatives.
Now that election returns are in, it seems clear that the voters have favored the reformers, and the moderate conservatives in both the local elections and for the Assembly of Experts. Mr. Ahmadinejad's supporters came in a distant fourth in all aspects of the election. This is certainly a setback for his political ambitions, and it should help Westerners to put his extreme remarks in perspective: Clearly Iranians don't buy them any more than forces in the West.
The trend among Iranian voters is thus in the direction of change away from the conservatism of the past. This has been the general direction of Iranian politics, and it will undoubtedly continue.
The one issue in which all Iranians are united, however, is the right for Iran to develop its nuclear-energy capabilities. This is a matter of national pride in Iran, where it is seen as an aspect of modernization. There is no strong evidence that Iran is pursuing a weapons program. The United States is foolish to continue to antagonize the Iranian people by threatening attacks, sanctions and other hostile actions based on this one-note foreign policy.
A policy of talking to Iran, engaging in diplomacy and working toward reasonable mutual solutions to regional issues of mutual concern will pay off in the long run when Iran's new generation comes to power.
William O. Beeman is a professor of anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University and the author of "The Great Satan vs. The Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other."
Youth movement Iran's new generation will be more moderate
By William O. Beeman
The Providence Journal
The recent election in Iran signals change in the Islamic Republic. The rising generation of Iranian youth, along with the increasingly important population of politically active women, is making itself felt in a dramatic way. It is this combination -- youth and women -- that will lead Iran in the near future.
The new political landscape is not yet at full strength -- that will occur in about five years as the post-revolutionary population matures. If left to its own devices without foreign interference, Iran would undoubtedly be more democratic, more liberal, more secular and more positively disposed toward the West than ever before.
The elections that chose the members of local municipal councils as well as the Assembly of Experts, which monitors the actions of Iran's Spiritual Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, resulted in losses for the extreme conservative elements in Iran's political spectrum and a resurgence of moderate and reformist candidates.
Many commentators have had difficulty interpreting the election results. It becomes easier, however, once the Iranian political landscape has been properly laid out.
The dominant group in Iranian political life is what I call the post-revolutionary hard-line conservatives. This is the group who came to power under the aegis of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The current Iranian spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, and his supporters make up the bulk of this group, which currently dominate the government. Often identified in derogatory fashion as the "mullocracy,'' it is no longer dominated by clerics.
Challenging this establishment for power are three groups. First are a number of moderate conservatives -- individuals and factions who have posts within the conservative establishment who are vying for power. Chief among them is Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a former president who ran for a second nonconsecutive term against current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2006 elections. Hashemi-Rafsanjani currently heads the Expediency Council, which mediates between the spiritual leader and the parliament. Another contender for power is the current mayor of Tehran, Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, who also ran for president.
The second group consists of the Reformers, who, under President Mohammad Khatami, the last president, made strong gains in modifying the hard revolutionary line of the Khomeini conservatives. They were voted out of office by a public disgruntled because they could not take their reforms far enough. They were also prevented from seeking election by the conservatives who, under the constitution, have the right through a body called the Council of Guardians to remove "unsuitable'' candidates from elections. Former parliament Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, who came close to being in the presidential runoff last year, is part of this group.
The third challenger group might be called the revolutionary reactionaries, headed by current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This group is disgruntled for many reasons. Many are veterans of the Iran-Iraq War. They have never achieved real power in government, though they maintain a certain control in local politics. They reject the idea of clerical rule and want Iran to return to the ideals of the original revolution -- particularly in economic reform. They view the current conservative rulers as corrupt and venal. President Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric is aimed at energizing this group and attracting new followers to its philosophy. He is too weak to effect the religious conservative rollback in laws involving public behavior, or in redistribution of the nation's wealth -- one of the hallmark goals of the original revolution.
Unfortunately for both the reformers and the revolutionary reactionaries, they have very little power. President Khatami and those who represent his political stance are regularly vilified in the press and in public rhetoric. Though President Ahmadinejad has the bully pulpit at his disposal to launch whatever attacks he wishes on Israel, the United States or those who oppose Iran's nuclear-energy program, in fact he has very little actual power. Under Iran's governmental system the president has no control over the military, foreign policy or Iran 's nuclear program. Therefore, his words are empty.
Iran, however, does have a real, functioning electoral system, despite denigrating remarks made by the Bush administration. President Ahmadinejad hoped to increase his power by forming a political party and running candidates who would represent his philosophy. The reformers also ran candidates to challenge the conservatives.
Now that election returns are in, it seems clear that the voters have favored the reformers, and the moderate conservatives in both the local elections and for the Assembly of Experts. Mr. Ahmadinejad's supporters came in a distant fourth in all aspects of the election. This is certainly a setback for his political ambitions, and it should help Westerners to put his extreme remarks in perspective: Clearly Iranians don't buy them any more than forces in the West.
The trend among Iranian voters is thus in the direction of change away from the conservatism of the past. This has been the general direction of Iranian politics, and it will undoubtedly continue.
The one issue in which all Iranians are united, however, is the right for Iran to develop its nuclear-energy capabilities. This is a matter of national pride in Iran, where it is seen as an aspect of modernization. There is no strong evidence that Iran is pursuing a weapons program. The United States is foolish to continue to antagonize the Iranian people by threatening attacks, sanctions and other hostile actions based on this one-note foreign policy.
A policy of talking to Iran, engaging in diplomacy and working toward reasonable mutual solutions to regional issues of mutual concern will pay off in the long run when Iran's new generation comes to power.
William O. Beeman is a professor of anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University and the author of "The Great Satan vs. The Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other."
Friday, December 22, 2006
Democracy Gets Traction in Iran--William O. Beeman
Democracy Gets Traction in Iran
-->
New America Media, Opinion/Analysis, William O. Beeman, Posted: Dec 23, 2006
Editor's Note: The results of recent Iranian elections were a setback for conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a success for reformers. If Iran is left to itself, the writer says, a rising generation of young people and women will make the country more democratic and liberal than ever. William O. Beeman is professor of anthropology and Middle East studies at Brown University. He is president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, and author of "The 'Great Satan' vs. the 'Mad Mullahs': How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other" (Praeger Publishers, 2005).
Recent elections in Iran are harbingers of change in the Islamic Republic. The rising generation of Iranian youth, along with the increasingly important population of politically active women is making itself felt in a dramatic way. It is this combination -- youth and women -- who will lead Iran in the near future.
The new political landscape is not yet at full strength -- that will occur in about five years as the post-Revolutionary population matures. However, the presence of this new political coalition in last week's election has already shown the future of Iranian political life. If left to its own devices without foreign interference, Iran undoubtedly be more democratic, more liberal, more secular and more positively disposed toward the West than ever before in the Islamic Republic.
The elections chose the members of local municipal councils as well as the Assembly of Experts, which monitors the actions of Iran's Spiritual Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i. The results were a loss for the extreme conservative elements in Iran's political spectrum, and a resurgence of moderate and reformist candidates.
Many commentators have had difficulty interpreting the election results. However, it becomes easier once the Iranian political landscape has been properly laid out.
The dominant group in Iranian political life are the post-Revolutionary Hard-line Conservatives. This is the group who came to power under the aegis of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The current spiritual leader, Ali Khamene'i and his supporters make up the bulk of this group. They currently dominate the government. However, in the three decades following the Revolution they have become increasingly more pragmatic in their dealings with the United States and other Western nations. Often identified in derogatory fashion as the "mullocracy," they are no longer dominated by clerics.
Challenging this establishment for power are three groups. First are a number of Moderate Conservatives -- individuals and factions who have posts within the conservative establishment who are vying for power. Chief among them is Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, former president who ran for a second non-consecutive term against current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in last year's elections. Hashemi-Rafsanjani currently heads the Expediency Council, which mediates between the Spiritual Leader and the Parliament. Another contender for power is Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, current mayor of Tehran, who also ran for president.
The second group consists of the Reformers, who, under President Mohammad Khatami, the last president, made strong gains in modifying the hard revolutionary line of the Khomeini conservatives. They were voted out of office by a public disgruntled because they could not take their reforms far enough. They were also prevented from seeking election by the conservatives who, under the constitution, have the right through a body called the Council of Guardians to remove "unsuitable" candidates from elections. The former Parliament Speaker, Mehdi Karrubi, who came close to being in the presidential runoff last year, is part of this group.
The third challenger group might be called the Revolutionary Reactionaries, headed by current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This group is disgruntled for many reasons. Many are veterans of the Iran-Iraq war. They have never achieved real power in government, though they maintain a certain control in local politics. They reject the idea of clerical rule and want Iran to return to the ideals of the original Revolution -- particularly in the area of economic reform. They view the current conservative rulers as corrupt and venal. President Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric is aimed at energizing this group and attracting new followers to their philosophy. President Ahmadinejad is too weak to effect the religious conservative rollback in laws involving public behavior, or in redistribution of the nation's wealth -- one of the hallmark goals of the original Revolution.
Unfortunately for both the Reformers and the Revolutionary Reactionaries, they have very little power. President Khatami and those who represent his political stance are regularly vilified in the press and in public rhetoric. Though President Ahmadinejad has the bully pulpit at his disposal to launch whatever attacks he wishes on Israel, the United States or those who oppose Iran's nuclear energy program, in fact he has very little actual power. Under Iran's governmental system the president has no control over the military, foreign policy or Iran's nuclear program. Therefore his words are empty.
However, Iran does have a real, functioning electoral system, despite denigrating remarks made by the Bush administration. President Ahmadinejad hoped to increase his power by forming a political party and running candidates that would represent his philosophy. The Reformers also ran candidates to challenge the conservatives. Since the election, it seems clear that the voters have favored the Reformers and the Moderate Conservatives in both the local elections and for the Assembly of Experts. Mr. Ahmadinejad's supporters came in a distant fourth in all aspects of the election. This is certainly a setback for his political ambitions, and it should help Westerners to put his extreme remarks in perspective: clearly Iranians don't buy them any more than forces in the West.
The trend among Iranian voters is thus in the direction of change away from the conservatism of the past. This has been the general direction of Iranian politics, and it will undoubtedly continue. The one issue that all Iranians are united on, however, is the right for Iran to develop its nuclear energy capabilities. This is a matter of national pride in Iran where it is seen as an aspect of modernization. There is no evidence whatever that Iran is pursuing a weapons program. The United States is foolish to continue to antagonize the Iranian people by threatening attacks, sanctions and other hostile actions based on this one-note foreign policy.
A policy of talking to Iran, engaging in diplomacy and working toward reasonable mutual solutions to regional issues of mutual concern will pay off in the long run, when Iran's new generation comes to power.
-->
New America Media, Opinion/Analysis, William O. Beeman, Posted: Dec 23, 2006
Editor's Note: The results of recent Iranian elections were a setback for conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a success for reformers. If Iran is left to itself, the writer says, a rising generation of young people and women will make the country more democratic and liberal than ever. William O. Beeman is professor of anthropology and Middle East studies at Brown University. He is president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, and author of "The 'Great Satan' vs. the 'Mad Mullahs': How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other" (Praeger Publishers, 2005).
Recent elections in Iran are harbingers of change in the Islamic Republic. The rising generation of Iranian youth, along with the increasingly important population of politically active women is making itself felt in a dramatic way. It is this combination -- youth and women -- who will lead Iran in the near future.
The new political landscape is not yet at full strength -- that will occur in about five years as the post-Revolutionary population matures. However, the presence of this new political coalition in last week's election has already shown the future of Iranian political life. If left to its own devices without foreign interference, Iran undoubtedly be more democratic, more liberal, more secular and more positively disposed toward the West than ever before in the Islamic Republic.
The elections chose the members of local municipal councils as well as the Assembly of Experts, which monitors the actions of Iran's Spiritual Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i. The results were a loss for the extreme conservative elements in Iran's political spectrum, and a resurgence of moderate and reformist candidates.
Many commentators have had difficulty interpreting the election results. However, it becomes easier once the Iranian political landscape has been properly laid out.
The dominant group in Iranian political life are the post-Revolutionary Hard-line Conservatives. This is the group who came to power under the aegis of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The current spiritual leader, Ali Khamene'i and his supporters make up the bulk of this group. They currently dominate the government. However, in the three decades following the Revolution they have become increasingly more pragmatic in their dealings with the United States and other Western nations. Often identified in derogatory fashion as the "mullocracy," they are no longer dominated by clerics.
Challenging this establishment for power are three groups. First are a number of Moderate Conservatives -- individuals and factions who have posts within the conservative establishment who are vying for power. Chief among them is Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, former president who ran for a second non-consecutive term against current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in last year's elections. Hashemi-Rafsanjani currently heads the Expediency Council, which mediates between the Spiritual Leader and the Parliament. Another contender for power is Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, current mayor of Tehran, who also ran for president.
The second group consists of the Reformers, who, under President Mohammad Khatami, the last president, made strong gains in modifying the hard revolutionary line of the Khomeini conservatives. They were voted out of office by a public disgruntled because they could not take their reforms far enough. They were also prevented from seeking election by the conservatives who, under the constitution, have the right through a body called the Council of Guardians to remove "unsuitable" candidates from elections. The former Parliament Speaker, Mehdi Karrubi, who came close to being in the presidential runoff last year, is part of this group.
The third challenger group might be called the Revolutionary Reactionaries, headed by current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This group is disgruntled for many reasons. Many are veterans of the Iran-Iraq war. They have never achieved real power in government, though they maintain a certain control in local politics. They reject the idea of clerical rule and want Iran to return to the ideals of the original Revolution -- particularly in the area of economic reform. They view the current conservative rulers as corrupt and venal. President Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric is aimed at energizing this group and attracting new followers to their philosophy. President Ahmadinejad is too weak to effect the religious conservative rollback in laws involving public behavior, or in redistribution of the nation's wealth -- one of the hallmark goals of the original Revolution.
Unfortunately for both the Reformers and the Revolutionary Reactionaries, they have very little power. President Khatami and those who represent his political stance are regularly vilified in the press and in public rhetoric. Though President Ahmadinejad has the bully pulpit at his disposal to launch whatever attacks he wishes on Israel, the United States or those who oppose Iran's nuclear energy program, in fact he has very little actual power. Under Iran's governmental system the president has no control over the military, foreign policy or Iran's nuclear program. Therefore his words are empty.
However, Iran does have a real, functioning electoral system, despite denigrating remarks made by the Bush administration. President Ahmadinejad hoped to increase his power by forming a political party and running candidates that would represent his philosophy. The Reformers also ran candidates to challenge the conservatives. Since the election, it seems clear that the voters have favored the Reformers and the Moderate Conservatives in both the local elections and for the Assembly of Experts. Mr. Ahmadinejad's supporters came in a distant fourth in all aspects of the election. This is certainly a setback for his political ambitions, and it should help Westerners to put his extreme remarks in perspective: clearly Iranians don't buy them any more than forces in the West.
The trend among Iranian voters is thus in the direction of change away from the conservatism of the past. This has been the general direction of Iranian politics, and it will undoubtedly continue. The one issue that all Iranians are united on, however, is the right for Iran to develop its nuclear energy capabilities. This is a matter of national pride in Iran where it is seen as an aspect of modernization. There is no evidence whatever that Iran is pursuing a weapons program. The United States is foolish to continue to antagonize the Iranian people by threatening attacks, sanctions and other hostile actions based on this one-note foreign policy.
A policy of talking to Iran, engaging in diplomacy and working toward reasonable mutual solutions to regional issues of mutual concern will pay off in the long run, when Iran's new generation comes to power.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Iranian Elections Signal Change--William O. Beeman
Iranian Elections Signal Change
William O. Beeman
Elections in Iran last week are harbingers of change in the Islamic Republic. The rising generation of Iranian youth, along with the increasingly important population of politically active women is making itself felt in a dramatic way. It is this combination—youth and women—who will lead Iran in the near future.
The new political landscape is not yet at full strength—that will occur in about five years as the post-Revolutionary population matures. However, the presence of this new political coalition in last week’s election has already shown the future of Iranian political life. If left to its own devices without foreign interference, Iran undoubtedly be more democratic, more liberal, more secular and more positively disposed toward the West than ever before in the Islamic Republic.
The elections which chose the members of local municipal councils as well as the Assembly of Experts, which monitors the actions of Iran’s Spiritual Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, resulted in losses for the extreme conservative elements in Iran’s political spectrum, and a resurgence of moderate and reformist candidates.
Many commentators have had difficulty interpreting the election results. However, it becomes easier once the Iranian political landscape has been properly laid out.
The dominant group in Iranian political life are the post-Revolutionary Hard-line Conservatives. This is the group who came to power under the aegis of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The current spiritual leader, Ali Khamene’i and his supporters make up the bulk of this group. They currently dominate the government. However, in the three decades following the Revolution they have become increasingly more pragmatic in their dealings with the United States and other Western nations. Often identified in derogatory fashion as the “mullocracy,” they are no longer dominated by clerics.
Challenging this establishment for power are three groups. First are a number of Moderate Conservatives--individuals and factions who have posts within the conservative establishment who are vying for power. Chief among them is Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, former President who ran for a second non-consecutive term against current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in last year’s elections. Hashemi-Rafsanjani currently heads the Expediency Council, which mediates between the Spiritual Leader and the Parliament. Another contender for power is Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, current mayor of Tehran, who also ran for President.
The second group consists of the Reformers, who, under President Mohammad Khatami, the last President, made strong gains in modifying the hard revolutionary line of the Khomeini conservatives. They were voted out of office by a public disgruntled because they could not take their reforms far enough. They were also prevented from seeking election by the conservatives who, under the constitution have the right through a body called the Council of Guardians to remove “unsuitable” candidates from elections. The former Parliament Speaker, Mehdi Karrubi, who came close to being in the Presidential runoff last year, is part of this group.
The third challenger group might be called the Revolutionary Reactionaries, headed by current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This group is disgruntled for many reasons. Many are veterans of the Iran-Iraq war. They have never achieved real power in government, though they maintain a certain control in local politics. They reject the idea of clerical rule and want Iran to return to the ideals of the original Revolution—particularly in the area of economic reform. They view the current conservative rulers as corrupt and venal. President Ahmadinejad’s fiery rhetoric is aimed at energizing this group and attracting new followers to their philosophy. President Ahmadinejad is too weak to effect the religious conservative rollback in laws involving public behavior, or in redistribution of the nation’s wealth—one of the hallmark goals of the original Revolution.
Unfortunately for both the Reformers and the Revolutionary Reactionaries they have very little power. President Khatami and those who represent his political stance are regularly vilified in the press and in public rhetoric. Though President Ahmadinejad has the bully pulpit at his disposal to launch whatever attacks he wishes on Israel, the United States or those who oppose Iran’s nuclear energy program; in fact he has very little actual power. Under Iran’s governmental system the President has no control over the military, foreign policy or Iran’s nuclear program. Therefore his words are empty.
However, Iran does have a real, functioning electoral system, despite denigrating remarks made by the Bush administration. President Ahmadinejad hoped to increase his power by forming a political party and running candidates that would represent his philosophy. The Reformers also ran candidates to challenge the conservatives.
Now that election returns are in, it seems clear that the voters have favored the Reformers, and the Moderate Conservatives in both the local elections and for the Assembly of Experts. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s supporters came in a distant fourth in all aspects of the election. This is certainly a setback for his political ambitions, and it should help Westerners to put his extreme remarks in perspective: clearly Iranians don’t buy them any more than forces in the West.
The trend among Iranian voters is thus in the direction of change away from the conservatism of the past. This has been the general direction of Iranian politics, and it will undoubtedly continue.
The one issue that all Iranians are united on, however, is the right for Iran to develop its nuclear energy capabilities. This is a matter of national pride in Iran where it is seen as an aspect of modernization. There is no evidence whatever that Iran is pursuing a weapons program. The United States is foolish to continue to antagonize the Iranian people by threatening attacks, sanctions and other hostile actions based on this one-note foreign policy.
A policy of talking to Iran, engaging in diplomacy and working toward reasonable mutual solutions to regional issues of mutual concern will pay off in the long run when Iran’s new generation comes to power.
William O. Beeman is Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, and author of The “Great Satan” vs. The “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
William O. Beeman
Elections in Iran last week are harbingers of change in the Islamic Republic. The rising generation of Iranian youth, along with the increasingly important population of politically active women is making itself felt in a dramatic way. It is this combination—youth and women—who will lead Iran in the near future.
The new political landscape is not yet at full strength—that will occur in about five years as the post-Revolutionary population matures. However, the presence of this new political coalition in last week’s election has already shown the future of Iranian political life. If left to its own devices without foreign interference, Iran undoubtedly be more democratic, more liberal, more secular and more positively disposed toward the West than ever before in the Islamic Republic.
The elections which chose the members of local municipal councils as well as the Assembly of Experts, which monitors the actions of Iran’s Spiritual Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, resulted in losses for the extreme conservative elements in Iran’s political spectrum, and a resurgence of moderate and reformist candidates.
Many commentators have had difficulty interpreting the election results. However, it becomes easier once the Iranian political landscape has been properly laid out.
The dominant group in Iranian political life are the post-Revolutionary Hard-line Conservatives. This is the group who came to power under the aegis of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The current spiritual leader, Ali Khamene’i and his supporters make up the bulk of this group. They currently dominate the government. However, in the three decades following the Revolution they have become increasingly more pragmatic in their dealings with the United States and other Western nations. Often identified in derogatory fashion as the “mullocracy,” they are no longer dominated by clerics.
Challenging this establishment for power are three groups. First are a number of Moderate Conservatives--individuals and factions who have posts within the conservative establishment who are vying for power. Chief among them is Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, former President who ran for a second non-consecutive term against current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in last year’s elections. Hashemi-Rafsanjani currently heads the Expediency Council, which mediates between the Spiritual Leader and the Parliament. Another contender for power is Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, current mayor of Tehran, who also ran for President.
The second group consists of the Reformers, who, under President Mohammad Khatami, the last President, made strong gains in modifying the hard revolutionary line of the Khomeini conservatives. They were voted out of office by a public disgruntled because they could not take their reforms far enough. They were also prevented from seeking election by the conservatives who, under the constitution have the right through a body called the Council of Guardians to remove “unsuitable” candidates from elections. The former Parliament Speaker, Mehdi Karrubi, who came close to being in the Presidential runoff last year, is part of this group.
The third challenger group might be called the Revolutionary Reactionaries, headed by current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This group is disgruntled for many reasons. Many are veterans of the Iran-Iraq war. They have never achieved real power in government, though they maintain a certain control in local politics. They reject the idea of clerical rule and want Iran to return to the ideals of the original Revolution—particularly in the area of economic reform. They view the current conservative rulers as corrupt and venal. President Ahmadinejad’s fiery rhetoric is aimed at energizing this group and attracting new followers to their philosophy. President Ahmadinejad is too weak to effect the religious conservative rollback in laws involving public behavior, or in redistribution of the nation’s wealth—one of the hallmark goals of the original Revolution.
Unfortunately for both the Reformers and the Revolutionary Reactionaries they have very little power. President Khatami and those who represent his political stance are regularly vilified in the press and in public rhetoric. Though President Ahmadinejad has the bully pulpit at his disposal to launch whatever attacks he wishes on Israel, the United States or those who oppose Iran’s nuclear energy program; in fact he has very little actual power. Under Iran’s governmental system the President has no control over the military, foreign policy or Iran’s nuclear program. Therefore his words are empty.
However, Iran does have a real, functioning electoral system, despite denigrating remarks made by the Bush administration. President Ahmadinejad hoped to increase his power by forming a political party and running candidates that would represent his philosophy. The Reformers also ran candidates to challenge the conservatives.
Now that election returns are in, it seems clear that the voters have favored the Reformers, and the Moderate Conservatives in both the local elections and for the Assembly of Experts. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s supporters came in a distant fourth in all aspects of the election. This is certainly a setback for his political ambitions, and it should help Westerners to put his extreme remarks in perspective: clearly Iranians don’t buy them any more than forces in the West.
The trend among Iranian voters is thus in the direction of change away from the conservatism of the past. This has been the general direction of Iranian politics, and it will undoubtedly continue.
The one issue that all Iranians are united on, however, is the right for Iran to develop its nuclear energy capabilities. This is a matter of national pride in Iran where it is seen as an aspect of modernization. There is no evidence whatever that Iran is pursuing a weapons program. The United States is foolish to continue to antagonize the Iranian people by threatening attacks, sanctions and other hostile actions based on this one-note foreign policy.
A policy of talking to Iran, engaging in diplomacy and working toward reasonable mutual solutions to regional issues of mutual concern will pay off in the long run when Iran’s new generation comes to power.
William O. Beeman is Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, and author of The “Great Satan” vs. The “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
Saturday, December 02, 2006
US: The Secret World of Stephen Cambone: Rumsfeld's Enforcer
US: The Secret World of Stephen Cambone: Rumsfeld's Enforcer
by Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch
February 7th, 2006
(Note from William Beeman--Americans should rejoice at the just announced departure on December 31 from the Department of Defense of Stephen Cambone, on whose head much of the misery that is the Iraq quagmire must fall. )
The grave fellow in the business suit sitting between two uniformed generals at the witness table during the senate hearings about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib was Dr. Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, known throughout the Pentagon as Donald Rumsfeld's "chief henchman". In his testimony before the committee, Cambone was unapologetic and almost as dismissive as the ridiculous Sen. James Inhofe about the global disgust which erupted over the abuse and murder of Iraqi prisoners of war. Cambone, an apex neo-con and veteran of the Project for the New American Century, evinced disdain not only for the senatorial inquiry but also at a squeamish Lieutenant General Antonio Taguba, who sat next him, looking as if he suspected that he might well be the next one leashed to Cambone's bureaucratic pillory.
A Republican staffer on the Senate foreign relations Committee tells CounterPunch the little-known Cambone, who like so many others on the Bush war team skillfully avoided military service, has quietly become one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, rivaling even Paul Wolfowitz. "Cambone is a truly dangerous player", the staffer said. "He is Rumsfeld's guard dog, implacably loyal. While Wolfowitz positions himself to step into the top spot should Rumsfeld get axed, Cambone has dug in and gone to war against the insurgents in the Pentagon. Cambone's fingerprints are all over the occupation and the interrogation scandal. For him, there's no turning back".
Cambone has stealthily positioned himself as the most powerful intelligence operator in the Bush administration. On May 8, 2003, Rumsfeld named him Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a new position which Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz described thus: "The new office is in charge of all intelligence and intelligence-related oversight and policy guidance functions". In practice, this means that Cambone controls the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Organization, the National Security Agency, the Defense Security Service and Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity. Cambone meets with the heads of these agencies, as well as top officials at the CIA and National Security Council twice a week to give them their marching orders.
One senate staffer tells us he has more operational sway than George Tenet or Condi Rice. His rise to power has been quiet, almost unnoticed until the Abu Ghraib scandal forced him briefly into the spotlight. Indeed, prior to the events of May, Cambone completely evaded detection by Bob Woodward, who in two thick volumes on Bush's wars failed to mention the name Cambone once. Of course, this may reveal more about Woodward than Cambone's skill at bureaucratic camouflage.
Yes, Cambone has neo-con credentials. He got his masters and doctorate at Claremont College in southern California, an elite Straussian enclave. He went on to draft sections of the Project for a New American Century's 2001 Report, Rebuilding America's Defenses, a document notable for recommending that the US develop ethnic and race-based weapons. But more crucial for the speedy trajectory of his career is Cambone's resume as a devout Rumsfeldian. In 1998, Rumsfeld selected Cambone to serve as staff director of the Rumsfeld Commission on Ballistic Missile Defense, the Congressionally-appointed panel which justified implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative on the grounds that the US was vulnerable to strikes from missiles freighting nuclear, chemical and biological weapons launched by rogue nations, such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
Cambone was no newcomer to the Star Wars scheme. From 1982 through 1986, he toiled at Los Alamos developing policy papers about the need for space-based weapons. In 1990, George Bush, Sr. picked Cambone to head up the Strategic Defense Initiative Office at the Pentagon. After Bush lost, Cambone migrated to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a DC holding pen for hawks, where he continued to hammer away in essays and speeches about the windows of vulnerability in the skies over America.Rumsfeld first brought Cambone into his inner circle not as an overlord for intelligence, but as the chief Pentagon strategist for pushing SDI through Congress. Recall that in the early days of the Bush administration, Star Wars and the obliteration of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty were the twin obsessions of the Rumsfeld gang at the Pentagon.After 9/11 Rumsfeld moved Cambone over to work on war planning and intelligence as Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, where he labored under the neo-con luminary Douglas Feith. There's reason to believe that Cambone's real mission was to keep tabs on Feith, a notorious hothead and Cheney loyalist whom Rumsfeld distrusts. Rumsfeld wasn't the only one who loathed Feith. Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded the Afghan and Iraq wars, told Woodward that Feith was "the stupidest motherfucker on the face of the Earth".
Cambone and Feith reportedly soon developed an equally acrimonious relationship. But as Feith's star fell, Cambone's rose. In July 2002, Rumsfeld moved Cambone to the Office of Analysis and Evaluation, where his mission was to implement Rumsfeld's plan to reorganize the military and trim some of its most highly-prized weapons systems. "Cambone loomed as a huge threat to the generals", a senate staffer told us. "The message was pretty simple. Go along with our war plans or risk losing your big-ticket items and perhaps your command. Cambone was the enforcer". At the Pentagon, the most feared weapon isn't a dirty nuke, but a line item in the budget.
In April of 2003, Rumsfeld placed Cambone in charge of counter-terrorism teams operating under the code-name "Grey Fox". This covert operation is a kind of sabotage and assassination squad run out of the civil wing of the Pentagon. Rumsfeld had grown frustrated with the military's reluctance to assassinate suspected al-Qaeda and Iraqi resistance leaders, an understandable reluctance in light of US executive orders restricting the use of assassinations. So Rumsfeld seized control of the hit teams from the generals and assigned it to Cambone, a civilian appointee with no military experience. The Gray Fox project, so one Washington Post report concluded, is geared to perform "deep penetration" missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and North Korea, setting up listening posts, conducting acts of sabotage and assassination. When questioned about Gray Fox, Cambone snapped, "We won't talk about those things".
However, military officers did talk about Gray Fox. "The people in these units are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere around the world. They are very highly trained, with specialized skills for dealing with close-quarters combat and unique situations posed by weapons of mass destruction", a military officer told Army Times. "If we find a high-value target somewhere, anywhere in the world, and if we have the forces to get there and get to them, we should get there and get to them", the official said. "Right now, there are 18 food chains, 20 levels of paperwork and 22 hoops we have to jump through before we can take action. Our enemy moves faster than that".Aside from guarding Rumsfeld from assaults from within the Pentagon, Cambone's main role seems to be cutting through red tape and bothersome codes of conduct, such as the Geneva Conventions, to institute legally questionable policies. Take the treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The orders to soften up Iraqi prisoners for intelligence interrogators (both military and private contractors) came directly from Cambone's office.
In August 2003, as the occupation of Iraq began to turn bloody, Cambone ordered Brigadier General Geoffrey Miller, former commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo, to go to Iraq along with a team of experienced military interrogators, who had honed their inquisitorial skills with the torture of al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees captured in Afghanistan. His instructions were to "Gitmoize" the interrogations at Abu Ghraib and other prisons, including the notorious Camp Cropper on the outskirts of the Baghdad Airport, where the Delta Force conducted abusive interrogations of top level members of Saddam's regime.
Cambone's top deputy inside the military is none other than Lt. General William Boykin, the Christian warrior, whom Cambone and Rumsfeld elevated to the position to the position of intelligence czar for the US Army last fall. Boykin rose to this lofty eminence after he went on a revival tour of evangelical churches in Oregon, where he disclosed the top secret intelligence that the US "had been attacked because we are a Christian nation". Boykin also leaked the news that Bush's war on terrorism was actually "a war against Satan".
Boykin calmed the congregations by saying there was little reason to fear because the Christian god is mightier than Allah. "I know that my god is bigger than his", Boykin preached. "I know that my god is a real God and his an idol". The general also revealed to the faithful that the supreme deity of the Christians had hand-picked Bush to be president during these fraught times. It was obvious, the general reasoned, that Bush didn't win the election. He became president through a kind of preemptive strike by the Almighty.When word of Boykin's sermons landed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times in October of 2003, there was outrage in the American Islamic community that this two-star zealot was now directing US military intelligence operations in the Middle East. There were calls for his ouster and the Inspector General of the Army launched an investigation of Boykin. But Rumsfeld and Cambone shrugged off the probe and stood by Boykin.It now turns out that Boykin, the Islamophobe, played a central role in the torture scandal now gripping the Bush administration. Last summer, Boykin briefed Cambone on a list of no-holds-barred interrogation methods that he thought should be used to extract more information from Iraqi detainees.
These included humiliation, sleep deprivation, restraint, water torture, religious taunting, light deprivation, and other techniques of torture that have since come to light. A few weeks after this crucial meeting in June, Cambone sent General Miller to Iraq with instructions to oversee the implementation of the Boykin interrogation plan in order to "rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence". According to Lt. General Antonio Taguba, who investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Miller then instructed the Military Police to become "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of internees". The grim trio of Cambone, Boykin and Miller also conspired to put the control of the detention facilities in Iraq under the tactical control of military intelligence. At Abu Ghraib, the job fell to Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a move that Lt. General Taguba called contrary to established military doctrine.It now seems likely that Cambone was only the one to invite Israeli advice (and perhaps interrogators) on how to extract information from Iraqi detainees. Before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Cambone freely admitted to the Washington Times that he was taking advice from the Israelis and sharing intelligence with them on the mechanics of occupation and interrogation. "Those who have to deal with like problems tend to share information as best they can".
These days advancement through the ranks of the Pentagon often goes hand-in-hand with opportunities to deliver sweetheart deals to corporate allies. Here too Cambone has not disappointed his backers. From 1986 to 1990, Cambone worked as a top lobbyist for SRS, a murky software company with deep roots in the Pentagon and CIA. Although Cambone left SRS for government work, he didn't forget his old employers. With Cambone's approval, the Pentagon awarded SRS a $6 million contract to provide management support for the Missile Defense Agency, the wing of the Defense Department charged with managing the SDI program and the development of space-base weapons.
In addition, SRS benefited from Cambone's transfer to the spying wing of the Pentagon. An SRS subsidiary called Torch Concepts was hired by the Pentagon to conduct a data mining foray into passenger records of JetBlue airlines. Bart Edsall, SRS's vice-president, described the work Torch did this way: "the company got a contract from the Pentagon to work with the Army to ferret information out of data streams [in an effort to detect] abnormal behavior of secretive people". Sound familiar? It should. The scheme was essentially a privatized version of the kind of work that John Poindexter wanted to conduct with his discredited Total Information Awareness operation. No surprise that the contracts for this outsourced form of snooping should fall to SRS. It is already the primary private contractor working with the Information Awareness Office of DARPA, the agency which Poindexter ruled and which continues the nefarious work of prying into the private lives, including travel, health and financial records, of American citizens.
As Rumsfeld's hatchetman, Cambone has become so hated and feared inside the Pentagon that one general told the Army Times: "If I had one round left in my revolver, I'd take out Stephen Cambone". This raises the concept of fragging to an entirely new level.
This essay is excerpted from Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, Grand Theft Pentagon.
by Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch
February 7th, 2006
(Note from William Beeman--Americans should rejoice at the just announced departure on December 31 from the Department of Defense of Stephen Cambone, on whose head much of the misery that is the Iraq quagmire must fall. )
The grave fellow in the business suit sitting between two uniformed generals at the witness table during the senate hearings about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib was Dr. Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, known throughout the Pentagon as Donald Rumsfeld's "chief henchman". In his testimony before the committee, Cambone was unapologetic and almost as dismissive as the ridiculous Sen. James Inhofe about the global disgust which erupted over the abuse and murder of Iraqi prisoners of war. Cambone, an apex neo-con and veteran of the Project for the New American Century, evinced disdain not only for the senatorial inquiry but also at a squeamish Lieutenant General Antonio Taguba, who sat next him, looking as if he suspected that he might well be the next one leashed to Cambone's bureaucratic pillory.
A Republican staffer on the Senate foreign relations Committee tells CounterPunch the little-known Cambone, who like so many others on the Bush war team skillfully avoided military service, has quietly become one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, rivaling even Paul Wolfowitz. "Cambone is a truly dangerous player", the staffer said. "He is Rumsfeld's guard dog, implacably loyal. While Wolfowitz positions himself to step into the top spot should Rumsfeld get axed, Cambone has dug in and gone to war against the insurgents in the Pentagon. Cambone's fingerprints are all over the occupation and the interrogation scandal. For him, there's no turning back".
Cambone has stealthily positioned himself as the most powerful intelligence operator in the Bush administration. On May 8, 2003, Rumsfeld named him Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a new position which Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz described thus: "The new office is in charge of all intelligence and intelligence-related oversight and policy guidance functions". In practice, this means that Cambone controls the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Organization, the National Security Agency, the Defense Security Service and Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity. Cambone meets with the heads of these agencies, as well as top officials at the CIA and National Security Council twice a week to give them their marching orders.
One senate staffer tells us he has more operational sway than George Tenet or Condi Rice. His rise to power has been quiet, almost unnoticed until the Abu Ghraib scandal forced him briefly into the spotlight. Indeed, prior to the events of May, Cambone completely evaded detection by Bob Woodward, who in two thick volumes on Bush's wars failed to mention the name Cambone once. Of course, this may reveal more about Woodward than Cambone's skill at bureaucratic camouflage.
Yes, Cambone has neo-con credentials. He got his masters and doctorate at Claremont College in southern California, an elite Straussian enclave. He went on to draft sections of the Project for a New American Century's 2001 Report, Rebuilding America's Defenses, a document notable for recommending that the US develop ethnic and race-based weapons. But more crucial for the speedy trajectory of his career is Cambone's resume as a devout Rumsfeldian. In 1998, Rumsfeld selected Cambone to serve as staff director of the Rumsfeld Commission on Ballistic Missile Defense, the Congressionally-appointed panel which justified implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative on the grounds that the US was vulnerable to strikes from missiles freighting nuclear, chemical and biological weapons launched by rogue nations, such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
Cambone was no newcomer to the Star Wars scheme. From 1982 through 1986, he toiled at Los Alamos developing policy papers about the need for space-based weapons. In 1990, George Bush, Sr. picked Cambone to head up the Strategic Defense Initiative Office at the Pentagon. After Bush lost, Cambone migrated to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a DC holding pen for hawks, where he continued to hammer away in essays and speeches about the windows of vulnerability in the skies over America.Rumsfeld first brought Cambone into his inner circle not as an overlord for intelligence, but as the chief Pentagon strategist for pushing SDI through Congress. Recall that in the early days of the Bush administration, Star Wars and the obliteration of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty were the twin obsessions of the Rumsfeld gang at the Pentagon.After 9/11 Rumsfeld moved Cambone over to work on war planning and intelligence as Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, where he labored under the neo-con luminary Douglas Feith. There's reason to believe that Cambone's real mission was to keep tabs on Feith, a notorious hothead and Cheney loyalist whom Rumsfeld distrusts. Rumsfeld wasn't the only one who loathed Feith. Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded the Afghan and Iraq wars, told Woodward that Feith was "the stupidest motherfucker on the face of the Earth".
Cambone and Feith reportedly soon developed an equally acrimonious relationship. But as Feith's star fell, Cambone's rose. In July 2002, Rumsfeld moved Cambone to the Office of Analysis and Evaluation, where his mission was to implement Rumsfeld's plan to reorganize the military and trim some of its most highly-prized weapons systems. "Cambone loomed as a huge threat to the generals", a senate staffer told us. "The message was pretty simple. Go along with our war plans or risk losing your big-ticket items and perhaps your command. Cambone was the enforcer". At the Pentagon, the most feared weapon isn't a dirty nuke, but a line item in the budget.
In April of 2003, Rumsfeld placed Cambone in charge of counter-terrorism teams operating under the code-name "Grey Fox". This covert operation is a kind of sabotage and assassination squad run out of the civil wing of the Pentagon. Rumsfeld had grown frustrated with the military's reluctance to assassinate suspected al-Qaeda and Iraqi resistance leaders, an understandable reluctance in light of US executive orders restricting the use of assassinations. So Rumsfeld seized control of the hit teams from the generals and assigned it to Cambone, a civilian appointee with no military experience. The Gray Fox project, so one Washington Post report concluded, is geared to perform "deep penetration" missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and North Korea, setting up listening posts, conducting acts of sabotage and assassination. When questioned about Gray Fox, Cambone snapped, "We won't talk about those things".
However, military officers did talk about Gray Fox. "The people in these units are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere around the world. They are very highly trained, with specialized skills for dealing with close-quarters combat and unique situations posed by weapons of mass destruction", a military officer told Army Times. "If we find a high-value target somewhere, anywhere in the world, and if we have the forces to get there and get to them, we should get there and get to them", the official said. "Right now, there are 18 food chains, 20 levels of paperwork and 22 hoops we have to jump through before we can take action. Our enemy moves faster than that".Aside from guarding Rumsfeld from assaults from within the Pentagon, Cambone's main role seems to be cutting through red tape and bothersome codes of conduct, such as the Geneva Conventions, to institute legally questionable policies. Take the treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The orders to soften up Iraqi prisoners for intelligence interrogators (both military and private contractors) came directly from Cambone's office.
In August 2003, as the occupation of Iraq began to turn bloody, Cambone ordered Brigadier General Geoffrey Miller, former commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo, to go to Iraq along with a team of experienced military interrogators, who had honed their inquisitorial skills with the torture of al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees captured in Afghanistan. His instructions were to "Gitmoize" the interrogations at Abu Ghraib and other prisons, including the notorious Camp Cropper on the outskirts of the Baghdad Airport, where the Delta Force conducted abusive interrogations of top level members of Saddam's regime.
Cambone's top deputy inside the military is none other than Lt. General William Boykin, the Christian warrior, whom Cambone and Rumsfeld elevated to the position to the position of intelligence czar for the US Army last fall. Boykin rose to this lofty eminence after he went on a revival tour of evangelical churches in Oregon, where he disclosed the top secret intelligence that the US "had been attacked because we are a Christian nation". Boykin also leaked the news that Bush's war on terrorism was actually "a war against Satan".
Boykin calmed the congregations by saying there was little reason to fear because the Christian god is mightier than Allah. "I know that my god is bigger than his", Boykin preached. "I know that my god is a real God and his an idol". The general also revealed to the faithful that the supreme deity of the Christians had hand-picked Bush to be president during these fraught times. It was obvious, the general reasoned, that Bush didn't win the election. He became president through a kind of preemptive strike by the Almighty.When word of Boykin's sermons landed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times in October of 2003, there was outrage in the American Islamic community that this two-star zealot was now directing US military intelligence operations in the Middle East. There were calls for his ouster and the Inspector General of the Army launched an investigation of Boykin. But Rumsfeld and Cambone shrugged off the probe and stood by Boykin.It now turns out that Boykin, the Islamophobe, played a central role in the torture scandal now gripping the Bush administration. Last summer, Boykin briefed Cambone on a list of no-holds-barred interrogation methods that he thought should be used to extract more information from Iraqi detainees.
These included humiliation, sleep deprivation, restraint, water torture, religious taunting, light deprivation, and other techniques of torture that have since come to light. A few weeks after this crucial meeting in June, Cambone sent General Miller to Iraq with instructions to oversee the implementation of the Boykin interrogation plan in order to "rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence". According to Lt. General Antonio Taguba, who investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Miller then instructed the Military Police to become "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of internees". The grim trio of Cambone, Boykin and Miller also conspired to put the control of the detention facilities in Iraq under the tactical control of military intelligence. At Abu Ghraib, the job fell to Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a move that Lt. General Taguba called contrary to established military doctrine.It now seems likely that Cambone was only the one to invite Israeli advice (and perhaps interrogators) on how to extract information from Iraqi detainees. Before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Cambone freely admitted to the Washington Times that he was taking advice from the Israelis and sharing intelligence with them on the mechanics of occupation and interrogation. "Those who have to deal with like problems tend to share information as best they can".
These days advancement through the ranks of the Pentagon often goes hand-in-hand with opportunities to deliver sweetheart deals to corporate allies. Here too Cambone has not disappointed his backers. From 1986 to 1990, Cambone worked as a top lobbyist for SRS, a murky software company with deep roots in the Pentagon and CIA. Although Cambone left SRS for government work, he didn't forget his old employers. With Cambone's approval, the Pentagon awarded SRS a $6 million contract to provide management support for the Missile Defense Agency, the wing of the Defense Department charged with managing the SDI program and the development of space-base weapons.
In addition, SRS benefited from Cambone's transfer to the spying wing of the Pentagon. An SRS subsidiary called Torch Concepts was hired by the Pentagon to conduct a data mining foray into passenger records of JetBlue airlines. Bart Edsall, SRS's vice-president, described the work Torch did this way: "the company got a contract from the Pentagon to work with the Army to ferret information out of data streams [in an effort to detect] abnormal behavior of secretive people". Sound familiar? It should. The scheme was essentially a privatized version of the kind of work that John Poindexter wanted to conduct with his discredited Total Information Awareness operation. No surprise that the contracts for this outsourced form of snooping should fall to SRS. It is already the primary private contractor working with the Information Awareness Office of DARPA, the agency which Poindexter ruled and which continues the nefarious work of prying into the private lives, including travel, health and financial records, of American citizens.
As Rumsfeld's hatchetman, Cambone has become so hated and feared inside the Pentagon that one general told the Army Times: "If I had one round left in my revolver, I'd take out Stephen Cambone". This raises the concept of fragging to an entirely new level.
This essay is excerpted from Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, Grand Theft Pentagon.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Iran’s President Criticizes Bush in Letter to American People - New York Times
Iran’s President Criticizes Bush in Letter to American People - New York Times
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 29 — Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told the American people on Wednesday that he was certain they detested President Bush’s policies — his support for Israel, war in Iraq and curtailed civil liberties — and he offered to work with them to reverse those policies.
The call came in the form of a six-page letter in English, published online and addressed to “noble Americans” that discussed “the many wars and calamities caused by the U.S. administration.” It suggested that Americans had been fooled into accepting their government’s policies, especially toward Israel.
“What have the Zionists done for the American people that the U.S. administration considers itself obliged to blindly support these infamous aggressors?” Mr. Ahmadinejad wrote. “Is it not because they have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural and media sectors?”
This was the latest public step by Iran’s president to promote a dialogue with the United States. He wrote a letter to Mr. Bush in May, calling on him to shift his policies and open a discussion, but it was dismissed by the White House as irrelevant to the central issue dividing them — Iran’s nuclear program. Then Mr. Ahmadinejad challenged Mr. Bush to a public debate, also dismissed by the White House.
On Wednesday, the administration’s reaction remained unchanged.
“This is a transparently hypocritical and cynical letter,” Nicholas R. Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, said in Washington about the latest letter. “It reflects a profound lack of understanding of the United States.”
Still, at least tactically the letter seemed to take a page from Mr. Bush himself, who, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in September, sought to bypass the Iranian government and address the people directly. The letter also distinguished between the administration and the people.
“Undoubtedly, the American people are not satisfied with this behavior, and they showed their discontent in the recent elections,” Mr. Ahmadinejad wrote. “I hope that in the wake of the midterm elections, the administration of President Bush will have heard and will heed the message of the American people.”
But it was the emphasis on religious themes, specifically Shiite Muslim notions of justice and fighting oppression, that characterized the new letter as it did his letter to President Bush.
“Both our nations are God-fearing, truth-loving and justice-seeking, and both seek dignity, respect and perfection,” the letter said.
The letter seemed directed at three audiences. It sought to reach out to Americans through religious values; to the Arab world, by emphasizing the Palestinian conflict with Israel; and to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s political base at home, which includes the military, hard-line clerics and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader.
The letter also employed an inferential, Iranian style of communication that experts say is likely to leave Americans cold.
“Americans are going to be very puzzled by it,” said William Beeman, a linguistic anthropologist at Brown University who specializes in Persian. “People are simply not used to being talked to this way.” He added, “It is almost a sermon, which is very much in keeping with his religious background. But I should also point out it is also a lecture.”
The letter reminded Americans that “many victims of Katrina continue to suffer, and countless Americans continue to live in poverty and homelessness.”
It also lamented: “Civil liberties are increasingly being curtailed. Even the privacy of the individuals is fast losing its meaning.”
The president made no reference to the level of poverty, political freedom or judicial independence in his own country.
After referring to Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he wrote: “I have no doubt that the American people do not approve of this behavior and indeed deplore it.”
Since his election in June 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad has pursued an aggressive and outspoken foreign policy, relying on the bully pulpit of his position to make up for the limited powers of Iran’s presidency.
His refusal to end enrichment of uranium and his calls for the destruction of Israel have won him few friends in the West. But they have led to increasing popularity across the Muslim world.
Davoud Hermidas-Bavand, a professor of international relations at Tehran University, said the letter was mostly an effort to win the allegiance of Arabs. Iran has been trying to position itself as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East.
“His first objective is to get the sympathy of Arabs,” said Dr. Hermidas-Bavand. “The letter makes Ahmadinejad a subject of international talks, particularly in the Middle East.”
He said the letter gave insight into President Ahmadinejad’s understanding of American society and governance as being driven largely by Christian beliefs and values.
“He has probably been told that American people are religious and that is how Mr. Bush won, by addressing people’s sense of faith,” he said. “Now he wants to capitalize on this sense of religiousness.”
Iran finds its leverage rising, especially as Iraq struggles through bloody sectarian fighting. In Washington, there is increased pressure on the White House to open direct talks with Iran to help stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Ahmadinejad offered a litany of sharp attacks on American policy — calling, for example, for withdrawal from Iraq. And he once again highlighted a central demand of Tehran: that it be treated as an equal by Washington.
But Professor Beeman also said that Americans should recognize that the letter did represent an overture. “Iran is saying, ‘We want to have a dialogue with you,’ ” he said.
Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Amman, Jordan, and Nazila Fathi from Iran.
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 29 — Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told the American people on Wednesday that he was certain they detested President Bush’s policies — his support for Israel, war in Iraq and curtailed civil liberties — and he offered to work with them to reverse those policies.
The call came in the form of a six-page letter in English, published online and addressed to “noble Americans” that discussed “the many wars and calamities caused by the U.S. administration.” It suggested that Americans had been fooled into accepting their government’s policies, especially toward Israel.
“What have the Zionists done for the American people that the U.S. administration considers itself obliged to blindly support these infamous aggressors?” Mr. Ahmadinejad wrote. “Is it not because they have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural and media sectors?”
This was the latest public step by Iran’s president to promote a dialogue with the United States. He wrote a letter to Mr. Bush in May, calling on him to shift his policies and open a discussion, but it was dismissed by the White House as irrelevant to the central issue dividing them — Iran’s nuclear program. Then Mr. Ahmadinejad challenged Mr. Bush to a public debate, also dismissed by the White House.
On Wednesday, the administration’s reaction remained unchanged.
“This is a transparently hypocritical and cynical letter,” Nicholas R. Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, said in Washington about the latest letter. “It reflects a profound lack of understanding of the United States.”
Still, at least tactically the letter seemed to take a page from Mr. Bush himself, who, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in September, sought to bypass the Iranian government and address the people directly. The letter also distinguished between the administration and the people.
“Undoubtedly, the American people are not satisfied with this behavior, and they showed their discontent in the recent elections,” Mr. Ahmadinejad wrote. “I hope that in the wake of the midterm elections, the administration of President Bush will have heard and will heed the message of the American people.”
But it was the emphasis on religious themes, specifically Shiite Muslim notions of justice and fighting oppression, that characterized the new letter as it did his letter to President Bush.
“Both our nations are God-fearing, truth-loving and justice-seeking, and both seek dignity, respect and perfection,” the letter said.
The letter seemed directed at three audiences. It sought to reach out to Americans through religious values; to the Arab world, by emphasizing the Palestinian conflict with Israel; and to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s political base at home, which includes the military, hard-line clerics and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader.
The letter also employed an inferential, Iranian style of communication that experts say is likely to leave Americans cold.
“Americans are going to be very puzzled by it,” said William Beeman, a linguistic anthropologist at Brown University who specializes in Persian. “People are simply not used to being talked to this way.” He added, “It is almost a sermon, which is very much in keeping with his religious background. But I should also point out it is also a lecture.”
The letter reminded Americans that “many victims of Katrina continue to suffer, and countless Americans continue to live in poverty and homelessness.”
It also lamented: “Civil liberties are increasingly being curtailed. Even the privacy of the individuals is fast losing its meaning.”
The president made no reference to the level of poverty, political freedom or judicial independence in his own country.
After referring to Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he wrote: “I have no doubt that the American people do not approve of this behavior and indeed deplore it.”
Since his election in June 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad has pursued an aggressive and outspoken foreign policy, relying on the bully pulpit of his position to make up for the limited powers of Iran’s presidency.
His refusal to end enrichment of uranium and his calls for the destruction of Israel have won him few friends in the West. But they have led to increasing popularity across the Muslim world.
Davoud Hermidas-Bavand, a professor of international relations at Tehran University, said the letter was mostly an effort to win the allegiance of Arabs. Iran has been trying to position itself as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East.
“His first objective is to get the sympathy of Arabs,” said Dr. Hermidas-Bavand. “The letter makes Ahmadinejad a subject of international talks, particularly in the Middle East.”
He said the letter gave insight into President Ahmadinejad’s understanding of American society and governance as being driven largely by Christian beliefs and values.
“He has probably been told that American people are religious and that is how Mr. Bush won, by addressing people’s sense of faith,” he said. “Now he wants to capitalize on this sense of religiousness.”
Iran finds its leverage rising, especially as Iraq struggles through bloody sectarian fighting. In Washington, there is increased pressure on the White House to open direct talks with Iran to help stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Ahmadinejad offered a litany of sharp attacks on American policy — calling, for example, for withdrawal from Iraq. And he once again highlighted a central demand of Tehran: that it be treated as an equal by Washington.
But Professor Beeman also said that Americans should recognize that the letter did represent an overture. “Iran is saying, ‘We want to have a dialogue with you,’ ” he said.
Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Amman, Jordan, and Nazila Fathi from Iran.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
The Iranian Nuclear Crisis--Portland OR October 29, 2006
The Iranian Nuclear Crisis
William O. Beeman
Portland, Oregon
October 29, 2006
The United States and Iran are moving laboriously toward confrontation—perhaps military confrontation. John Bolton and Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns are working non-stop at the United Nations to try and get international sanctions imposed on Iran. The latest attempt is to get U.N. nations to prohibit Iranian students from studying certain subjects, such as engineering, in member nations.
Iran in turn has vigorously rejected any attempts to limit its development of a full nuclear enrichment cycle. The attempts on the part of the United Nations to impose trade or other sanctions on Iran is leading to diplomatic difficulties as Russia and China will likely oppose these measures.
An examination of the U.S. position vis-Ã -vis Iran leads inevitably to the conclusion that the nuclear issue is merely a pretext for action against the Iranian government, which the United States has been demonizing since the Revolution of 1978-79. The Bush administration’s real goal is regime change in Iran by whatever means, and finding an issue that can be trumped up enough to garner the support of the American public, and the international community has been a constant activity since President Bush came to office in his first administration.
Now the drive to destabilize Iran by whatever means has taken on a life of its own. It has become a dangerous obsession for the Bush administration, driving them increasingly to support actions that are not only counter-productive, but dangerous for the region and the world.
I want to make several points today.
First, that the Bush administration’s goal to attack Iran predates any concern about Iran’s nuclear program.
Second, that Iran’s nuclear development program poses no immediate danger for the United States, Israel or the Middle East region—because it is not a nuclear weapons program, and all attempts to prove that it is a weapons program are specious.
Third, Iran’s attempts to address American and European fears about the program have been systematically rejected by the United States, who wishes fervently to assure that this will continue to be a live issue
Finally, that potential U.S. actions against Iran pose far more danger than Iran poses for the region and for the world.
PRE-EXISTING PLANS
The attacks against Iran have their origins in longstanding concerns about the safety of Israel, ratcheted up by the extremist views of the neoconservatives that now dominate the Bush administration.
These concerns combined with decades long antipathy toward Iran, and the desire of the United States to dominate the oil-rich Middle East create a perfect storm of fervent desire on the part of the Bush administration to attack Iran.
The rhetoric against Iran has now pervaded American political culture to such an extent that no American lawmaker is willing to defend Iran. Conversely, no politician, Democratic or Republican ever lost a vote by attacking Iran.
According to journalist Sidney Blumenthal in Salon
>>>
>>>, the neocons in the administration, specifically Vice President Dick
>>>Cheney and National Security Agency Middle East Director Elliott Abrams,
>>>have been funneling U.S. intelligence intercepts to the Israelis as part
>>>of a plan to target Syria and Iran (see Tom Barry, Hunting Monsters with
>>>Elliott Abrams).
>>>
>>>Those intercepts were behind the recent House Intelligence Committee
>>>report blasting U.S. spy agencies for their reluctance to say that
>>>Hezbollah is nothing more than an extension of Iran, that Tehran is on
>>>the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, and that Iran poses a clear and
>>>present danger to the United States.
>>>
>>>The author of the House report, Frederick Fleitz, was a former special
>>>assistant to current UN Ambassador John Bolton. Bolton was a key figure
>>>in gathering the now-discredited intelligence that Iraq had weapons of
>>>mass destruction.
>>>
>>>According to Blumenthal, Cheney and his Middle East aide David Wurmser
>>>have dusted off a 1996 document called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
>>>Securing the Realm." The study was authored by Wurmser, ex-Pentagon
>>>official Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, disgraced former head of the
>>>Defense Policy Board.
>>>
>>>The "Break"-originally written for then-Likud prime minister Benjamin
>>>Netanyahu-advocates that the Israelis, with support from the United
>>>States, dump the 1992 Oslo Agreement with the Palestinians, target Syria
>>>and Iraq, and redesign the Middle East.
>>>
>>>A key ingredient in the document, and one central to current
>>>administration thinking, is that since terrorism is state-supported, the
>>>war on terrorism can be won by changing regimes. Hence, to defeat
>>>Hezbollah, you have to overthrow Syria and Iran.
>>>
The only problem that the Bush administration felt they had was how to sell the overthrow of Iran to the American public. The fact that such an action would be a massive, stunning failure seems even now not to be of any great concern to them.
The only issue that really frightens and concerns the American public is their own safety. Raising the specter of atomic weapons that might be used against Americans worked effectively in convincing the U.S. public to support the Iraqi invasion. Having used this device once, the Bush administration has trotted it out again, and has fed the U.S. public a full measure of yellow journalism trying to frighten them into supporting an Iranian attack. Neoconservative Bush supporters wrote fantasy accounts of Iranian cataclysmic atomic attacks on America. Jerome Corsi, ghost author of Unfit for Command, the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry wrote Atomic Iran—in which a hyperbolic account of an Iranian atomic bomb dropped on New York’s Central Park vies for his accounts of Iranian mullahs abducting children to support their regime. Kenneth Timmerman, penned Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran in a similar vein. Let me read a passage from Ray Takyeh of the Council on Foreign Relations’ review of the book from the Washington Post:
Timmerman's thesis is simplistic and provocative: Iran is America's most militant, relentless enemy and has been involved in nearly every terrorist attack against the United States since 1979. Iran is also actively seeking the bomb -- not for deterrence, but to menace the United States and its allies. . . . Timmerman, the author of earlier books attacking France and Jesse Jackson, begins his book with the outlandish claim that Iran was complicit in the Sept. 11, 2001, atrocities. In his retelling of history, a craven CIA, determined to exonerate rogue states that sponsor terrorism, has deliberately withheld this information from the American public. The conclusions of the numerous congressional investigations and journalistic inquiries into Sept. 11 are simply ignored. The one independent examination that Timmerman does cite, the 9/11 Commission, is faulted for missing what he considers the all-too-apparent Iran link. The reader gets the impression that Timmerman would rather not bother with facts precisely because they undermine his conspiracy theory.
The book was praised by the right-wing Washington Times, New York Sun and New York Post and has been widely cited on Fox News and other sycophantic supporters of the Bush administration.
IRAN POSES NO DANGER
However, there is no proof whatever that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
President Bush declared on June 25, 2003 that "we will not tolerate" a nuclear armed Iran. His words are empty. The physical evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iran simply does not exist.
Iran is completing a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant in Bushehr with Russian help. The existence of the site is common knowledge. It has been under construction for more than three decades, since before the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.
Two other nuclear research facilities, now under development, have come to light: a uranium enrichment plant in the city of Natanz and a deuterium ("heavy water") facility in the city of Arak. Neither is in operation. The only question of interest is whether these facilities offer a plausible route to the manufacture of plutonium-based nuclear bombs, and the short answer is: They do not.
The Bushehr plant is only part of the argument that Iran is embarked on a nuclear weapons program, but it is the part that can readily be analyzed. State Department accusations of dangerous Iranian intentions for the Natanz and Arak facilities are based on a patchwork of untestable, murky assertions from dubious sources, including the People's Mujahedeen (Mujahedeen-e Khalq, MEK or MKO), which the United States identifies as a terrorist organization. These sources assert that there are centrifuges for enriching uranium (an alternative to fissile plutonium for bombs) or covert facilities for extracting plutonium. Neither of these claims are especially credible, since the sources are either unidentified or are the same channels which disseminated the stories about Iraq's non-conventional weapons or the so-called chemical and biological weapons plant in Khartoum.
The testable part of the claim -- that the Bushehr reactor is a proliferation threat -- is demonstrably false. There are several reasons, some technical, some institutional.
--The Iranian reactor yields the wrong kind of plutonium for making bombs.
--The spent fuel pins in the Iranian reactor would, in any case, be too dangerous to handle for weapons manufacture.
--Any attempt to divert fuel from the Iranian plant will be detectable.
--The Russian partners in the Bushehr project have stipulated that the fuel pins must be returned to Russia, as has been their practice worldwide for other export reactors.
Just as there are many different kinds of nuclear reactors, there are different forms of plutonium, distinctions that are almost never made in public discussions of nuclear proliferation.
There are two different kinds of reactors, heavy-water or graphite-moderated reactors; and pressurized, or "light water" reactors (PWRs). The Dimona nuclear power plant in Israel is an example of the former. The Bushehr plant is the latter.
The Israeli plant is ideal for yielding the desirable isotope of Plutonium (Pu 239) necessary for making bombs. The Iranian plant will produce plutonium, but the wrong kind. It will produce the heavier isotopes, Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242 -- almost impossible to use in making bombs.
Crucial to extracting weapons-grade plutonium is the type of reactor and the mode in which it is operated. The Israeli-type plant can be refueled "on line," without shutting down. Thus, high-grade plutonium can be obtained covertly and continuously. In the Iranian plant, the entire reactor will have to be shut down -- a step that cannot be concealed from satellites, airplanes and other sources -- in order to permit the extraction of even a single fuel pin.
In the Israeli reactor, the fuel is recycled every few weeks, or at most every couple of months. This maximizes the yield of the highest-quality, weapons-grade plutonium. In the Iranian-type reactor, the core is exchanged only every 30-40 months -- the longer the fuel cycle, the better for the production of power.
For the Iranian reactor at Bushehr, any effort to divert fuel will be transparent because a shutdown will be immediately noticeable. No case of production of bomb-grade material from fuel from an Iranian-type plant has ever been reported.
No one can read the collective mind of a government. But even if Iran proves in the future to have ambitions for developing nuclear weapons, any actual production is years, perhaps decades away. Furthermore, Iran has fully acquiesced to the international inspections process. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). On June 22, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, Gholam-Reza Aghazadeh, reiterated that all of Iran's nuclear facilities are open for inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in compliance with treaty guarantees.
Of course, Iran is developing other facilities—an enrichment plant in Isfahan, and a deuterium production plant in Natanz have been opened. These plants are entirely legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and they are entirely consistent with power generation. Much has been made in the last week of the fact that Iran has placed two cascades of 164 centrifuges on line which now have produced enriched uranium at a lower grade than is even needed for power generation (5%). Production capacity would require 50,000 centrifuges and enrichment to a level of 90%. All intelligence experts agree that Iran is years away from coming even close to producing enough weapons grade uranium to produce even a single bomb. The German intelligence office last week estimated that if it worked non-stop on this level of enrichment, it might have enough weapons grade uranium by 2015. U.S. Intelligence Director John Negroponte agrees with this assessment. Mohammad el Baradei of the IAEA last week once again reiterated that he was “unconvinced” that Iran had any weapons program.
The deuterium plant has resulted in some interesting press. The U.S. press regularly reported that the plant has the capacity to produce weapons grade fuel. Of course this is absurd. The plant produces heavy water, which would then be used in a heavy water reactor, designed to be completed in 2009 or 2010. The spent fuel from the reactor would then have to be processed to extract any weapons-grade fuel, and another plant to build any weapons. The idea that this operation could go undetected by international inspection teams is absurd.
IRANIAN NEED
The furor in Washington over possible nuclear weapons development in Iran is fueled in part because Bush administration officials claim that Iran doesn't need to generate nuclear power. They assert that Iran's nuclear energy program is unnecessary given its oil reserves. Therefore, officials say, its nuclear plants must exist for weapons production.
In fact, for Iran, generating nuclear power makes sense. Moreover, the plans to do this were started decades ago, and with American approval.
Ex-CIA director James Woolsey, in an interview on the PBS program Frontline on Feb. 23, 2003 claimed "there is no underlying (reason) for one of the greatest oil producers in the world to need to get into the nuclear (energy) business."
At first glance, such logic seems sound. Countries with vast oil reserves also have large reserves of natural gas sitting on top of those reserves. Some years ago, the natural gas was regularly burned off to get at the oil beneath. However, technological advances today make it feasible to use this gas for power generation.
Even so, nuclear power still makes sense in a country with vast amounts of natural gas, particularly given the unusual circumstances in the Iranian hydrocarbons industry. There are needs for gas in Iran that command much higher priorities than the construction of gas power plants.
First, gas is vitally needed for reinjection into existing oil reservoirs (repressurizing). This is indispensable for maintaining oil output levels, as well as for increasing overall, long-term recovery of oil.
Second, natural gas is needed for growing domestic use, such as in cooking fuel and domestic heating (Iranians typically use kerosene for both), where it can free up oil for more profitable export. New uses such as powering bus and taxi fleets in Iran's smoggy urban areas are also essential for development.
Third, natural gas exports -- via pipelines to Turkey or in liquefied form to the subcontinent -- set an attractive minimum value for any available natural gas. With adequate nuclear power generation, Iran can profit more from selling its gas than using it to generate power.
Fourth, the economics of gas production in Iran are almost backwards, certainly counter-intuitive. Much of Iran's gas is "rich" -- it contains by-products, such as liquid-petrolem gas (LPG, better known as propane), which are more valuable than the natural gas they are derived from. Iran can profit by selling these derivatives, but not if it burns the natural gas to generate power. Furthermore, Iran adheres to OPEC production quotas, which combine oil and natural gas production. Therefore Iran cannot simply increase natural gas for export to make up for what it burns at home.
Overall, therefore, it can reasonably be argued that natural gas in Iran has economic uses that are superior to power generation, in spite of Iran's much-touted large reserves. The economic rationale is therefore plausible -- the costs of gas versus nuclear power generation are sufficiently close that the choice is a standoff, especially given the reported bargain price for the Russian reactor.
The great irony in America's accusations is that Iran's nuclear program was first developed on the advice of American specialists, who urged the government of the Shah to begin producing nuclear power in order to save oil reserves for more lucrative purposes than fuel. The prospect of an industrial base built on petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals never materialized, but the nuclear power program continued unabated.
Now, to have American officials express alarm over the exact same program is illogical at best and utterly disingenuous at worst. Much of the criticism of Iran's nuclear program comes from the same people who insisted that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons development program before the American invasion of that nation on March 19. That fact alone should raise severe skepticism throughout the world.
AMERICAN REJECTION
The potential impasse in the Iranian nuclear program could have been forestalled long ago, but the United States has regularly rejected all attempts on the part of Iran to negotiate this matter. The Bush administration should be called to explain why it seems to be driving the Iranian nuclear matter to crisis level.
As everyone in the world must now know, the United States maintains that Iran is in the process of developing nuclear weapons. It has convinced a number of European nations of the correctness of its suspicions. Iran maintains that its nuclear development is for domestic power generation purposes only, and everything it is doing is allowed under the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which Iran is a signatory.
There is no objective evidence whatever that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program—only the suspicions of the United States and its ally, Israel, that this is true.
As part of the basis for its suspicions, the United States maintains that Iran had concealed its nuclear program for many years—the number of years varies depending on which official one asks. In fact, Iran has done no such thing. First and foremost, as mentioned previously, Iran’s nuclear program is more than 30 years old, and was started with the encouragement of the United States. President Gerald Ford offered the Iranians a full nuclear cycle in 1976 before the Revolution of 1978-79. Despite the change in government, the program has been implemented largely as conceived with U.S. approval.
Regarding concealment of Under the NPT Iran is not required to disclose its facilities until it begins to process nuclear material. This had not taken place when the United States began to object to the Iranian nuclear development in 2003.
However, that consideration aside, Iran offered as early as 1997 to make its nuclear development known to the world through inspections. The United States was fully apprised of these developments at that time.
For example, Iran offered to provide the land for EU-United Nations University nuclear enrichment facilities to be staffed exclusively by non-Iranian personnel, with no Iranians allowed to enter the facility -- very much treated as a foreign Embassy. This proposition was rejected.
In 1997, at the request of Iran, Iranian nuclear scientist Behrad Nakha’I arranged for a group of prominent US nuclear scientists to visit Iran's nuclear facilities. After couple of days of discussions, he was able to get US State Department's agreement, but the United States Department of Defense absolutely refused this offer from the beginning to the end of the two months that we were interacting, trying to make these arrangements.
He responded to all of the concerns, but just like a telemarketer reading from a prepared statement, his contact at the Department of Defense repeated the same sentence over and over, rejecting such a visit. He offered to include a representative from the DOD of the U.S. government’s choice in the inspection group, but to no avail. Since these scientists had the highest clearance from US government, requiring government permission for them to maintain their status. he had to call off the visit. This was a huge missed opportunity, among many others.
In 2003, Iran, under the presidency of moderate Mohammad Khatami issued a general offer to negotiate all outstanding issues with the U.S. These included addressing the question of Iran’s nuclear development as well as coming to agreement on a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The offer had the full support of Iran’s spiritual Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Bush administration not only rejected the offer, they excoriated the Swiss diplomatic officer who brought the offer.
Iran also was the only nation to publicly accept the 2003 U.N. proposal by Mohammad El Baradei that weapons-usable fissile materials be placed under international control . This would be a step leading to fulfillment of the Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty (FMCT). This earlier treaty was passed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1993 over U.S. objections. El Baradei’s proposal was passed 149-2, the United States and Palau being the only dissenting votes with Israel and Great Britain abstaining. El Baradei's proposal would monitor all nuclear fission and guarantee that non-nuclear weapons states would be able to obtain adequate supplies for their nonmilitary usage of enriched plutonium. If implemented, this proposal would have ended the Iranian nuclear crisis, but at the price of establishing controls that would be incumbent on other nations as well—the basis for the U.S. objection to the FMCT.
It is hard to know precisely why the United States is driving the specter of Iran’s nuclear development so hard that it ignores all the attempts on Iran’s part to allay international concerns, and ignores even its own previous knowledge of and involvement with Iran’s nuclear program.
ATTACKING IRAN
The conclusion that Iran has drawn is that the nuclear issue is a pretext on the part of the United States to vilify Iran before the international community, perhaps as a prelude to a military attack. With President Bush continuing to insist that with regard to Iran “all cards are on the table,” it is easy to see how they might reach that conclusion. Iran is conducting military maneuvers on all of its borders this week (August 20). Perhaps this is coincidence, or perhaps they anticipate that whatever they do regarding the nuclear issue will not preclude hostile American action.
Just now, however Americans should be on guard—a real war may break out at any minute and the resulting conflagration would likely engulf the region, and then the world. Even now, Daniel Ellesberg in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, Seymour Hirsh in the New Yorker, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, eminent historian William Polk and numerous others have written about the coming war between the United States and Iran that few in the United States know about, but which seems to be immanent.
Polk Writes:
The Washington Post has reported that at least since March, large teams have been working on invasion plans in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, while the Iran “desk” at the State Department has been augmented to task force size. It reports to Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of the vice president, who is assistant secretary of state for the Near East. In the Pentagon, a similar organization has been established under Neoconservative Abram Shulsky. In addition a new outpost has been set up in Dubai to coordinate plans. On October 2, a powerful naval battle group around the giant aircraft carrier Eisenhower sailed for the Persian Gulf and is due to arrive a week before the November Congressional elections to join a similar battle group led by the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Meanwhile aircraft of the U.S. Air Force are being readied in bases surrounding Iran and in distant locations. These forces could deliver destructive power that would dwarf the aerial assaults on Iraq.
The Israeli bombardment of Lebanon has been regarded as a test. Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker talks he had with current and retired American military and intelligence experts who told him that it was regarded as “a prelude to a potential American preemptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.” They did terrible damage and killed many people, but they failed to accomplish their mission. As Bush’s former Deputy of State Richard Armitage said, “If the most dominant military force in the region – the Israel Defense Forces – can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million…The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the [Lebanese] population against the Israelis.”
The Air Force plans have been resisted by the senior generals of the Army, Navy and Marine corps. In rare public statements and frequently in private, they have said that the plans are fatally flawed and that even if an invasion begins with aerial attack it will soon require ground troops. Despite the misgivings of the military professionals, Joseph Cirincione wrote in the March issue of Foreign Policy that conversations with senior officials in the Pentagon and the White House had convinced him that the decision for war had already been made.
This is it folks. As I have warned, history changes on October 31st. It is now apparent that Bush does intend to have our ships sunk in the Gulf by Iran in a last-ditch effort to save himself and the GOP with a short bounce in the polls caused by a New Pearl Harbor. The USS Boxer Strike Group has now joined the Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group and the Eisenhower and Enterprise Carrier Groups off the coast of Iran.
IRANIANS DON’T HELP
In closing I should make it clear that Iranians have not helped the situation very much. They have continued to antagonize the United States, largely due to their anger about being singled out for attack by the United States. Iran views nuclear energy development as a hallmark of modernization and a source of national pride. They think the United States is putting them down and trying to keep them backward. It is for this reason that although the majority of Iranians do not support their government, the absolutely support the development of nuclear energy.
President Ahmadinejad has also exacerbated Iran’s situation. He has been misquoted on his views on Israel and the holocaust, but he has also learned that making extreme statements raises his own political stock at home. He needs public support for his domestic political agenda -- an agenda that is paradoxically opposed by a large number of the ruling clerics in Iran. Every time he makes a defiant assertion against the United States, the public rallies behind him.
This creates what political scientist Richard Cottam termed a "spiral conflict" in which both parties escalate each other's extreme positions to new heights. It is entirely possible that Iran could goad President Bush into a disastrous military action, and that action would result in an equally disastrous Iranian reaction.
What have the Iranians done? True to fashion, they have declared the U.S. action a bluff, and have behaved in an even more defiant manner. The spiral conflict continues to everyone’s detriment.
Obviously the most reasonable position for both the United States and Iran is for the two states to sit down and talk face to face. As I have pointed out, Iran has tried to get the United States to respond to this need, but the U.S. has thus far refused. One obstacle is that Iran wants talks constructed between equals; the United States refuses to treat Iran as an equal, preferring to continue to denigrate and demonize the Islamic Republic. The U.S. wants to bring Iran to its knees or destroy its current government, and face-to-face talks are not likely to achieve that goal.
So, we have gunboats in the Persian Gulf this week. A conflagration that should never take place is ever more likely. It is a tragedy in the extreme.
William O. Beeman
Portland, Oregon
October 29, 2006
The United States and Iran are moving laboriously toward confrontation—perhaps military confrontation. John Bolton and Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns are working non-stop at the United Nations to try and get international sanctions imposed on Iran. The latest attempt is to get U.N. nations to prohibit Iranian students from studying certain subjects, such as engineering, in member nations.
Iran in turn has vigorously rejected any attempts to limit its development of a full nuclear enrichment cycle. The attempts on the part of the United Nations to impose trade or other sanctions on Iran is leading to diplomatic difficulties as Russia and China will likely oppose these measures.
An examination of the U.S. position vis-Ã -vis Iran leads inevitably to the conclusion that the nuclear issue is merely a pretext for action against the Iranian government, which the United States has been demonizing since the Revolution of 1978-79. The Bush administration’s real goal is regime change in Iran by whatever means, and finding an issue that can be trumped up enough to garner the support of the American public, and the international community has been a constant activity since President Bush came to office in his first administration.
Now the drive to destabilize Iran by whatever means has taken on a life of its own. It has become a dangerous obsession for the Bush administration, driving them increasingly to support actions that are not only counter-productive, but dangerous for the region and the world.
I want to make several points today.
First, that the Bush administration’s goal to attack Iran predates any concern about Iran’s nuclear program.
Second, that Iran’s nuclear development program poses no immediate danger for the United States, Israel or the Middle East region—because it is not a nuclear weapons program, and all attempts to prove that it is a weapons program are specious.
Third, Iran’s attempts to address American and European fears about the program have been systematically rejected by the United States, who wishes fervently to assure that this will continue to be a live issue
Finally, that potential U.S. actions against Iran pose far more danger than Iran poses for the region and for the world.
PRE-EXISTING PLANS
The attacks against Iran have their origins in longstanding concerns about the safety of Israel, ratcheted up by the extremist views of the neoconservatives that now dominate the Bush administration.
These concerns combined with decades long antipathy toward Iran, and the desire of the United States to dominate the oil-rich Middle East create a perfect storm of fervent desire on the part of the Bush administration to attack Iran.
The rhetoric against Iran has now pervaded American political culture to such an extent that no American lawmaker is willing to defend Iran. Conversely, no politician, Democratic or Republican ever lost a vote by attacking Iran.
According to journalist Sidney Blumenthal in Salon
>>>
>>>, the neocons in the administration, specifically Vice President Dick
>>>Cheney and National Security Agency Middle East Director Elliott Abrams,
>>>have been funneling U.S. intelligence intercepts to the Israelis as part
>>>of a plan to target Syria and Iran (see Tom Barry, Hunting Monsters with
>>>Elliott Abrams
>>>
>>>Those intercepts were behind the recent House Intelligence Committee
>>>report blasting U.S. spy agencies for their reluctance to say that
>>>Hezbollah is nothing more than an extension of Iran, that Tehran is on
>>>the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, and that Iran poses a clear and
>>>present danger to the United States.
>>>
>>>The author of the House report, Frederick Fleitz, was a former special
>>>assistant to current UN Ambassador John Bolton. Bolton was a key figure
>>>in gathering the now-discredited intelligence that Iraq had weapons of
>>>mass destruction.
>>>
>>>According to Blumenthal, Cheney and his Middle East aide David Wurmser
>>>have dusted off a 1996 document called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
>>>Securing the Realm." The study was authored by Wurmser, ex-Pentagon
>>>official Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, disgraced former head of the
>>>Defense Policy Board.
>>>
>>>The "Break"-originally written for then-Likud prime minister Benjamin
>>>Netanyahu-advocates that the Israelis, with support from the United
>>>States, dump the 1992 Oslo Agreement with the Palestinians, target Syria
>>>and Iraq, and redesign the Middle East.
>>>
>>>A key ingredient in the document, and one central to current
>>>administration thinking, is that since terrorism is state-supported, the
>>>war on terrorism can be won by changing regimes. Hence, to defeat
>>>Hezbollah, you have to overthrow Syria and Iran.
>>>
The only problem that the Bush administration felt they had was how to sell the overthrow of Iran to the American public. The fact that such an action would be a massive, stunning failure seems even now not to be of any great concern to them.
The only issue that really frightens and concerns the American public is their own safety. Raising the specter of atomic weapons that might be used against Americans worked effectively in convincing the U.S. public to support the Iraqi invasion. Having used this device once, the Bush administration has trotted it out again, and has fed the U.S. public a full measure of yellow journalism trying to frighten them into supporting an Iranian attack. Neoconservative Bush supporters wrote fantasy accounts of Iranian cataclysmic atomic attacks on America. Jerome Corsi, ghost author of Unfit for Command, the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry wrote Atomic Iran—in which a hyperbolic account of an Iranian atomic bomb dropped on New York’s Central Park vies for his accounts of Iranian mullahs abducting children to support their regime. Kenneth Timmerman, penned Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran in a similar vein. Let me read a passage from Ray Takyeh of the Council on Foreign Relations’ review of the book from the Washington Post:
Timmerman's thesis is simplistic and provocative: Iran is America's most militant, relentless enemy and has been involved in nearly every terrorist attack against the United States since 1979. Iran is also actively seeking the bomb -- not for deterrence, but to menace the United States and its allies. . . . Timmerman, the author of earlier books attacking France and Jesse Jackson, begins his book with the outlandish claim that Iran was complicit in the Sept. 11, 2001, atrocities. In his retelling of history, a craven CIA, determined to exonerate rogue states that sponsor terrorism, has deliberately withheld this information from the American public. The conclusions of the numerous congressional investigations and journalistic inquiries into Sept. 11 are simply ignored. The one independent examination that Timmerman does cite, the 9/11 Commission, is faulted for missing what he considers the all-too-apparent Iran link. The reader gets the impression that Timmerman would rather not bother with facts precisely because they undermine his conspiracy theory.
The book was praised by the right-wing Washington Times, New York Sun and New York Post and has been widely cited on Fox News and other sycophantic supporters of the Bush administration.
IRAN POSES NO DANGER
However, there is no proof whatever that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
President Bush declared on June 25, 2003 that "we will not tolerate" a nuclear armed Iran. His words are empty. The physical evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iran simply does not exist.
Iran is completing a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant in Bushehr with Russian help. The existence of the site is common knowledge. It has been under construction for more than three decades, since before the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.
Two other nuclear research facilities, now under development, have come to light: a uranium enrichment plant in the city of Natanz and a deuterium ("heavy water") facility in the city of Arak. Neither is in operation. The only question of interest is whether these facilities offer a plausible route to the manufacture of plutonium-based nuclear bombs, and the short answer is: They do not.
The Bushehr plant is only part of the argument that Iran is embarked on a nuclear weapons program, but it is the part that can readily be analyzed. State Department accusations of dangerous Iranian intentions for the Natanz and Arak facilities are based on a patchwork of untestable, murky assertions from dubious sources, including the People's Mujahedeen (Mujahedeen-e Khalq, MEK or MKO), which the United States identifies as a terrorist organization. These sources assert that there are centrifuges for enriching uranium (an alternative to fissile plutonium for bombs) or covert facilities for extracting plutonium. Neither of these claims are especially credible, since the sources are either unidentified or are the same channels which disseminated the stories about Iraq's non-conventional weapons or the so-called chemical and biological weapons plant in Khartoum.
The testable part of the claim -- that the Bushehr reactor is a proliferation threat -- is demonstrably false. There are several reasons, some technical, some institutional.
--The Iranian reactor yields the wrong kind of plutonium for making bombs.
--The spent fuel pins in the Iranian reactor would, in any case, be too dangerous to handle for weapons manufacture.
--Any attempt to divert fuel from the Iranian plant will be detectable.
--The Russian partners in the Bushehr project have stipulated that the fuel pins must be returned to Russia, as has been their practice worldwide for other export reactors.
Just as there are many different kinds of nuclear reactors, there are different forms of plutonium, distinctions that are almost never made in public discussions of nuclear proliferation.
There are two different kinds of reactors, heavy-water or graphite-moderated reactors; and pressurized, or "light water" reactors (PWRs). The Dimona nuclear power plant in Israel is an example of the former. The Bushehr plant is the latter.
The Israeli plant is ideal for yielding the desirable isotope of Plutonium (Pu 239) necessary for making bombs. The Iranian plant will produce plutonium, but the wrong kind. It will produce the heavier isotopes, Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242 -- almost impossible to use in making bombs.
Crucial to extracting weapons-grade plutonium is the type of reactor and the mode in which it is operated. The Israeli-type plant can be refueled "on line," without shutting down. Thus, high-grade plutonium can be obtained covertly and continuously. In the Iranian plant, the entire reactor will have to be shut down -- a step that cannot be concealed from satellites, airplanes and other sources -- in order to permit the extraction of even a single fuel pin.
In the Israeli reactor, the fuel is recycled every few weeks, or at most every couple of months. This maximizes the yield of the highest-quality, weapons-grade plutonium. In the Iranian-type reactor, the core is exchanged only every 30-40 months -- the longer the fuel cycle, the better for the production of power.
For the Iranian reactor at Bushehr, any effort to divert fuel will be transparent because a shutdown will be immediately noticeable. No case of production of bomb-grade material from fuel from an Iranian-type plant has ever been reported.
No one can read the collective mind of a government. But even if Iran proves in the future to have ambitions for developing nuclear weapons, any actual production is years, perhaps decades away. Furthermore, Iran has fully acquiesced to the international inspections process. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). On June 22, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, Gholam-Reza Aghazadeh, reiterated that all of Iran's nuclear facilities are open for inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in compliance with treaty guarantees.
Of course, Iran is developing other facilities—an enrichment plant in Isfahan, and a deuterium production plant in Natanz have been opened. These plants are entirely legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and they are entirely consistent with power generation. Much has been made in the last week of the fact that Iran has placed two cascades of 164 centrifuges on line which now have produced enriched uranium at a lower grade than is even needed for power generation (5%). Production capacity would require 50,000 centrifuges and enrichment to a level of 90%. All intelligence experts agree that Iran is years away from coming even close to producing enough weapons grade uranium to produce even a single bomb. The German intelligence office last week estimated that if it worked non-stop on this level of enrichment, it might have enough weapons grade uranium by 2015. U.S. Intelligence Director John Negroponte agrees with this assessment. Mohammad el Baradei of the IAEA last week once again reiterated that he was “unconvinced” that Iran had any weapons program.
The deuterium plant has resulted in some interesting press. The U.S. press regularly reported that the plant has the capacity to produce weapons grade fuel. Of course this is absurd. The plant produces heavy water, which would then be used in a heavy water reactor, designed to be completed in 2009 or 2010. The spent fuel from the reactor would then have to be processed to extract any weapons-grade fuel, and another plant to build any weapons. The idea that this operation could go undetected by international inspection teams is absurd.
IRANIAN NEED
The furor in Washington over possible nuclear weapons development in Iran is fueled in part because Bush administration officials claim that Iran doesn't need to generate nuclear power. They assert that Iran's nuclear energy program is unnecessary given its oil reserves. Therefore, officials say, its nuclear plants must exist for weapons production.
In fact, for Iran, generating nuclear power makes sense. Moreover, the plans to do this were started decades ago, and with American approval.
Ex-CIA director James Woolsey, in an interview on the PBS program Frontline on Feb. 23, 2003 claimed "there is no underlying (reason) for one of the greatest oil producers in the world to need to get into the nuclear (energy) business."
At first glance, such logic seems sound. Countries with vast oil reserves also have large reserves of natural gas sitting on top of those reserves. Some years ago, the natural gas was regularly burned off to get at the oil beneath. However, technological advances today make it feasible to use this gas for power generation.
Even so, nuclear power still makes sense in a country with vast amounts of natural gas, particularly given the unusual circumstances in the Iranian hydrocarbons industry. There are needs for gas in Iran that command much higher priorities than the construction of gas power plants.
First, gas is vitally needed for reinjection into existing oil reservoirs (repressurizing). This is indispensable for maintaining oil output levels, as well as for increasing overall, long-term recovery of oil.
Second, natural gas is needed for growing domestic use, such as in cooking fuel and domestic heating (Iranians typically use kerosene for both), where it can free up oil for more profitable export. New uses such as powering bus and taxi fleets in Iran's smoggy urban areas are also essential for development.
Third, natural gas exports -- via pipelines to Turkey or in liquefied form to the subcontinent -- set an attractive minimum value for any available natural gas. With adequate nuclear power generation, Iran can profit more from selling its gas than using it to generate power.
Fourth, the economics of gas production in Iran are almost backwards, certainly counter-intuitive. Much of Iran's gas is "rich" -- it contains by-products, such as liquid-petrolem gas (LPG, better known as propane), which are more valuable than the natural gas they are derived from. Iran can profit by selling these derivatives, but not if it burns the natural gas to generate power. Furthermore, Iran adheres to OPEC production quotas, which combine oil and natural gas production. Therefore Iran cannot simply increase natural gas for export to make up for what it burns at home.
Overall, therefore, it can reasonably be argued that natural gas in Iran has economic uses that are superior to power generation, in spite of Iran's much-touted large reserves. The economic rationale is therefore plausible -- the costs of gas versus nuclear power generation are sufficiently close that the choice is a standoff, especially given the reported bargain price for the Russian reactor.
The great irony in America's accusations is that Iran's nuclear program was first developed on the advice of American specialists, who urged the government of the Shah to begin producing nuclear power in order to save oil reserves for more lucrative purposes than fuel. The prospect of an industrial base built on petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals never materialized, but the nuclear power program continued unabated.
Now, to have American officials express alarm over the exact same program is illogical at best and utterly disingenuous at worst. Much of the criticism of Iran's nuclear program comes from the same people who insisted that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons development program before the American invasion of that nation on March 19. That fact alone should raise severe skepticism throughout the world.
AMERICAN REJECTION
The potential impasse in the Iranian nuclear program could have been forestalled long ago, but the United States has regularly rejected all attempts on the part of Iran to negotiate this matter. The Bush administration should be called to explain why it seems to be driving the Iranian nuclear matter to crisis level.
As everyone in the world must now know, the United States maintains that Iran is in the process of developing nuclear weapons. It has convinced a number of European nations of the correctness of its suspicions. Iran maintains that its nuclear development is for domestic power generation purposes only, and everything it is doing is allowed under the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which Iran is a signatory.
There is no objective evidence whatever that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program—only the suspicions of the United States and its ally, Israel, that this is true.
As part of the basis for its suspicions, the United States maintains that Iran had concealed its nuclear program for many years—the number of years varies depending on which official one asks. In fact, Iran has done no such thing. First and foremost, as mentioned previously, Iran’s nuclear program is more than 30 years old, and was started with the encouragement of the United States. President Gerald Ford offered the Iranians a full nuclear cycle in 1976 before the Revolution of 1978-79. Despite the change in government, the program has been implemented largely as conceived with U.S. approval.
Regarding concealment of Under the NPT Iran is not required to disclose its facilities until it begins to process nuclear material. This had not taken place when the United States began to object to the Iranian nuclear development in 2003.
However, that consideration aside, Iran offered as early as 1997 to make its nuclear development known to the world through inspections. The United States was fully apprised of these developments at that time.
For example, Iran offered to provide the land for EU-United Nations University nuclear enrichment facilities to be staffed exclusively by non-Iranian personnel, with no Iranians allowed to enter the facility -- very much treated as a foreign Embassy. This proposition was rejected.
In 1997, at the request of Iran, Iranian nuclear scientist Behrad Nakha’I arranged for a group of prominent US nuclear scientists to visit Iran's nuclear facilities. After couple of days of discussions, he was able to get US State Department's agreement, but the United States Department of Defense absolutely refused this offer from the beginning to the end of the two months that we were interacting, trying to make these arrangements.
He responded to all of the concerns, but just like a telemarketer reading from a prepared statement, his contact at the Department of Defense repeated the same sentence over and over, rejecting such a visit. He offered to include a representative from the DOD of the U.S. government’s choice in the inspection group, but to no avail. Since these scientists had the highest clearance from US government, requiring government permission for them to maintain their status. he had to call off the visit. This was a huge missed opportunity, among many others.
In 2003, Iran, under the presidency of moderate Mohammad Khatami issued a general offer to negotiate all outstanding issues with the U.S. These included addressing the question of Iran’s nuclear development as well as coming to agreement on a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The offer had the full support of Iran’s spiritual Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Bush administration not only rejected the offer, they excoriated the Swiss diplomatic officer who brought the offer.
Iran also was the only nation to publicly accept the 2003 U.N. proposal by Mohammad El Baradei that weapons-usable fissile materials be placed under international control . This would be a step leading to fulfillment of the Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty (FMCT). This earlier treaty was passed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1993 over U.S. objections. El Baradei’s proposal was passed 149-2, the United States and Palau being the only dissenting votes with Israel and Great Britain abstaining. El Baradei's proposal would monitor all nuclear fission and guarantee that non-nuclear weapons states would be able to obtain adequate supplies for their nonmilitary usage of enriched plutonium. If implemented, this proposal would have ended the Iranian nuclear crisis, but at the price of establishing controls that would be incumbent on other nations as well—the basis for the U.S. objection to the FMCT.
It is hard to know precisely why the United States is driving the specter of Iran’s nuclear development so hard that it ignores all the attempts on Iran’s part to allay international concerns, and ignores even its own previous knowledge of and involvement with Iran’s nuclear program.
ATTACKING IRAN
The conclusion that Iran has drawn is that the nuclear issue is a pretext on the part of the United States to vilify Iran before the international community, perhaps as a prelude to a military attack. With President Bush continuing to insist that with regard to Iran “all cards are on the table,” it is easy to see how they might reach that conclusion. Iran is conducting military maneuvers on all of its borders this week (August 20). Perhaps this is coincidence, or perhaps they anticipate that whatever they do regarding the nuclear issue will not preclude hostile American action.
Just now, however Americans should be on guard—a real war may break out at any minute and the resulting conflagration would likely engulf the region, and then the world. Even now, Daniel Ellesberg in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, Seymour Hirsh in the New Yorker, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, eminent historian William Polk and numerous others have written about the coming war between the United States and Iran that few in the United States know about, but which seems to be immanent.
Polk Writes:
The Washington Post has reported that at least since March, large teams have been working on invasion plans in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, while the Iran “desk” at the State Department has been augmented to task force size. It reports to Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of the vice president, who is assistant secretary of state for the Near East. In the Pentagon, a similar organization has been established under Neoconservative Abram Shulsky. In addition a new outpost has been set up in Dubai to coordinate plans. On October 2, a powerful naval battle group around the giant aircraft carrier Eisenhower sailed for the Persian Gulf and is due to arrive a week before the November Congressional elections to join a similar battle group led by the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Meanwhile aircraft of the U.S. Air Force are being readied in bases surrounding Iran and in distant locations. These forces could deliver destructive power that would dwarf the aerial assaults on Iraq.
The Israeli bombardment of Lebanon has been regarded as a test. Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker talks he had with current and retired American military and intelligence experts who told him that it was regarded as “a prelude to a potential American preemptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.” They did terrible damage and killed many people, but they failed to accomplish their mission. As Bush’s former Deputy of State Richard Armitage said, “If the most dominant military force in the region – the Israel Defense Forces – can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million…The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the [Lebanese] population against the Israelis.”
The Air Force plans have been resisted by the senior generals of the Army, Navy and Marine corps. In rare public statements and frequently in private, they have said that the plans are fatally flawed and that even if an invasion begins with aerial attack it will soon require ground troops. Despite the misgivings of the military professionals, Joseph Cirincione wrote in the March issue of Foreign Policy that conversations with senior officials in the Pentagon and the White House had convinced him that the decision for war had already been made.
This is it folks. As I have warned, history changes on October 31st. It is now apparent that Bush does intend to have our ships sunk in the Gulf by Iran in a last-ditch effort to save himself and the GOP with a short bounce in the polls caused by a New Pearl Harbor. The USS Boxer Strike Group has now joined the Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group and the Eisenhower and Enterprise Carrier Groups off the coast of Iran.
IRANIANS DON’T HELP
In closing I should make it clear that Iranians have not helped the situation very much. They have continued to antagonize the United States, largely due to their anger about being singled out for attack by the United States. Iran views nuclear energy development as a hallmark of modernization and a source of national pride. They think the United States is putting them down and trying to keep them backward. It is for this reason that although the majority of Iranians do not support their government, the absolutely support the development of nuclear energy.
President Ahmadinejad has also exacerbated Iran’s situation. He has been misquoted on his views on Israel and the holocaust, but he has also learned that making extreme statements raises his own political stock at home. He needs public support for his domestic political agenda -- an agenda that is paradoxically opposed by a large number of the ruling clerics in Iran. Every time he makes a defiant assertion against the United States, the public rallies behind him.
This creates what political scientist Richard Cottam termed a "spiral conflict" in which both parties escalate each other's extreme positions to new heights. It is entirely possible that Iran could goad President Bush into a disastrous military action, and that action would result in an equally disastrous Iranian reaction.
What have the Iranians done? True to fashion, they have declared the U.S. action a bluff, and have behaved in an even more defiant manner. The spiral conflict continues to everyone’s detriment.
Obviously the most reasonable position for both the United States and Iran is for the two states to sit down and talk face to face. As I have pointed out, Iran has tried to get the United States to respond to this need, but the U.S. has thus far refused. One obstacle is that Iran wants talks constructed between equals; the United States refuses to treat Iran as an equal, preferring to continue to denigrate and demonize the Islamic Republic. The U.S. wants to bring Iran to its knees or destroy its current government, and face-to-face talks are not likely to achieve that goal.
So, we have gunboats in the Persian Gulf this week. A conflagration that should never take place is ever more likely. It is a tragedy in the extreme.
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