(Nazila Fathi | New York Times | 29 December 2009) – Iran continued to arrest opposition members on Tuesday in what seemed to be an effort to curb further protests after Sunday’s defiant demonstrations against the government, according to opposition Web sites.

The authorities arrested dozens of journalists, students and activists on Monday and Tuesday, the Web sites said. Among those arrested was the sister of the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, who has been critical of the government.

The crackdown appears to be the largest since June, when antigovernment protests exploded after the country’s widely disputed presidential election.

Sunday’s protests were the bloodiest since the summer, and on Tuesday an opposition Web site, Jaras, said the death toll was likely to be significantly higher than previously thought. The site quoted what it said was a leaked confidential report by the official news agency IRNA, saying that 37 people had been killed.

The security forces had earlier said that eight people had been killed in Tehran, and Jaras itself had earlier reported that 13 people were killed in Tehran and elsewhere.

IRNA sometimes issues reports only to a limited number of subscribers, but it was impossible to immediately verify either the existence of the report or its contents. Opposition figures had said earlier that they expected the number of dead to rise because government forces had shot into crowds, and videos have surfaced on the Web in recent days that are said to show protesters being run over by cars.

Ali Moussavi, a nephew of the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, was one of those run over by a vehicle, according to a family friend who said earlier this week that the assault was an assassination that took place outside the nephew’s home.

Because foreign reporters were barred from the demonstration, it was impossible to confirm the breadth of the violence on Sunday.

The authorities have claimed that the West has been behind the protests and that the killings were carried out by “suspicious elements.” The semiofficial Fars news agency reported Tuesday that the British ambassador, Simon Gass, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry over Britain’s “interference into Iran’s internal affairs.”

The British government said its envoy would respond “robustly” to any criticism, Reuters reported. After the election in June, Iran sought to cast Britain as a major instigator of the unrest that followed.

Also on Tuesday, the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, who had voiced more moderate views in the past, called for the “arrest of offenders of the religion and the harshest punishment for antirevolutionary figures,” ISNA, a semiofficial news agency, reported.

He refrained from naming those he wanted punished, but other government officials have called for Mr. Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, another leader of the opposition, to be held accountable for the continuing defiance of the government.

Meanwhile, some Iranians living abroad — many of whom fled the country after the Islamic Revolution — appeared to be making a more concerted effort to discredit the government.

A group called United4Iran, a network of Iranians around the world who came together after the June protests, posted a postcard on its Web site titled “Wanted,” with the pictures of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the winner of the disputed election; and the leader of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Ali Jafari.

“The diaspora wants to play a role in bringing the violence to an end,” said Hadi Ghaemi, one the organizers for United4Iran. “We are highlighting the human rights situation in Iran and the three figures that are behind it.”

United4Iran also posted a statement from Ms. Ebadi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, saying that her sister, who had been arrested, was not a political person. Ms. Ebadi, who left Iran right before the election, said the authorities have been threatening to arrest her sister unless she handed over what they hoped would be damaging information about Ms. Ebadi.

“I initially did not take this seriously,” Ms. Ebadi wrote, “but I am sad and upset to see that this was not an empty threat.”

Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Toronto, and Peter Baker from Honolulu.

(Robert F. Worth | New York Times | 24 November 2009) — After last summer’s disputed presidential election, Iran’s government relied largely on brute force — beatings, arrests and show trials — to stifle the country’s embattled opposition movement.

Now, stung by the force and persistence of the protests, the government appears to be starting a far more ambitious effort to discredit its opponents and re-educate Iran’s mostly young and restive population. In recent weeks, the government has announced a variety of new ideological offensives.

It is implanting 6,000 Basij militia centers in elementary schools across Iran to promote the ideals of the Islamic Revolution, and it has created a new police unit to sweep the Internet for dissident voices. A company affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards acquired a majority share in the nation’s telecommunications monopoly this year, giving the Guards de facto control of Iran’s land lines, Internet providers and two cellphone companies. And in the spring, the Revolutionary Guards plan to open a news agency with print, photo and television elements.

The government calls it “soft war,” and Iran’s leaders often seem to take it more seriously than a real military confrontation. It is rooted in an old accusation: that Iran’s domestic ills are the result of Western cultural subversion and call for an equally vigorous response. The extent of the new campaign underscores just how badly Iran’s clerical and military elite were shaken by the protests, which set off the worst internal dissent since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been using the phrase “soft war” regularly since September, when he warned a group of artists and teachers that they were living in an “atmosphere of sedition” in which all cultural phenomena must be seen in the context of a vast battle between Iran and the West. He and other officials have since invoked the phrase in describing new efforts to re-Islamize the educational system, purge secular influences and professors, and purify the media of subversive ideas.

The new emphasis on cultural warfare may also reflect the rising influence of the Revolutionary Guards, whose leader, Mohammad Ali Jafari, has long been one of the main proponents of a “soft war” strategy, analysts say.

In October, Masud Jazayeri, a leading ideologue within the military’s Joint Forces Command, published a letter in the conservative newspaper Kayhan in which he called for a more aggressive campaign of countersubversion. “If we had a better understanding of the enemy, and if we had sufficient determination and motivation to define the defensive lines,” he wrote, “we would never have allowed the enemy to penetrate our Islamic society.”

There have been periodic earlier campaigns to reinforce the government’s Islamist message throughout society. Some analysts say that the new efforts are unlikely to be any more effective than those in the past, and may even backfire.

“By trying to gain more control of the media, to re-Islamize schools, they think they can make a comeback,” said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, an Iran expert and professor at Syracuse University. “But the enemy here is Iran’s demographics. The Iranian population is overwhelmingly literate and young, and previous efforts to reinstall orthodoxy have only exacerbated cleavages between citizens and the state.”

Still, the idea has returned with new force in the months since the disputed June presidential elections, which brought millions of Iranians into the streets to denounce President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory as a fraud. In the weeks that followed, the government’s aura of sacred authority seemed to erode further, with many protesters denouncing Iran’s supreme leader as a dictator for the first time.

Iran’s military and clerical leaders made clear soon afterward that they saw in those attacks the signature of a foreign plot, and perhaps a more subtle and insidious one than those of the past. It was, in a sense, the only way for the Iranian leadership to reconcile the internal challenges they were facing with President Obama’s mild calls for reconciliation and engagement.

In early September, Brig. Gen. Muhammad Bagher-Zolghadr, the former deputy chief of the Revolutionary Guards, outlined the “soft war” concept in a speech: “In a hard war, the line between you and the enemy is clear, but in a soft war there is nothing so solid. The enemy is everywhere.” General Zolghadr said that a soft war was fought in large part through the media, and that the West was “better equipped” to fight it than Iran.

Soon after his speech, the authorities unrolled a series of measures seemingly aimed at redressing that imbalance. This month, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi, the head of the Basij militia, announced a new era of “super media power” cooperation between the media and the Revolutionary Guards, according to the state-owned official press.

The Revolutionary Guards plan to start a news agency called Atlas in the spring, modeled on services like the BBC and The Associated Press, according to semiofficial Iranian news sites.

The Revolutionary Guards already largely control the Fars news agency, which reflects views of Iran’s hard-line camp. Two weeks ago Iran formed a 12-person unit to monitor the Internet for “insults and the spreading of lies,” a phrase used to describe opposition activities, the semiofficial media reported.

And the government has teamed up with private companies to begin giving out free home Internet filtering software, the semiofficial ILNA news agency reported Monday.

The authorities have also cracked down on dissent within the educational system, hinting that professors who do not toe the official line will be purged. A number of hard-line clerics have called for the university humanities curriculums to be Islamized further.

Mohammad-Saleh Jokar, the head of the student and cultural section of the Basij, said the group was opening the elementary school centers because “students of this age are more open to influence than older students, and for this reason we want to promote and establish the ideas of the revolution and the Basij,” according to Iran’s official state news agency.

But the size and bureaucratic complexity of the school system make such goals profoundly difficult, former teachers say.

In the same way, the state’s new efforts to inoculate Iranians against dissident ideas in the media may be difficult — or even counterproductive, analysts say. This month a high-ranking official at IRIB, the state broadcaster, seemed to unwittingly concede the point when he announced that 40 percent of Iranians — twice as many as last year — had access to satellite television in their homes.

“The enemy no longer invests in the military to advance their goals,” said the official, Ali Daraei. “Their primary investment is in the media war through satellite channels.”

(Reuters | 24 November 2009) - Six world powers have drafted a resolution at the UN nuclear watchdog urging Iran to clarify the purpose of its previously secret uranium enrichment site and confirm it has no more hidden atomic work, diplomats said.

The draft text, backed by the United States, Germany, France, Britain, Russia, and China, is to be presented at the year-end meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation governing board that starts on November 26.

Russian and Chinese support could be significant since they have often blocked tougher action against Iran in the IAEA’s governing body and the UN Security Council, including the pursuit of tough sanctions.

Nevertheless, it was not certain if the draft text would muster a majority among IAEA governors, almost half of whom belong to a developing nation bloc that includes Iran.

The IAEA said in a report last week that Iran’s late admission of the Fordow enrichment plant had eroded confidence that it was not harboring more secret activity.

The draft resolution will call on Iran to provide the agency with a timeline of the site’s design and construction, diplomats familiar with its content told Reuters, asking for anonymity due to the subject’s political sensitivity.

“There was a strong measure of agreement at the P5+1 meeting in Brussels last week that the [Fordow] revelation was a serious new development,” one senior diplomat said.

Iran revealed the site to the IAEA in September, two years after it said construction began. The IAEA said Iran was legally bound to own up about the plant as soon as plans were drawn.

The eight-point resolution draft highlighted this and also urged Iran to cooperate fully with the agency to clear up all outstanding issues about its nuclear work.

Western powers fear Iran is using the cover of a civilian nuclear program to develop bomb-making capability. Iran denies this and says its atomic work is for peaceful uses only, like power generation.

The last IAEA board resolution passed against Iran was in February 2006 when governors referred Tehran’s case to the UN Security Council over its refusal to suspend enrichment and open up completely to IAEA inspections and investigations.

(Benjamin Weiser | New York Times | 12 November 2009) - Federal prosecutors in Manhattan began legal action on Thursday to seize properties in Queens and across the country where several mosques are located in a broad move against a nonprofit organization that was accused of illegally providing money and other services to Iran.

The organization, the Alavi Foundation, owns the land on which the mosques sit, as well as a majority interest in an office tower at 650 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which has also been slated for seizure by the government.

The authorities accused the Alavi Foundation of spending millions of dollars to obtain and develop the properties, in violation of federal laws that ban trade with Iran.

In addition to the Queens property, which is at 55-11 Queens Boulevard and houses the Imam Ali Mosque, the government sought forfeiture of the foundation’s ownership in seven other properties, several of which house mosques. Another of the properties is a 36-story granite-and-glass tower at 52nd Street known as the Piaget Building.

The prosecutors did not specify how much money they were seeking to be forfeited, but they said that the foundation had tried for years to hide its relationship with the government of Iran. The prosecutors described meetings between the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations and the foundation’s president. The two men met periodically, in a closed room, at the center in Queens, the complaint said.

The government, in a complaint filed in Federal District Court, made no allegations against the mosques or other tenants of the properties owned by the foundation.

In a statement issued late Thursday, the office of the United States attorney, Preet Bharara, said that they remained free to use the properties.

“There are no allegations of any wrongdoing on the part of any of these tenants or occupants,” said Yusill Scribner, a spokeswoman. “No action has been taken against any tenants or occupants of those properties.”

A lawyer for the foundation, Daniel Ruzumna, said: “The Alavi Foundation is disappointed that the government decided to bring this civil forfeiture action. The foundation has been cooperating fully with the government since the investigation began. The foundation intends to litigate the government’s claims and expects to prevail when the litigation is over.”

The prosecutors’ action came on the same day the White House said that President Obama had renewed longstanding economic sanctions against Iran, Reuters reported. The president said, “Our relations with Iran have not yet returned to normal.”

Worshippers at the Imam Ali Mosque were stunned by the news of the government’s action, which they said they learned of only from reporters outside.

The mosque is in a white two-story building that also houses the Razi School. A forfeiture notice had been taped to the front door.

“This is a place of worship; anybody can come to pray, that’s it,” said one congregant, Ali Naderi of Queens. “We do believe this allegation is not true.”

He said the mosque was a nonprofit organization and received support from the Alavi Foundation and others. “We don’t own this place,” he said. “We are a community and we come for worship.”

Mr. Naderi said 600 to 700 families attended the mosque regularly.

A man who answered the phone at Imam Ali Mosque on Thursday night said, “No one is here; everybody is praying,” and abruptly hung up.

“Because information is lacking, this might well cause yet another wave of fear in the Muslim community,” said Adem Carroll, chairman of the Muslim Consultative Network, an advocacy group. “It would be sad if word in our community starts spreading that the government will shut us all down. Already some think this is a war against the religion; that is a very unhelpful perception.”

The mosques — also on Alavi Foundation property in Maryland, Texas and California — receive space and financial support from the foundation, said one person affiliated with the organization who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

On its Web site, the foundation says that it has promoted “Islamic culture and Persian language, literature and civilization” for more than 30 years, through grants and other activities.

Al Baker, Anahad O’Connor and Karen Zraick contributed reporting.

(The Real News Network | 7 October 2007) - In this five-part series, retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern and Iraq whistle-blower Greg Thielmann discuss respectively the role of faith-based intelligence in disinformation (Part 1) and under what conditions Iran would restart its suspended weapons program (Part 2).  In the question and answer session, McGovern and Thielman discuss the implication of US silence on Israel’s nuclear weapons (Part 3); the disconnect between the intelligence community, government and the public (Part 4); and the potential causes of armed conflict in Iran (Part 5).

Part 1:  Disinformation and Faith-based Intelligence

(Ray McGovern | The Real News Network | 7 October 2009) - Retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern speaks on disinformation, Iran, and “faith-based intelligence”

Part 2:  Military threats may push Iran to restart suspended weapons program

(Greg Thielmann | The Real News Network | 7 October 2009) - Iraq whistle-blower Greg Thielmann, ” Military threats may push Iran to restart suspended weapons program.”

Part 3:  Israel’s nukes and Iran

(McGovern & Thielmann | The Real News Network | 7 October 2009) – McGovern & Thielmann on consequences of US silence on Israel’s nuclear weapons.

Part 4:  What’s intelligence got to do with it?

(McGovern & Thielmann | The Real News Network | 7 October 2009) – Ray McGovern and Greg Thielmann discuss the disconnect between the intelligence community, government and the public.

Part 5:  How would a US-Iran war begin?

(McGovern & Thielmann | The Real News Network | 7 October 2009) - Ray McGovern and Greg Thielmann on the potential causes of armed conflict in Iran.

(Michael Slackman | New York Times | 10 October 2009) — Iranian officials have sentenced to death three protesters who participated in demonstrations following the nation’s disputed presidential election in June, according to ISNA, Iran’s semiofficial news agency.

The news service quoted an unnamed spokesman for the Tehran prosecutor’s office saying that the three were sentenced to be hanged and that they had been part of what Iran considered terrorist organizations.

The death sentences are the first to be made public in cases involving the hundreds charged in the vast protests that followed the government’s declaration of a landslide victory for the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in the June 12 presidential election.

Reform-aligned Web sites reported last week that a prisoner named Mohammad-Reza Ali-Zamani had received a death sentence. The announcement on Saturday, which said a man with the initials M. Z. would be put to death, appears to confirm that sentence and report two others.

According to the report Saturday, two of the protesters were members of the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, a group that wants to restore the monarchy.

The third, identified as N. A., was said to be a member of People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, an exile group that Iran says works to overthrow the government.

The news of death sentences sparked immediate condemnation from international human rights groups. In the weeks after the election, millions of Iranians marched in the streets of Tehran, charging that Mr. Ahmadinejad stole the race. At least 30 people were killed in a government crackdown that quelled the protests but failed to end the simmering discontent.

“Zamani’s trial was a mockery of justice,” the executive director of Amnesty International USA, Larry Cox, said in a statement. “To impose the death sentence is beyond deplorable. Iran should immediately rescind this sentence.”

The ISNA report, without giving details, said the court also sentenced 18 other protesters. That raised concerns about the hundreds of journalists, former government officials, academics and protesters still held in prison, many incommunicado, said the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a group based in the United States.

There have been many charges of protesters’ being tortured while in prison, and the government has agreed that some prisoners were abused, although it has continued to dispute accusations that some were raped and sodomized.

“Iranian authorities have released little or no information about many of the approximately 400 persons who remain detained,” the human rights campaign said in a statement, adding that Iran was “violating international standards for due process and raising deep concerns about their health and safety.”

Among those who remain in detention are Maziar Bahari, a filmmaker and reporter for Newsweek, and Shapur Kazemi, the brother-in-law of Mir Hussein Moussavi, who the opposition claims won the election. Mr. Kazemi, 62, is a respected telecommunications engineer and is known for his activities in technical and economic fields rather than for political activism.

Others who are still being held include the former vice president, Mohammad Ali Abtahi; Muhammad Atrianfar, a publisher and confidant of the former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani; Mostafa Tajzadeh, a deputy interior minister in the reformist government of the former president Mohammad Khatami; Saeed Leylaz, an economist and former government official; and the journalist Isa Saharkhiz, who according to Iranian news reports suffered broken ribs during interrogation.

Student activists being held include Abdullah Momeni, a former spokesman for the student group Iran Alumni Association, who confessed in court. Mr. Momeni’s wife says he had been badly tortured, according to Iranian news reports.

The revelation late on 24 September 2009 that Iran is in the process of building a second uranium-enrichment plant inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom introduces a fresh source of dispute to a longstanding contest of wills between the Tehran regime and western states. The information – supplied by Iran itself to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on 21 September, after it emerged that western intelligence sources had become aware of the project – is not in itself evidence that Iran has an active nuclear-weapon programme; but it most certainly does mean that Iran will have that option at a time of its choosing.

The varying parts of the differentiated Iranian leadership have been consistent in denying that their state intends to acquire a nuclear-weapon capacity, though they also affirm – and foreign governments and international agencies agree – that Iran has the right to develop civil nuclear technologies. The information about the second installation both heightens the ambiguity that has always surrounded this issue, and creates a new source of tension.

Iran responded to the moment on 27-28 September by test-firing short- and long-range missiles on successive days (the latter the liquid-fuel Shahab-3 and the solid-fuel Sajil, each with a range of up to 1,987 kilometres). This forms a tense backdrop to the already scheduled meeting in Geneva on 1 October 2009, part of the ongoing cycle of diplomatic discussion among the “five-plus-one” group (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany – plus Iran).

The context

The strategic and economic relevance of nuclear power for an oil-and-gas-rich state such as Iran has been endlessly disputed. There is a strong and longstanding belief in Iran that the possession of a thriving nuclear-energy sector forms one of the attributes of modernity, a sentiment arguably reinforced by western nuclear lobbies’ powerful advocacy of this energy source as a big part of the response to climate change.

The development of a nuclear-weapons capacity carries the civil-nuclear argument into another realm, but for many Iranian politicians there are pressing security reasons to take this course, even if their public stance (including that of the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) is to disclaim any interest in a military nuclear capacity.

The most immediate argument is the perceived need to counter Israel, a nuclear-weapons state since the late 1960s that now has a substantial arsenal. This extends to a sense of Iran existing alongside (if not indeed being encircled by) other nuclear-weapons states in the region – Pakistan and India to the east, and Russia to the north. Many western analysts pay little attention to such concerns, as indeed to Iranian perceptions of the massive United States presence in the vicinity of Iran, but this is all the more reason for registering their existence.

Indeed, it is hard to understand the tortuous arguments over Iran’s nuclear plans over the past decade without taking the view from Tehran centrally into account. In this respect, President Bush’s state-of-the-union address in January 2002 – which identified Iran as a core member of the “axis of evil” alongside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea – was hugely significant. This speech, after all, was delivered while Iran was still ruled by the relatively moderate Mohammad Khatami, whose government had – just two months earlier, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks – aided the United States in terminating the Taliban regime across Iran’s eastern border in Afghanistan.

The George W Bush administration went on to demolish an even more bitter adversary of Iran,  the Ba’athist regime across Iran’s western border, in 2003; but the accompanying rhetoric and the underlying dynamic meant that this also was perceived in Iran as threatening. Iran attempted to address this new situation by offering a “grand bargain” with Washington in spring 2003, but this was rejected. Iran’s elite came to see the US leadership as representing a “clear and present danger”, which may have been one factor in the election of the hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Khatami’s successor in June 2005.

It is true that the outcomes of US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq were in some ways helpful to Iran: the despised Taliban were driven back, Tehran was handed greater influence in Iraq, Barack Obama is clearly different to George W Bush. But the Iranian leadership – armed with a perspective that is rooted (as authors such as Fred Halliday emphasise) in 3,000 years of continuous statehood – also understands that Obama may continue in office only until January 2013, and could well be replaced by a new president every bit as hawkish as Bush.

The calculations

At present, however, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his cohort do have a problem: that Barack Obama is not functioning sufficiently as the embodiment of the “evil empire”. This fact is strikingly confirmed in the United States administration’s reaction to the news of 24 September 2009; for it is becoming clear that Obama has effectively ruled out a military option and is sticking forcefully to diplomatic engagement. If Iran does not so engage, then US policy will be to isolate Iran through even more stringent sanctions, anticipating that even Russia will come at least part of the way (see Glenn Kessler, “U.S. Aims To Isolate Iran if Talks Fail“, Washington Post, 29 September 2009).

True, China may present difficulties here, given its close relationship with Tehran over oil-and-gas deals as well as armaments supplies (see Michael Wines, “China‘s Ties With Iran Complicate Diplomacy“, New York Times, 30 September 2009). But even without China’s aid, a United States-led coalition could significantly increase the damage to Iran’s already shaky economy.

In a broader frame, the foreign-policy approach of the Obama administration poses serious difficulties to Ahmadinejad, who badly needs an external enemy to divert attention from the failing economy and the deep political divisions inside Iran (see Nazenin Ansari, “Iran’s unfinished crisis“, 16 September 2009). In the absence of such an enemy, and with the United States highly unlikely to take the war option, the obvious and logical option is to use every opportunity to identify Israel as the core threat.

This motive is matched and even exceeded on the other side: for both the rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu and a wider, deep-seated and cross-party view in Israel hold that Iran simply cannot under any circumstances be allowed to become a nuclear-weapons power. This combination of circumstances makes it more than likely that the period following the Geneva meeting on 1 October 2009 will be characterised by Iran’s further diplomatic stalling and high-pitched anti-Israel rhetoric, and Israel’s own repeated warnings about the imminent nuclear danger from Tehran.

This means that Obama will have the tough job of persuading the Israelis not to take military action against Iran on their own account. He will persist in this, both out of conviction and from underlying concern over the probable results of any Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. These were explored in an Oxford Research Group briefing  – Iran: Consequences of a War (February 2006) – which at the time of publication and after was widely read, in Tehran as well as in Washington. The document is still pertinent.

In military terms, Israel has the capacity to inflict serious damage on most of Iran’s current nuclear facilities, principally by using its recently acquired long-range F-15I and F-16I strike-aircraft as well as its ballistic and cruise missiles. It might even be able to conduct an operation without overflying Iraqi territory – if Jordan and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have their own concerns about Iran, give such permission; but in any case, it is unlikely that any attack would do more than set Iran’s nuclear ambitions back by two or three years.

The consequences

In the short term, and especially from an Israeli perspective, there would be value in accomplishing even this: for it could be seen as sending the necessary message that Iran will not be permitted to take the nuclear-weapons path, either now or in the future.

At the same time, this assessment could be deeply mistaken in that it underestimates greatly the immediate consequences an attack on Iran is almost guaranteed to provoke:

* It unites much of Iranian political opinion behind Ahmadinejad and his intransigent allies – at least for some months. He may be disliked in many circles and hated in some, but if the country is under attack this will transcend political differences

* Iran formally withdraws from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. This will disallow any future inspections, and allow the country to rebuild its bomb-damaged facilities and move as rapidly as possible to develop a nuclear-weapons capability. This alone means that more attacks from Israel will be necessary – leading to a long-term state of war

Iran also has other options, although it may chose to wait for months or even years to utilise them:

* Engineer a series of crises over transit through the Straits of Hormuz, not sufficient to demand an out-and-out response from the United States fifth-fleet but more than enough to send shock-waves through the oil markets. Such a process could be sustained for many months

* Increase engagement with the Shi’a majority in Iraq, to the extent of encouraging more forceful opposition to any continuing US presence in the country

* Provoke more difficulties for the US-led coalition in western Afghanistan, less by aiding Taliban elements than by expanding Iranian influence from Herat eastwards and undermining central governance in Kabul

* Aid the Hizbollah movement in Lebanon even more overtly in its confrontation with Israel.

If any of these actions and strategic choices were in turn to lead to a forceful US response -  perhaps around 2013-14, after the end of the Barack Obama presidency – then Iran has more extreme options in its armoury: including the paramilitary targeting of oil-and-gas production and transport facilities in western Gulf states.

The predicament

It is relevant to these prognoses that most Arab elites would quietly welcome an Israeli strike on Iran, but that Arab public opinion would be bitterly opposed. The absence of any real political progress in achieving a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a key factor here. An additional relevant factor is that while Iraq is the only major Arab state with a Shi’a majority, there are substantial Shi’a communities in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. There is particular concern in security circles in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that Shi’a minorities would react with great anger to an Israeli attack on Iran.

All these issues have been analysed in great depth in Washington policy-circles. The Barack Obama administration is facing a difficult position as a new period of negotiations with and about  Iran gets underway (see Godfrey Hodgson, “Barack Obama’s great test“, 30 September 2009). Some of the wilder voices on the American right argue even now for military action against Iran. But this constant domestic refrain pales against a far greater external challenge: from elements in Tehran that actively want confrontation, and from an Israeli government that could be all too ready to oblige.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. Paul Rogers’s books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007) – an analysis of the strategic misjudgments of the post-9/11 era and why a new security paradigm is needed. A third edition of his Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2009) is forthcoming.  He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001.

Who Is in Control of the Islamic Republic?

Iran’s disputed election marked the rise of a new power elite. Now, with more protests looming and a nuclear program facing international pressure, can the Revolutionary Guard and its allies sustain their tightening grip on the Islamic Republic?

(Jerry Guo | Foreign Policy | 30 September 2009) - The headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) are in a European-style palace, replete with Greek columns and a grand staircase, in the eastern suburbs of Tehran. From here, the IRGC orchestrated the crackdown that followed Iran’s disputed presidential vote in June, beating protestors on the street and torturing those behind bars. More ominously, the IGRC and other extreme hard-liners have sidelined fellow conservatives in the Iranian government, carving out their own power base in a regime that is becoming increasingly insular, reactionary, and violent.So far, much of the analysis of the emerging Iranian power struggle has focused on the clash between the country’s conservatives and reformers, pitting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his patron, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, against Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, two thwarted presidential candidates, and Mohammad Khatami, a former president. (Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and seasoned kingmaker has eased toward the reformists in the election’s aftermath.)

The real struggle, however, is the conflict among the hard-liners themselves, many of whom operate behind the headlines in unseen corners of the state machinery. Although Iran’s opposition movement has witnessed an unprecedented surge in public support, the election and its aftermath mark a radicalization of the system not seen since the early days of the Islamic revolution.

In the reformist era of Khatami, and to some extent during Ahmadinejad’s first term, the country’s conservative theocrats and technocrats — such as Ali Larijani, the speaker of the parliament, and Gholam-Hussein Mohseni-Ejei, the ousted intelligence minister who criticized the state’s use of forced confessions — held much of the power over the executive and legislative branches. Although they were entrenched status quo forces, these pragmatists believed in the dual nature of the Islamic Republic’s statehood — a country with religious and political legitimacy.

But now such figures are losing their influence to a new breed of second-generation revolutionaries from Iran’s security apparatus known as “the New Right.” They are joined in the emerging power structure by ultraconservative clerics and organizations such as the Alliance of Builders of Islamic Iran. These neo-fundamentalists call for the “re-Islamization” of the theocracy, but their true agenda is to block further reform to the political system in terms of reconciling with both domestic opponents and the West.

This coalition includes Hassan Taeb, the commander of the Basij, the paramilitary branch of the IRGC; Saeed Jalili, the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council and the country’s chief nuclear negotiator; and Mojtaba Khamenei, the supreme leader’s second son, a man so feared that his name is not often uttered in public.

Hard-line figures such as the younger Khamenei and the IRGC leadership are granted religious legitimacy through the support of the most radical mullahs in the theocratic establishment: Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of the Guardian Council, the committee that certified the election tallies, and Ayatollah Mohammad Mesbah Yazdi, a former head of the judiciary and Ahmadinejad’s spiritual adviser. Yazdi is affiliated with an underground messianic sect called the Hojjatieh Society, which hopes to quicken the coming of the apocalypse. Democratic reforms, the Majlis (parliament), and elections are mere annoyances under this radical Islamic worldview.

It is not surprising, then, that Yazdi issued a fatwa shortly before June 12 that gave authorities tacit approval to fudge the vote. Indeed, the clerics seem to have gotten the intended result: after the election, a number of employees at Iran’s Interior Ministry released an open letter stating that “the election supervisors, who had become happy and energetic for having obtained the religious fatwa to use any trick for changing the votes, began immediately to develop plans for it.”

Yazdi’s influence on Ahmadinejad became pronounced in the early days of the president’s first term, when Ahmadinejad declared that the return of the apocalyptic 12th imam would come within two years. Now, his second term will likely be marked by even more radical behavior: in a meeting with Yazdi in June to discuss his domestic agenda, Ahmadinejad promised to Islamize the country’s educational and cultural systems, declaring that Iranians had not yet witnessed “true Islam.” Then, in August, amid calls to purge reformist professors, a presidential panel began investigating university humanities curricula deemed to be “un-Islamic.” Several progressive students told me that they have been barred from returning to campus this semester, including a top law student at Tehran University. “I was going to continue the protests with my law degree in a more effective manner,” he said. “But now I am just a simple pedestrian.”

But ideology remains secondary in the struggle to maintain and consolidate control within the fractured regime. It is becoming increasingly clear that Ahmadinejad and his associated faction of neo-fundamentalists no longer aim to take on the mantle of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary ideals. As Khamenei’s representative to the IRGC put it, “Some people are sticking to Imam Khomeini’s ideas … [but] the situation has changed.” Accordingly, religion and revolutionary ideology have become convenient means to an end, but not the end themselves. Purges of un-Islamic faculty and students are meant to target the organizers of mass protests; the arrests and subsequent trials of political opponents, meanwhile, act to shield the financial interests of the IRGC and its hard-line partners.

The biggest prize is a number of state petrochemical contracts worth billions of dollars. During his presidency in the early 1990s, Rafsanjani steered oil development projects to family and friends. In 2005, Ahmadinejad defeated Rafsanjani and promised to take on the “oil mafia” — but then loaded two-thirds of his cabinet with IRGC veterans, signed off on hundreds of no-bid construction and petrochemical contracts for IGRC-backed companies, and condoned the IRGC’s proliferating smuggling networks, which net $12 billion a year, according to one Iranian lawmaker. A local market analyst told me that the IRGC functions like “a mafia.” It uses free and low-cost labor, as well as an extensive intelligence apparatus, to undercut competing bids.

The resulting opacity and confusion have left many business and financial leaders in Iran unclear of how to navigate the new environment. “We don’t know what they will do,” one financial analyst told me recently. “Maybe they will stage a military coup and then open our doors like China, or maybe Pakistan,” he speculated, referring to the Islamization of the Pakistani state under General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq’s military rule from 1978 to 1988.

To his second-term cabinet, Ahmadinejad has appointed IRGC hard-liners to some of the most influential posts in government, such as the ministers of defense, intelligence, interior, and oil, which together not only control the country’s energy industry but also domestic security.

Until recently, the IRGC was split between pragmatists and hard-liners. In 2001, three-quarters of the IRGC’s 130,000 foot soldiers voted to reelect Khatami. At least one internal government poll before this summer’s election showed that a “high percentage” of the IRGC’s rank and file planned to vote for Mousavi. Four days before the election, the organization’s weekly newspaper, the Sobhe Sadeq, warned of a “Velvet Green revolution” and promised that the IRGC would not allow the opposition to triumph. Then, immediately following the polls, IRGC commanders purged leaders who were sympathetic to the reformists, leaving a united bloc of hard-liners whose views lie at the extreme right.

These new players are wasting little time in attempting to consolidate power. In early August, Yadollah Javani, the head of the IGRC’s political bureau, called for the arrest of the opposition leaders. “What is the role of Khatami, Mousavi, and Karroubi in this coup?” he asked. “If they are the main agents, which is the case, judiciary and security officials should go after them, arrest them, try them, and punish them.” Such a move may not be far off: in early September, security forces raided offices connected to Mousavi and Karroubi and arrested three of their top aides. The same week, Khamenei warned during a Friday sermon that further attacks by the reformist leadership would be met with a “harsh response.” (According to Rafsanjani, Khamenei already issued an arrest warrant for Karroubi in late August.)

If the neo-fundamentalist bloc is able to further concentrate its power, it will not only bode ill for the beleaguered domestic opposition but also dash any hope of an international resolution to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “The nuclear question is finished,” Ahmadinejad said earlier this month. “We will not negotiate over Iran’s undeniable rights.” Eroded legitimacy at home means the ruling hard-liners have little room to budge on a compromise over halting fuel production, for fear of alienating a power base that depends on continued pariah status to feed its clandestine business interests. As such, U.S. administration officials indicated that they have extremely low expectations going into the October 1 meeting with their Iranian counterparts.

For now, the neo-fundamentalists seem to have settled on the tactic of intimidate and escalate. Last month, the regime put French and British diplomatic staff on trial in Tehran, in addition to bringing charges against a Canadian-Iranian Newsweek journalist and an Iranian-American academic. Ahmadinejad has defiantly declared, “We welcome sanctions” — a signal to reconciliatory elements within the conservative camp that he and the hard-liners will not back down in the face of opposition. In any case, the neo-fundamentalists do not seem eager to jeopardize their near monopoly of the black market by reconciling with the West, particularly when China and Russia continue to extend an open hand in business.

Many of my colleagues in Tehran are preparing for a winter of confrontation. “Iranians have been living through these conditions since the Iran-Iraq war, when everything — food, oil, clothes — were rationed,” one coworker told me. But this time, the regime must contend with an embattled opposition that is backed by mass popular support. As the last few months have proven, it is a movement that cannot be easily bullied into submission.

JERRY GUO was an analyst in an Iranian investment bank in Tehran.

Upcoming discussions with Iran should address its nuclear program and its awful human rights record.

(LA Times | Editorial | 19 September 2009) – The Obama administration has agreed to direct talks with the government of Iran, along with the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, at a meeting scheduled for Oct. 1. Now the question is: What will they talk about?

The United States and its allies want to discuss the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, of course; that’s why they’re meeting. Tehran has proposed a sweeping agenda of global affairs that seems to include everything but its uranium enrichment activities. Human rights activists, meanwhile, are pressing for the group to address Iranian political repression in the aftermath of the contested presidential election, presenting the Obama administration with a potential conflict between U.S. strategic goals of nonproliferation and regional stability, and its interest in promoting democracy and civil rights.

Iran’s postelection human rights record is awful. The country’s political opposition says 72 people were killed in violence following the June reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — twice the government’s count. Of the approximately 4,000 people imprisoned for protests against alleged vote fraud, an estimated 300 to 400 opposition leaders, journalists and student activists remain in jail, accused of trying to launch a “velvet revolution” to topple the government. About 100 detainees have faced mass trials on myriad charges ranging from acting against national security to spreading propaganda and destroying public property. Some prisoners have been held incommunicado and in solitary confinement, and some were beaten, according to international human rights groups; opposition leaders maintain that they have documented a few cases of rape, although a government judicial committee has rejected the allegations. Freedom of speech has been quashed.

Although the central issue of the upcoming talks is and should be nuclear weapons, it is important that the world powers also register their concern about Iran’s human rights record, as silence would amount to condoning it. The United States must reject torture and the denial of free speech, the right of assembly and due process — ever more so after our own lapses in recent years.

There is often a conflict between realpolitik and idealist politics. In this case, the United States must carefully balance its overriding goal of preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon with its moral imperative to speak out against human rights violations. But this has been made easier by the fact that, in seeking to divert talks from its nuclear program, Iran offered a five-page proposal for dialogue on security, economic and political issues, including “principles of democracy and the right of people to have free elections.” Iran may hope to use thatto bring up Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and even Bush vs. Gore, but to us, it seems to offer an opening to discuss Iran’s elections in the framework of international justice and law. Just as the world looks to Iran to live up to its nonproliferation commitments, so it expects the Islamic Republic to honor international principles and signed conventions on civil rights. Both topics should be addressed.

Thousands of opposition supporters have clashed with security forces during a government-sponsored rally in Tehran.

(BBC News | 18 September 2009) – Iran’s reformists had been warned not to try to turn the pro-Palestinian Quds (Jerusalem) Day marches into anti-government protests.

Reports say opposition leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and former President Mohammad Khatami were attacked.

The opposition has been banned from holding rallies since the disputed presidential election in June.

As part of the Quds Day events, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a speech in which he repeated his view that the Nazi Holocaust was a myth.

Tear gas

The Quds Day rallies are held annually on the last Friday of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

The day began peacefully, with thousands of Mr Ahmadinejad’s supporters marching through central Tehran.

But despite warnings by the authorities not to try to hijack the event, protesters shouted slogans in support of Mr Mousavi, a key opponent of the president.

Reports say there were clashes between police and protesters as the march progressed, with some arrests. Stones were thrown, and police used tear gas.

Iranian state-run channel Press TV showed footage of an opposition rally, with many supporters wearing green, the colour adopted by supporters of Mr Mousavi.

Mr Mousavi was forced to leave the rally after his car was attacked, the official Irna news agency reported.

Witnesses said supporters helped Mr Mousavi into his car when hardliners approached and the vehicle sped away as a crowd tried to hold the hardliners back.

Reformist website Parlemennews.ir reported that Mr Khatami was pushed to the ground and his turban knocked off, before police intervened.

In his speech at Tehran University, Mr Ahmadinejad again criticised the creation of Israel.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Mr Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust was “abhorrent as well as ignorant”.

“It is very important that the world community stands up against this tide of abuse,” Mr Miliband said.

The White House later added to the condemnation, calling Mr Ahmadinejad’s remarks “ignorant and hateful”.

Reporter for BBC Persian, Siavash Ardalan, said it was the first time since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 that opposition groups had tried to hijack the Quds Day rallies.

For the past 30 years, the sermon on Jerusalem Day has been given by former President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Analysts say Mr Rafsanjani is normally regarded as a pillar of the Islamic power system, but he quietly sympathises with the opposition.

This year he has been stood down in favour of a hard-line preacher.

Mr Mousavi was defeated by President Ahmadinejad in June’s election, which opposition leaders claim was rigged.

In the aftermath, there was a violent crackdown on anti-government protesters, with a number of deaths and hundreds of people arrested.