(Online Newshour | 28 December 2009) – In the wake of weekend protests in Iran that left at least eight people dead, Margaret Warner speaks with a pair of experts about the enduring opposition movement.

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian-American Council, a nonpartisan organization promoting Iranian-American participation in U.S. civic life. And Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

As protesters poured into the streets of Iran in the biggest and bloodiest demonstrations since June, Trita and Rouzbeh Parsi say this time could be the breaking point.

(Trita Parsi & Rouzebeh Parsi | The Daily Beast | 27 December 2009) – With the government growing increasingly desperate—and violent—the new clashes on the streets in Iran may very well prove to be the breaking point of the regime. If so, it shows that the Iranian theocracy ultimately fell on its own sword. It didn’t come to an end due to the efforts of exiled opposition groups or the regime-change schemes of Washington’s neoconservatives. Rather, the Iranian people are the main characters in this drama, using the very same symbols that brought the Islamic republic into being to close this chapter in a century-old struggle for democracy.

Protests flared up again because of Ashura, the climax of a month of mourning in the Shiite religious calendar. It is a day of sadness for the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussain, who was martyred in 680. And this year the commemoration coincided with the seventh day after the death of dissident Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, adding to the significance of the day. Ashura is also a reminder that the eternal value of justice must be defended regardless of the odds of success. This has provided the relentless Green movement with yet another opportunity to outmaneuver the Iranian government by co-opting its symbols and challenge its legitimacy through the language of religion. At protests Sunday, at least 10 demonstrators were killed by police.

This battle cry for justice in all its simplicity is where most political conflagrations start. It is the deafness of the powers that be that often make them the kernel of something larger and more earth shattering. It is testimony to the arrogance of power that a simple and rather modest call for accountability and justice is beaten down only to return, demanding more, and less willing to compromise and accommodate.

And it wouldn’t be the first time. In 1906, the call for a house of justice went unheeded and was followed by demonstrations, and eventually transformed into a demand for a written constitution. Similarly, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, in his imperial ineptitude, brought on himself an increasingly anti-monarchical coalition, ranging from liberals and communists, to the victorious Islamists who forged the Islamic republic in 1979.

Ashura, with its story of perseverance and martyrdom in the face of overwhelming force of oppression, was a perfectly stylized allegory for the struggle between the mighty state of the shah and the revolutionaries at the end of the 1970s. The Shiite mourning rituals, with their revisiting of the dead on the 3rd, 7th and 40th day of death, provided the demonstrators then, as well as now, with the opportunity to both remember those who died for the cause as well as re-iterating their opposition and condemnation of that state repression. This played an important role in bringing the simmering political discontent to a boiling point and wearing down what was perceived as the all-powerful Pahlavi state in 1977-78.

It is even more important this time around because there is no extensive leadership structure that steers the opposition. The ability to bring out crowds for important days of the calendar, religious and revolutionary ones, reminds everyone that they are not alone in their opposition to the current government.

No one can predict a revolution nor say with certainty when an authoritarian state loses its footing if not its grip. For it is not necessarily its ability or will to repress that will falter as much as ordinary people’s unwillingness to allow themselves to be cowed and intimidated. It is a battle of wills where, on the one hand, the constant mobilization and tension pervading a discontented and rebellious society tests the state machinery’s ability to endure as they try to perform their functions (including repression). Weighing in on the other side of the balance is the patience and capacity to stomach pain and suffering by the protesters and their sympathizers in all quarters of society.

Today a significant number of the original revolutionaries of 1979 are imprisoned or being harassed by shadowy groups from the borderlands of state authority. The constituency of the Islamic republic is becoming increasingly alienated as the hard-line faction ruling Tehran demands loyalty to an increasingly surreal understanding of, and vision for, Iranian society. Not much is left of the dynamism and visions that fuelled the revolution of 1979—but having learned from that experience, the demands of the reformist movement today are much more sophisticated and their abstention from violence so much more promising for the future.

The state’s ability to use the language of religion to repress these developments is failing. Again and again, religion has proven itself to be much better suited as a language of resistance than governance. This became increasingly clear to Khomeini himself after the success of the revolution. In the constant bickering within the revolutionary elite, Khomeini increasingly invoked reasons of state for justifying actions, demoting religion to the role of ideological veneer. By the end of his life, he stated that the state could abrogate the basic principles of Islam if it deemed necessary for the survival of the Islamic republic.

Instead of a system where religious thinking controlled and wielded state power, he ended up with an arrangement where the state utilized religion for its own purposes, emptying religion and its language of substance, discarding it on the growing heap of unfulfilled promises of the revolution.

Ashura, the commemoration and the principle it invokes, proves to be relevant yet again, as those who hold the reins of power in Tehran unleash violence against their own people. Undoubtedly the people of Iran will persevere in their quest for greater freedom and justice through their nonviolent transformation of the system from within. It will indeed be ironic if the Iranian theocracy begins to crumble on the most important religious day of the Shiite calendar.

Rouzbeh Parsi is research fellow at the European Institute for Security Studies. Trita Parsi is the president of the National Iranian American Council and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

(Juan Cole | Informed Consent | 28 November 2009) – The board of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency on Friday condemned Iran for secretly building a new nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo near Qom, and called on it to mothball the new site. The resolution was backed by the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including China and Russia, as well as Germany.

Fully 25 of the 35 nations on the nuclear board voted for the resolution, India joined the consensus condemning Iran, though New Delhi issued a statement saying its vote did not signal openness to the imposition of further sanctions on Iran. Only Cuba, Venezuela and Malaysia voted against the text, with 6 others abstaining and one absent. Brazil was among those abstaining. And its abstention spells future trouble for US policy toward Iran, since President Lula da Silva appears to fear that if Iran’s right to enrich is withdrawn, it could have implications for countries such as Brazil. Iran has been wooing Brazil and other Latin American countries, with some success, on anti-imperialist grounds, as WaPo rightly says.

The text (see below) affirmed Iran’s right to enrich uranium for fuel under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, but nevertheless insisted that it cease its enrichment activities. The position of the IAEA and the UN Security Council that Iran’s secret experiments before early 2003 and its refusal to be bound by the safeguards provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty have the effect of making its enrichment activities illicit. The UNSC demands that they cease until Iran allows full and completely transparent inspections. The document also said that the secret nature of the Fordo plant raised questions about whether there were other concealed sites. (In fact, outgoing IAEA head Mohammed Elbaradei confirmed that all inspectors found at Fordo was ‘a hole in the ground,’ not a real facility.)

Iran replies that its preference for working in secrecy was the result of military threats against its right to enrich, as enshrined in the NPT. It has allowed UN inspections, and these have never found a weapons program. Moreover, the text of the NPT (Article IV, Para. 1) explicitly says, “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.”

Even the safeguards system, the more recent and robust version of which Iran’s parliament declined to ratify, specifies inspections of fissile material, whereas Iran does not appear even to have any of the latter or to be capable of producing it for a decade or more.

Iranian leaders say that nuclear weapons are contrary to the Islamic law of war, that they do not want them and could not legally deploy them. They hold that the enrichment facilities are intended to produce fuel for a string of nuclear reactors that will keep Iran from having to use its precious petroleum, a key earner of foreign exchange and guarantor of national independence, for domestic power generation. Russia is building nuclear plants for Iran at Bushehr.

My own position is that, in addition, Iran’s leadership is seeking whatis sometimes called the “Japan option” or a “rapid breakout capability.” Unlike North Korea, India and Pakistan, I think Tehran genuinely does not want to actually construct and detonate a nuclear device. India and Pakistan are such large and important countries that they defied the First World nuclear club successfully and so joined it. North Korea, much smaller, weaker and poorer, has made itself an international pariah in this way, and is suffering more and more severe UN sanctions. I think most senior Iranian leaders wish to avoid those heavy sanctions, having seen what they did to Iraq.

But having a rapid breakout capability– being able to make a bomb in short order if it is felt absolutely necessary to forestall a foreign attack– has a deterrent effect. So Iran would have the advantages of deterrence without the disadvantages of a bomb if it could get to the rapid breakout stage.

My theory has the advantage of explaining everything about Iran’s behavior– its condemnation of the Bomb as incompatible with Islamic law, its willingness to offer fair cooperation with UN inspectors, the repeated inability of US intelligence and of the IAEA to find any trace of a weapons program, and yet Iran’s frustrating lack of complete transparency and its penchant for building secret enrichment sites. You can’t retain a credible rapid breakout capability, or “nuclear latency,” if your enrichment facility can be destroyed by air strikes. Repeated Cheneyite and Israeli threats to attack the enrichment plant at Natanz near Isfahan are what I believe drove Iran to construct the Fordo site inside a mountain, in hopes that this step would make it impossible for an outside power to use military might to wipe out Iran’s nuclear latency.

The US and Western Europe and Israel interpret Iran’s secrecy as a sign that nefarious secret weapons programs are being pursued. But this conclusion is riddled with difficulties. A weapons program uses enormous amounts of water and electricity and would be very difficult to conceal nowadays from US satellite and electronic surveillance. The US knew about Fordo as soon as work began on it.

A desire on the part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commanders to retain the soft deterrence of a rapid breakout capability probably explains Iran’s waffling on the deal tentatively adopted at Geneva on October 1. That agreement would have had Iran send 2600 pounds of its 3200 pounds of low enriched uranium (enriched to less than 5 percent) to Russia for processing, so that it could be used in Iran’s small medical research reactor, and used to produce medical isotopes. In this way, the LEU, the seed stock for any potential bomb, would get used up. It would have taken Iran a couple of years to replace that LEU, reassuring Western hawks in the meantime that Iran’s weapons-making capability had been temporarily blunted. But when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative brought this deal back to Tehran, I believe that the IRGC commanders vetoed it because they want to retain a rapid break out potential and did not want the LEU seed stock to be lost.

That the hawks were able to veto the representative of Supreme Leader Khamenei lends credence to Gary Sick’s argument that the Revolutionary Guards have carried out a soft coup behind the scenes and Iran looks more and more like a military junta.

I personally suspect that most Western officials involved in this matter know perfectly well that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program and does not want an actual bomb. I think the Western leaders do not want Iran to have nuclear latency, either, because it would change the balance of power in the Middle East and would take forcible regime change off the table as an option for the West.

Although some observers are wondering if Friday’s vote is a prelude to stricter UN Security Council sanctions on Iran, Howard LeFrachi at [the] C[hristian] S[cience] M[onitor] rightly points out that China does not want more sanctions. China was essentially blackmailed into voting for Friday’s resolution, according to the Washington Post, by an Israeli threat to start a war, conveyed by Dennis Ross, a prominent member of the US Israel lobbies who also has a position in the Obama administration. But voting for an IAEA text is different from actually imposing sanctions that might hurt the Chinese economy.

Moreover, Russian Prime Minister and eminence grise Vladimir Putin is against a tightening of sanctions. India announced its opposition to a tougher economic boycott even as it voted to condemn Iran.

The reason for the reluctance of the BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India and China) to push Iran harder economically is that they have an interest in Iran’s resources not being closed off to their exploitation. Reuters just reported that: “Indian state explorer Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC.BO) is seeking a 20-25 percent stake in a $7.5 billion phase-12 project of Iran’s South Pars gas field, media reports said on Friday.” India is growing 7 and 9% a year and has relatively little energy of its own, and so is very hungry for Iranian natural gas.

So far the US has managed to strongarm India into backing off, by threatening Treasury Department third-party sanctions. But it is entirely possible that Indian energy hunger will cause its firms to write off the $14 trillion US market and to partner with Iran. After all, the world economy is now about $60 trillion, and united Europe’s economy is as big as that of the US. If India has a choice of seeing its growth strangled for lack of electricity to run its factories and being excluded from 23% of the world economy, it may decide that the 77% is enough of a market. The importance of the US economy as a proportion of the global whole will likely rapidly decline over the next four decades.

The same considerations affect China. Russia is different because it is an energy producer. But in a world where demand for hydrocarbons is rapidly growing, there is enough demand to go around, and Russia’s economy is sufficiently diversified that it views Iran as a market and an investment opportunity. Harsher UNSC sanctions on Iran would backfire on BRIC, and therefore short of egregiously bad behavior on Iran’s part (discovery of an actual, dedicated weapons plant, e.g.), the BRIC countries will likely seek to block them.

Bottom line: Friday’s vote was likely symbolic and a signal to Iran from the international community that there is discomfort with its secretiveness and lack of transparency, and that many are suspicious of its motives. In China’s case, it may have been a warning against actions that could harm the Middle Kingdom’s burgeoning economy.

What it likely was not was a harbinger of tougher international sanctions against Tehran or a sign that BRIC is softening on that issue.

Ahmadinejad’s grip is slipping. The ayatollah is losing ground. And the military is on the rise. Gary Sick on how Obama should handle the aftershocks of a political earthquake.

(Gary Sick | The Daily Beast | 27 November 2009) - Iran is at a revolutionary juncture, one of those hinge moments in history when an explosion of actions and debates produces towering outcomes—often unintended—that bend the course of events the way a black hole in space bends a beam of light. In the tumult of these moments, it is almost impossible to know how it will end; only in retrospect does the outcome appear inevitable.

This hinge moment began on 22 Khordad—June 12 on the Western calendar—the date of Iran’s electoral debacle. On that date, all the old rules changed and a new set of rules began to be devised. There is evidence of deep political fissures among the ruling elite and signs of fierce debate. At the moment, Iran’s political leadership finds it convenient to pretend that all is as before. But in fact, there has been a political earthquake and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is moving to consolidate its power. Before it is over, we may see a new strongman emerge from the military, as has happened in so many other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere when the political status quo was shattered and everything was in flux.

Before it is over, we may see a new strongman emerge from the military, as has happened in so many other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere when the political status quo was shattered and everything was in flux.

Iran, of course, has experienced such hinge moments before: notably the 1979 collapse of the shah and the replacement of his monarchy with a revolutionary Islamic government. Its effects extended far beyond the borders of Iran. I was in the White House at the time when Iran invaded the American embassy in Tehran and held its occupants prisoner for 444 days. That action arguably insured the defeat of President Jimmy Carter and the election of Ronald Reagan. It also indelibly imprinted an image of a fanatical, hostile Iran on the psyches of Americans who watched it play out as the first major U.S. foreign policy crisis to be televised live and broadcast into the living rooms of every family in the United States.

Part of the problem that Washington had in attempting to negotiate an end to that deadly dispute was the absence of an address in Iran. We knew that the hostages had been taken by a group of radical students; we knew that the revolutionary regime had thrown its support to the students; we knew that the supreme revolutionary authority was Ayatollah Khameini, but he would not talk to us, and the Iranians who did talk to us proved to have no real authority.

Today I am experiencing a back-to-the-future moment.

The election debacle on 22 Khordad was in my view the final, bungled stage of what was intended to be a gentle coup propelling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the pasdaran, into a position of unassailable power behind the scenes. The amazing rise of the Green Movement, under the almost accidental leadership of Mir Hossein Moussavi and later Mehdi Karroubi, threatened to upset these plans, and panicked efforts to prevent it brought the pasdaran out of the shadows and into the full glare of international attention.

The pasdaran had begun playing an overtly political role a full decade earlier. Its insinuation into the economy of Iran had been widely observed for years. It also controlled the nationwide paramilitary force known as the basij. Its association with a radical faction of Iranian clerics, led by Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, who preached that the word of the Supreme Leader in Islamic Iran was absolute—the very voice of God—was well known. But the election of 22 Khordad propelled the pasdaran into an active role in domestic politics, just as it forced Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader who is supposed to remain above politics, to align himself with a specific political faction and thereby sacrifice his legitimacy as an objective arbiter.

I am personally convinced that the Revolutionary Guard Corps is now rapidly becoming the dominant force in Iranian politics—greater than President Ahmadinejad, and greater even than Ayatollah Khamenei himself, though the pasdaran and others continue to pay lip service to his “leadership.” I base this judgment, among other things, on the fact that senior leaders of the pasdaran no longer have any compunction about taking positions that differ from those of the President or the Supreme Leader; yet neither the President nor the Supreme Leader ever dare disagree with the pasdaran. But if that is true, who exactly is calling the shots?

The political decision-making apparatus of the pasdaran is totally opaque. It is possible to conjecture a circle of dogmatic officers together with a narrow faction of clerical advisers who share a belief in the divine right of rulers. But it is impossible to give a list of the members of this circle, let alone the process by which they arrive at policy positions.

This uncertainty is what reminds me of the days of the revolution and the murky operations of what was then the Revolutionary Council. The U.S. government spent a tremendous amount of time and effort during the hostage crisis trying to identify the key members of the Revolutionary Council and to develop channels for communicating with this central policy-making body.

The results were less than satisfactory, partly no doubt because the group was itself a mirror image of the political chaos after the Iranian revolution. The Council had a fairly well established membership, but influence on specific policies varied from one moment to the next according to the shifting political winds, and there was no reliable process by which decisions were taken and implemented. There was, in short, no reliable address where a U.S. initiative might be registered and acted on.

It is 30 years later, and we have arrived at another hinge moment in history. And the Obama administration has a serious problem, scarcely discussed but eerily familiar. How do you engage with Iran when there is no reliable address in Tehran?

Gary Sick served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan. He was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis and is the author of two books on U.S.-Iranian relations. Mr. Sick is a captain (ret.) in the U.S. Navy, with service in the Persian Gulf, North Africa and the Mediterranean.

(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.

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(Bob Simon | 60 Minutes – CBS News | 22 November 2009) - Recently freed after four months of interrogation and torture in Iran, Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari tells his story to Bob Simon and writes about his ordeal in the next issue of Newsweek.

In the next two “extra” video segments, “A Peaceful Terrorist” and “Mr. Hillary Clinton” journalist Maziar Bahari explains how he was the most dangerous kind of opponent to the Iranian government and how a strange nickname gave him hope in an Iranian prison.

A Peaceful Terrorist

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Mr. Hillary Clinton

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Woodrow Wilson Center | Washington D.C. | 30 November 2009

The Middle East Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting present a panel discussion with Iason Athanasiadis, freelance journalist; Barbara Slavin, Assistant Managing Editor for World and National Security, The Washington Times; and Jon Sawyer, Executive Director, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Iason Athanasiadis is a writer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker covering Middle Eastern current affairs from his Istanbul base. He reported on Iran’s presidential election for American and British news outlets, including The Washington Times, on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He was jailed at the direction of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry and held for three weeks in solitary confinement at Tehran’s Evin Prison. He was a consultant on A Death in Iran, a documentary for the BBC and PBS Frontline that aired earlier this month.

Monday, November 30, 2009
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
5th Floor Conference Room
Woodrow Wilson Center

Please RSVP to mep@wilsoncenter.org or fax 202-691-4184

Seating is limited. Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis. A photo ID is required for entry.

The Woodrow Wilson Center is located in the Ronald Reagan Building (Federal Triangle stop on Blue/Orange Line). Public parking is available underneath the Reagan Building; however we recommend metro or taxi. www.wilsoncenter.org/directions

(PBS | Frontline | 17 November 2009) - At the height of the protests following Iran’s controversial presidential election this summer, a young woman named Neda Agha Soltan was shot and killed on the streets of Tehran. Her death — filmed on a camera phone, then uploaded to the Web — quickly became an international outrage, and Soltan became the face of a powerful movement that threatened the hard-line government’s hold on power.

In A Death in Tehran, FRONTLINE revisits the events of last summer, shedding new light on Neda’s life and death and the movement she helped inspire.

In response to the international outcry over Neda’s death — including President Obama’s confirmation that he’d seen the “heartbreaking” video on YouTube — the regime set about attempting to rewrite the story, pointing a finger at the CIA and outside agitators, the same forces they blamed for the mass street protests and allegations of vote rigging that led to the greatest upheaval in Iran since the revolution of 1979. FRONTLINE uncovers some video of Neda’s killer — a member of the Basij militia who’d been brought into Tehran by the regime’s Revolutionary Guards to stamp out the “Green Revolution.” A medical doctor in the crowd who had watched Neda die now watched as the crowd considered its own violence against the Basij militia member:

“They started to discuss what to do with him,” the doctor recalled. “They grabbed his wallet, took out his ID card and started shouting, ‘He is a Basiji member; he is one of them,’ and started swearing and cursing him, and he was begging for people not to harm him or kill him. … They believed the police wouldn’t do anything to him as the Basiji are really powerful and he would have easily have got away, so in all of the chaos they decided to release him.”

The Iranian government admits 11 protesters were killed on June 20, but doctors from three Tehran hospitals confirmed at least 34 deaths. Other bodies were buried by security forces without first being identified. In October, the regime tried to script the end of the story for Neda. But instead, Neda’s mother made a very public stand. The government offered her financial help if she would blame Neda’s death on opponents of the regime. All she had to do was to agree to call Neda a “martyr” for the Islamic Republic. But she refused, telling FRONTLINE: “Neda died for her country not so I could get a monthly income from the Martyr Foundation. If these officials say Neda was a martyr, why do they keep wiping off the word ‘martyr’ which people write in red on her gravestone?”

Carnegie Endowment for Peace | Washington D.C. | 20 November 2009

Dr. Trita Parsi, one of America’s foremost experts on Iran, is the author of Treacherous Alliance – the Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (2007) which won the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Polk Award. Dr. Parsi has a PhD from Johns Hopkins/SAIS. He is now the President of the National Iranian American Council, adjunct scholar at the Middle East Insitute and a regular writer and sought-after commentator on Iran. He will speak on the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program, the Iranian decision making process, the Iran dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and prospects for a resolving the crisis.

This event is sponsored by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Americans for Peace Now, Churches for Middle East Peace and the Middle East Institute.

EVENT DETAILS:

Friday November 20, 3-4:30pm
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
1779 Massachusetts Avenue
Washington, DC

RSVP: Foundation for Middle East Peace, info@…, 202-835-3650