Iran’s Dangerous Power Vacuum

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Rethinking our Iran strategy

The Islamic Republic’s revolution may be at a crossroads. It’s a possible opening for the U.S.

(Robin Wright and Robert Litwak | Los Angeles Times | 13 September 2009) - Three decades of assumptions about Iran — including the premises behind Washington’s recent outreach to Tehran — have been transformed by its stunning uprising. It’s time for a policy rethink. Read the rest of this entry »

IRAN: Ten days of anguish, abuse inside Tehran’s prison archipelago

Families of detainees gather outside Evin Prison on July 6, 2009 (Part 1 of 2)

From Babylon & Beyond, A Los Angeles Times Newsblog – All 33-year-old Ali-Reza wanted to do was stop pro-government Basiji militiamen from beating up a man lying on the ground. Instead the engineer said he wound up in the clutches of the capital’s security archipelago, where he was himself beaten for days. Read the rest of this entry »

Quick Links:
Khamenei stamps authority on US relations, AFP http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jxlz-o2pTtBtLRTktl169QEIxL1w
Iran’s response to US shows mind-set of leadership, AP http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/21/AR2009032101079.html
Editorial: Obama strikes new tone with Tehran, Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/617f1fb4-1713-11de-9a72-0000779fd2ac.html
Roger Cohen: From Tehran to Tel Aviv¸ International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=20978866
Rami G. Khouri: Dialogue or Dictating to Iran?, Middle East Times http://www.metimes.com/International/2009/03/23/dialogue_or_dictating_to_iran/9371/
Despite Iran’s tepid response, experts hail Obama approach, McClatchy http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/64536.html
Iran sets terms for U.S. ties, AP http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090322/wl_nm/us_iran_usa
‘No proof’ Iran seeks atom bomb: Russian minister, AFP http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hBPU3NuguY_rj19oOwLADdyt-E2w
John Bolton: Iran’s Axis of Nuclear Evil, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123759986806901655.html
Amir Taheri: Iran Has Started a Mideast Arms Race, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123776572203009141.html%20http:/online.wsj.com/search/search_center.html?KEYWORDS=AMIR+TAHERI&ARTICLESEARCHQUERY_PARSER=bylineAND
Wife of founder of Iran’s Islamic republic dies, AP http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ikwGcpqo0p2JwanEHkViYsOE0s2QD9739J480

Khamenei stamps authority on US relations, AFP, March 22, 2009
The swift response from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to US President Barack Obama’s overtures to Iran shows the supreme leader’s determination to keep a tight grip on the issue of ties with Washington, analysts said on Sunday. “He wanted to send a message to the whole world that he is the one who takes the big decisions,” said Parviz Esmaili, who is close to Iran’s dominant conservatives. “The silence of both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the foreign ministry proves it,” Esmaili told AFP. Another analyst, Said Leylaz, who is close to the reformist minority in the Iranian parliament, also commented on the unusual silence on the issue from the hardline president. “I am certain that President Ahmadinejad would have wanted to give this response to President Obama himself as that would have boosted his chances of re-election,” Leylaz said.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jxlz-o2pTtBtLRTktl169QEIxL1w

Iran’s response to US shows mind-set of leadership, AP, March 22, 2009
The Iranian leader’s rebuff on Saturday to President Barack Obama’s offer for dialogue was swift and sweeping: Words from Washington ring hollow without deep policy changes.  But Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s response was more than just a dismissive slap at the outreach. It was a broad lesson in the mind-set of Iran’s all-powerful theocracy and how it will dictate the pace and tone of any new steps by Obama to chip away at their nearly 30-year diplomatic freeze.  ”It’s the first stage of the bargaining in classic Iranian style: Be tough and play up your toughness,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a professor of regional politics at United Arab Emirates University. “The Iranian leaders are not about concessions at this stage. It’s still all about ideology from the Iranian side.”  For Khamenei and his inner circle, that means appearing to stay true to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the political narrative of rejecting the United States.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/21/AR2009032101079.html <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/21/AR2009032101079.html>

Editorial: Obama strikes new tone with Tehran, Financial Times, March 22 2009
Barack Obama’s overture to Iran, delivered by video on the eve of Monday’s Iranian new year, is a smart move, tone-perfectly delivered, and a clear departure not just from George W. Bush’s bellicose attitude but the visceral animosity that has bedevilled relations between Washington and Tehran since the Islamic Revolution of 30 years ago. Mr Obama managed simultaneously to address Iran’s innate sense of cultural superiority as an ancient civilisation, and its paranoid sense of vulnerability. “The US wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations,” he said. “You have that right but it comes with real responsibilities and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilisation”. His use of the formal title of Islamic Republic implies US recognition of the revolution and abandonment of regime change. The emphasis on rights and responsibilities – the sort of discourse tailored for, say, China – suits Iran’s sense of entitlement and ambition to be acknowledged as a regional power. The address is well aimed, furthermore, not just at Iran’s leaders but at the Iranians, arguably the most instinctively pro-American people in the wider Middle East.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/617f1fb4-1713-11de-9a72-0000779fd2ac.html

Roger Cohen: From Tehran to Tel Aviv¸ International Herald Tribune, March 22, 2009
With his bold message to Iran’s leaders, President Obama achieved four things essential to any rapprochement. He abandoned regime change as an American goal. He shelved the so-called military option. He buried a carrot-and-stick approach viewed with contempt by Iranians as fit only for donkeys. And he placed Iran’s nuclear program within “the full range of issues before us.” By doing so, Obama made it almost inevitable that one of the defining strategic issues of his presidency will be a painful but necessary redefinition of America’s relations with Israel as differences over Iran sharpen. I will return to that below. The innovations in the president’s Persian New Year, or Nowruz, overture to Tehran were remarkable. He referred twice to “the Islamic Republic of Iran,” a formulation long shunned, and said that republic, no other, should “take its rightful place in the community of nations.” Here was explicit American acceptance of Iran’s 30-year-old clerical revolution.
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=20978866

Rami G. Khouri: Dialogue or Dictating to Iran?, Middle East Times, March 23, 2009
We should not underestimate the courage and self-confidence it took for Obama to move in this direction and to make several gestures towards Iran since taking office. He reflects real strength, political realism and much humility in being able to reverse many aspects of the belligerent Bush approach and instead to reach out to Iran. Yet the persistent flaw in the Obama approach that might prove to be fatal is a lingering streak of arrogance that is reflected in both the tone and the substance of his message. This is most obvious in his insistence – after telling the Iranians that they are a great culture with proud traditions, which is presumably something they already knew, experienced and felt on their own — on lecturing Iran about the responsibilities that come with the right to assume its place in the “community of nations”, and then linking Iran’s behavior with “terror of arms” and a “capacity to destroy.”
http://www.metimes.com/International/2009/03/23/dialogue_or_dictating_to_iran/9371/ <http://www.metimes.com/International/2009/03/23/dialogue_or_dictating_to_iran/9371

Despite Iran’s tepid response, experts hail Obama approach, McClatchy, March 20, 2009
Triti Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, which favors U.S. engagement with Iran, called Obama’s latest message “historic.” He said the president took the right tack in not trying to ignore Iran’s leaders and speak only to the Iranian people, as Bush almost always did. Bush’s rhetoric helped the fiery Ahmadinejad, and Obama’s approach “now may ‘un-help’ Ahmadinejad,” Parsi said. Iranian reformists, who favor improved ties with the United States, also say the previous approach helped the hawkish camp in Iran’s divided political system, which often manipulates anti-American sentiment for political ends. While Bush was in the White House, “reformists became weak,” reformist politician Mostafa Tajzadeh said in a recent interview in Tehran. The Carnegie Endowment’s Sadjadpour said that while Iran’s internal political battles won’t be resolved anytime soon, the new U.S. diplomacy “will undermine (hardliners) and their narrative of a hostile U.S. government bent on oppressing Iran.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/64536.html <http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/64536.html

Iran sets terms for U.S. ties, AP, March 22, 2009
Iran wants the United States to show concrete change in its behavior toward it, for example by handing back frozen assets, but Tehran is not pursuing “eternal hostility,” said Professor Mohammad Marandi at Tehran University. “I think they (the Iranian leadership) are quite willing to have better relations if the Americans are serious,” said Marandi, who heads North American studies at the university. Marandi said Khamenei did not dismiss Obama’s overture but was “effectively saying that this is simply not enough, that the United States must take concrete steps toward decreasing tension with Iran.” But Professor Hamidreza Jalaiepour, who teaches political sociology in Tehran, said Khamenei had delivered a pragmatic message rather than one based on ideology on Saturday. If the United States eased sanctions imposed on Iran or released frozen funds, Iran was likely to respond, for example in helping to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan, he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090322/wl_nm/us_iran_usa http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090322/wl_nm/us_iran_usa

‘No proof’ Iran seeks atom bomb: Russian minister, AFP, March 22, 2009
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Saturday there was no proof that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon and urged the West to respect and reach out to the Islamic republic. “There is no proof that Iran even has decided to make a bomb,” he told the Brussels Forum conference, alongside EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who on behalf of world powers has led talks to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Lavrov said the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was best placed to monitor Iran’s activities and establish whether it might try to covertly develop a weapon under the guise of a civilian programme. Lavrov said that “as long as the IAEA works in Iran,” real concerns it may develop a bomb could be allayed.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hBPU3NuguY_rj19oOwLADdyt-E2w

Amir Taheri <http://online.wsj.com/search/search_center.html?KEYWORDS=AMIR+TAHERI&amp;ARTICLESEARCHQUERY_PARSER=bylineAND> : Iran Has Started a Mideast Arms Race, Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2009
Make no mistake: The Middle East may be on the verge of a nuclear arms race triggered by the inability of the West to stop Iran’s quest for a bomb. Since Tehran’s nuclear ambitions hit the headlines five years ago, 25 countries — 10 of them in the greater Middle East — have announced plans to build nuclear power plants for the first time. The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates [UAE] and Oman) set up a nuclear exploratory commission in 2007 to prepare a “strategic report” for submission to the alliance’s summit later this year. But Saudi Arabia is not waiting for the report. It opened negotiations with the U.S. in 2008 to obtain “a nuclear capacity,” ostensibly for “peaceful purposes.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123776572203009141.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123776572203009141.html

Wife of founder of Iran’s Islamic republic dies, AP, March 23, 2009
The wife of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, has died after a long illness, state media reported Sunday. She was 93. Khadijeh Saqafi, who was known as the “mother of the Islamic revolution,” died Saturday in Tehran, state TV said. Thousands of people, including Iran’s president and supreme leader, attended her funeral at Tehran University on Sunday. “After a lifetime of patience and perseverance, and months of sick health, the dear and respected wife of Imam Khomeini has finally passed way, leaving friends of the late imam in grief,” her grandson Hasan Khomeini said in a statement posted on the Web site of Iran’s English-language state television station, Press TV.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ikwGcpqo0p2JwanEHkViYsOE0s2QD9739J480 http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ikwGcpqo0p2JwanEHkViYsOE0s2QD9739J480

Tony Wilson
Program Assistant
Open Society Institute/Open Society Policy Center
1120 19th Street, NW- 8th Floor Washington, DC 20036
Tel. 1-202-721-5600
Fax: 1-202-530-0128

Dear Campaigner for Peace with Iran,

The Tehran Peace Museum and the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support
(SCWVS) are planning a candlelight vigil at 19:00 local time (10:30 EST) on September 21
to commemorate the UN-designated International Day of Peace. The organized event is a
historic first in Iran, where tensions with the United States are causing serious anxiety.
Please see the forwarded attachments for event details.
On behalf of the Tehran Peace Museum and the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims
Support (SCWVS), the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran
(CASMII), Fellowship Of Reconciliation (FOR), Payvand and Iranians For Peace (IFP) invite
your antiwar group to act on September 21 in solidarity with the nascent Iranian peace
movement. The Museum was established a year ago, inspired by a Dayton Peace Museum
director whose trip to Iran was arranged by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Earlier this
year, CASMII-US and Physicians for Social Responsibility organized a U.S. speaking tour for
representatives of SCWVS. We hope peace and justice groups like yours will help build on
these and similar successes.

We ask that people of conscience in your circle respond to active outreach among Iranians
and connect with the September 21 event there. Although this is late notice, we hope you
can arrange a candlelight vigil with a few or a few dozen others in your community that
evening.

Even a smaller gesture from Americans, such as announcing news of the Tehran ceremony
in your next newsletter or at your weekly local peace vigil, will uplift our Iranian partners
in peace. They tell us so. Please check the attachments for event details and consider
sending a message of support now to the lead international organizer in Tehran, Dr.
Shahriar Khateri, at khateri@scwvs.org . Thank you very much.

by Samaneh Maddah | Tehran | 15 May 2008

Turning away from the TV screen, nine-year-old Alireza makes a grave pronouncement, “We shouldn’t let the Americans kill us like they kill the Iraqis.”

Alireza has been watching old footage of the moment a group of British sailors was released last year, following their detention by Iranian border guards. He cannot tell the difference between British and Americans, but the fair complexion of the faces he sees gives him reason enough to understand they are the enemy. Yet Alireza’s world view has been formed less by images of this kind than by the latest western cartoons, which he watches on his favourite kids’ channel, MBC 3, available via the illicit satellite dish owned by his family.

He finds it hard to reconcile what he watches on the satellite channels with the knowledge that this kind of thing is disapproved of and even discouraged by the school he goes to.

His mother is one of the many Iranian parents who find it hard to explain to their young children how to reconciles these clashing views of the world.

The gulf between what is taught at school – overtly and implicitly – and what people practice at home, away from prying eyes, is a difficult one to navigate for many adults, let alone children.

Alireza has come to understand that there are some things about school that you just have to take at face value. The message he gets at home is, “You’re too young to understand”, and “When you grow up, you’ll find out for yourself.”

A foreigner walking around in Iran would be shocked at the number of anti-western slogans adorning the walls of public institutions like offices and schools, and at the rhetoric in similar vein delivered by the state-run monopoly broadcaster IRIB.

To people on the inside, it all seems perfectly normal.

For nearly 30 years, Iranian children as young as six have begun their day by chanting slogans against the Great Satan (the United States), the Occupying Regime of Israel, and, depending on the political mood of the day, a number of other countries such as Britain. This is now so commonplace that few Iranians passing a school in the morning will be irritated to hear the chanting of hate-filled slogans.

PE classes at school are usually accompanied by the same resentful slogans. It is quite a paradox to see young smiling children imitating their trainer and punctuating their agile moves with vows to wreak revenge on a country they’d be hard put to find on a map.

On Qods Day (Jerusalem Day) last October, Iranian state television broadcast a cartoon in praise of suicide bombings targeting Israelis – or “martyrdom-seeking operations”, as they are called in Iran. The cartoon showed a young boy blowing himself up “to show the Zionists how brave Palestinian children are”.

As well as television, the theme has entered the booming electronic games market. A recent release called “Rescue the Nuclear Scientist” invites gamers to save an Iranian engineer kidnapped by American forces in Iraq while on pilgrimage with his wife to the holy city of Karbala.

As the Fars news agency explained, the game was conceived by its designers as a response to “Assault on Iran”, an American product. However, it does not appear to have taken off among young Iranians. Many of them have never even heard of it.

Iranian manufacturers have also tried to combat western culture by making a homegrown, Islamic version of the Barbie and Ken dolls, called them Sara and Dara. Sara wears a headscarf and a long dress, while Dara cuts a dowdy figure next to Ken.

Although heavily advertised on state TV, the figures never really stood a chance against their flashier foreign rivals.

For a consumer opinion, we asked five-year old Minoo about her preferences. Minoo spends hours changing Barbie’s fashionable clothes, applying the cosmetics that come with the doll, and making up stories about her and Ken.

She has never wanted to acquire Sara, a doll conceived as the image of Iranian cultural and religious values. Sara “isn’t beautiful”, she explains.

It is fairly easy to influence children as young as Alireza and Minoo, when their horizons are limited to cartoons, video games and toys, plus whatever else their various adult mentors – parents and teachers – want to instill in them.

Beyond a certain age, though, attempts to influence them are no longer so effective, and adolescents begin to exercise their own choices. Then it becomes more complicated to guide them towards one’s own preferred way of thinking.

As children grow up, the state has its work cut out trying to retain the upper hand. It fears losing a generation that was not even born when the Iranian revolution took place in 1979, and whose knowledge of the decade-long conflict with Iraq in the Eighties is limited to the stories their parents tell them, war films, and pictures of martyrs on street walls.

Young Iranians may not know much about why a particular street is named after a martyr, a war hero, or some other national figure like a poet or a scientist. But they are up to speed on James Blunt and the Spice Girls, their song lyrics, and all the celebrity gossip.

In recent years, the government has imposed strict filtering policies on websites and intensified its crackdown on “bad hijab” and privately-owned satellite dishes. But it can hardly claim victory in its campaign against the western cultural invasion.

To the dismay of the state, young people have figured out how to get round internet filters, and how to hide a satellite dish from nosy neighbours.

All this stems from a desire to be connected with the rest of the world. It would be quite naive to imagine that members of this, the third generation of the revolution, are cut off from the outside world, even if the image they acquire of the West is somewhat skewed.

The preference for western over Iranian culture may not be the result of a genuine curiosity about all things foreign, whether this is fed deliberately or by accident from outside. Instead, ignorance of what constitutes true Iranian culture has more to do with the poor and vulgar terms in which it is articulated – through indoctrination and the regime’s identification of selected values as the correct ones, with no attempt to win hearts and minds.

An unspoken struggle is taking place for the minds of this generation, whose members make their own choices between the two options whenever they can, and submit helplessly to whichever trend is prevalent when they cannot.

Young Iranians have made huge efforts to surmount the barriers and gain access to the outside world, often at some cost to themselves. Yet often it seems they end up caught between two worlds, knowing only a little about either. And that is a shame.

In Iran, a great deal of time and energy has been expended on keeping young people away from things they should not do, and very little on engaging their interest in what they should do.

There is a Persian proverb which goes, “The crow wanted to learn to walk like a partridge, but it forgot its own way of walking.”

Young Iranians did not themselves choose to forget how to walk in their own manner. It is their own government’s pursuit of its illusory “campaign against cultural invasion” that has alienated them, and left them somewhere between the worlds of the crow and the partridge.

Samaneh Maddah is a freelance journalist in Tehran.

This article is an abridged and translated version of the full original text published on the Farsi pages of Mianeh, with editorial adjustments agreed with the writer made to provide clarity for English-language readers.

Originally published here: www.mianeh.net/en/articles/?aid=120

Robert Dreyfuss, foreign affairs journalist for The Nation, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and several other publications, was one of the 13 Americans on a recent Peace Delegation to Iran to discuss US/Iranian relations and foster more peace between the countries in March 2008 along with Transcendence singer/songwriter Ed Hale, author Larry Beinhart, Carah Ong, Iran Program director for the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, and fifty year veteran activist Stephen Chinlund. Dreyfuss just recently published an article on the trip in The Nation Magazine, reprinted below.  

Letter From Iran – by ROBERT DREYFUSS
This article appeared in the May 19, 2008 edition of The Nation.

Across the street from the sprawling shrine to Fatima al-Masumeh,
the revered sister of Imam Reza, the eighth Shiite imam, a group of
campaign workers on a rooftop are busy unfurling wall-sized election
posters for a conservative candidate in Iran’s March parliamentary
election. We’re in downtown Qom, a city of 1 million about 100 miles
southwest of Tehran. Qom is Iran’s religious capital, the wellspring
for a host of fundamentalist clerics who’ve ruled Iran since 1979,
and it is an eerie place. Unlike some other cities in Iran, where
urban professionals, merchants and the middle class try to push back
against onerous restrictions on freedom of expression and women’s
dress, there’s little evidence of that in Qom. Women are cloaked
head to toe in black garments, and turbaned mullahs on motorbikes
are a common sight.

Under a brilliant blue sky, mourners are lining up to enter the
shrine and pay their respects to Fatima, whose remains are entombed
inside an Oz-like green-mirrored vault. Among the mourners, in
formation behind a green banner, are a phalanx of grim-faced,
muscled militiamen, members of the Basij corps, wearing black T-
shirts and black headbands. The Basij is an estimated million-strong
volunteer paramilitary force that serves as an adjunct to the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and in 2005 the Basijis voted en
bloc to help elect hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president.

Read the rest of this entry »