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.

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.

The Obama administration’s offer to engage was the right idea. But the theocracy’s brutal crackdown on the opposition since the June 12 presidential election, followed by the purge of senior politicians in show trials and an alarming increase in general executions, marks a turning point for Iran’s revolution. U.S. policy now needs a broader approach. Recent history offers relevant guidelines.

The three most important revolutions of the 20th century — for their political innovation and impact — happened in the Soviet Union, China and Iran. At the peak of revolutionary paranoia, the Soviet Union and China witnessed turmoil similar to what is happening today in Iran. Soon afterward, however, Moscow and Beijing altered course. Both began the move from defiant revolutionary regime to a normal state willing to work within the international order and mended relations with the United States.

The shift in both the Soviet Union and China was partly tied to the maturation of revolutions, as Crane Brinton outlined in “The Anatomy of Revolution,” which leads to the final stage of “convalescence” that plays out over years, even decades. The Islamic Republic is on the same trajectory. Its current uprising pits those trying to transform Iran into a normal state against unrelenting revolutionaries. The men and women now on trial have made the transition, in varying degrees, in their political thinking.

In their civil disobedience since June, millions of Iranians also have indicated that they’re ready for normalcy. The U.S. should now factor them into policy.

The pattern of revolutions suggests, however, that a catalyst is required to trigger the critical transition. The spark has traditionally been one of three factors: a geo-strategic challenge, economic necessity or political exigency. In other words, a revolution needing to convert an enemy into an ally to survive.

In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin launched show trials of Communist Party officials from 1936 to 1938, when vast numbers were dispatched to gulags or executed. Yet pressure from the Nazi threat combined with the costs of war spawned a U.S.-Soviet alliance and Stalin’s meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Stalin was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who started de-Stalinization. The revolution’s later undoing began after Mikhail Gorbachev concluded that the Soviet system of political control was no longer viable in the information-based global economy and that basic changes were essential to survive.

In the 1960s, China had all the trappings of a rogue state. It defied the international order. It detonated an atomic bomb in 1964. And in 1966, it launched the Cultural Revolution, a period of chaotic political and social upheaval when Mao Tse-tung ruthlessly purged alleged “bourgeois liberals” in the Communist Party. Yet in 1969, the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance followed by troop buildups along their mutual border led Mao to consider the realpolitik of normalizing relations with Washington. Henry Kissinger’s secret 1971 trip led to President Nixon’s historic visit in 1972.

Neither Stalin nor Mao became America’s friends. But those encounters — under conditions of strategic need — did pave the way for meaningful engagement.

Iran’s three most specific overtures to the U.S. fit the same pattern. In 1986, at a desperate juncture in its war with Iraq, Tehran was willing to deal secretly with both the United States and Israel to acquire weaponry, namely TOW anti-tank missiles. Even after this arms-for-hostages swap was revealed, the regime still sent a secret emissary to the White House to probe further potential.

In the early 1990s, Iran offered the most lucrative petroleum deal in its history to Conoco, to develop offshore oil and gas fields to help pay for postwar reconstruction and modernization demanded by a war-weary population.

In 2001, after the U.S. toppled Afghanistan’s Taliban, Iran cooperated with Washington in crafting a new government. After the U.S. invasion toppled Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003, Tehran put out feelers, prodded partly by the Swiss, about resolving differences with Washington. Flanked by U.S. troops on key borders, Tehran wanted to ensure it was not next.

Three U.S. administrations did not exploit opportunities when Iran needed to play and reached out. The challenge now is to create a confluence of factors that will make Tehran again feel that a real deal with Washington is in its interest. Then engagement has a real shot.

Under the current circumstances, it doesn’t.

Diplomacy centered primarily on Iran’s nuclear program is unlikely to work. The regime as well as many protesters view pressure to end uranium enrichment — a process to provide fuel for peaceful nuclear energy that can be subverted to develop a nuclear weapon — as a challenge to Iran’s sovereignty and a denial of its economic development. Under the current circumstances, the regime is more likely to engage in a process — largely to get the world off its back — that would not produce enduring substance or real resolution.

And if that diplomatic tactic doesn’t work, simply slapping on more international sanctions (given stonewalling by Russia and China on anything tough) also seems unlikely to alone squeeze Iran into cooperation.

Yet a military strike is also likely to backfire, instead rallying Persian nationalism around the regime, just as Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion mobilized support for the revolution at a time it was running out of steam.

The Obama administration would be well-advised to step back and recalculate what conditions would lead Iran to feel that the benefits of beginning the transition to a normal state outweigh the costs of sticking to the revolutionary zealotry increasingly rejected by its own people.

Robin Wright, author of “Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East,” has covered Iran since 1973. Robert Litwak is the former director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council. Both are at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

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.

The east Tehran resident’s story is among the tales of abuse and detention surfacing from Iran’s weeks-long crackdown against dissidents and protestors in the wake of the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a vote marred by allegations of massive vote-rigging.

Ali-Reza said he was near Tehran’s Fatemi Square on June 13, a day of riots and unrest just after the election, when he spotted the plainclothes Basiji fighters beating a man “in a very bad way,” he said.

“Do not beat him!” he protested to the Basijis.

But instead of laying off, the militiamen came after him. “They started to follow me,” he said. “I ran and changed my direction, but in a dead-end street they caught me.”

He said they began pummeling him. “The started to beat and beat and beat me, with their batons, feet and cables.”
They stuffed him into a van with other young men and women and took them to a holding cell near Horr Square, where they were all beaten for more than two hours, he said.

“You voted for Mousavi,” one of the Basijis told them, according to Ali-Reza. “Beating you is our right. We can even kill you.”

The Basiji called each other by honorifics, like Haji or Seyed, never by their real names.

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

For two days the captives were held in the facility, fed only bread and sugar.

But Ali-Reza said his treatment improved after he was handed over to the regular police. At one point a Basiji interrogator was about to break the fingers of a 24-year-old man, but the police stopped him, Ali-Reza said.

After days at the police detention facility, he and others were moved into Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison, where they were no longer subject to as much abuse, but crammed into horribly overcrowded conditions.

“Our place for sleeping was nothing,” Ali-Reza said. “There were too many people forced to sleep in one place and the toilet was very dirty.”

During interrogations he and others were presented with pictures and video footage showing them at demonstrations and asked to answer questions about their political views and lives.

After 10 days, Ali-Reza was freed. His family had to put up the deed to their house as collateral, and in a month he’s scheduled to appear before a judge at a branch of the Revolutionary Court.

The ordeal has made him more angry and contemptuous of Iranian authorities. He remembers watching as young men lay bleeding and injured on the ground and no one came to help them.

“Now I know whom I hate,” he said. “Now I know how they are wild, are not human. They do not believe in anything. They just close their eyes and beat you until they kill you.”

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

 BROOKS SUNDAY GLOBAL REVIEW – NEWSMAKER INTERVIEW 

March 14, 2009

Dr. Hooshang Amirahmadi, President of American Iranian Council Discusses 

White Paper on President Obama’s Iran Strategy 

To Hear Interview click on www.brooksreview.wordpress.com 

Hartford, Connecticut — On Sunday March 8, Dr. Hooshang Amirahmadi, President of the American-Iranian Council (AIC) and America?s foremost expert on Iran conducted an in-depth interview on the Obama administration and the future of U.S.-Iran relations on the Brooks Sunday Global Review. Under Amirahmadi?s leadership the AIC gained a rare approval from the U.S. government to establish an NGO lobbying group in Tehran, Iran. The AIC has been a leading non-profit/non-partisan organization promoting the renewal of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran. Dr. Amirahmadi is also a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University.

Among the topics Dr. Amirahmadi discussed with host Webster Brooks are Iran?s nuclear program, the June 2009 presidential elections, Iran?s regional involvement in the Middle East and the prospects of improved relations between the U.S. and Iran under President Obama?s administration.*****

Webster Brooks is a Senior Fellow for Foriegn Policy at the Center for New Politics and Policy at the University of Denver.  

www.newpolicycenter.org

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.

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

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.

I’m standing in the inner courtyard of the shrine, a vast public
space surrounded by vaulted enclaves, towering minarets and
spectacular entrance halls bedecked in blue, green and gold tiles.
With me is Muhammad Legenhausen, 55, a New York-born, ex-Catholic
professor of philosophy who converted to Shiism, changed his name
from Gary and moved to Iran in the 1980s. Legenhausen tells me he
teaches philosophy at four universities and institutions in Qom. At
the powerful Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute, he also
serves as an aide to Ayatollah M.T. Mesbah-Yazdi, who is widely seen
as the chief backer of President Ahmadinejad and who has even been
mentioned as a possible successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as
Iran’s next Supreme Leader.

It’s true, says Legenhausen, that Mesbah-Yazdi was the power behind
Ahmadinejad’s 2005 candidacy. “He was concerned that the reformers
had opened things up too far,” Legenhausen says, with an odd twinkle
in his eye, in his distinct New York-accented English. “On that, he
agrees with Ahmadinejad 100 percent.” But how, I ask, can you work
for someone who supports a conference to deny the Jewish Holocaust?
“Oh, that!” he says. “When we heard about that, Mesbah-Yazdi and I
just rolled our eyes. That was all Ahmadinejad’s doing. We said to
each other, ‘What can you do?’” He shrugs, as if to imply that this
was just Ahmadinejad being Ahmadinejad.

To understand where the power in Iran lies–and where the money goes-
- it’s enough to glance at the gleaming new headquarters of the Dar
al-Hadith Research Institute in Qom. Astride one of the main
approaches to the city, the Dar al-Hadith, which translates roughly
into “house of Islamic traditions,” is an imposing orange-yellow
edifice with blue and green decorative tiles under a yellow tiled
dome. It stands in sharp contrast to the dilapidated buildings that
crowd the downtowns of many Iranian cities. Inside the Dar, a
bustling staff of clerics and researchers, working in modernistic
surroundings and aided by computers and a vast library, spend their
time assembling and reassembling the medieval opinions of Muslim
scholars, compiling them into compendiums that are published in
Farsi, Urdu and Arabic.It’s a labor of love.

In a large, well-appointed conference room, the head of Dar al-
Hadith holds forth for visitors. He’s an impressive man,
nicknamed “the scary ayatollah.” Slim and balding, with a gray-
flecked beard, Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammadi Reyshahri wears rimless
glasses with thick lenses under a white turban. In the early ’80s he
was one of Iran’s first ministers of intelligence, a post in which
he developed a reputation for brutal acts of repression and summary
executions. Today he is the head of a major shrine foundation in
Tehran and a member of the Assembly of Experts, which selects the
Supreme Leader. Surrounded by a dozen staffers, including six
mullahs, he says without irony, “Islam is the religion of logic,
ethics and justice.”

One of his jobs in Iran is to oversee the hajj, the pilgrimage to
Mecca that is the duty of all devout Muslims. Under his supervision
Iranians visit not only Mecca but Najaf and Karbala, the Shiite holy
cities in Iraq. He is frank about Iranian support for the Baghdad
regime. “You must be aware that the government in Iraq is a
government supported by us,” he says. Given that tens of thousands
of Iranian pilgrims visit Iraq each month, in a migration overseen
by a former intelligence minister, it’s not unlikely that some of
them, at least, are on official business.

Reyshahri makes his exit, but later, over a lunch of kabobs, yogurt
and rice, I find myself engaged in a vigorous political discussion
with one of his aides, a mullah named Mohammad Mahdavi. Portly and
grandfatherly, with a white turban, Mahdavi is a well-connected
senior cleric, a hojatolislam (a rank below ayatollah), who not long
ago turned down a job as deputy foreign minister. How, I ask, can
Reyshahri talk about justice when the regime sends the Guard onto
the campus of Tehran University to throw protesting students out of
the dormitory windows to their death? When assassins are sent to
hack liberal politicians like Darioush Forouhar and his wife to
death in their beds? “There are conspiracies,” he says,
unfazed. “There are spies. So, of course, sometimes we have to take
strong measures against the protesters.” He justifies such actions
by citing reports that the United States is trying to break up Iran,
to provoke separatist movements in Kurdistan, Baluchistan and the
oil-rich Arab province of Khuzestan in southwest Iran, though the
evidence of such covert US activity is mixed at best.

I ask Mahdavi why the regime doesn’t allow reformists, secular
parties or the left to organize and run for office freely. “People
who go into Parliament must swear allegiance to the Constitution,
and that requires that they support Islam. They do not. If they say
they do, they are lying. Should we send liars to Parliament?” We
send liars to Congress all the time, I reply, and he laughs,
adding, “For myself, I would allow all of them to run. Why not? If
they ran, well–” He wipes his palms together. You mean they
wouldn’t get any votes? “Exactly,” he replies. “But you must
understand. Our people are very religious. If we did that, there
would be big protests by the people. They would ask, ‘Why are you
letting these people run?’”

Ahmadinejad’<wbr>s election was the first step by Iran’s hard-line clergy
to uproot the reform movement in Iran. The other shoe dropped on
March 14, when hard-liners consolidated their control in
parliamentary elections, ensuring the ultraconservatives near-total
control of all three branches of government: the presidency, the
judiciary (which is controlled directly by the Supreme Leader) and
the Parliament. From the start, the election was rigged in favor of
the right. Two thousand candidates were disqualified from running.
Liberal and secular parties, and those who don’t accept the premise
of a clergy-run Islamic Republic, have been banned outright for
years. Harsh restrictions were placed on those who did run. And
candidates who managed to get approval got the nod so late that they
were unable to gain any traction.

Not surprisingly, under such conditions many Iranians are not
enthusiastic about voting. Although in 2008 overall turnout was 60
percent, in Tehran it was far lower, just 30 percent, and in runoff
elections only 26 percent showed up. Many who did go to the polls
went only because the regime stamps Iranians’ ID cards when they
vote, and those who fail to vote can find it impossible to be hired
as, say, teachers or other state employees. From dozens of
discussions with ordinary Iranians–in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and
Kashan–it is clear that most Iranians are disenchanted with the
clerical regime.

First, though, a word about talking with Iranians. I’ve come to Iran
as a journalist, part of a small delegation from the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, an interfaith peace organization founded in 1914.
The delegation is hosted by the Center for Interreligious Dialogue,
an Iranian government organization whose staff says that it
is “linked to the office of the Supreme Leader.” When I engage
Iranians by myself, whether through random encounters or in
prearranged meetings, people want to talk. When they find out I’m an
American, they tell their stories with enthusiasm. But whenever I’m
accompanied by a minder, in the form of an official from the Center
for Interreligious Dialogue, an oppressive chill descends and people
clam up.

In almost every conversation, Iranians’ attitudes toward the regime
of the mullahs range from sullen tolerance to bitter hostility. In
the Tehran bazaar, two young men who sell carpets want to talk
politics. “Do you know the mullahs?” one asks. “We hate them. They
are stupid.” And they both laugh. In Shiraz, the historic and
beautiful city of poets in the south, I have dinner with four women
and three men, ranging in age from 20 to 40. Mehri, one of the
women, is a dentist in her late 30s. Earlier that day, we’d met at
Persepolis, where the breathtaking ruins of the palaces of Darius,
Xerxes and Cyrus the Great lie sparkling in the intense sunlight,
and I’d invited her and her friends for dinner. “We had such hopes
for [the previous reformist president, Mohammad] Khatami,” says
Mehri. “But you see what happened. The regime killed everything. Now
we don’t know what is better to do: do we vote for the reformers,
even though we know they can’t do anything? Or do we stay home and
not vote at all?”

On a hiking trail in the snow-covered mountains north of Tehran,
Hirad, a young notary public, complains about how hard it is to get
a job and–in a complaint I hear repeatedly–how hard it is to meet
women in the face of severe harassment by the morality olice. “This
regime is terrible,” he says. Suddenly he notices the bearded man in
a blue blazer who’s been assigned to accompany our group this
morning. The two men shake hands and exchange greetings, and then
Hirad and I walk quickly away. He glances over his shoulder. With
contempt, he spits on the ground. “Fucking beard!” he says, lashing
out at the symbol of loyalty to the Islamic Republic.

A few days later I have a chance to ask a top Iranian official about
public disenchantment with the regime. M. Hossein Saffar-Haramdi,
minister of culture and Islamic guidance, has an easy manner and a
ready grin, and looks like a carbon copy of Ahmadinejad: wiry, with
a short, neatly trimmed beard. It’s his job to enforce Islamic
discipline on the media, the arts and other forms of public
expression. “The solution to the problems of the world,” he says
earnestly, “is to move closer to religion.” A layman and former
deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Saffar-Haramdi served
for ten years as chief of the guard’s political bureau. Asked why he
forcibly closes newspapers, he is defiant. “Any press activity that
would disturb the fabric of society or create some sort of
disruption, the law must be applied,” he says. “The press is free,
as long as it does not start insulting political personalities and
religious beliefs.”

Unlike the frown-faced, fire-and-brimstone mullahs cast in the mold
of the scowling Ayatollah Khomeini, Mohammad Khatami seems gentle
and avuncular, and when he was elected president in 1997 he embodied
the hopes of Iranians who longed for a thaw in Iran’s frozen
politics. But he ran afoul of the hard-liners, including Khamenei,
the Guardian Council and the courts, and his efforts at reform were
stymied. Conservatives like Mesbah-Yazdi, along with the
Revolutionary Guard and the Basij, mobilized against him, and in
three successive elections–parliamentary elections in 2004, the
presidential election in 2005 (won by Ahmadinejad) and the March
parliamentary election–the Islamic rightists won big.

Today, sitting in a high-ceilinged room at the International Center
for Dialogue Among Civilizations, which he founded in 1999, Khatami
appears relaxed and confident. He’s sitting cross-legged in a black
turban and black robe, sporting penny loafers, wearing a turquoise
ring. I ask him to reflect on his eight years as president, about
what went wrong and where to go from here, and he laughs. “That
answer calls for a two- or three-hour meeting!” he says. He makes it
clear that despite everything, he is either unwilling or unable to
challenge the regime directly. “We are reformists,” he ays. “Reform
takes place within the system, not against the system. Once you go
outside the system, then it is a revolution you seek.” He is willing
to work for incremental gains. “The path we have chosen is the right
path,” he says. “I am not pessimistic.”

Khatami hopes for better relations with the United States, but he
leaves no doubt that the Bush Administration destroyed any
possibility of rapprochement. “During my tenure, many steps were
taken to eradicate misunderstandings. I believe the Clinton
Administration did not object to these efforts. But I am sorry to
say that certain forces were opposed. When Bush came into power,
everything was turned upside down. When the Iran of the Khatami era
is branded as the axis of evil, despite the fact that Iran’s
cooperation was the most important factor in America’s success in
Afghanistan [in 2001], these misunderstandings become more powerful.”
A few seats away, nodding in agreement, is Sadegh Kharazi, the
former deputy foreign minister who is now an aide to Khatami. Five
years ago, Kharazi helped write a secret offer to cooperate with the
Bush Administration on a broad range of issues, from Israel and
terrorism to Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, but the offer was
rebuffed.

The campus of Iran’s foreign ministry, stately and tree-lined, is an
oasis amid the noisy, traffic-clogged streets of Tehran. Inside, I
meet Ali Akbar Rezaie, the director of the section of the ministry
that deals with the United States. “We don’t have relations with
your government, but ironically we are the busiest department in the
ministry,” he says. Rezaie oversees a staff of ten people, including
six who specialize in American affairs, and he works closely with
the ministry’s in-house think tank, the Institute for Political and
International Studies. I ask Rezaie about Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei’s recent comment that he could envision a time when Iran
and the United States renew ties. Rezaie says that among Iran’s
political elite, a debate is raging about whether and how to seek
better relations with the United States. “The significance of
[Khamenei's] statement is that at a high level the debate is a live
one, and it’s very important. It’s not ideological, and it’s not
based on imperatives from the top.”

But the United States is sending conflicting and contradictory
signals, he says, combining bellicose rhetoric and a push for
sanctions against Iran with less hostile actions, such as the
December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which said Iran had
halted its nuclear weapons program nearly five years ago. “It’s
confusing for many of us here,” he says. “We don’t see honesty from
the US side. They are just looking to diminish our power, our role,
our influence in the region.” Whether the United States seeks a
rapprochement with Iran or continues to be hostile, America’s goal
of hegemony in the Persian Gulf will not alter. “It doesn’t matter
if you have cooperation or confrontation. In both ways they are
trying to diminish us. Confront us or embrace us, it’s the same
goal.”

Over at the think tank, Dr. Sayed Kazem Sajjadpour is worried.
They’re watching the US election campaign carefully, he says, and
they’re worried that the White House might escalate tensions with
Iran in order to create a climate of confrontation that could
benefit John McCain. “We’re concerned that the United States will be
harsh against Iran in order to facilitate votes for the Republican
candidate, who will seek to profit over tension with Iran,” he
says. “The Republicans are likely to use the issue of Iran to divert
attention from other problems.”

Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is the author of
Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist
Islam (Metropolitan).