Throwing Ahmadinejad a Lifeline

(Hossein Askari and Trita Parsi | New York Times Op-Ed | 14 August 2009) – In an effort to squeeze Iran into submission over its nuclear policy, Congress and the White House are edging toward a gasoline embargo. This would do nothing to force Iran into submission. In fact, it would be a blessing for the hard-line government to once again be able to point to a foreign threat to justify domestic repression and consolidate its base at a time when opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is increasing among conservatives. Read the rest of this entry »

John Bolton believes that a military strike against Iran would buy time and lead to a possible regime change

After a long absence, pro-Mousavi cleric Rafsanjani to lead prayers

Majid Ghaemi Heidari is welcomed at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. He and four other Iranians were freed after 30 months in U.S. custody in Iraq. (Photo: Javad Moghimi / Fars News Agency)

After a long absence, pro-Mousavi cleric Rafsanjani to lead prayers.  Former President Mohammad Khatami reportedly will also attend Iran’s weekly keynote sermon Friday. The reformists’ return to the event can be seen as a challenge to hard-liners or a sign of a truce. Read the rest of this entry »

Iranian hardliner calls opposition leader US agent

By Ali Akbar Dareini (Associated Press) – Sat Jul 4, 1:07 pm ET

TEHRAN, Iran – A top aide to Iran’s all-powerful leader has accused the country’s main opposition leader of being an American agent who should be tried for treason, increasing the pressure on reformists disputing the outcome of last month’s presidential election. Read the rest of this entry »

Iran’s Clenched Fist Election:  What’s next for US policy

The Carnegie Endowment For International Peace

Policy Discussion held on June 25, 2009 in Washington D.C.

With demonstrations across Iran subsiding under a brutal security crackdown, and opposition leaders hoping to turn protests into strikes and other acts of civil disobedience, Carnegie hosted leading Iran experts Ambassador Nicholas Burns, Abbas Milani, and Karim Sadjadpour to discuss the aftermath of the election and its implications for U.S. foreign policy in the region.  David Ignatius moderated the discussion.

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The Fellowship of Reconciliation joins 35 national organizations in letter to Iranian leaders on ending the violence

June 24, 2009

To the Iranian Leadership: End the Violence Immediately

To:  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, U.N. Ambassador & Permanent Representative Mohammad Khazaee

We are leaders of organizations representing tens of thousands of U.S. citizens who love Iran: its people, culture, poetry, and land. Some of our members have traveled in recent years to the Islamic Republic of Iran to build relationships between our cultures, and have returned home with images and stories of wonderful new friends and your land’s admirable humanitarian and religious cultures. We passionately urge peace between our countries, and deeply regret the unfortunate history of U.S. intervention in Iran and its sovereignty. We believe all nations and peoples have the right to live free of the threat of unjust foreign interference in their internal affairs.
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Stephen Kinzer

guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 June 2009

By reviving memories of an ousted leader, Iran’s protesters are signalling

they want to win reform without US intervention

Protesters displaying pictures of former prime minister Muhammad Mossadeq alongside presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi during demonstrations in Iran last week.

Carrying a picture of Mossadeq today means two things: “We want democracy” and “No foreign intervention”. These demands fit together in the minds of most Iranians. Desperate as they are for the political freedom their parents and grandparents enjoyed in the early 1950s, they have no illusion that foreigners can bring it to them. In fact, foreign intervention has brought them nothing but misery.

The US sowed the seeds of repression in Iran by deposing Mossadeq in 1953, and then helped bathe Iran in blood by giving Saddam Hussein generous military aid during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Militants in Washington who now want the US to intervene on behalf of Iranian protesters either are unaware of this history or delude themselves into thinking that Iranians have forgotten it. Some of them, in fact, are the same people who were demanding just last year that the US bomb Iran – an act which would have killed many of the brave young protesters they now hold up as heroes.

America’s moral authority in Iran is all but non-existent. To the idea that the US should jump into the Tehran fray and help bring democracy to Iran, many Iranians would roll their eyes and say: “We had a democracy here until you came in and crushed it!”

President Barack Obama seems to grasp this reality. During his recent speech in Cairo, without mentioning Mossadeq by name, he conceded that “in the middle of the cold war, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Then, after the current electoral protests broke out, he avoided the hypocrisy of righteous indignation and confined himself to saying that “ultimately the election is for the Iranians to decide.“

Gary Sick from Columbia University and founder of the Gulf/2000 Project and Afshin Molavi of the New America Foundation and author of “The Soul of Iran” discuss the elections and the “Green Movement” in Iran.

Worldwise: Witnessing History in Iran
Deep divisions within the Iranian regime (09:37)
Moussavi, the “accidental leader” of the opposition (03:39)
Eroding legitimacy and expanding repression (06:10)
Obama’s huge challenge (06:57)
Afshin: What viewers can do (01:23)
Political Islam: It’s not easy being green (05:00)

Remember Iran, the greatest threat to Western civilization since, well, Iraq? The posturing conservatives who dominated America’s foreign policy for most of the last seven years pretended the only approach that ever could or should be pursued toward the mullahs would be isolation, confrontation and, what the hell, annihilation. Who can forget the oft-repeated campaign mantra of Sen. John McCain that the only thing worse than going to war with Iran would be a nuclear-armed Iran?

Well, it turns out that a lot of things are worse. It’s funny how a reassertive Russia armed with some 10,000 all-too-real nuclear weapons puts the theoretical menace of Iran’s as yet non- existent arsenal in perspective. But, looking ahead, what’s more curious still is that a new administration–maybe even McCain’s–may start looking for ways to work with Iran to help balance Russian power.

For centuries, whenever Russia has thrashed around in the Caucasus or in Central Asia, the Persians have been among the first to feel the bear’s hot breath. The kingdoms of Georgia, one may recall, were vassals of the shahs before they were taken by the tsars in the early 19th century. Imperial Russia kept pushing decade after decade until its troops occupied even the Iranian city of Tabriz. In the 20th century, the Soviets repeatedly tried to establish variations on the theme of a Persian Socialist Republic. That’s the kind of history the millennially minded Iranians keep in mind.

It’s true that over the last 20 years, Tehran’s relations with Moscow have been much more cooperative. The Persian pariahs would take any friends they could get. But those were the decades when Russia’s sphere of influence was shrinking–and the Russian move into Georgia is a clear signal those days of timidity are over.

History, especially Caucasian, Caspian and Central Asian history has restarted with a vengeance. The dynamics of confrontation and conciliation in Iran’s neighborhood are now every bit as complicated as they were in the 19th century, when an expanding Russian empire came up against the intrigues, alliances and sometimes overt military actions of imperial Britain in the rivalry that became known as “The Great Game.” What’s needed as we start reshaping American policy to fit the new circumstances is a reality check or, perhaps better said, a realpolitik check.

Over the short run, the mullahs will reap several benefits from Russia’s play in Georgia and Western reaction to it. “If you are no longer the greatest threat du jour then you are off the hook,” says Vali Nasr, an Iran scholar affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations. Given the diplomatic standoff between Moscow and Washington, it will be much harder to enforce U.N. Security Council sanctions leveled against Iran for pursuing its nuclear-enrichment program. Further tightening the screws will be all but impossible. At the same time, the likelihood of American-led or supported military action against Iran is also diminished. It was never a good idea, and now it would be a very dangerous distraction for the already depleted U.S. military. Israel, however worried it may be, will have to understand that.

If Iran is not already working at full speed to develop nuclear weapons (it insists its intentions are entirely peaceful), it could be expected to pick up the pace now, and not least as a deterrent to Russian expansion in its direction. On the other hand, if it pushes too hard and too fast, Moscow may start to see nuclear-armed mullahs as a dangerous distraction, and Tehran would have to take into account the possibility that Russia, in its new and aggressive posture, would act directly and ruthlessly to eliminate the threat. Under current circumstances, who would come to Iran’s defense? Even if the Iranians decide to slow down their nuclear program, or stop it, they will have to worry about Moscow’s long-term designs on oil and natural-gas deposits around the Caspian Sea, where Russia already has a fleet and already disputes Iran’s claims to a large portion of the resources beneath the water.

The incoming American administration could “play on those kinds of fears and take advantage of the opportunities,” says Nasr. “But to play that kind of game you need a lot of clarity of vision.” That hasn’t really been the hallmark of the Bush administration, nor of McCain’s rhetoric, nor of Barack Obama’s talk about talking. Indeed, the basic policy framework of the United States is built on fundamental contradictions. “We talk as if Iran is the biggest threat, but we act as if Russia is,” says Nasr.

Thus Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed a deal with Warsaw on Tuesday to put part of the American ballistic-missile shield in Poland, having long asserted that the purpose was to thwart Iran. But, um, Iran has no intercontinental ballistic missiles. Its attempt to launch a rocket into space over the weekend appears to have quite literally fizzled. Moscow, meanwhile, has hundreds of perfectly serviceable ICBMs. (We sometimes send our own American astronauts to the International Space Station on Russia’s reliable rockets.) It’s hardly surprising the Russians think the purpose of the American missile shield is to eliminate what’s left of the old strategic balance and give Washington a potential first-strike capability against Moscow. That sort of confrontation, if overplayed, could slip toward the Strangelovian standoffs of the cold war or, conceivably, something worse.

In fact, the new Great Game, like the old one, will be a long narrative of intrigue and confrontation in which there is no sudden or decisive resolution. Realism will dictate efforts to improve relations with states on Russia’s periphery whether or not their ideologies are compatible with American democratic ideals. Another Iran scholar, Gary Sick at Columbia University, believes the policymakers remaining in the Bush administration have actually come to understand this, albeit very late. “After 9/11 their world view was that the United States had limitless power,” says Sick. “I don’t think they believe that anymore. And if you really believe you have to husband your power in ways that are more cost effective, you have to change our approach to Iran.” It won’t be easy. The Iranians are hard bargainers with regional ambitions of their own, but they are not irrational, and their primary interest is security. Oddly enough, Washington may find that the U.S. benefits by helping them feel safer, not more threatened.

Read original article here: www.newsweek.com/id/154523

By: Nahal Mishel-Ghashghai

My name is Nahal. Nahal in Farsi (the language of Iran) means a seedling, a little tree. In many ways I still feel like a little tree, young, alive, ready to poke around and grow into my full potential.

I was born and raised in Iran. I came to the US when I was 19 to finish my college education and for various reasons decided to live here. I’ve now lived longer in the US than I have in Iran and consider the US “my home” and Iran my “birth country”. I love both countries.

In all my years of living in the US and throughout all the political ups and downs between the US and Iran, I’ve never once experienced hostility or prejudice towards myself or my family. Perhaps it is because I really like all people and do my best not to have prejudice towards any one in particular. I believe that deep down inside, we are all very similar and want similar things, health, happiness, peace of mind, safety and comfort for ourselves and our loved ones.

I believe people of different cultures, backgrounds and upbringing can live side by side in harmony when we respect and appreciate both our similarities and differences.

I believe increasing compassion in the world, even one person at a time, is the key to creating peace.

An act of kindness, a smile, a wave, a helping hand, no matter how small, cracks open the door to compassion and the reward is the wonderful “feeling good inside”.

I invite you to try this. Do a good deed for someone today without any expectations, and know that you are adding to the collective compassion and moving one step closer to a peaceful world. Imagine if every person on the planet did this!

Nahal is a former Microsoft Engineer and currently an Avatar Master who lives in Seattle and teaches the Avatar Course all over the world. Look for her on MySpace or Facebook for contact