JUST days before Dec. 9, 1997, every Iranian government official's heart was beating faster than normal including that of the newly elected President Mohammad Khatami.

Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami spoke out against the continued detainment of opposition figures and protesters, and criticized the government for failing to resolve the "extraordinary situation" of the past two years.

Tradition, Modernity and the Rise of Islamic Feminism in Iran: 1979-2009 Kurdish Globe These developments were followed by the election of Mohammad Khatami on the platform of "civil society and the rule of law," the event which led to an open confrontation of reformist forces and traditionalists within the government. ...

Eurasia Review

Iran: Reform Party Appoints Veteran Politician Ali Mazrooei As Spokesperson Eurasia Review Following the election of Mohammad Khatami as president in 1997, Mazroeei became a founding member of Iran's largest reform party the Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF). He is currently a member of the IIPF's Political Bureau as well as its ...

The Basij is a large paramilitary organisation with multifaceted roles which acts as the eyes and ears of the Islamic Republic. Sitting under the IRGC, it has a presence in schools, universities, governmental and private institutions, factories, and even among tribes and thus it greatly enhances the IRGC ability to govern Iran and repress dissidents.

Although much has been written on the Basij and its relationship to the IRGC, less is known about its younger, student branch in spite of its growing importance in post-election Iran. The student branch of Basij – SBO – is being used as a tool to help in the suppression of dissident students and professors and, more importantly, as an ideological “school” educating future managers of the regime’s apparatus.

Established on 25 November 1989, the SBO is managed in a top-down fashion with its main headquarter in Tehran. Each of Iran’s thirty provinces is a designated SBO region and controls multiple zones with each zone directing ten to fifteen SBO bases located in almost every university. According to its articles of association, recruiting new members is the primary mission of the SBO and in doing so it holds short-term recreational, cultural, and religious camps during academic semesters such as the Rahian Noor Camp.  

Since the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, however, the relationship between the SBO and the government has entered a new phase. The function of the SBO is now to defend and support the Ahmadinejad government, further counteract opposing and dissident students, and seek recruits from not only universities but also schools and high-schools in order to promote “the culture of self-sacrifice and martyrdom”. Since last November, 6,000 Basij centres have been established in primary schools across Iran. Children join different groups according to what class they are in; the “Hope Resistance” for 7 to 11 year olds, the “Dynamic Resistance” for those aged 11 to 13, and the “Pioneer Resistance” for high school students aged between 14 and 18.

In an attempt to attract a larger number of students, the SBO offers a number of incentives of which a "fast-track path" to governmental jobs and "Basij-specific quota" for both graduate and postgraduate studies are the most prominent. However, pupils must be active members to take advantage of such privileges. They must spend six months after the initial stage and undergo additional training with required courses that include ideological and political teaching (IPT) and military training. Only after they have passed these courses and following a six-month probationary period of continuous activity, students become active members of Basij.

Military training is the responsibility of the IRGC and includes instruction in information protection, weapons familiarity and use, modern war theory, psychological warfare, and riot and antiriot methods. IPT, on the other hand, is the responsibility of the Office of the Representative of the Supreme Leader within the Basij which prepares the syllabi, writes textbooks, and trains ideological-political educators who are divided into three broad categories: organisational trainers who are full-time special Basij members, non-organisational trainers who are members of the IRGC, and invited trainers who usually come from conservative institutions such as the Imam Khomeini institution headed by hardliner and Ahmadinejad religious mentor Mesbah-e Yazdi.

The religious content of IPT programs focuses on theology, on Islam as a religion and ideology, and on prophecy and Shia leadership. Courses start by proving the existence of God, demonstrating the necessity of prophecy, establishing Islam as the most complete religion, and upholding the legitimacy of the imams as successors of the Prophet Mohammad. The most important part of this section is the discussion of the “hidden imam” and of the doctrine of guardianship according to which jurists are the true successors of the hidden imam and have the right to rule in Islamic societies.

The second part of IPT programmes focuses on political education. The issues discussed range from domestic to international affairs. There is some focus on the constitution, elections, the various political parties and groups, and the structure of political power in Iran. Other topics include Islamic movements, “knowledge of the enemy”, achievements of the Islamic revolution along with nuclear technology, relations with the United States, velvet revolutions, and soft war.

Finally, having realised the importance of the Internet and the new social media, SOB has been training its own bloggers in order to "promote the values of the Islamic Revolution in the cyberspace and to counter soft threats". As part of this virtual war, the Basij has designed its own politically correct computer game – Devil Den – which is based on a scenario where Iranian students on a pilgrimage to Karbala are captured by American soldiers.

Starting from the end of Mohammad Khatami's presidency, the IRGC, which had set its eyes on increasing its role in Iranian politics, restructured and expanded the Basij force into every aspect of Iranian social life turning it into a voting bloc in support of conservative candidates. In a sense, the Basij, particularly the SBO, is there to train volunteers and students to “defend the country and the Islamic Republic” thereby facilitating the government's efforts in internalization of the regime’s values.

Nevertheless, how successful IPT programmes have been is hard to confirm though it seems that training courses have not been as successful as the regime had initially hoped. Political doubts evidently led some Basij students to avoid taking part in the violent suppression of the opposition in the aftermath of the 2009 election. In response, the regime has decided to increase the scope of IPT programmes, while simultaneously creating training circles for Basij members in which they are thoroughly controlled and supervised. Whether this will prove an effective strategy in the information age, however, is questionable.

Washington Post

A country gives up its secrets Washington Post As a historical record of Iranian politics, from the rise of the reformists under Mohammad Khatami to their fall with the election of neoconservative ... and more »

De belangrijkste Iraanse oppositiepolitici Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karroubi en Mohammad Khatami mogen het land niet verlaten. Dat heeft de conservatieve politicus Mousa Qorbani, lid van de Gerechtelijke Commissie van het parlement, zaterdag...

Tags: Elections, General news, Government and politics, Government regulations, Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mohammad Khatami, National elections, Political and civil unrest, Protests and demonstrations, Travel laws ...

Scott Peterson's account of Iran, "Let the Swords Encircle Me" Washington Post As a historical record of Iranian politics, from the rise of the reformists under Mohammad Khatami to their fall with the election of neo-conservative ...

Media attention being paid to the massive overhaul of the Iranian national subsidy system and the sudden dismissal of Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki could be overlooking the possibility of increased stability in Iran as the Iranian ... an alliance of the clerical elite and the Revolutionary Guards emerging to counter the elected reformists-figures such as reformist President Mohammad Khatami, and presidential candidate and Green Movement figure Mir-Hossein Mousavi. ...

The past few weeks have seen rumors of a looming impeachment trial of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, followed by his humiliating dismissal of Foreign Minister Mottaki. These are hardly the signs of calm leadership steering through an ... with an alliance of the clerical elite and the Revolutionary Guards emerging to counter the elected reformists-figures such as reformist President Mohammad Khatami, and presidential candidate and Green Movement figure Mir-Hossein Mousavi. ...

Iran's Reformist Camp prepares for parliamentary elections Trend News Agency (subscription) Iran's Reformist Camp's representative, former president Mohammad Khatami gave instructions on conducting works on the forthcoming parliamentary elections, ...

The Friday prayer address delivered on June 4, 2010 by Ayatollah Khamenei the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution. It was on the 21st death anni......click here to continue reading Related posts:

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... wrote Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Mohammad Khatami after the elections." He claimed that the government constantly violated laws and must be criticised, calling on Ahmadinejad and his men to co-operate with Parliament. ...

The website of former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has announced that authorities have blocked it without explanation.

The website of former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has announced that authorities have blocked it without explanation. A statement on Khatami.ir said a government committee had

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Americas

• With Hurricane Tomas bearing down on Haiti, most earthquake camp residents are ignoring warnings to leave.
• Brazilian President-elect Dilma Rousseff says Brazil will maintain its ties with Iran but only for peaceful purposes.  
• Investigators have removed 18 bodies from a mass grave near Acapulco, Mexico. 

Asia

• Burma is scheduled to holds its first elections in two decades on Sunday with the country's military junta expected to consolidate its power in the tightly controlled vote. 
• A suicide bomber killed at least 50 at a mosque in Northwest Pakistan. 
• Indonesia's Mount Merapi erupted again on Thursday night, killing dozens and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate. 

Europe

• Georgia arrested 13 people accused of spying for Russia.
• France and China signed $14 billion worth of new contracts during President Hu Jintao's visit to Paris.  
• Ireland has outlined its plan to make $21.3 billion in budget cuts. 

Middle East

• British Foreign Secretary William Hague, visiting Israel, has assured Israel officials that they need not fear arrest warrants if they visit Britain. 
• Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki al-Faisal says the Kingdom will refuse to engage with Israel until Palestinian land is returned. 
• Iran has blocked the website of former President Mohammad Khatami. 

Africa

• The Ivory Coast election is set to go to a second round after neither candidate reached 50 percent. 
• Nigeria will deport hundreds of illegal immigrants in an attempt to crack down on Islamist militants. 
• Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has dismissed most of her cabinet. 

The headline news of Iran continues to be dominated by hard, often menacing political news - from Tehran’s nuclear programme and the international tensions it raises, to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon and the acclamation the president received as he denounced Israel from just across the border.

But behind the headlines, Iran's everyday life - including the way that Iran’s citizens cope with the many social and political challenges pressing them -  offers an often more revealing insight into the country’s true reality.

The battle for gender equality in Iran continues to be one of these. The daily struggles of Iranian women may have receded from international attention since the government’s vicious crackdown in the wake of the presidential election of June 2009, but they still provide an essential prism through which to understand the inner life and the dynamics of change in the Islamic Republic.

Women vs the state

Women were prominent participants in the post-election demonstrations, and many activist women were targeted by the regime or caught up in its dragnet during the months of protest. Indeed, scores of women have been detained and jailed since June 2009, and several have received unprecedentedly long jail sentences. An equally damaging measure to women is the return to parliament of a controversial “family-protection” bill whose provisions would (among other things) make polygamy easier. 

The overall purpose of the regime’s strategy here is to quash the momentum and impact of Iran’s women’s movement. This very objective indicates that women’s rights remain a potent element of the contests - factional, political and ideological - that  dominate Iran’s domestic frontier.

The fraudulent re-election of Mahmood Ahmadinejad and the rise (before and after the election) of the opposition “green movement” are but a phase in the long-running tensions between state and society in Iran. Since the revolution that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, women have been at the forefront of these tensions - and in particular, at the head of a three-decade struggle for improved gender rights (see Nikki R Keddie, "Iranian women and the Islamic Republic", 24 February 2009).

Across this period in Iran’s modern history, the varying trajectory of the women’s movement - and the government's reaction to it - helps explain the rise and fall of wider political trends: reformism, secularism and the conservative backlash evidenced in the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2005. This point can be illustrated by reference to three historic turning-points in which changes in the Iranian women’s movement were enmeshed with key political and ideological arguments in Iran as a whole.

A new horizon

The first major transition for women since the formation of the Islamic Republic came with the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. This, combined with the election of Hashemi Rafsanjani as president in the aftermath of the devastating Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), ushered in a period of economic reconstruction and moderation designed to stimulate the Iranian economy and return Iran to the international community. For women, this was a period of greater economic investment in the country’s institutions, with an expansion of the education system in particular opening doors and opportunities.

Yet greater educational access did not translate into increased levels of employment. The vice that trapped many women - an ailing economy with double-digit unemployment and a dominant patriarchal culture - hampered their entrance into the job market and forced them into gender-acceptable professions. At the same time, the resources of a better education and the increased expectations it brought, combined with the restrictions of a gender-unequal society, also motivated a new generation of women to demand more from the government.

A rainbow moment

The second big transition for women arrived in May 1997, when women played an indispensable part in the election of Rafsanjani’s successor Mohammad Khatami as president. The reformist leader’s promise of greater political liberalisation and an enlarged role for civil society - the so-called “Tehran spring” - was reflected both in the media and on the streets: by a newly vibrant press, greater openness in social and political dialogue, and a relaxing of Islamist restrictions on the dress code and everyday behaviour.

An increased provision of government licenses during Khatami’s tenure (1997-2005) meant that the women’s press too blossomed in this period. The magazine Zanan was the most effective at addressing controversial gender issues. In this atmosphere of government encouragement and approval of NGO activity, female activism flourished. Though Khatami’s administration proved ineffective in securing substantial legal improvements, the liberal ferment created new spaces of dialogue and interaction among women’s activists (both secular and Islamic). This cooperation led, for example, to direct protests and petitions in favour of gender equality, and to public celebrations of International Women’s Day.

The election of a reformist majlis (parliament) in 2000 increased the sense of momentum behind the campaign for legal reforms. Yet the parliament had limited success in passing gender legislation, including the United Nations Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

A conservative backlash against the reform movement grew during Khatami’s second term in office (from 2001) - evident in the closing of newspapers, institutional constraints on the president’s powers, the repression of the student movement and the barring of would-be parliamentary candidates by the Guardian Council.

A reversing tide

This conservative restoration, capped by the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2005, propelled the women’s movement into a third transition. The new president sought to revive the “authentic” ideology of the revolution in order to consolidate the Islamic state against its social critics, in part by reimposing strict social mores. The result was to shift Iran’s political landscape decisively to the right.

Women’s activists, still intent on fulfilling the potential the reformist wave had created, responded by initiating a direct challenge to the regressive gender laws still enshrined in the Iranian constitution. The most visible example was the “one million signatures” campaign that began in 2006, which sought through a referendum-type model of collective action both to increase public awareness and exert pressure on the government to implement gender-law reform. The campaign did generate public attention, but also provoked the government into severe repression of activists through arrests and detentions (see Nasrin Alavi, "Women in Iran: repression and resistance", 5 March 2007).

In 2007, Ahmadinejad’s government proposed a new and retrograde family-protection bill. The most deleterious clause is Article 23, which would institutionalise polygamy. The Islamic law applied in Iran permits men to have up to four wives, though in practice polygamy is rare (and indeed is widely condemned). The existing statute requires a man to have permission from his first wife before taking another, and that they should treat their wives equally. The new provision on polygamy would allow a husband to take a second wife without permission from his current wife on a number of grounds (including the first wife becoming sterile, and her contraction of a terminal illness). In addition, the bill reduces the age of (female) eligibility for marriage from 16 to 13; and its Article 25 would require a woman to pay taxes on money received from her marriage contract.

A fourth phase

For three years, women activists have agitated against the bill, arguing that these measures would damage (rather than protect) the family structure and reduce women’s marriage and divorce rights. These protests were vital in the bill being referred to the parliament’s legal committee for more work in 2008, when the majlis was due to vote on it. Now, as the post-election wave of suppression fuels the government’s desire both to reassert its conservative agenda and subdue the undefeated women’s movement, the bill has resurfaced on parliament’s agenda.

For many Iranian women, such setbacks are also a tribute to the challenge their activism continues to present to the authorities. In the thirty years since the revolution, women have sought to build on every opportunity to advance the movement for gender equality. So far, the hardest actions of a powerful state - arrests, exile, legal sanction - have been unable to destroy the wellsprings of women’s awareness and agency, which continue to blossom in the face of great pressure. The potential for a fourth transition is there. 

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

Iran Feminist School

Nikki R Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2006)

Nikki R Keddie, Women in the Middle East: Past and Present (Princeton University Pres, 2007)

Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Ali M Ansari, Iran under Ahmadinejad: The Politics of Confrontation (Routledge, 2007)

Pardis Mahdavi, Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2009)

Ali Gheissari & Vali Nasr, Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Sidebox: 

Sanam Vakil is a adjunct professor and visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She is writing a book on women’s activism in Iran

Also by Sanam Vakil in openDemocracy:

“Iran’s nuclear gamble” (1 February 2008) 

“Iran’s hostage politics” (2 April 2007) 

“The Iran-American dialogue: enemies within” (4 June 2007) 

“Iran’s political shadow-war” (16 July 2008)

“Iran’s election and Iran’s system” (21 April 2009) - with David Hayes

"Iran: a phantom victory" (19 February 2010)

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Iran’s revolution in global history

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Second episode in the documentary series marking the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution.

Inside stories are told by two ex-presidents of Iran, Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, by two founders of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, and by leading westerners including Secretaries of State George Shultz, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright.

Equally at home in Tehran or New York, Hooman Majd benefits from a background as intricately woven as any Persian carpet. The son of a diplomat under the shah of Iran, Majd attended schools in California, India, Iran, North Africa and England. After the tumultuous 1979 Islamic Revolution, return to Iran for Majd and others like him suddenly became highly unlikely if not impossible.

But with reforms and an easing of restrictions on dual-passport holders under former President Mohammad Khatami, Majd returned to Iran for the first time in three decades in 2003.

read more

President's chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, says women continue to be treated unjustly in Iranian society

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's closest aide has called for more rights for Iran's "oppressed" women – the latest comments from a man who has become a lightning rod for divisions in the country's ruling elite.

"Women have been oppressed and treated unjustly in our society in the past, and this oppression still exists," Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, the Iranian president's chief of staff, was quoted as saying by Iranian newspapers today.

Iranian women's rights have long been championed by activists abroad, most recently over the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the woman sentenced to be stoned for adultery.

Mashaie's comments are likely to have more impact within Iran where he has often been the focus of ideological and personal rifts among the hardliners who rule the Islamic republic and dislike what they see as his liberal leanings.

Mashaie's interview with the semi-official ILNA news agency took place as Iran's parliament debated a law that, among other things, could give a man the right to take up to three other wives without the consent of his existing spouse.

Consent is currently required, and opponents of the law see it as a retrograde step for women's rights in a country where a woman's testimony in court is accorded half of the value of a man's.

"Today, women play an important role in our society and the current situation of our society is not comparable to the past centuries and decades," Mashaie said. "We should try to guarantee women's rights where our religious framework allows us.

"The legislative system should act in a way to take the rights of women into consideration more than ever."

Mashaie has faced relentless criticism from hardliners since Ahmadinejad's re-election last year, and his comments on a particularly sensitive subject are likely to fuel controversy.

Some analysts say Mashaie, a constant presence at the president's side, acts as a buffer to absorb criticisms from Iran's hardliners. Ahmadinejad himself is criticised by governments abroad and the Iranian opposition for his hardline policies.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, forced Ahmadinejad to sack Mashaie from the post of first vice-president last year amid outrage from conservatives at his suggestion that Iran was a friend to all nations, including the people of Israel.

But the president, whose son is married to Mashaie's daughter, managed to keep his charismatic political ally by making him chief of staff and appointing him to dozens of other positions, most recently Middle East policy adviser.

Mashaie's harshest critics accused him of espousing "pagan" views when he spoke at a conference in August of the importance of an Iranian brand of Islam – prompting calls from 200 parliamentarians for him to be sacked.

Some analysts speculate that Mashaie, having shown remarkable staying power in Iran's corridors of power, could be a potential future presidential candidate. Ahmadinejad, one year into his second four-year term, cannot run again.

The issue of women's rights is one that divides the various hardline factions in the ruling elite. Under sharia law, imposed after the 1979 Islamic revolution, women must cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes. Violators can receive lashes, fines or imprisonment.

Under Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, enforcement was relaxed and many started to wear figure-hugging coats and headscarves pushed back to reveal their hair. Since Ahmadinejad's election in 2005, crackdowns by morality police have become more common.

Beneath the noisy protests and the quiet remembrances that surrounded the 9/11 anniversary in Washington and across the United States, there is also hard calculation about a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. A striking fact at this stage is that proponents of an attack in America seem to prefer that the job were done by Israel, whereas their Israeli counterparts favour a US operation.

But if there is increasing momentum behind the war option among decision-makers in Washington and Israel, many both in and beyond the inner-policy circles still argue cogently that a military assault will create more problems than it solves (see Paul Rogers, "Israel vs Iran: fallout of a war", 15 July 2010). A close look at current internal Iranian realities can only strengthen this conviction.

A network state

What makes the present situation even more complicated than it seems is that the preferred alternative to military action, namely sanctions against Iran, carries its own problems and contradictions. Barack Obama administration’s sanctions policy towards Tehran seeks to do several things: satisfy the US Congress, persuade (or force) Iran to make concessions on its nuclear programme, and postpone or prevent outright an Israeli attack on Iran. So far, however, the escalating sanctions - backed after intense diplomatic efforts by the United Nations Security Council - have been unable to divert Iran from its course of uranium-enrichment or more generally from making a priority of its nuclear policy.

Indeed, the occasional signals towards compromise that Iran has made, such as the suggestion in early September 2010 of new negotiations, are reactions to the danger of war rather than to the reality of sanctions. An Iranian regime which makes a virtue of intransigence and is concerned about losing face can compromise only with great difficulty and at the margins. Moreover, the regime needs the foreign threat to continue with its unannounced state of emergency (see Omid Memarian, "Iran: a political calculus", 6 September 2010).

There is a further element in this complex game, namely that material interests and national pride are intertwined. In Iran, for example, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is a complex military-intelligence organisation which operates nationwide businesses; and a large network of former IRGC officers is purportedly the main beneficiary of illicit trade involving Iran.

In this respect, significant powers in Iran have a vested interest in the international sanctions continuing. The tightening control of such clientelist networks over the economy squeezes even further Iran’s middle class, which is the bastion of political opposition. A sanctions regime that pleases the United States and its western allies thus inadvertently also helps the cause of the hardliners in Iran.

This linkage between international politics and domestic realities highlights the key weakness of analyses that see the conflict between Iran and its major adversaries (United States and Israel) solely through the prism of international relations. The role of internal politics in all the relevant states, including their impact on how important actors influence state behaviour, is too often ignored.

A hybrid state

This point is relevant to understanding current Iranian politics, both in relation to the sanctions regime and to the threat or reality of a military attack. If sanctions are operating to reinforce the power of regressive forces such as the IRGC, it is plausible that a strike against Iran will have the same effect by enabling it to mobilise the population behind the patriotic cause of defence of the nation’s territory. The alternative view is that an assault could inflict a humiliating military defeat on Iran’s security forces (particularly the IRGC), and demonstrate both the regime’s impotence in face of the “forces of arrogance" and the failure of its brinkmanship diplomacy, thus emboldening the opposition forces.

The response of the opposition to a military attack will depend very much on its scale. If the human and physical damage is minimal, the regime’s critics may be able to seize the moment as an opportunity to demonstrate against the regime; but extensive destruction would leave no option for the opposition but to gather around the flagpole.

In any case, two factors make it hard to sustain the argument that a military attack on Iran would undermine the regime and enhance the democratic cause in the country.

The first is Iran’s current political balance of forces, fifteen months after the fixed presidential elections of June 2009 and the months of protest that followed. The regime’s ferocious repression, backed by the systems and networks of patronage that enable it to reward and buy the loyalty of important sectors, has allowed it to consolidate its power and prepare to survive an external assault.

The second is the evolution of Iran’s state itself, which from its inception has been a hybrid. The Islamic Republic of Iran was born of the popular uprising of 1978-79 against the Shah’s absolute monarchy, and this legacy endures in the “republican” language and forms of democratic legitimacy that it espouses; at the same time, the clerical rulers have sought in principle to impose on Iran (or return it to) an imaginary, pure Islamic polity and community based on Sharia law.

But this dual character, which has survived three tumultuous decades since 1979 and is still discernible in the constitution after two major overhauls, is now coming to an end. During the reformists’ period in office (under the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, 1997-2005), the republican elements if the state were emphasised; but increasingly since the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, and even more since his re-election in 2009, the arachaic vision of an Islamic state has been rigorously pressed by a new and powerful political coalition of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Ahmadinejad, and the IRGC.

In present conditions, this process will not be halted or even slowed by either sanctions or a military attack. In fact the response to a strike - depending on its magnitude and length - may allow the regime to use the resulting atmosphere of phobia and raw emotion to engage in even more repression against the opposition.

The Iranian regime thrives on chaos. A series of raids on the facilities at Isfahan, Arak, Natanz and Bushehr would create great loss of life, fear of nuclear contamination and mass evacuation; there might be riots and temporary anarchy, and minorities in Iran’s east and northwest might seek advantage from the crisis. But many Iranians will turn towards rather than away from the regime, whose most important firepower will be intact. If sanctions are in key respects working in favour of the Iranian regime, a military attack would equally give it another injection.

A military state

At the same time, Iran is if attacked unlikely to engage in major retaliation, for two reasons: the government would fear greater internal unrest if the war became protracted, and its limited arsenal could not seriously counter its major and well-resourced adversaries. The regime's retaliation would most likely be restricted to symbolic gestures such as the few missiles Saddam Hussein fired at Israel during the United States-led Desert Storm operation in 1991.

A military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be a disaster. Yet even were Iran left to acquire a nuclear-weapon capability, this could become more of a hazard to itself than to the outside world. A small nuclear arsenal cannot guarantee the safety of a regime, and can create new dangers (by making it a more attractive target to terrorists as well as states, by encouraging proliferation in the Arab world, and by diverting resources from more important social goals).

Even independently of the stance of the United States and Israel, therefore, Iran’s regime has an interest in ending its brinkmanship, engaging with the international community, and focusing its energies on developing the country’s economy and improving the lives of its people. A wise leadership would also extend a hand to leading reformists such as Mohammad Khatami and Mir-Hossein Moussavi, and seek to bring them in to a broad-based government.

But Iran’s current balance, and the end of the dual character of Iran’s hybrid state, make such a change of course hard to imagine. It is more likely that a toxic mix of corporate and group self-interest, national ideology and emotional power, will continue to drive Iran - and its adversaries - nearer to the brink.

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

Ali M Ansari, Iran under Ahmadinejad: The Politics of Confrontation (Routledge, 2007)

Planet Iran

Tehran Bureau

IranWatch

Ali Gheissari & Vali Nasr, Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Ray Takeyh, Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic (CFR, 2006)

Iranian.com

Rooz

Iran and IAEA

Michael Axworthy, Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran (C Hurst, 2007)

Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007)

Sidebox: 

Rasool Nafisi teaches the sociology of development at Strayer University in Virginia. He contributes to various news agencies, including the Voice of America, BBC, and Radio France International. Rasool Nafisi is co-author of The Rise of the Pasdaran (Rand Corporation, 2009). His website is here

Also by Rasool Nafisi in openDemocracy:

"The meaning of Ramin Jahanbegloo's arrest" (16 May 2006)

"Ramin Jahanbegloo: a repressive release" (1 September 2006) 

"Haleh Esfandiari: Iran's cultural prison" (17 May 2007)

"Iran's majlis elections: the hidden dynamics" (11 April 2008)

"Iran: revolution beyond caricature" (7 August 2009)

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Iran: a political calculus

Iran in darkness and light

Iran 2010-11: four scenarios and a nightmare

Iran's ocean of dissent

Iran and the United States: time to engage

Iran: torch of fire, politics of fun

How to make peace with Iran

Iran: prepared for the worst

Iran: what happened, where now?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: a political shadow

Iran: a time to rethink

Iran's tide of history: counter-revolution and after

Iran: revolution for the hereafter

Iran: from protest to politics

Voices of a new Iran

Iran: a blind leap of faith

Iran's ocean of dissent

The children of Iran: lives in tumult

Iran: a green wave for life and liberty

From the mother sentenced to death by stoning to the lawyer arrested for defending opposition activists, women are prominent symbols of Iran's struggle for democracy

When Shahrzad Kariman finally saw her imprisoned daughter Shiva Nazar Ahari earlier this month, it was for a brief moment outside the Tehran courtroom where the 26-year-old human rights campaigner had been brought. "We could see her for a few minutes," Kariman told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran last week. "Just enough to hug her. But we couldn't ask her how the court session went… We didn't know what the charges were prior to the court session."

The charges against Nazar Ahari are among the most serious that can be levelled in Iran: muharebeh (enmity against God), a crime, in theory punishable by death, originally intended to be used against armed gangs and pirates, not dissidents.

Nazar Ahari is also charged with assembly and collusion aiming to commit a crime, propagating against the regime and disrupting public order. But perhaps most dangerous among the allegations – strongly denied both by her family and her organisation, the Committee for Human Rights Reporters – is of "relations" with the banned Mojahedin e-Khalq group, which is accused by the Iranian regime of terrorist activities. Her family says that she deplores the organisation.

Arrested twice since the disputed Iranian elections in June 2009 and held in the notorious Evin prison, in north-west Tehran, Nazar Ahari has been kept largely incommunicado since December, when she was arrested with several other women activists on her way to the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in the city of Qom. Also detained was Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, another prominent women's rights activist and film-maker, who has since left Iran and was sentenced in absentia to two-and-a-half-years in jail and 30 lashes for her part in a 2007 protest.

For the 15 months since Iran's stolen elections, the faces of these women and others like them have been visible from Paris to New York, in London, Berlin, Sydney and the Hague.

Their pictures have been held aloft at demonstrations, appeared on human rights websites and are plastered almost daily across newspapers and television screens. They have joined the faces of other Iranian women who, through their activism or by dint of becoming victims of the regime, have come to be the most visible symbols in the west of the wider political and social oppression in Iran under its conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Then there are the images of the dead, such as Neda Agha-Soltan, shot on 20 June 2009 while attending an opposition demonstration to protest at the theft of the Iranian election by Ahmadinejad and his supporters.

If female activists have been prominent, so too have women threatened with death, such as Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the 43-year-old mother-of-two thrust to international attention after she was sentenced to being stoned to death for adultery.

And if Mohammadi Ashtiani is not an activist but a victim, her shocking case has become a lightning rod for activism for Iranian human rights, an example of how women are treated in the Islamic republic and the failure of its judicial system. This has been seized on by film stars and celebrities such as Colin Firth, Emma Thompson and Carla Bruni, the wife of France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, by politicians such as foreign secretary William Hague, and by institutions such as the European parliament and the Vatican.

The consequence has been that some names and pictures have become as recognisable as those Iranian women internationally renowned before 2009, such as Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel prize-winning human rights activist.

There is a simple reason why the cases of those women being persecuted for their activism and the case of Mohammadi Ashtiani are connected. Their stories reflect different aspects of the same confrontation in Iran: the place of women – and how women who fall foul of the regime can be accused and charged with anything, with no guarantee of a fair trial.

While the existence of this faultline long predates the events surrounding the 2009 election and the rise of the Green Movement, what is true is that Iran's opposition, for a while at least, has amplified the calls for women's rights which have come to define both the international anxiety about and protest against Ahmadinejad's regime.

Dr Ziba Mir-Hosseini, a Cambridge-based activist and scholar, argues that the current thrusting of women to the fore of the struggle between "despotism and democracy", as she calls it, has been inevitable given the history of women's rights in Iran.

It is a tension, she argues, that has been exacerbated by the contradictory attitude of the 1979 Islamic revolution towards women's political rights. For while the family protection law, introduced by the shah to give women equal rights in issues such as divorce, was quickly revoked after his downfall, the Islamic revolution allowed women to continue voting – a political right, ironically, that was invested with more meaning after the revolution, even as women's human rights were being eroded again under the pretence of the revolution's "protection of women's honour".

The reformists also opened up political space for women to operate, according to Mir-Hosseini. "Mohammad Khatami, during the eight years of his reformist presidency, set up a Centre for Women's Participation that saw the number of women's NGOs in Iran increase from around 45 to over 500."

The consequence, she believes, was that feminism – a word that could not even be uttered in the early 1980s – and a feminism linked strongly to notions of wider human rights, took hold in a new generation of Iranian women.

But even during the period when the country's women were actively encouraged to participate, conservative elements of the regime were working to silence them.

With the birth of the One Million Signature campaign, set up by veteran women's rights activists in 2006, a year after the election of Ahmadinejad for the first time, the scene was set for a confrontation.

And while the campaign was successful in forcing the temporary shelving of Ahmadinejad's own new family protection law, which would have made polygamy easier for men and divorce more difficult for women, the emerging power of women activists, who became leaders of the street protests against the 2009 election result, set them on a collision course with the increasingly hardline regime.

"I think part of the reason there has been so much focus on women's rights since the election is the important role women had in the protests [in 2009]," says Maryam Namazie of the international support group Iran Solidarity. "They were at the very forefront, leading the chanting of the slogans. It is also a fact that women's rights are very much the target of this government."

If the face of that activism went largely unnoticed in the international media before the 2009 election protests, confined to the figure of Shirin Ebadi, the violent sweeping up of those protests catapulted a wider group of women to global attention, both as prisoners of conscience and campaigners on an international stage.

This was partly due to the Neda effect, which drew attention to the role of women activists after Neda Agha Soltan was gunned down, with her death, recorded on video and viewed around the world.

But if that event created a climate of intense interest in the often young women protesters, the response of the Ahmadinejad regime in clamping down on female campaigners drew even more attention.

A final component is the global attention paid to the stoning sentence delivered against Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, which has served to underline what the women activists had long been saying about the broader attempt to dismantle women's rights.

Another prominent case is that of Shadi Sadr, who ran Rahai, a women's legal advice centre, campaigning against stoning and acted as defence lawyer for Nazar Ahari.

Arrested in July last year walking to Tehran University, where she had been planning to attend the Friday prayers led by the reformist former president Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Shadi Sadr was bundled into an unmarked car and taken to Evin prison. Here she was held in solitary confinement and interrogated about other women's rights activists and the election, before being informed that she would be charged with endangering national security by causing riots.

In court, she was named as a leader of a women's rights movement accused of attempting to overthrow the Islamic republic. Shadi Sadr fled to Turkey two days later.

Describing her attempts to defend Nazar Ahari last week, Shadi Sadr said: "I was never given the permission to meet Shiva [Nazar Ahari] until the day I myself was arrested and, ironically, taken to the same cell Shiva was kept in until the day before I was taken in.

"On the wall of the cell she had written her stories and the charges she thought she was facing. Can you imagine that? The lawyer and her client both kept in one cell within a day? I was not allowed to meet her to hear what she had to say in her defence but that day I read it all on a cell wall.

"Shiva's arrest and especially charging her with muharebeh, which is punishable by death, is a clear message to all women's rights activists in Iran and the message is that they face execution if they continue."

The fate of Shadi Sadr, Shiva Nazar Ahari and Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh since 2009 is deeply instructive. Their cases, as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre (IHRDC) argued last month in a report entitled "Silencing the Women's Rights Movement in Iran", have been used to attempt to dismantle the women's rights movement, and to cow it into silence under the cover of national security concerns.

That has included claims of links with "terrorism", as in Nazar Ahari's case, or collaboration with foreign countries, which was the explicit claim made by the Iranian authorities last year when they identified the women's rights movement as being one of six groups behind an attempted "velvet revolution".

Whether the regime really believes that or not, the aim since then, says Parisa Kakaee, a veteran women's rights activist quoted in the IHRDC report, is to present women activists with three options: "to become inactive, to go to prison or to leave the country".

There is no indication that the campaign against women activists is letting up. Last month it was the turn of Nasrin Sotoudeh, 45, an outspoken lawyer and colleague of Shirin Ebadi who has defended a number of opposition activists and protesters. A member of the One Million Signatures campaign, she had been threatened by intelligence service officials that she would be arrested if she continued representing Shirin Ebadi, who left Iran a day before the election for a conference in Spain and didn't return for fear of harassment.

Ebadi said of Sotoudeh's arrest: "The only reason she was arrested is because of her human rights activities, because of defending her clients without any fear. Since the election last summer, a new move of intimidating and putting pressures on lawyers and especially women lawyers has emerged.

"Many have been forced to leave Iran and some are in jail. In this situation, Sotoudeh was one of the very few lawyers and women's rights activists who was still working in Iran."

Ebadi is certain why the present Iranian regime is so afraid of women. In an article in the Guardian, she declared: "Mark my words, it will be women who bring democracy to Iran."

That socially potent coincidence of women's rights and democratic reform is something Ahmadinejad and his supporters are determined should not be permitted to arise.

Iran's regime has also targeted foreign women in high-profile cases.

It had been hoped that US citizen Sarah Shourd would be releasedcorrect to mark the end of Ramadan, but she remains in custody. Shourd is one of three American hikers who crossed into Iran from Iraq's northern Kurdish region in July 2009.

Iran has threatened to put Shourd and her two male companions on trial for spying. Their families say they were hiking in the largely peaceful region of Iraq and that, if they did cross the border, it was accidental.

Clotilde Reiss, a French teaching assistant, was released earlier this year after being initially accused, like Shourd and her companions, of espionage. Reiss was arrested during the mass protests in 2009, when she was 24, and given two five-year jail sentences. Two Iranian men tried on the same day were hanged.

Found to have attended a demonstration and sent photographs of Iran to contacts at home, Reiss was put on trial with more than 100 others accused of trying to topple the regime and spent a month and a half in Evin prison before she was freed on bail and transferred to the French embassy.

A letter from the Iranian government appearing on opposition web sites orders the media to refrain from reporting on two defeated presidential candidates, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, as well as former President Mohammad Khatami. -db The New York Times August 25, 2010 By William Yong and Robert F. Worth TEHRAN — In a further clampdown [...]

Iranian media have been prohibited from mentioning opposition leaders, including former president Mohammad Khatami, under a purported media directive that would further strengthen the government’s grip over the remaining news outlets.



Iran - Mohammad Khatami - Middle East - Government - Mir-Hossein Mousavi

Reports: Iran bars local coverage of opposition DUBAI, United Arab Emirates ? Iranian media have been prohibited from mentioning opposition leaders, including former President Mohammad Khatami, under a purported media directive that would further strengthen the government’s grip over the remaining news outlets. The document, which has appeared this week on pro-reform websites, requires Iranian newspapers and ... Read this article on Gaea Times at : Iranian media banned from coverage of opposition leaders, says pro-reform websites.

Iranian media have been prohibited from mentioning opposition leaders, including former President Mohammad Khatami, under a purported media directive that would further strengthen the government's grip over the remaining news outlets.

Iranian media have been prohibited from mentioning opposition leaders, including former President Mohammad Khatami, under a purported media directive that would further strengthen the government's grip over the remaining news outlets.



Iran - Mohammad Khatami - Middle East - President of the United States - Mir-Hossein Mousavi

Iranian media have been prohibited from mentioning opposition leaders, including former President Mohammad Khatami, under a purported media directive that would further strengthen the government's grip over the remaining news outlets.



Iran - Mohammad Khatami - Middle East - President of the United States - Mir-Hossein Mousavi

Iranian media have been prohibited from mentioning opposition leaders, including former President Mohammad Khatami, under a purported media directive that would further strengthen the government's grip over the remaining news outlets.

Some time ago in April 2006, in what it seems were different times, then British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw remarked that a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran over its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons under the cloak of a nuclear energy program was “completely nuts”. That remark is widely regarded as the final ‘straw’ that facilitated his removal in a later cabinet reshuffle at the insistence of the Bush administration. Yet, it was a rare moment of honesty and wisdom from an experienced member of the foreign policy elite. Straw had driven a negotiation round with Iran outside of the realm of the Bush administration and in doing so championed an alternative to the polarized positions that had come to characterise the Iranian-American standoff on the Iran’s nuclear ambitions. 

Such diplomatic gestures, though well intentioned, will fail in the future as they have in the past and are continuing to do so in the present. Why? Because Iran has its sights set on gaining full mastery of the nuclear cycle, not on a deal (no matter how generous it seems) involving a compromise over enriched uranium from a third party nor anything other than full independence in the nuclear process.

Iran has continually played the compromise game in a characteristic brinkmanship strategy to scatter attention and play for time, before withdrawing and continuing on its pre-ordained path. Negotiators therefore proceed, and have proceeded, with the false assumption that Iran wishes to negotiate. 

Similarly, the posture of the Bush administration (and the bulk of the international community) made it continually clear that there was no compromise on its insistence that Iran must not possess full, independent mastery over the nuclear cycle. When both sides begin a negotiation process with incompatible demands, and proceed to maintain those incompatibilities, either a conflict or a reappraisal of position from one or both parties is the inevitable eventuality. In this case, America, Israel and the international community must learn to live with a nuclear Iran, as the alternative – attacking it to remove its nuclear program – is much less palatable.

The quest to find a mutually acceptable way for the international community, most vocally America, to tolerate the reality of the Iran having a nuclear programme dates back to 2003 when the EU-3 (Britain, Germany and France) collectively pursued a diplomatic solution to the issue. Faced with American insistence that the Iran was not to be trusted with enriching uranium due to the possibility that this could be used to build nuclear weapons, and the general climate internationally considering the Bush doctrine and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, there were genuine concerns that a major regional incident would unfold including a possible preventive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities by either Israel, America or both in tandem. After all, this had happened before in 1981 when Israel secretly bombed a French-built Iraqi nuclear plant over fears that Iraq might use it for a nuclear weapons program.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s arrival as Iranian president in 2005 presented a major problem for the negotiation process. The overt international mistrust in Iran and its intentions, developed over 25 years of witnessing rogue behaviour and state support for terrorism, had been downplayed (though certainly not forgotten) during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency. Ahmadinejad’s arrival coincided with a resurgence in suspicion of Iran due chiefly to the belligerent posture of the new president and his government. His actions provoke opposition often by default, particularly regarding the perceived ‘personality’ of Iran internationally, in much the same way as President George W Bush did of America amongst nations opposed to his foreign policy posture as he polarised friends and allies alike. The result of this dynamic has been to reinforce stereotypical attitudes and fears over Iran’s character that had somewhat abated, or were at the very least open to interpretation, during Khatami’s presidency. One example that can be attributed to Ahmadinejad personally is the resurgence of an openly hostile position towards Israel together with overt holocaust revisionism, harking back to the mantra of the revolutionary father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Imam Khomeini.

The EU-3 process failed to reach a conclusive deal, though it did have some success in stalling the Iranian programme and providing time for a future deal to be worked out. A change of administration in America, together with a highly publicised promise delivered personally by the president via video message to ‘reach out a hand’ to Iran, brought America into direct involvement in the successor P5+1 negotiations which included the original EU-3, China, Russia and America. This was a landmark considering that there have been no direct official negotiations between America and Iran for almost 30 years. Despite this, no deal with any realistic chance of long term success looks likely to be made. 

Why? The international order as we have come to know it and the Islamic Republic of Iran are incompatible. This is the inescapable fact of international politics that no sugar coating or talk of potential reformist leadership in Iran can mask. Iran will continue to enrich uranium, and continue to generally do what it likes in spite of international diplomatic rambling, much as it has done since 1979. It is not impossible that some deal will be fashioned, but if so, it is highly unlikely that it will serve as anything more than another stalling move in a larger political game by Iran in which all roads lead, and always have led, to full and independent mastery of the nuclear cycle.

Ahmadinejad recently noted that America under President Obama had not changed from the America of George W Bush in its foreign policy as applied to the middle east. Obama has stalled on closing Guantanamo Bay despite promising to do so, has not altered the American refusal to countenance a truly independent Iranian ‘civilian’ nuclear program, and he has not changed course in Afghanistan or Iraq. Similarly, support for Israel, the frequent demon in Iranian domestic discourse regarding America, has been retained (though with some qualifications). The friendly appearance and conciliatory rhetoric of the Obama administration, the Nobel Peace Prize award, and its refusal to use the term ‘war on terror’, do not detract from the reality that regarding foreign policy towards the middle east, nothing of substance has indeed changed. The fact that arguably the world’s most notorious ‘elected’ statesman has pointed towards this elephant in the room does not mean that it should be ignored. America may have not changed much recently as Ahmadinejad laments; but then again, neither has Iran.

The Islamic Republic of Iran owes its existence to its identity as a reaction against the western way of life and of doing business. To come to a conciliation with the international community, spearheaded by the American insistence that Iran must never have full mastery of the nuclear cycle is in essence dismantling the foundations and the pride of the regime. From its inception it was a lone actor, surviving in spite of the uproar within the international community over the 1979 hostage crisis and a gruelling war with Iraq, which it did not start. In short, it has a siege mentality soldered into its psyche. 

Iran has always been a nation that despite different manifestations in its internal shape and character has aspired to a greater stature internationally, or at the very least regional predominance. For example, the Shah of Iran whose rule was brought to an end by the 1979 revolution that created the Islamic Republic of Iran, had harboured grand designs for Iran as the premier nation of the middle east and the Persian Gulf from early in his reign. This vision, although resisted by Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy was shared by later American administrations, particularly the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations which generously armed Iran with advanced weaponry and aircraft in the mid-1970s at levels dwarfing its regional peers, including Israel, to enable it to transition from a client state to a security exporter. The current regime is in this sense, no different to the Shah, with the significant caveat that the regional and global role Iran was to play under the Shah was largely in line with western desires, while the role envisioned of the Islamic Republic is perceived as deeply antagonistic at best.

Put simply, the Islamic Republic of Iran does not consider itself the pariah state the international community, especially America, sees it as. It views itself as an ambassador for a non-western way of life, free of a perceived American global hegemony. It additionally is imbued with an incredibly adversarial and over-simplified view of the world, especially of America and Israel, another legacy of Khomeini, in which everything tends to be reduced to notions of good and evil.

Fast forward to the present day, supposedly a new era in international politics, inspired by a multilateral and diplomatic American administration, led by a man who appears in every sense to be the opposite of George W Bush, Barack Obama. The problem of course is, Iran. That ever present thorn on so many a president’s foot, is in danger of revealing Obama as another thinly veiled president of ‘more of the same’ when it comes to foreign policy. It is an often observed trend in international politics, particularly American politics, that foreign policy rarely changes. Rather it slowly evolves. President Truman famously declared that he saw foreign policy as residing above the partisan divide. In American politics and the politics of national security, his words have indeed proven largely accurate, and Iran is a valid case to that effect.

Obama has inherited a foreign policy momentum in the middle east that he has chosen to see through, rather than halt. There have been changes in language and posture, such as the careful jettisoning of the term ‘war on terror’, yet the general thrust of the Bush legacy in the region remains intact. Nowhere is this more visible than in the Iran case. It was highly doubtful even to the most faithful in the change camp that Obama would drastically re-appraise the Iraq and Afghanistan situations due to the fact that the situation on the ground in both theatres was far from ‘mission accomplished’, and in any case Congress seems to be doing that for him as its revisionism increases and its fiscal reticence increases. But in the case of Iran, Obama made visible signs that he was prepared to listen, to ‘reach out a hand’, towards Iran. This constituted a clear and incontrovertible gesture toward a 180 degree turn in policy. This was a rare occurrence, which will certainly go down in history as an early sign of naiveté and perhaps of arrogance.

As Iran marches on with its nuclear program, with any possibility of domestic revisionism dying when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ‘triumphed’ in the allegedly rigged election of 2009, Obama has reverted to the familiar constant left in place prior to his arrival in the Whitehouse of keeping the option to attack Iran ‘on the table’, as confirmed recently by a high level official. It begs the question of what exactly Obama expected the Iranian leadership to talk to him about when he reached out his hand? After all, he has always maintained the precondition that Iran must negotiate on its nuclear program (a Bush leftover). Yet, it is clear that this insistence is the very factor that has rallied Iran, in another episode in its now famous belligerence towards America.

Iran will never negotiate on the independence of its nuclear program, something that pre-dates Ahmadinejad’s reign and has been a steady goal of the regime. What is less widely known is that whilst Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, was talking of embracing the west in a ‘dialogue of civilisations’ and appearing to be a reformist character, Iran was engaged in a full-scale, clandestine nuclear program that reached as far back as the 1980s. With that in mind, it is worth noting that nuclear proliferation is an all around winner when viewed within the distorted logic of middle eastern politics. Firstly it provides much needed deterrence from attack from a nuclear-armed Israel and from the ‘Great Satan’ itself, America. Secondly, it provides additional strength for the faltering clerical regime, focusing the domestic discourse on the embattled and besieged nation of Iran and redirecting sympathy and loyalty to the leadership. It is via a combination of these two factors that the solution-less and reciprocal logic of the entire situation becomes clear. In this case, change rather than continuity is looking increasingly unlikely in Washington despite the supposed presence of ‘change’ in the White House itself.

The stark truth is that the international community, and America, simply must accept Iran’s nuclear program. This is not a desirable admission, nor is it a triumph for anyone, including the Iranians themselves who would presumably more happily receive the funds spent on their own faltering economy and increasingly dire social situation. Yet, it must be seen within the deterrence paradigm, and as such, no realistic threat to anyone. If we are to accept that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a rational actor wishing to survive and prosper, then we must accept that it is fully aware that using its nuclear arsenal or placing a bomb into the hands of a terrorist group such as Hezbollah or Hamas would be national suicide at worst and suicide for the regime itself at best. Its alleged proliferation is therefore a non-issue outside of standard international concerns when a country goes nuclear. 

The alternative, when viewed through the increasingly Bush-like Obama (when it comes to Iran) is to attack Iran and open up pandora’s box in the middle east. Something that is potentially so toxic that talk of World War III is surely not an exaggeration. Israel must continue to be restrained from launching an offensive against Iran, for the same reasons. Additionally, attacking Iran would put the domestic reform movement in Iran back twenty years as it would embolden support for the regime as the Iran-Iraq war did, as nationalism frequently trumps politics.

There is simply no middle ground to tread. Talk of containment and sanctions is unhelpful and tiresome in this case. Iran has been dealt every card in the containment deck short of direct force for over thirty years, and has prevailed intact, somehow. A middle ground cannot be possible when both sides insist on mutually exclusive postulates.

Iran is a rogue state in every sense of the word, but its history proves that it is also a rational actor in international politics. It must also be stated for factual purposes that neither the Islamic Republic of Iran, nor the Shah’s Iran before it ever attacked another nation. Consequently, there are only two options on the table: either to continue strangling Iran from a distance, standing tall and hoping that its internal organic political movement will enlighten or revolutionise the stale, corrupt clerical regime or, secondly, initiate the end of the Iranian nuclear program by force (most probably outside the bounds of international law). This option involves unleashing potential hell on the region that would make the current fallout from the war on terror look like a picnic. One would hope that the American military is genuinely too fatigued (or perhaps too sensible?) to genuinely push for such a mission, the Obama administration has learned the lessons of miscalculation and arrogance in foreign policy from its predecessor, and that the Israelis don’t take the initiative and do something they will regret as recent news reports suggest they are considering at a high level of urgency.

Therefore, in every sense of the word and for every sensible reason ‘on the table’, attacking Iran in any sense, at any time, remains completely nuts.

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Iran and the United States: time to engage

 

Obama's New Map

As he assumes leadership of this freaked-out world, the success of our new president's foreign policy — and presidency — will depend on the thinking he does inside the box.

By Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, March 2009, pp. 53-54.

For roughly the past quarter century, America has run the world using the following two levers: its massive consumption rate and its willingness to deploy military forces around the planet. Together these two drivers facilitated the rise of many new great powers by enabling their export-fueled growth and obviating any need for them to engage in distracting military buildups or overseas interventions.

That U. S. grand strategy has essentially run its course, having proven both amazingly successful (the death of great-power war in East Asia) and extremely exhausting (our crippling debt overhang).

As President Obama renegotiates America's role in this world that we created, four potential flash-cum-bang points stand out for the year ahead.

Flash Point No. 1

First, and most obviously, is the second global economic summit in April to deal with the world's ongoing financial crisis. With the EU and Japan accompanying us into recession and our economy unlikely to turn any corner until early 2010, China's Keynesian role as globalization's "spend to save" stimulant is of critical importance, meaning that China today plays the same role vis-à-vis America that we played to imperial Great Britain at the end of World War II: The imperial power needs a bailout, and the rising power has the cash. As a rule, the price for such cooperation is steep — to wit, America got to call most of the shots in the resulting Bretton Woods financial order.

So what does China want? It wants to graduate from the kiddie table that is the expanded G20 crew of emerging economies and gain a seat at the more exclusive G8, where actual heads of state meet. If Obama is serious about his "team of rivals" philosophy, he'd do well to acquiesce, even to the point of permanently expanding the G8 to include the adjunct dozen.

But here's the tough compromise that may hold up this much-needed expansion: The EU seems determined to get some sort of global securities-and-exchange commission to regulate intermarket financial flows in the future — in effect, viewing the current global crash as Washington once did Wall Street's 1929 collapse. As far as emerging markets are concerned, that's going to feel suspiciously constraining; having just achieved some wealth, the rising East and South now face the West's desire to regulate crucial investment flows so as to smooth out an inevitable global business cycle. Which is like wanting to go all the way on the first date — that trust simply does not yet exist in the system.

Obama's balancing act here is difficult. No one wants to derail the emergence of a global middle class, the bulk of which will be found overwhelmingly in emerging markets in coming years, but globalization's periodic panics have clearly grown more frequent and more volatile. Obama must ask China to grow up very fast and assume a lot more leadership (read: exposure to monetary risk), meaning his "fair trade" agenda must inevitably yield to Beijing's definition — and, by extension, New Delhi's and Brasília's — of a fair deal for its still-impoverished masses.

Flash Point No. 2

Flash point No. 2 will be the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, which took on more urgency after Pakistani militants tried to trigger a diversionary war with India by launching the frighteningly effective mini-invasion of downtown Mumbai.

Washington's national-security community is wrapping up a comprehensive strategy review, much like it did on Iraq a couple of years ago, and this time the logic of regionalizing the solution damn well better prevail. If the Obama administration displays an inkling of Bush-Cheney's Great Gamesmanship, then say goodbye to the "good war," because the Hindu Kush is where bankrupt empires go for slaughter.

If Obama is smart enough to socialize the problem beyond NATO (because it's truly beyond NATO in every sense of the word), then we're into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's roster of member states and observers. You know that old bit about crazy in your bedroom versus crazy on my front lawn? Well, this is their front lawn.

Besides India's hard-earned seat at the table, China must be included in some high-viz capacity (Britain's PM Gordon Brown recently floated the notion of Chinese peacekeepers joining the fray) and so must nuclear bad-boy Iran (more on that below). Hell, we should also rehabilitate the Russians, if Obama is clever enough to exploit the situation to defuse recent tensions over Moscow's August smackdown of Georgia.

Remember: This insolvent Leviathan needs some immediate credit-default swaps (what we called "burden sharing" in the Before Time) in both the financial and security realms, so don't be surprised to see both great-power dances (the mega-stimulus package and the new military strategy) either succeed or fail in concert. The era of "separate lanes" is over in American grand strategy.

Flash Points No. 3 and 4

The next two potential flash points are equally intertwined: No. 3, the presidential election in Iran, and No. 4, the question of Obama's follow-through on Bush's August deal to deploy missile-defense facilities in Eastern Europe — ostensibly to protect NATO from Iranian missiles. (Feeling out of the loop on ancient Polish-Persian hatred? You're not alone.)

If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad manages to win reelection (and yes, Israel's Gaza adventure strengthens his hand), it'll signal that the Supreme Leader isn't looking for any "Nixon goes to China" overtures to rescue its moribund economy with Western investments and technology. Such a dead end would complicate any future U. S. cooperation with India and China on either global finance or Afghani-Pakistan, because both states need long-term access to Iran's energy as their own domestic demand grows. It would also make it near impossible for Obama to finesse the missile-shield issue (i.e., indefinitely delayed until "further testing"), thus further antagonizing Moscow when Putin's already in a pissy mood and looking to test our young leader.

If Ahmadinejad is toppled by either the moderate former president Mohammad Khatami or the technocratic Tehran mayor, Mohammad Qalibaf, then Iran is definitely back in play, giving Obama plenty more wiggle room elsewhere, but only if he and Hillary Clinton can keep a lid on Israel's hard-line factions, which seem intent on taking out Iran's nuclear facilities preemptively. (Such strikes won't succeed, but they would trigger Iran's hard-line retrenchment, no matter which candidate prevails.) To that end, when the Obama camp coolly floats the notion of extending America's nuclear umbrella over Israel and — implicitly — any friendly neighboring Arab state that desires it, the former junior senator from Illinois is breaking out the big-boy voice of the world's sole military superpower.

That's the cluster of strategic issues that either facilitates or foils Obama's first year as leader of the freaked-out world. Everything else waits on this unscrambled Rubik's Cube, unless Kim Jong Il decides that he's so lonely that he wants to pop off another nuke to get back on Washington's radar.

And in the end, everything depends on how many new frenemies Obama is willing to add to his great-power Facebook. If our new president decides that America is still stuck with the same old friends we've always had, then he will quickly find himself as boxed in as George W. Bush was at the end of his second term and as impotent as Jimmy Carter was at the end of his only term.

The worst thing Obama can do coming out of the gate is attempt to demonize any of these rising powers with doofus labels (e.g., axis of evil/diesel, league of autocracies) or to simultaneously "contain" all their regional ambitions. Trust me, if they're not a significant part of the solution, they'll invariably constitute the insoluble heart of the problem.

Thomas P. M. Barnett is a contributing editor and best-selling author whose new book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush (G. P. Putnam's Sons), is being published this month. 

Abdollah Nouri, the former interior minister during Mohammad Khatami's administration, in an Iftar ceremony hosted a great number of Green leaders and activist, reformists as well as senior and well-known political activists and intellectuals.

0955 GMT: Truce Over? So what is happening less than 48 hours after President Ahmadinejad and Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani supposedly reconciled with. ... In the continuing tale of how Iranian authorities are trying to shut down news, The Guardian of London follows up yesterday's revelations that the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has issued an order to newspapers to avoid all mention and images of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Mohammad Khatami: ...

Security officials have considerations about publishing news, photos and speeches of Mr Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohammad Khatami, therefore according to the clause 2 of the article 5 of the press code publishing news, ...

 

Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Your Second Term, Secure Your Legacy, And, Oh Yeah, Create a Future Worth Living

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

 

Esquire, February 2005, pp. 90-93-128-29.

 

So you say you have no concern for your legacy. That some historian eighty years from now will figure out if you were a good president or not. Fair enough, but let's review so far. Your big-bang strategy to reform the Middle East took down Saddam, which was good; you've completely screwed up the Iraq occupation, which is bad; and now you don't seem to know exactly where you're going, which is not so great. This brings me to the bad news. The two players with the greatest potential for hog-tying your second term and derailing your big-bang strategy don't even live in the Middle East. Instead, they're located on little islands of unreality much like Washington, D. C.: Taiwan and North Korea. When either Taipei or Pyongyang decide to sneeze, it's gonna be your legacy that catches a cold, and here's why: Either country can effectively pull all your attention away from the Middle East while simultaneously torpedoing the most important strategic relationship America has right now. Yeah, I'm talking about China, a country your old man knows a thing or two about (hint, hint), even if the neocons don't have a clue. Your posse rode into town four years ago convinced that China was the rising military threat to America, only to be proven wrong by bin Laden on 9/11. Enough said.

3 SIMPLE STEPS: Iran, you can have the bomb, but you must recognize Israel. Next, China. Let's be partners. Sorry, Taiwan, the defense guarantee's got to go. We've got bigger fish to fry. Namely, Kim Jong Il.

What I'm here to tell you is this: You can achieve the fabled Middle East peace, but only if you lay down an effective fire wall between that region and the two potential flash points that can still ignite East Asia and send this whole global economy up in flames in a heartbeat. China is the baby you can't throw out with the bathwater you've dubbed the "global war on terrorism." You lose China, you might just kill globalization, and if that happens, it won't be just a matter of what historians write eighty years from now; you'll spend the rest of your days wondering why the world thinks you personally destroyed the planet's best hope for ending war as we know it.

So here's the package you need to pursue: Co-opt Iran, lock in China, and take down North Korea. Let's get started, shall we?

Nixon Goes to Tehran

WORK WITH ME ON THIS ONE. Iran getting the bomb could be the best thing that's ever happened to the Middle East peace process.

Whoa! Don't put down the magazine before I've had a chance to explain.

Iran is the one country standing between you and peace in the Middle East. You can't solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without its say-so, because the mullahs are the biggest potential spoilers in the region. They fund the terrorist groups that can effectively veto peace efforts in both Jerusalem and Baghdad. Iran is the one regional power that can still menace the Gulf militarily. Everyone else there operates in Tehran's shadow.

You and I both know Nixon would have inevitably headed to Tehran by now, absent 9/11 and your subsequent Axis of Evil speech. The Shiite revolution is a spent force in that country, whose sullen majority pretends to obey the mullahs while they pretend to rule over a very young population that's frighteningly ambitious for a better life. We're looking at a very late-Brezhnev-type situation here, with the Gorby already on the scene in the person of reformist president Mohammad Khatami. His version of perestroika took one step forward and then ten steps back once we lumped him in with Saddam and Kim, but even though his preferred course of treatment is on hiatus, the political diagnosis remains the same for Iran.

I know, I know. If the mullahs are so weak and scared, then why do they reach so obviously for the bomb?

Look at it from their perspective, Mr. President. Those scary neocons just toppled regimes to Iran's right (Afghanistan) and left (Iraq), and our military pulled off both takedowns with ease. Moreover, your administration has demonstrated beyond all doubt that you don't fear leaving behind a god-awful mess in your war machine's wake. Frankly, you're as scary as Nixon was in his spookiest White House moments on Vietnam. All I'm saying is now's the time to cash in on that reputation with Iran.

And don't tell me we can't do that rapprochement thing with a hostile regime that supports international terrorism. If we could do it with the Evil Empire back in 1973, we can do it with the Axis of Evil's number two today.

Our offer should be both simple and bold. I would send James Baker, our last good secretary of state, to Tehran as your special envoy with the following message: "We know you're getting the bomb, and we know there isn't much we can do about it right now unless we're willing to go up-tempo right up the gut. But frankly, there's other fish we want to fry, so here's the deal: You can have the bomb, and we'll take you off the Axis of Evil list, plus we'll re-establish diplomatic ties and open up trade. But in exchange, not only will you bail us out on Iraq first and foremost by ending your support of the insurgency, you'll also cut off your sponsorship of Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli terrorist groups, help us bully Syria out of Lebanon, finally recognize Israel, and join us in guaranteeing the deal on a permanent Palestinian state. You want to be recognized as the regional player of note. We're prepared to do that. But that's the price tag. Pay it now or get ready to rumble."

This is a win-win for everybody. The ruling mullahs desire survival most of all, and once Iran opens up economically, its people will stop blaming them for all that's wrong with the country because they'll be too busy taking advantage of all that opportunity. Israel wins because Tel Aviv finally gets someone on the Muslim side who is big enough and scary enough to sit down with the "Little Devil" as a real nuclear equal but still willing to guarantee Israel's existence. I know, it might seem insane to Israel (especially the Likud party), but mutually assured destruction really works and, frankly, Mr. President, now's the time to use some of that political capital you've built up with Ariel Sharon.

No doubt some neocons will try to sell you on a military option in Iran, but don't pull that thread under any circumstances, because if you do, you'll find yourself having to go medieval across an "arc of crisis" stretching from Riyadh to Islamabad, and nobody's got cojones that big. Trust me, Afghanistan and Iraq alone are enough to tap Central Command and Special Operations Command.

I'm also aware that there are plenty of regional experts who'll tell you we've got to do this or that with Egypt or Saudi Arabia, but, frankly, neither of those regimes has shown the ability to do squat when it comes to forging a lasting Middle East peace. Iran's the key. Squeeze it now while it's scared--and while Arafat's still dead. America has played bad cop long enough with Iran. For crying out loud, Iranians are the only people in the Middle East who actually like us!

What's more, Iran is the gateway for bringing both India and China into the mix. Both countries have recently cut huge oil and gas deals with Tehran. You know you want India and China to feel secure about their energy flow, and you know Iran's simply too big a player on both counts for either country to pass up. Plus, India considers itself both a major Gulf security player and Iran's natural mentor, while China's emerging alliance with Tehran (not to mention its ties with Pakistan) should be exploited for all it's worth. New Dehli and Beijing want to stabilize the Islamic arc of crisis as much as you do.

If detente with Iran secures Iraq to the south, then it's clear whomwe need to romance in the north on the issue of the Kurds--Tur-key. Yes, the role of the Kurds in Turkey is a long and complex tale, but who the hell else is going to step up to the plate on that one?

The price tag is not hard to dream up. You twist some arms in the European Union until they either fall off or Turkey's admission gets fast-tracked. If NATO won't come to our rescue in the Sunni triangle, it's the least Old Europe can do.

Speaking of the triangle, that stinker's going to remain ours for the long term, but with Israel and Palestine off the table and real cooperation from both Iran and Syria in clamping down on all those jihadists with a one-way ticket to paradise, we'll extinguish the dream of the Saddam Baathists who are still fighting hard by effectively killing Iraq as a unitary state. Eventually, Iraq's Sunni population will realize that it can either become the recognized master of the triangle and nothing else (the same narrowing solution we forced on the Serbs in the Balkans), or it can choose to live in the region's new West Bank, surviving on intifada for the rest of its days.

Lock in China at Today's Prices

TO UNDERSTAND CHINA TODAY, you have to remember what it was like for the United States back in the early years of the twentieth century. Here we were, this burgeoning economic powerhouse with a rising yet still relatively small military package, and all the old-school powers worried about us as an up-and-coming threat. While the European form of globalization predominated at that time, our upstart version ("We don't need no stinkin' empire!") would come to dominate the landscape by the century's midpoint, primarily because Europe decided to self-destruct all its empires via two "world" wars that in retrospect look like the European Union's versions of the American Civil War.

China is the United States of the early twenty-first century: rising like crazy, but not really a threat to anyone except small island nations off its coast. (God, I miss T. R. and the Rough Riders.) Hu Jintao, China's current president and party boss of the country's fourth generation of leaders, has tried to calm global fears by proposing his theory of Peacefully Rising China, a tune that, frankly, none of the Pentagon's hardcore neocons can carry.

Why? The far Right is still gunning for China, and precious Taiwan is its San Juan Hill. Nixon burned Taiwan's ass back in the early seventies when he effectively switched official recognition from Taipei to the mainland, so the price it demanded was the continued "defense guarantee" that said we'd always arm Taiwan to the teeth and rush to its rescue whenever China unleashed its million-man swim of an invasion.

That promise is still on the books, like some blue law from a bygone era. Does anyone seriously think we'd sacrifice tens of thousands of American troops to stop China from reabsorbing Taiwan?

I know, I know. China's still "communist" (like I still have a full head of hair if the lighting's just so), whereas Taiwan is a lonely bastion of democracy in an otherwise . . . uh . . . increasingly democratic Asia. So even though the rest of Asia, including Japan, is being rapidly sucked into China's economic undertow (as "running dogs of capitalism" go, China's a greyhound), somehow the sacredness of Taiwan's self-perceived "independence" from China is worth torching the global economy over? Does that strike anybody as slightly nuts?

Here's the weirdest part: China's been clearly signaling for years that it's perfectly willing to accept the status quo, basically guaranteeing Taiwan's continued existence, so long as Taipei's government maintains the appearance of remaining open to the possibility of rejoining the mainland someday.

Now I know people say you don't read books, Mr. President, but being a Southerner, you know something about the Civil War. Imagine if Jefferson Davis and the leftovers of the Confederacy had slipped away to Cuba in 1865 to set up their alternative, nose-thumbing version of America on that island. Then fast-forward to, say, 1905 and imagine how much the U. S. would have tolerated some distant, imperial power like England telling us what we could or could not do vis-a-vis this loser sitting just off our shore. Imagine where old Teddy Roosevelt would have told the Brits they could shove their defense guarantee.

My point is this: In a generation's time, China will dominate the global economy just as much as the United States does today. (Don't worry, we'll be co-dominatrices.) The only way to stop that is to kill this era's version of globalization--something I worry about those neocons actually being stupid enough to do as part of their fanciful pursuit of global "hegemony." That nasty, far poorer future is not the one I want to leave behind for my kids, and I expect you feel the same about yours. China won't go down alone; it'll take most of the advanced global economy with it. So on this one, let's go with those vaunted American interests I keep hearing about and look out for number one.

This may seem a back-burner issue, but there's credible talk of Taipei doing something provocative like adding the word Taiwan in parentheses behind its official name, the Republic of China. That may not seem like much to us, but Beijing's reluctant hand may be forced by this act. Seems crazy, doesn't it?

Again, how much of the global economy--how many American lives--are you prepared to sacrifice on your watch just so Taiwan can rejoice in this moment of self-actualization?

I vote for zero. Zip. Nada.

Take America's defense guarantee to Taiwan off the table and do it now, before some irrational politician in Taipei decides he's ready to start a war between two nuclear powers. Trust me, you'd be doing Taiwan a favor, because it's my guess that our defense guarantee would evaporate the moment any Taiwan Straits crisis actually boiled over, leaving Taipei severely embarrassed and Beijing feeling excessively emboldened.

Let's lock in a strategic alliance with rising China at today's prices, because it's got nowhere to go but up over the coming years. Buying into this relationship now is like stealing Alaska from the czars for pennies on the dollar; it'll never be this cheap again.

More to the point, preemptively declaring a permanent truce in the Taiwan Straits is the quid we offer for Beijing's quo in the solution set that really matters in East Asia today: the reunification of Korea following Kim Jong Il's removal from power.

Kill Kim: Volumes 1, 2 & 3

NOW WE GET TO THE GOOD PART. The Koreas issue is the tailbone of the cold war: completely useless, but it can still plunge you into a world of pain if middle-aged Asia slips and falls on it. North Korea is the evil twin, separated at birth, and yet, because it's still joined at the hip with its sibling, its better half grows ever more irrationally distraught as time passes, contemplating the inevitable invasive surgery that lies ahead.

So while it might seem at first glance like a job for Team America: World Police, you'll want something less South Park in its comic simplicity and a little more

Tarantinoesque in its B-movie grandeur. That's right, we need a Deadly Viper Assassination Squad to make Kim an offer he can't refuse.

Kim Jong Il's checked all the boxes: He'll sell or buy any weapons of mass destruction he can get his hands on, he's engaged in bizarre acts of terrorism against South Korea, and he maintains his amazingly cruel regime through the wholesale export of both narcotics and counterfeit American currency. Is he crazy? He once kidnapped two of South Korea's biggest movie stars and held them hostage in his own personal DreamWorks studio. But if that doesn't do it for you, then try this one on for size: The Kim-induced famine of the late 1990s killed as many as two million North Koreans. If that doesn't get you a war-crimes trial in this day and age, then what the hell will?

Here's the squad we need to assemble: China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, plus Russia.

You just shook hands with China over Taiwan. Japan's there because both China and America are on the team and because it's got the most cash to finance the reconstruction. The Aussies and Kiwis are invited out of respect for their longtime security role in Asia, and the Russians are in because they might just run a pipeline to Japan through the Korean peninsula when it's all said and done. As for the wobbly South Koreans, just smack 'em upside the head and tell them it's strictly business--nothing personal.

Those are the Seven Samurai that walk into Kim Jong Il's palace and offer him three possible endings to this thriller: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Version #1 (Good) is the Baby Doc Duvalier package. Keep your money, keep your women, keep your entourage, keep it all . . . just somewhere else. China can offer Kim a fabulous forbidden city somewhere in Inner Mongolia. Hell, promise this Cecil B. Demented a five-picture deal and tell him Steven Spielberg wants to do lunch.

If he doesn't bite on that one, then show Kim Version #2 (Bad). He goes on trial in the Hague for years on end, paraded around like the freak job he is, and once he's thoroughly stripped of what passes for his "majesty," we'll let him rot in a jail cell for the rest of his days.

Version #3 (Ugly) is delivered sotto voce. Just have Paul Wolfowitz show Kim the "six-month reconstruction plan" the Pentagon neocons drew up for the postwar occupation. If he thinks you're bluffing, then instruct Wolfie to slip him some of those morgue shots of Uday and Qusay looking all stitched up like a pair of Frankensteins. Kim'll get the hint. Your administration has proven that you're willing to wage war with almost no concern for the resulting VIP body count, the subsequently incompetent occupation, or the inevitable political uproar back home. I say when you've got it, flaunt it.

If it comes to trigger-pulling, can we pull it off? You know we can, and even here we've got a choice between the stripped-down package (i.e., just kill Kim) and the tricked-up models (e.g., smash-and-grab WMD, decapitating command-and-control, pounding ground forces). North Korea's military will prove less brittle than Saddam's Republican Guard but hardly invulnerable. Plus, on this one the local players will provide plenty of boots on the ground (South Korea, China) and humanitarian aid (Japan) just to prevent refugees from flooding across their borders. Moreover, Kim's slim power base sits atop a Mafia-like criminal empire that features the usual "honor" among thieves, so bribing his fellow kleptocrats with golden parachutes is quite feasible. Finally, the postconflict investment flow will be heavy on this one, because there will be no insurgency, no jihad, no nothing, just a gulag's worth of political prisoners to set free.

But the truth is, it probably won't come to that simply because both you and the neocons have such a scary reputation that you can likely stare down Lil' Kim, so long as you've got China glaring at him disapprovingly over your shoulder. You know China would just as soon jettison Kim because he's a genuine nut and he's terrible for property values. So what you really need to offer the Chinese on the far side is something truly useful, and that something is an Asian NATO. That's right: Kim's tombstone should mark the spot where a NATO-like security alliance for East Asia is born.

If you terminate Taiwan's defense guarantee in order to bring Beijing to Kim's table, then you offer to kill all your plans for missile defense to get the Chinese to pull the chair out from under him. Star Wars has been the single worst boondoggle in the history of the Pentagon--nearly $100 billion wasted and not even Tang to show for it. By securing America's military alliance with China, Japan, and Korea, you not only kill the concept of great-power war in Asia for good, you've just ended Osama bin Laden's bid to pit East against West.

That's it. And you've got about ten months to get it all rolling, with maybe another twenty months to wrap most of it up. By the summer of 2007, your presidency and all the power you wield right now will begin to be severely discounted by politicians both at home and abroad.

Mr. President, I know you're committed to following through on what you've set in motion in the Middle East, and I know you're hell-bent to prove all the eggheads wrong about the possibility of democracy taking root there--and I like your certitude on both points. You're the just-do-it president. You react from your gut more than either your heart or your brains, and you know what? You're as big a gift from history as 9/11's wake-up call turned out to be--and almost equally hard for many Americans to swallow.

You believe that America will defeat global terrorism only if it is willing to transform the Middle East in the process, and I agree. But just as we had to make peace with the Soviets before we could "tear down that wall," your administration will have to make peace with Iran's mullahs before we can begin dismantling the many walls that still isolate that insular region from the global economy and the mutually assured dependence that defines its long-term stability and peace. The road to lasting security in both Jerusalem and Baghdad starts in Tehran, and ultimately it must run through Beijing as well.

You lock down Asia by putting a leash on Taiwan, inviting China into the copilot seat and shoving Kim underground, and you'll not only free up America's military resources for more-urgent tasks in the Middle East, you'll create a sense of strategic despair in the minds of bin Laden and Zarqawi that they'll never be able to overcome. Their dream is to split up the advancing core of globalization and stop its creeping embrace of their idealized Islamic world, which they know will be forever altered by that integration process. Their best strategic hope in this conflict is that some hostile great power will rise in the East to challenge the American-led West. You lock in China today, Mr. President, and you will corner and kill transnational terrorism tomorrow.

And not that you care, Mr. President, but there's your legacy.

[The President then speaks of the opposition "within the system", describing Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Mohammad Khatami but not naming them.] GALLOWAY: Are they still inside the system? AHMADINEJAD: Almost in the system. ...

Kourosh Ziabari - It's more than 8 years that the world's newspapers are filled with miscellaneous news, reports and commentaries concerning Iran's nuclear program. Controversy over Iran's nuclear program has spanned through two administrations in Iran: ex-President Mohammad Khatami's government and the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration. The term "Iran nuclear program" returns more than 6 million results in Google web search. Thousands of scholars, journalists, politicians and political pundits have made their own statement regarding this debatable subject.

Terminologically, Iran's nuclear program calls to mind the words holocaust, Israel, Zionism, Axis of Evil, George W. Bush, stretched hands and uranium enrichment. The world is watching the uninteresting continuation of confrontation over Iran's nuclear program and the opportunist journalists find this tedious charade the best subject to entertain their readers and enrich their portfolio.

Iran says that it needs enriched uranium to meet its energy demands and produce electricity. The United States and its European allies claim that Iran wants to produce nuclear weapons in order to launch a military strike against Israel. Israel, over the past 5 years, has been incessantly threatening Iran with a preemptive attack, warning that it would not allow Iran to achieve nuclear technology.

The United Nations Security Council, under the pressure of United States and its stalwart allies, has imposed 4 rounds of backbreaking financial sanctions against Iran to dissuade it from developing "nuclear weapons". Iranian officials have repeatedly rejected the claims that they're moving towards developing nuclear weapons and called the sanctions ineffective, valueless.

The forthright politician has compared the treatment of protesters in his country to that of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq
Read the exclusive Guardian interview with Mehdi Karroubi

Mehdi Karroubi, a former speaker of the Iranian parliament under the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, came fourth in last summer's election, in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected president after a disputed vote.

Known for his directness, the 73-year-old infuriated hardliners by alleging that male and female protesters were raped by their jailers in the crackdown on mass protests after the election.

When one hardline cleric called for Karroubi to be prosecuted for making the claim, he went further, saying some detainees had been tortured to death and comparing the treatment of prisoners with that at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Born in 1937 in Aligoudarz, a town in western Lorestan province, in south-west Iran, Kerroubi has been a fixture in Iranian politics since the 1979 Islamic revolution. His father was a cleric, and he studied theology in Qom before becoming a supporter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the early 1960s.

After Khomeini was arrested in 1963 and sent into exile, Karroubi was active in distributing Khomeini's open letters to government officials and spreading his teachings to the people.

Between 1963 and 1977, Karroubi was arrested several times and spent years in jail, including stints at the notorious Qasr and Evin prisons in Tehran.

During the protests against the Shah in 1978 and 79, Karroubi was in charge of the local committees that distributed food to protesters and strikers. After the Shah's overthrow, Karroubi was elected to the Iranian parliament.

During last year's election, he won the support of many young voters for his willingess to challenge the status quo, speaking openly about the need to revise the constitution to make it more democratic.

The most vociferous opposition figure since the 2009 election, Karroubi has dismissed Ahmadinejad's government as illegitimate and illegal, and has attacked state media for their one-sided coverage of political developments.

Karroubi's wife, Fatemeh, comes from a wealthy family from Aligoudarz. She has been a social activist herself, involved in women's issues. They have four children, all boys.

Exclusive: Former presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi tells Guardian US and British policy is a gift to Ahmadinejad regime
Profile: Mehdi Karroubi

Punitive international sanctions imposed on Iran have strengthened the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and assisted its post-election crackdown on the opposition Green movement, the leading reformist politician and former presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi has told the Guardian.

In his first interview with a British newspaper since widespread unrest erupted after Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election as president last June, Karroubi blamed the US and Britain for adopting counterproductive policies to combat Iran's suspect nuclear programme, describing sanctions as a gift to the Iranian regime.

"These sanctions have given an excuse to the Iranian government to suppress the opposition by blaming them for the unstable situation of the country," Karroubi said in emailed responses to the Guardian's questions.

Karroubi, 73, a former speaker of the Majlis (Iranian parliament) under the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, and a candidate in last year's election, said that isolating Iran would not bring democracy to the people.

"Look at Cuba and North Korea," he said. "Have sanctions brought democracy to their people? They have just made them more isolated and given them the opportunity to crack down on their opposition without bothering themselves about the international attention."

The UN security council agreed a new round of sanctions on Iran in June after the US and Britain, which believe Iran is secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons capability, obtained backing from Russia and China. The EU, and individual countries such as the US and Britain, subsequently imposed additional punitive measures.

The tougher action against Tehran followed Washington's rejection of a proposed deal, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, under which Iran would have handed over nearly half of its stock of low-enriched uranium in return for "safe" nuclear fuel supplies that could not be used in bomb-making.

Turkey and Brazil voted against the new UN sanctions, but today Brazil announced that it was reluctantly prepared to enforce them.

Mir Hossein Mousavi, who helped lead the protests following last summer's election, co-authored a public letter with Karroubi last week in which they condemned the sanctions while blaming Ahmadinejad's government for mishandling negotiations over Iran's nuclear programme.

"Sanctions have targeted the most vulnerable social classes of Iran including workers and farmers," the letter said.

Speaking to the Guardian, Karroubi said: "On the one hand, the government's mishandling of the economy has resulted in deep recession and increasing inflation inside the country, which has crippled the people of Iran and resulted in the closure of numerous factories. On the other hand, we have sanctions which are just strengthening the illegitimate government."

Karroubi, who was imprisoned before the Islamic revolution in 1979, said that despite widespread corruption, the Shah's regime treated its opponents less harshly than the current government, partly because the Shah was sensitive to international criticism.

"But because Iran is getting more isolated, more and more they [Ahmadinejad's government] are becoming indifferent to what the world is thinking about them," he said.

Last summer's unrest resulted in the killing, beating or arrest of hundreds of protesters who took to the streets convinced that Ahmadinejad, who is backed by Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, had stolen the election.

Hopes that the regime would call a fresh vote or might even collapse under the weight of public anger dissipated in clouds of teargas, officially organised pro-government counter-demonstrations, and often brutal repression.

Since then Iranians have suffered a widening crackdown on dissent and an increase in human rights abuses.

Yesterday the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, issued an appeal to Iran to honour its international treaty obligations to respect the civil and human rights of its citizens. She expressed concern about the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who was sentenced to death by stoning after being found guilty of adultery. In his interview with the Guardian, Karroubi condemned Ashtiani's sentence and said he was opposed to stoning in principle.

Karroubi said that since the election, his office has been sealed off and his newspaper, Etemad-e-Melli (the National Trust), closed down, while he was under informal house arrest. Wherever he went, he said, groups of government supporters, sometimes accompanied by plain-clothes basiji militiamen, followed him, placing whomever he met at risk of arrest.

Karroubi said he tried to keep up the opposition's political momentum by meeting Mousavi on a weekly basis, and they sometime issued statements together.

"In the last year, they [officials] have tried to suppress me in many ways," he said. "Once I was physically attacked, on the anniversary of the Islamic revolution, and my son Ali was arrested and severely tortured.

"During a recent visit I had to Qazvin province, they went further in attacking me and opened fire on my car and later raided my house."

Ayatollah Khamenei, the ultimate authority in Iran, has never attacked him or Mousavi by name but always referred to them as "leaders of sedition", a term that is now used routinely to describe opposition leaders. Last month, during a visit to the holy city of Qom, Karroubi was greeted by government supporters shouting "western stooge".

Despite having to call off protests in the face of the government crackdown, Karroubi said he believed the Green movement has not been defeated.

"It's no longer possible for the opposition movement to pour out en masse into the streets ... But we also do not think it's necessary any more to do this," he said.

The Green movement's message had already reached the world, he said. "People were out in the streets to inform the world of what is really happening inside Iran, and they succeeded in doing so. Now the world knows what is the problem in Iran and what the opposition movement is seeking."

The fact that the regime was still arresting activists and mounting show trials were an indication that the Green movement was still very much alive.

Karroubi said he still believed in the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic but not the current ruling system. "I should make it clear that we are a reformist movement, not a revolutionary one ... We are seeking nothing more than a free election [in accordance with] the current constitution."

Asked about criticism that the opposition has no clear leader and sometimes appeared divided, Karroubi said: "In my opinion, it's an advantage that no specific person is the leader. I think that the only reason the Green movement has not been stopped yet is because it doesn't have one leader or unified leadership. If it had, then by arresting that leader they could have controlled the whole movement."

Reaching out to ordinary people inside Iran remained the opposition's biggest problem; any newspaper that mentioned the Green movement would be immediately closed down, he said. "We are not even allowed to publish a funeral announcement at the moment."

The Guardian

The Widening Rift Among Iran's Clerics International Herald Tribune In every presidential election since 1980, including those of the impeached Abolhassan Bani-Sadr and the reformist Mohammad Khatami, senior clergy in Iran ... Music fails to chime with Islamic values, says Iran's supreme leaderThe Guardian Teaching of Music Incompatible with Islam in IranNews By The Second (blog) all 40 news articles »

Kourosh Ziabari - Global Research: It's more than 8 years that the world's newspapers are filled with miscellaneous news, reports and commentaries concerning Iran's nuclear program. Controversy over Iran's nuclear program has spanned through two administrations in Iran: ex-President Mohammad Khatami's government and the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration. The term "Iran nuclear program" returns more than 6 million results in Google web search. Thousands of scholars, journalists, politicians and political pundits have made their own statement regarding this debatable subject.

Terminologically, Iran's nuclear program calls to mind the words holocaust, Israel, Zionism, Axis of Evil, George W. Bush, stretched hands and uranium enrichment. The world is watching the uninteresting continuation of confrontation over Iran's nuclear program and the opportunist journalists find this tedious charade the best subject to entertain their readers and enrich their portfolio.

A summary of Monday's meeting between Mir Hossein Mousavi and former President Mohammad Khatami, from Khatami's website via Payvand: stressed that 1) firm.

The United States of America has joined the United Nations group calling itself the "Alliance of Civilizations." President Obama joined this group, when former Pres. G.W. Bush refused to do so in 2006.