. . . (Briefly about Iran's flawed but roughly accurate vote last June, read the the best done poll (pdf), written up in a Washington Post op-ed last June, and a recent analysis of multiple polls.) And so, doesn't it feel surreal when Hillary Clinton attacks Iran as drifting toward military dictatorship while sipping tea with King Abdullah, absolute monarch of Saudi Arabia, our leading puppet/ally in the Persian Gulf? Yeah, it does. But, more importantly, how does the ratcheted-up name-calling regime-change rhetoric (see the following article) help Iran, Iranians, or the cause of peace?
Hillary Talks Tough On Iran
Monday, 15 February 2010 7:09AM
CBS/AP
DOHA, Qatar -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday the Obama administration believes Iran is becoming a military dictatorship.
In remarks to Arab students at Carnegie Mellon's campus in Qatar, Clinton said the Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran appears to have gained so much power that it effectively is supplanting the government.
"Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship," she told the crowd.
Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank in Washington, told "Early Show" co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez on Monday that Secretary Clinton's assessment was accurate.
Iran is "no longer a theocracy, it's a thug-ocracy," quipped Haass . . .
(POLL preview) Which of these Middle Eastern nations do you think is a 'thug-ocracy'?
1. Iran
2. Saudi Arabia (U.S. protectorate)
3. (U.S.-occupied) Iraq
4. (NATO-occupied) Afghanistan
5. Egypt (recipient of $2 billion a year in U.S. foreign aid)
6. Hard to choose just one.
7. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
8. None of the above.
9. I'm not sure / I don't know.
I'm pretty good at predicting stuff (spot on last Friday about the Marjah non-event), and it seems to me inevitable that another round of in-fact mild sanctions will be imposed on Iran, no regime change will come close to occurring, Iran will continue to develop its nuclear power capacity as it feels it has the right to, and the U.S. will continue its harsh 'Iran is enemy No. 1' rhetoric.
What should concern peace-loving people is not that this new rhetoric means Barack Obama is preparing to start a third U.S. war in the Middle East, but that another three years of fear-stoking and name-calling by, across-the-board, all the Democratic Party top guns, leads inevitably to a bipartisan war when the Republican neocons return to power. Yeah, just like the war on Iraq, it will likely be the Republicans turning blistering talk into action. So White House Democrats having now worked themselves up into a furious level of anti-Iran talk is definitely not a good thing.
And the barebones of the nuke conflict, I'll remind everyone again, now is that Iran continues simply to ask for simultaneous exchange of its processed uranium for made-in-the-West fuel rods:
At a news conference in Tehran on Tuesday, reports said, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated that Iran was ready to suspend enrichment if it could exchange its low-enriched uranium stockpile for processed fuel rods from abroad. But he said the swap should be "simultaneous" - a demand already dismissed by the United States and its allies.
Us underlings, the citizens of the West, have never been told why this seemingly innocuous condition has been rejected.
P.S. Two interesting articles to check out.
1. Should U.S. Iran policy be regime change, when not even most of the failed rebellion/reform movement, Iran's Green Movement, wants that? Discussing that Green phenomenon and the June election, Paul Robinson (professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa) wrote last Friday:
As for Iran, research released last week by the World Public Opinion organization, based on an analysis of numerous pre- and post-election surveys, shows that whatever electoral fraud took place during the presidential election did not alter the result. Even if the official results might have exaggerated Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's lead, the Iranian president almost certainly did win more than 50 per cent of the vote. The vast majority of Iranians consider his election legitimate. The regime remains secure in power, and its president represents the will of its people far more than his opponents do.
In our enthusiasm to find others who appear to share our goals, we have allowed ourselves to be fooled into believing that anybody we dislike is by necessity illegitimate, that our enemy's enemy is our friend, and that anybody who talks the talk of democracy is a democrat. Our interests have suffered as a result, and so have those of our alleged allies. . . .
In the meantime, the mistaken belief that the Green revolution will soon bring the Iranian regime to its knees is encouraging many in the U.S. Congress to ramp up sanctions against Iran. With the regime about to fall, now is not the time to relax the pressure, the logic goes. The result, sadly, will be further diplomatic stalemate. The regime will most likely not fall, and any chance of serious engagement will be lost for a long time.
2. Ardeshir Ommani (co-founder of the American Iranian Friendship Committee, (AIFC)) yesterday examined the class nature of Iran's Green Movement:
Essentially, the social groupings within the Green Movement are heterogeneous in their class character, philosophical outlook, their views of the future mode of production and social relations, the nature of the foreign policy and the strategy of attaining state power. The amorphous "movement" consists of reactionary monarchist groups, the pro-U.S. terrorist organization of Mojahedin Khalgh, along with the conservative segment of Iran's national bourgeoisie and even some misguided left leaning individuals and organizations, connected to a small but vociferous section of the upper-middle class secular Iranians in various cities. This "movement" lacks a written set of philosophical and socio-economic objectives that the future members of this bloc can examine and express their consent and commitment to. The "movement" lacks a rational organizational form with an elementary chain of command. . . .
As the President of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), Trita Parsi along with his relative, Rouzbeh Parsi, in an article entitled "Iran's unhappy Anniversary" wrote in the Daily Beast, "There are elements around Mr. Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader who want to reclaim the revolution through a non-violent campaign within the framework of the current constitution." Then he continues, "There are also people within the movement who see an opportunity to do away with Iran's Islamic system as a whole." If we take Parsi's assertion seriously, there must have been leaders among the "reformists" who were ready to use armed struggle to seize power.
. . . A major shortcoming of the "movement" has been that it had no roots in the major toiling classes and among the Basij (militia) forces, which overwhelmingly come from working class background. During the entire eight-month period following the Presidential election in June 2008, not even one major work stoppage was declared in sympathy with the movement by the vast merchant class (bazaris) that is influential in the economic and political spheres the country so much depends on. The farmers, one third of the work force, were the solid supporters of Ahmadinejad and felt a great alienation between themselves and the well-to-do residents of northern Tehran, with their pricey real estate and foreign-made cars, whereas in the 1979 Revolution that overthrew the Shah, the shopkeepers, the merchants, and the landless farmers all played significant roles. Furthermore, no significant number of senior clerics joined the reform movement.
The "Green Movement" has remained an off-shoot of the petty-bourgeoisie, an upper-middle class urban population that by the nature of its work within the workforce is separated from the working class and farmers working on small plots of land throughout the country. . . . |
