Listening to the drums

October 12th, 2007

I’m keeping a close eye on the War Drums this month and next; the astrology is worrisome. Add that Dubby’s progressed chart has Mars and a flip-flopping Merc traveling his twelfth house … and you know how he is; at this point, his mood is about all that stands in Uncle Dick’s way.

Here is the latest on Iran, the in’s and out’s, the wrinkles — interesting stuff in this collection, including a Youtube of disturbing Bush commentary, a Fiore ‘toon, a MoDo article, and a Ted Rall piece in his usual “wake up, stupid” style. The Good General Petraeus seems to be carrying Cheney’s water lately and that’s not good. A Scott Ritter article, and toward the end, two pieces on what’s actually going on inside Iran, give us a hint of realism — the last piece is a portrait of chilling delusion we will be dealing with for some time to come. This is the only post of the day, and has a bit of “weekend read” feel to it.

Of note today is news of Al Gore’s winning the Peace Prize in tandem with the UN International Panel on Climate Change — the push to nominate him will grow steadily now; he looks like an adult, and we badly need one. It’s said he is happier being an international crusader than a politician and who could blame him — a pundit said this week that if he won, he should rest on his laurels … an Oscar, an Emmy, a Peace Prize … and not put himself in harms way by thinking about the presidency; said he wasn’t a very good politician, anyhow. For obvious reasons, that makes him even more attractive to me … but I also have to pity the one who gets to pick up the pieces of Bush’s fractured “legacy.”

And with that, I leave you until next week when I’ll check in from [most likely] sunny California — and in [I'm sure] a much sunnier mood myself.

Jude

Cheney-in-Chief
Mark Fiore ‘toon

Forewarned Is Forearmed: Bush On Iran
Youtube

Bomb, Bomb Iran
MAUREEN DOWD, NYT
October 10, 2007

Up until now, she has displayed remarkable imperturbability — gliding along with the help of good lighting, a hearty guffaw and a clever husband.

But on Sunday in New Hampton, Iowa, Hillary lost her cool at last. Sparring with a voter on Iran, she sounded defensive and paranoid.

A Democrat, Randall Rolph, asked Senator Clinton why he should back her when she did not learn her lesson after voting to authorize W. to use force in Iraq. He did not understand how she could have voted yea to urge W. to label Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, possibly setting the stage for more Cheney chicanery.

Hillary said that “labeling them a terrorist organization gives us the authority to impose sanctions on their leadership. …I consider that part of a very robust diplomatic effort.”

Fearful that her questioner was an enemy spy creeping into her perfect little world, she suggested that he had been put up to the question and did not have his information right.

“I take exception,” Mr. Rolph insisted. “This is my own research. … I’m offended that you would suggest that.”

Hillary apologized and said that she had been asked “the very same question in three other places.” She explained that she had signed on to a rewritten version of the amendment that did not, as he claimed, give a green light for combat.

In the original “sense of Senate on Iran” document, sponsored by Joe Lieberman and the Republican Jon Kyl last month, there was a paragraph that supported “the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence and military instruments, in support of the policy with respect to” Iran. That original draft, called “tantamount to a declaration of war” and “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream” by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, was softened.

Even so, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd voted no, and Barack Obama would have voted no if he had voted.

If you know the dingbat vice president is agitating for a conflict with Iran, if you know that Condi is chasing after Cheney with a butterfly net on Iran and Syria, if you know you can’t believe anything this administration says, why vote to give them more backing on their dysfunctional Middle East policy?

The schism in the administration is deepening in a way that should alarm Hillary. Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper report in today’s Times that Cheney and his hawks are arguing that the Israeli intelligence about Syria’s nascent nuclear capabilities that led to last month’s Israeli strike on Syria was credible and should dictate a harsher policy toward Syria and North Korea, while Condi, Bob Gates and calmer heads “did not believe the intelligence presented so far merits any change in the American diplomatic approach.”

Hillary’s hawkish Iran vote was an ill-advised move, especially given her private view that Cheney is untrustworthy and given Sy Hersh’s New Yorker report claiming that Cheney had pushed to devise a plan to attack the Revolutionary Guard facilities in Iran.

She made a course correction on Oct. 1, co-sponsoring legislation introduced by Mr. Webb to prohibit the use of funds for military operations against Iran without explicit Congressional authorization.

Her opponents have sounded the fool-me-once-shame-on-you, fool-me-twice-shame-on-me drumbeat. Obama chided Hillary for her willingness “to once again extend to the president the benefit of the doubt.” John Edwards wondered if in “six months from now he goes to war in Iran, are we going to hear her once again say if only I had known then what I know now?”

When Hillary voted to let W. use force in Iraq, she didn’t even read the intelligence estimate. She wasn’t trying to do the right thing. She was trying to do the opportunistic thing. She felt she could not run for president, as a woman, if she played the peacenik.

By throwing in with Joe Lieberman and the conservative hawks on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard issue, she once more overcompensated in a cynical way. She’d like to paint Obama as the weak reed who wants to cozy up to dictators, while she’s the one who will play tough. It was odd, given her success in the debates conveying the sense that she is the manliest candidate among the Democrats, that she felt the need to man-up on Iran.

But maybe she knows that Rudy will hurl thunderbolts at her, as he did in the debate yesterday, suggesting that she doesn’t have the guts to use a military option to stop Iran from going nuclear.

Voters seem more concerned with Hillary’s political expediency — which the vote underscored — than with her ability to be manly.

Her camp seems to think her vote was a safe one because W. and Cheney do not have the time or support to bomb Iran, and that Bob Gates can stop it. But she may be underestimating W. and Cheney. She should be at least as paranoid about that pair as she was about an Iowa Democrat.

Why is Hillary Greasing the Skids for Another War?
James Heffernan, HuffPo
October 8, 2007

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice once said.

While running for the White House on a pledge to end the war in Iraq, Senator Hillary Clinton has just voted to brand Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization — even before the Bush administration has done so.

Well now, is she’s racing to outflank the president on the right, or implicitly authorizing another war? Oh no, she assures us. When asked about her vote during a campaign stop in New Hampton, Iowa, on Sunday, she said that it simply gives the president authority to impose penalties.

Interesting. Back in 2002, when she voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, she did so only ON HER OWN UNDERSTANDING that the president would first get approval from the United Nations. But she voted against an amendment — moved by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan — that would have required the president to do precisely that.

Now she claims that she’s authorizing only penalties, not war.

A lovely distinction. But if Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is indeed a terrorist organization, as Hillary’s vote says, doesn’t the War on Terror compel us to fight it with everything we have? Where are the brakes on the car that Hillary has just boarded?

There aren’t any. But as Seymour Hersh has just shown in the NEW YORKER, Hillary’s new car has a 500-horsepower engine all tuned up by Pentagon planners. Bored to tears with the futility of fighting in Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan (remember that one?), and overloaded with soldiers who have absolutely nothing to do after eighteen grueling months of combat, they’re just itching to open a third front in Iran.

Even if sanity somehow stops us short of bombing Iran, invading it, or both, the Senate vote offers yet another example of what our Middle East policy has become. We have replaced diplomacy with demonization. Even though Hamas won the most recent election in Palestine and will be crucial to its future, we have branded it a terrorist organization. Even though we now know that the war against Iraq’s insurgents cannot be won on the battlefield, and even though we must also see that Iran is absolutely crucial to any diplomatic or political resolution we might hope to achieve in Iraq, we are doing everything possible to demonize Iran.

Does it deserve to be demonized? Some say yes. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust and Israel’s right to exist. He’s reviled as a dictator by students at Tehran University, where students have been jailed and tortured for speaking out against him. And it may well be true that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is furnishing bombs to anti-American militia forces in Iraq, and are thus indirectly responsible for killing American troops.

Inconveniently, it’s also true that the Shiite majority who now largely govern Iraq (insofar as it can be governed at all) have close ties to the majority Shiites of Iran, where many of the most influential Iraqis (such as Moktada al-Sadr) lived in exile during the reign of Saddam Hussein. In case you hadn’t noticed, our very own man in Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, regards Ahmadinejad as a partner. But now General David H. Petraeus has accused Iran’s ambassador to Iran, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, of membership in the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard. Thanks in part to Hillary’s vote, that makes him a terrorist.

So what do we do now? Since killing him would violate diplomatic immunity, do we simply get the Iraqis to deport him? And just how would that help us?

In a recent debate, Hillary and Barack Obama both declared that in quest of peace they would talk to anyone, even our enemies. (The press made much of a minor tactical difference between them, but the main point was their common commitment to seek diplomatic solutions to international conflicts.) Within Iraq itself, our commanders have already been wooing men it once regarded as terrorists: Sunni shieks in Abnar and Diyala who have soured on al-Qaeda and are willing to help us fight it. Why then don’t we try talking to the Iranian ambassador instead of simply branding him a terrorist?

Yes, I know the answer: we don’t talk to terrorists. And we know they’re terrorists because we’ve branded them as such, just as we know that Guantanamo detainees are “enemy combatants” — and therefore ineligible for anything remotely approaching a fair trial — because the president has branded them as such.

Branding is the worst possible way to reach a verdict on a suspect or to conduct foreign policy. As a Democrat who admires Hillary for many things, I’m dismayed to find her wielding a brand. If we want diplomatic solutions to international conflicts (which is what we finally seem to have achieved in North Korea, once part of the “axis of evil”), we will never get them by demonizing the very people who might be able to help us. Instead of branding the Iranian ambassador a terrorist, why don’t we test the hypothesis that he might just mean what he said in a recent interview — which is that Iran wants security and stability in Iraq?

“WE DON’T SPEAK TO EVIL”
Ted Rall, Yahoo
Wed Oct 3

The nation is Iran. And the reaction is ridiculous.

“The Evil Has Landed,” shrieked the headline of the New York Daily News on the occasion of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speeches at the United Nations and Columbia University. A “madman,” Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post spat, setting the tone for a week of Bizarro News. On “60 Minutes,” the Iranian president said there was no reason his country and ours couldn’t be friends–even the best of friends.

“La la la la–we can’t hear you” was the response.

“Is it the goal of your government, the goal of this nation to build a nuclear weapon?” CBS News’ Scott Pelley asked Ahmadinejad.
He replied: “You have to appreciate we don’t need a nuclear bomb. We don’t need that. What need do we have for a bomb?”

Pelley followed up: “May I take that as a ‘no,’ sir?”

Ahmadinejad: “It is a firm ‘no.’”

Some Americans would pay good money to hear an answer as honest and straightforward as that from their leaders. Yet, minutes later, Pelley kept badgering: “When I ask you a question as direct as ‘Will you pledge not to test a nuclear weapon?’ you dance all around the question. You never say ‘yes.’ You never say ‘no.’”

Weird. Is Pelley hard of hearing? But what I really can’t figure out is how Iran qualifies as our–Very Big Word coming–”enemy.” We’re not at war with Iran. Neither are our allies.

What gives?

Capitalizing on the reliable ignorance of the American public and the indolent gullibility of its journalists, the Bush Administration regularly conflates its numerous targets of regime change, pretending they love each other to death and are united only in their desire to slaughter innocent American children. There are gaping chasms in this narrative, but they vanish into our national memory hole.

After the 9/11 attacks turned the U.S. against the Taliban, U.S. media outlets put footage of a handful of jeering Palestinians on heavy rotation. Meanwhile, “In Iran, vast crowds turned out on the streets and held candlelit vigils for the victims. Sixty-thousand spectators respected a minute’s silence at Tehran’s football stadium.”

Wondering why you never heard that? The above quote comes from the BBC. Fox News didn’t report. American news consumers didn’t know, much less decide.

Finding an opportunity for rapprochement and a mutual foe in the Taliban, Iran became a silent America ally after 9/11. The Iranian military offered to conduct search and rescue operations for downed U.S. pilots during the fall 2001 war against the Taliban. It used its influence with the Afghanistan’s Dari population to broker the loya jirga that installed Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan.

Everyone expected U.S.-Iranian relations to thaw. There was even talk about ending sanctions and exchanging ambassadors. A few weeks later, however, White House neocons had Iran named as a member of an “Axis of Evil” in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. “We were all shocked by the fact that the U.S. had such a short memory and was so ungrateful about what had happened just a month ago,” remembers Javad Zarif, now the Iranian ambassador to the U.N.

Bush accused Shiite-majority Iran, a mortal enemy of Sunni-dominated Al Qaeda, of offering sanctuary to Al Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan. “Iran must be a contributor in the war against terror,” Bush railed. “Either you’re with us or against us.” The allegation was BS. No one–not the CIA, not one of our allies, no one–believed that Iran would harbor, or had harbored, members of Al Qaeda. “I wasn’t aware of any intelligence supporting that charge,” says James Dobbins, Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan. But we never took it back.

In May 2003, Iran shook off its annoyance and again tried to make nice. The Iranian overture came in the form of a letter delivered to the State Department after the fall of Baghdad. “Iran appeared willing to put everything on the table–including being completely open about its nuclear program, helping to stabilize Iraq, ending its support for Palestinian militant groups and help in disarming Hezbollah,” reported the BBC.

U.S. officials confirm this overture.

“That letter went to the Americans to say that we are ready to talk, we are ready to address our issues,” says Seyed Adeli, an Iranian foreign minister at the time. Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the Bushies made a conscious decision to ignore it. “We don’t speak to evil,” he recalls that Administration hardliners led by Donald Rumsfeld said.

In the minds of the hard right, the case for Iran’s evilness rests on three issues: the 1979 hostage crisis, its opposition to Israel, and its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Readers of Mark Bowden’s “Guests of the Ayatollah” can’t help but sympathize with the American embassy staffers who spent 444 days in captivity from late 1979 to early 1981. But the right-wingers’ real beef over this episode concerns our wounded national pride.

What they fail to mention is that President Carter brought the mess upon himself, first by continuing to prop up the corrupt and brutal regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi long after it was obviously doomed, and then by admitting him to the U.S. for cancer treatment. Carter knew that his decision to coddle a toppled tyrant could stir up trouble.

“He went around the room,” said then-Vice President Walter Mondale,” and most of us said, ‘Let him [the Shah] in. And he said, ‘And if [the Iranians] take our employees in our embassy hostage, then what would be your advice?’ And the room just fell dead. No one had an answer to that. Turns out, we never did.”

Iran finances and arms Hezbollah, the paramilitary group-cum-nascent state based in Lebanon that wages sporadic attacks against Israel. If proxy warfare and funding Islamist terror organizations that despise Israel were a consideration, however, the U.S. would cut off relations with and impose sanctions against Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. (Can we stop talking to ourselves? We supported the Afghan mujahedeen.) It is possible to maintain friendly relations with nations that hate one another, and we do.

There are two points missing from most discussions of Iran’s nuclear energy program and whether it’s a cover for a weapons program. First, Iran ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970. Leaders of the Islamic Republic inherited the NPT from the Shah. The revolutionaries voluntarily chose to honor the agreement after they threw him out.

Second, the U.S. practices a double standard by threatening war against Iran while ignoring Israel’s refusal to obey a U.N. resolution calling for a nuclear-free Middle East passed in 1996. As of the late 1990s, U.S. intelligence agencies believed Israel to possess between 75 and 130 nukes. Iran has zero. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there’s even less evidence against Iran than there was against Saddam’s Iraq.

There are many legitimate reasons to criticize the government of Iran. They’re just a regional rival in the Middle East–another frenemy.

It’s Official…Petraeus is marching US towards war with Iran
News Sophisticate
Sunday, October 7, 2007

How long do we have before the Bush administration TAKES US into our third war in six years? According to General David Petraeus’ recent statements on Iran…not long..not long at all.

On Saturday, Petraeus gave a speech to reporters in which he basically linked Iran to everything going wrong in Iraq. Assassinated governors, smuggled sophisticated weaponry, the dreaded explosively formed projectiles (EFPs)..and oh yeah…the Iranian ambassador to Iraq..he’s a Qods force member, too. Here are a few of his statements…

“They are responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed U.S. soldiers,”

“There is no question about the connection between Iran and these components, (the) attacks that have killed our soldiers.”
……

“The ambassador is a Qods force member,” said Petraeus, before appearing to suggest that Kazemi-Qomi was not under the U.S. military spotlight because he was a diplomat.
…..

“There should be no question about the malign, lethal involvement and activities of the Qods force in this country”
…..

“They are implicated in the assassination of some governors in the southern provinces,” said Petraeus.

Asked to be more specific, he said one case “was clearly an explosively formed projectile”.

“They only come from Iran and they are only used by militias so it’s a sort of a signature trademark of militia extremists. The other case the suspicion is the same, we just don’t have the same quality of forensics.”

Asked if there was intelligence directly linking Iran to the two bomb attacks, he said: “I would not comment on this.” Read the full article.

Amazing…without a doubt we are off to war….again. Soon Fox News will be broadcasting 24/7 in ‘night vision’. We’ll start seeing the Pentagon flashing video propaganda of how ‘pin point’ their air strikes have been. The sky will be filled with tracers flying through the air in all directions.

Folks…We the People, have seen this ’show’ all too often lately. Stop BUSH/CHENEY NOW!

Same Players. Different Scandal.

The Big Lie: ‘Iran Is a Threat’
Scott Ritter, CommonDreams
Monday, October 8, 2007

Iran has never manifested itself as a serious threat to the national security of the United States, or by extension as a security threat to global security. At the height of Iran’s “exportation of the Islamic Revolution” phase, in the mid-1980’s, the Islamic Republic demonstrated a less-than-impressive ability to project its power beyond the immediate borders of Iran, and even then this projection was limited to war-torn Lebanon.

Iranian military capability reached its modern peak in the late 1970’s, during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlevi. The combined effects of institutional distrust on the part of the theocrats who currently govern the Islamic Republic of Iran concerning the conventional military institutions, leading as it did to the decay of the military through inadequate funding and the creation of a competing paramilitary organization, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command (IRGC), and the disastrous impact of an eight-year conflict with Iraq, meant that Iran has never been able to build up conventional military power capable of significant regional power projection, let alone global power projection.

Where Iran has demonstrated the ability for global reach is in the spread of Shi’a Islamic fundamentalism, but even in this case the results have been mixed. Other than the expansive relations between Iran (via certain elements of the IRGC) and the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, Iranian success stories when it comes to exporting the Islamic revolution are virtually non-existent. Indeed, the efforts on the part of the IRGC to export Islamic revolution abroad, especially into Europe and other western nations, have produced the opposite effect desired. Based upon observations made by former and current IRGC officers, it appears that those operatives chosen to spread the revolution in fact more often than not returned to Iran noting that peaceful coexistence with the West was not only possible but preferable to the exportation of Islamic fundamentalism. Many of these IRGC officers began to push for moderation of the part of the ruling theocrats in Iran, both in terms of interfacing with the west and domestic policies.

The concept of an inherent incompatibility between Iran, even when governed by a theocratic ruling class, and the United States is fundamentally flawed, especially from the perspective of Iran. The Iran of today seeks to integrate itself responsibly with the nations of the world, clumsily so in some instances, but in any case a far cry from the crude attempts to export Islamic revolution in the early 1980’s. The United States claims that Iran is a real and present danger to the security of the US and the entire world, and cites Iranian efforts to acquire nuclear technology, Iran’s continued support of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s “status” as a state supporter of terror, and Iranian interference into the internal affairs of Iraq and Afghanistan as the prime examples of how this threat manifests itself.

On every point, the case made against Iran collapses upon closer scrutiny. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), mandated to investigate Iran’s nuclear programs, has concluded that there is no evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Furthermore, the IAEA has concluded that it is capable of monitoring the Iranian nuclear program to ensure that it does not deviate from the permitted nuclear energy program Iran states to be the exclusive objective of its endeavors. Iran’s support of the Hezbollah Party in Lebanon - Iranian protestors shown here supporting Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah during an anti-Israel rally - while a source of concern for the State of Israel, does not constitute a threat to American national security primarily because the support provided is primarily defensive in nature, designed to assist Hezbollah in deterring and repelling an Israeli assault of sovereign Lebanese territory. Similarly, the bulk of the data used by the United States to substantiate the claims that Iran is a state sponsor of terror is derived from the aforementioned support provided to Hezbollah. Other arguments presented are either grossly out of date (going back to the early 1980’s when Iran was in fact exporting Islamic fundamentalism) or unsubstantiated by fact.

The US claims concerning Iranian interference in both Iraq and Afghanistan ignore the reality that both nations border Iran, both nations were invaded and occupied by the United States, not Iran, and that Iran has a history of conflict with both nations that dictates a keen interest concerning the internal domestic affairs of both nations. The United States continues to exaggerate the nature of Iranian involvement in Iraq, arresting “intelligence operatives” who later turned out to be economic and diplomatic officials invited to Iraq by the Iraqi government itself. Most if not all the claims made by the United States concerning Iranian military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been backed up with anything stronger than rhetoric, and more often than not are subsequently contradicted by other military and governmental officials, citing a lack of specific evidence.

Iran as a nation represents absolutely no threat to the national security of the United States, or of its major allies in the region, including Israel. The media hype concerning alleged statements made by Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has created and sustained the myth that Iran seeks the destruction of the State of Israel. Two points of fact directly contradict this myth. First and foremost, Ahmadinejad never articulated an Iranian policy objective to destroy Israel, rather noting that Israel’s policies would lead to its “vanishing from the pages of time.” Second, and perhaps most important, Ahmadinejad does not make foreign policy decisions on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is the sole purview of the “Supreme Leader,” the Ayatollah Khomeini. In 2003 Khomeini initiated a diplomatic outreach to the United States inclusive of an offer to recognize Israel’s right to exist. This initiative was rejected by the United States, but nevertheless represents the clearest indication of what the true policy objective of Iran is vis-à-vis Israel.

The fact of the matter is that the “Iranian Threat” is derived solely from the rhetoric of those who appear to seek confrontation between the United States and Iran, and largely divorced from fact-based reality. A recent request on the part of Iran to allow President Ahmadinejad to lay a wreath at “ground zero” in Manhattan was rejected by New York City officials. The resulting public outcry condemned the Iranian initiative as an affront to all Americans, citing Iran’s alleged policies of supporting terrorism. This knee-jerk reaction ignores the reality that Iran was violently opposed to al-Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan throughout the 1990’s leading up to 2001, and that Iran was one of the first Muslim nations to condemn the terror attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.

A careful fact-based assessment of Iran clearly demonstrates that it poses no threat to the legitimate national security interests of the United States. However, if the United States chooses to implement its own unilateral national security objectives concerning regime change in Iran, there will most likely be a reaction from Iran which produces an exceedingly detrimental impact on the national security interests of the United States, including military, political and economic. But the notion of claiming a nation like Iran to constitute a security threat simply because it retains the intent and capability to defend its sovereign territory in the face of unprovoked military aggression is absurd. In the end, however, such absurdity is trumping fact-based reality when it comes to shaping the opinion of the American public on the issue of the Iranian “threat.”

Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.

Rare protest targets Iranian president
ALI AKBAR DAREINI, AP
Mon Oct 8

TEHRAN, Iran - About 100 students staged a rare protest Monday against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling him a “dictator” as he gave a speech at Tehran University marking the beginning of the academic year.

While the demonstrators and hard-line students loyal to Ahmadinejad scuffled in the auditorium, the president ignored chants of “Death to the dictator” and gave his speech on the merits of science and the pitfalls of Western-style democracy, witnesses said.

The hard-line students chanted “Thank you, president” as police looked on from outside the university’s gates without intervening. The protesters dispersed after Ahmadinejad left the campus.

Students were once the main power base of Iran’s reform movement but have faced intense pressure in recent years from Ahmadinejad’s hard-line government, making anti-government protests rare.

The president faced a similar outburst during a speech last December when students at Amir Kabir Technical University called him a dictator and burned his picture.

Organizers hoped to avoid a similar disturbance Monday with tightened security measures. They checked the identity papers of everyone entering the campus and allowed only selected students into the hall for the speech, but the protesters were somehow able to gain entrance.

Iran’s reform movement peaked in the late 1990s after reformist Mohammad Khatami was elected president and his supporters swept parliament. But their efforts to ease social and political restrictions were stymied by hard-liners who control the judiciary, security forces and powerful unelected bodies in the government.

Reformists, who also favor better relations with the United States, were further demoralized and divided after Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005 elections.

In recent months, dissenters have witnessed an increasing crackdown, with hundreds detained on accusations of threatening the Iranian system. Numerous pro-reform newspapers have been shut down and those that remain have muted their criticism.

At universities, pro-government student groups have gained strength and reformist students have been marginalized, left to hold only low-level meetings and occasional demonstrations, usually to demand better school facilities or the release of detained colleagues.

Some dissenters blame the crackdown on the regime’s fear of a U.S. effort to undermine it as tensions over Iran’s nuclear program intensify. Others say the intent is simply to contain discontent fueled by a faltering economy.

Ahmadinejad’s popularity at home has fallen since he was elected, with critics saying he has failed to fix the economy and has hurt Iran’s image internationally.

Elected on a populist agenda, Ahmadinejad has not kept campaign promises to share oil revenues with every family, eradicate poverty and reduce unemployment. Instead, housing prices in Tehran have tripled, and prices for fruit, vegetables or other commodities have more than doubled over the past year. Inflation worsened after a 25 percent hike in fuel prices in May.

Last December, Ahmadinejad’s allies were humiliated in municipal elections, with some reformists gaining seats. He was dealt another blow when a rival, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, was chosen as chairman of the Assembly of Experts, a powerful clerical body, over a close Ahmadinejad ally.

Conservatives who once supported the president have increasingly joined in the criticism, saying that he needs to pay more attention to domestic issues and that his inflammatory rhetoric has needlessly stoked tensions with the West.

Lifting the veil: undergrad explores Iranian culture
Andrew Alexander, Chicago Maroon
[Student newspaper of the University of Chicago]
Friday, October 5th, 2007

The middle-aged Iranian man made the throat-slitting gesture when I told him I was American. He then grinned as he invited me to sit down and share sunflower seeds with him and his family.

It was a typical scene from Iran, where I spent two weeks in early September with eight other U of C students and Laura Hollinger, associate dean of Rockefeller Chapel.

Our “cultural exchange,” organized by San–Francisco-based non-profit Global Exchange, was meant to focus on human rights issues in Iran, but the Iranian government, in the midst of its two-year crackdown on dissidence, blocked our meetings with human rights groups.

As Americans, we were also pulled aside, detained, and fingerprinted at the airport––the first Americans to experience that new policy––and forbidden to wander around outside without our government-licensed guide.

But those were small inconveniences compared to what Iranians have lived through under 28 years of rule by the Islamic Republic. Inflation has been running at 20 percent per year and unemployment is twice that. Squads of Moral Police roam the streets, arresting women whose headscarves expose too much hair or who are seen walking with unrelated men.

Especially unpopular is the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An August poll by a mainstream Tehran newspaper found that 32 percent of people who voted for him in 2005 would not do so again. A reformist newspaper ran a cartoon saying that Ahmadinejad was proof that humans were related to monkeys, and another praising him for accelerating the return of the 12th Imam, the Shia messiah who is fated to return when the world is in deep crisis. Many factors and factions may be behind Iran’s economic troubles and paucity of civil liberties, but Ahmadinejad has personally turned himself––and his country—into an international caricature.

The irony of the foreign view of Iran as a repressive, terrorist-funding backwater is that the country’s population is, for the most part, young, well educated, and pro-Western. English is the first foreign language most students learn in school, and all of the bookstores I went into had English sections—and some had entire floors devoted to English language-learning materials. One bookstore in an upscale part of Tehran even had the same edition of Leviathan I bought for Sosc, but that wasn’t terribly surprising, since the bookstore had the complete set of the Penguin Classics, as well as other familiar editions of classic books.

Nearly all the highway signs and museum placards I saw were in English, and one state-run museum in Tehran even provided us with a guide who spoke perfect English––and wore a full-length black chador.

Women are required to wear hair-covering headscarves, as well as form-obscuring neck-to-thigh raincoats, but many younger women skirt this by tying colorful, patterned scarves far enough back on their head that they barely stay on. For men, mullets and tight jeans are in, and the only people who wear turbans are clerics––one of whom was standing near us in the customs line in the airport, carrying four enormous shopping bags from the duty-free store in the Frankfurt airport.

The government may not have wanted us to meet with human-rights groups, but one subject they didn’t declare off-limits was religion.

We visited quite a few religious sites, including a Zoroastrian temple and a Tower of Silence, an Armenian church, and a synagogue. As “People of the Book,” Jews and Christians (and, for some reason, Zoroastrians) are given nearly the same rights as Muslims under the law, if not always in practice. The Jewish community, while small and shrinking, comprises the largest religious minority in Iran.

Still, Iran is no oasis of tolerance, and the country has long persecuted members of, for example, the Bahá’í faith. A Zoroastrian carpet shop we visited had a portrait of reformist former president Mohammed Khatami on its wall––a significant contrast to the dual portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Khameini that hang like flags in every public building and many private ones.

We visited a Shia seminary (madrasa in Farsi), where we met a young imam who told us that he wanted to improve his English so he could visit the U.S. and dispel the notion that the colleges for clerical training are camps for terrorist training. We also met with Grand Ayatollah Imami Kashani, one of the most senior clerics in Iran, a Dumbledore-like figure who was fairly senile but surrounded by a number of clerics and aides who were eager to talk with American Christians and Jews.

As for the throat-slitting man in Isfahan, I spoke with him and his family about American and Iranian politics for nearly 45 minutes. As I walked around the bazaar afterwards, four more people came up to me and started conversations in English. They were all surprised to hear that I was American––but maybe I should have been the one who was surprised.

After all, we were in the middle of Iran and they were telling me in fluent English how much they love the U.S.

America’s Armageddonites
Jon Basil Utley, AntiWar
October 11, 2007

Utopian fantasies have long transfixed the human race. Yet today a much rarer fantasy has become popular in the United States. Millions of Americans, the richest people in history, have a death wish. They are the new “Armageddonites,” fundamentalist evangelicals who have moved from forecasting Armageddon to actually trying to bring it about.

Most journalists find it difficult to take seriously that tens of millions of Americans, filled with fantasies of revenge and empowerment, long to leave a world they despise. These Armageddonites believe that they alone will get a quick, free pass when they are “raptured” to paradise, no good deeds necessary, not even a day of judgment. Ironically, they share this utopian fantasy with a group that they often castigate, namely fundamentalist Muslims who believe that dying in battle also means direct access to Heaven. For the Armageddonites, however, there are no waiting virgins, but they do agree with Muslims that there will be “no booze, no bars,” in the words of a popular Gaither Singers song.

These end-timers have great influence over the U.S. government’s foreign policy. They are thick with the Republican leadership. At a recent conference in Washington, congressional leader Roy Blunt, for example, has said that their work is “part of God’s plan.” At the same meeting, where speakers promoted attacking Iran, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay glorified “end times”. Indeed the Bush administration often consults with them on Mideast policies. The organizer of the conference, Rev. John Hagee, is often welcomed at the White House, although his ratings are among the lowest on integrity and transparency by Ministry Watch, which rates religious broadcasters. He raises millions of dollars from his campaign supporting Israeli settlements on the West Bank, including much for himself. Erstwhile presidential candidate Gary Bauer is on his Board of Directors. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson also both expressed strong end-times beliefs.

American fundamentalists strongly supported the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. They consistently support Israel’s hard-line policies. And they are beating the drums for war against Iran. Thanks to these end-timers, American foreign policy has turned much of the world against us, including most Muslims, nearly a quarter of the human race.

The Beginning of End Times

The evangelical movement originally was not so “end times” focused. Rather, it was concerned with the “moral” decline inside America. The Armageddon theory started with the writings of a Scottish preacher, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882). His ideas then spread to America with publication in 1917 of the Scofield Reference Bible, foretelling that the return of the Jews to Palestine would bring about the end times. The best-selling book of the 1970s, The Late, Great Planet Earth, further spread this message. The movement did not make a conscious effort to affect foreign policy until Jerry Falwell went to Jerusalem and the Left Behind books became best sellers.

Conservative Christian writer Gary North estimates the number of Armageddonites at about 20 million. Many of them have an ecstatic belief in the cleansing power of apocalyptic violence. They are among the more than 30% of Americans who believe that the world is soon coming to an end. Armageddonites may be a minority of the evangelicals, but they have vocal leaders and control 2,000 mostly fundamentalist religious radio stations.

Although little focused on in America, Armageddonites attract the attention of Muslims abroad. In 2004, for instance, I attended Qatar’s Fifth Conference on Democracy with Muslim leaders from all over the Arabian Gulf. There, the uncle of Jordan’s king devoted his whole speech to warning of the Armageddonites’ power over American foreign policy.

Armageddonite Foreign Policy

The beliefs of the Armageddon Lobby, also known as Dispensationalists, come from the Book of Revelations, which Martin Luther relegated to an appendix when he translated the Bible because its image of Christ was so contrary to the rest of the Bible. The Armageddonites worship a vengeful, killer-torturer Christ. They also frequently quote a biblical passage that God favors those who favor the Jews. But they only praise Jews who make war, not those who are peacemakers. For example, they vigorously opposed Israel’s murdered premier Yitzhak Rabin, who promoted the Oslo Peace Accords.

Based on this Biblical interpretation, the Armageddonites vehemently argue that America must protect Israel and encourage its settlements on the West Bank in order to help God fulfill His plans. The return of Jews to Palestine is central to the prophetic vision of the Armageddonites, who see it as a critical step toward the final battle, Armageddon, and the victory of the righteous over Satan’s minions. There are a couple internal inconsistencies with this prophecy, such as the presence of Christians already living in the Holy Land and the role of Jews in the final dispensation. In the first case, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other Religious Right leaders tried to pretend that Christians already in the Holy Land simply didn’t exist. As for Jews, they needed to become “born again” Christians to avoid God’s wrath (or, according to some Armageddonites, a separate Jewish covenant with God will gain them a separate Paradise).

Everyone else – Buddhists, Muslims (of course), Hindus, atheists, and so on – are then slated to die in the Tribulation that comes with Armageddon. As described in the bestselling Left Behind series, this time of human misery ends with Christ then ruling a paradise on earth for a thousand years.

Armageddonites know little about the outside world, which they think of as threatening and awash with Satanic temptations. They are big supporters of Bush’s “go it alone” foreign policies. For example, they love John Bolton. They were prime supporters for attacking Iraq. And, with very few exceptions, they were noticeably quiet about, if not supportive, of torturing prisoners of war (only with a new leadership did the National Association of Evangelicals finally condemn torture in May, 2007). Their support of the Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani shows that they consider aggressively prosecuting Mideast war (to help speed up the apocalypse) more important than the domestic programs of these socially liberal politicians.

On other foreign policy issues, they are violently against the pending Law of the Seas Treaty, indeed any treaty which possibly circumscribes U.S. power to go it alone. They want illegal immigrants expelled and oppose more immigration. They fear China’s growth. They despise Europeans for not being more warlike. The UN figures prominently in their fears, and the Left Behind books present its Secretary General as the Antichrist.

Domestically, they strongly support the USA PATRIOT Act and all of President Bush’s actions, legal or illegal.

Armageddonites and Fascism

Author and former New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges argues that worldview and reasoning of the Armageddonites tend toward fascism. In his book American Fascists, Hedges focuses on their obedience to leadership, their feelings of humiliation and victimhood, alienation, their support for authoritarian government, and their disinterestedness in constitutional limits on government power. Theirs was originally a defensive movement against the liberal democratic society, particularly abortion, school desegregation, and now globalization, which they saw as undermining their communities and families, their values, and livelihood. Their fundamentalism is very fulfilling and, Hedges writes, “they are terrified of losing this new, mystical world of signs, wonders and moral certitude, of returning to the old world of despair.”

Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, also shows that fundamentalists are quite selective. They don’t take the Bible literally when it comes to justifying slavery or that children who curse a parent are to be executed. The movement is also very masculine, giving poor men a path to re-establish their authority in what they perceive as an overly feminized culture. Images of Jesus often show Him with thick muscles, clutching a sword. Christian men are portrayed as powerful warriors.

The overwhelming power and warmongering of the Armageddonites has inspired some resistance from other fundamentalists, but they are a minority. Theologian Richard Fenn writes, “Silent complicity (by mainline churches) with apocalyptic rhetoric soon becomes collusion with plans for religiously inspired genocide.” Their death-wishing “religion” is actually anti-Christian and should be challenged openly by traditional Christians.

The next election will likely loosen their grip on the White House. However, their growing ties to the military industrial complex will remain. Exposure of their war wanting as a major threat to America and the world may well become as destructive for them as was the famous Scopes trial in the 1920s. But that will only happen if Americans become as concerned as foreign observers about the influence of the Armageddonites.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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