تآبا
یک ایرانی
4/30/2006
Open letter to President Bush by an Iranian academic
By Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh
His Excellency President George W. Bush
The White House
Washington DC.
United States of America
16 April 2006
Mr. President
I am writing to you in the name of peace and in the name of human dignity. And in the absence of a balanced debate in Western political, academic and media circles on the issue of Iran’s nuclear energy program, I would humbly invite Your Excellency to spend a few minutes of your most valuable time to read an alternative argument about the said issue for the sake of peace and preservation of human dignity.
I wrote to you once before (5/2/2002) to say that as an academic of Iranian origin in Great Britain, I was seriously offended by your remarks in your state of the union address of that year about our nation being a member of the so-called axis of evil. In that letter I stated that Iran was not Afghanistan or Iraq to have been created by the former British Empire for their geo-strategic needs of the time and/thus it is not be meddled with by new powers when desired. It is a nation of about 70 million with a long history of civilization; a major contribution to the progress of mankind and a substantial cultural influence in the region. It is equipped with a strong sense of national identity and patriotism. Perhaps Iran’s eight years of relentless defense in the face of Saddam Hussein’s war that was encouraged by Washington and supported by the Soviet Union and almost all who profess to be US ally, including Britain, France, Germany, Israel etc. who directly or otherwise breached the UN imposed ban on supply of arms to the belligerent states and armed Saddam Hussein with all kinds of military hardware and intelligence, as well as soldiers and countless of billions of dollars from Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The world witnessed that against all these and in spite of its defense ability having been seriously undermined in the process of revolution that preceded the war, the Iranians staged a resistance of the kind that had no precedence in the history of mankind. With their bare foot they marched on Iraq of Baath Party and with their hands deprived of any advanced weaponry they effectively defeated Saddam Hussein and all those who backed him, chasing them back to where they had come from. I think that unmatched display of national unity and pride made it clear to all that Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq of former description.
I also pointed out that as a nation-state of today; Iran has come a long way. Exactly a century ago, when all of Asia was still living in dark ages this nation began its eventful journey to the modern world of human dignity, social equality, political integrity and economic prosperity. In this long journey, Iran has experienced many ups and downs, but never succumbed to the indignity of accepting outside interests deciding for its destiny. The task of democratization of Iran might not have, as yet, been completely successful, but Sir, when you talk about wanting to spread your brand of democracy to the so-called Greater Middle East or creating democracy in Iraq in order to influence Iran, you could have taken into consideration the fact that first; democracy is real and sustainable when it is home-grown. Second; the US version of democracy, in which the lobbies are gradually replacing the demo, leaves much to be desired, as your Excellency has appointed two of former US presidents to study ways of improving on its election system. Third, there is not any symbol of democracy in the Middle East to be modeled on by the others; in reality, there is no democracy in the Middle East; Israel is a state that deprives a large segment of its population of the basic human rights; sends tanks and helicopters to fight women and children; invades its neighbours to grab their lands; pays no attention to repeated UN resolutions to behave responsibly etc. Turkey, though has managed to construct a façade of democracy as a result of pressure from the US and EU, its military junta decides how the Turks and non-Turks are to live there. The mockery of the concept of democracy US friends have created in places like Jordan and Egypt, cannot be acceptable even by Washington.
It seems Sir, your advisers either do not have the necessary knowledge or do not find it discernable to explain that apart from Bahrain, Iran is the only country in the Middle East that has made some progress towards a real democracy; it still has many problems, but the society is debating a democracy that cannot be sustainable unless it is home-grown. Moreover, given Iran’s millennial civilizational and cultural influence in West Asia, it is more likely that Iran’s progress in democracy influenced Iraq and others in that part of the world to develop their own homogenous democracy, if only the West stops meddling in the internal affairs of Iran and others in Muslim Middle East. Having said all that, it is no denying however, that we Iranians still have a long way to go to achieve our final national goals in this respect, but that has very little to do with outside powers, and for that matter, I would not even bore you explaining what these problems are. In fact, US interference in support for those involved in democratic debates will inevitably brand our hard work as being inspired or instructed by a power that unfortunately leaves no stone unturned in proving to be our national enemy.
Sir, evidently you have heeded these parts of my said letter and on some occasions you indeed repeated the fact that Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan, and/thus promised to treat Iran differently. You even went as far as stating in your ‘state of the union’ address of 31 January 2006 that: Tonight, let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran. But Sir; did you really mean that America respects our nation and that you respect our country? Or your government’s frantic endeavor to construct an internationally acceptable case to justify destruction of our country by war or worldwide economic sanction is their way of respect for Iran as a nation? Are we to believe that your efforts and those of your Secretary of State for instance to get India to retreat from Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline deal which is vitally important to the economy of all three, is your way of showing respect for the Iranians; a project that has nothing to do with Iran’s strategic policies and nuclear program? Surly you know that each time Washington threatens Iran of military options, the business world in Iran looses large portions of its hard earned business, which has nothing to do with the ruling clergy. Is this your government’s way of expressing respect for Iran as a nation?
Sir, in their shortsighted views, your neo-con aids and advisers may think of Iran as a terrorist nation who cannot be trusted to have nuclear weapon while India, Pakistan and Israel who are constantly at war can have it. But it is sad that the President of the United States is not advised by wise people that America has never been short of, that under any kind of regime, Iran has not even threatened any nation in the past 200 years, and/or there has not been even one single Iranian involved in so many terrorist activities of the recent years. Iran is a civilized nation that is fully aware that nuclear weapon is not to be used; that it is for regional and global deterrence and balance of power for peace. Iran is fully aware that even international villains like Stalin, Hitler did not use their nuclear weapons. Even Ariel Sharon did not threaten to use nuclear weapon against those he considered as enemies of his country; but the United States of America did use it at the end of World War II. Not only America has failed to justify use of this evil tool to the satisfaction of human conscience, but also is using the bunker buster variety of it in its military adventure in Iraq and is threatening to use it against our country. Iran believes that even as deterrence, nuclear weapon cannot guarantee lasting peace and security in the world and/thus what is needed for the Middle East at least, is a nuclear disarmament that would make her age-old desire of a nuclear free zone in that volatile region a reality.
Sir, may I respectfully assure you that very few Iranians have been influenced by your promise of respect for our country and our right to choose our own future. This was more like asking us to ignore what we see in your government’s fierce global endeavour to get our nation condemned internationally, not because it is really developing nuclear weapon, but because of the Islam-o-phobic fear of a few in Israel that Iran might decide sometime in future to develop nuclear weapon and might decide to use it against Israel. Your UN Ambassador, John Bolton, promised the AIPAC meeting of Zionist Lobby on 7 March 2006 to inflict pain on Iran in that international forum. When making that promise, he twisted his fist in gesture to display his hatred of Iran and the sadistic desire to inflicting pain on a nation that his boss had claimed to have respect for.
Moreover, you have made the best of President Ahmadinejad’s ideological remarks about the state of Israel ought to be wiped off the world map; a non-practical proposition; an expression of ideological wish which was not supported by proposing any practical plan or policy for carrying it out; an ideological rhetoric that had been repeated many times before him in the world of Islam without having caused such a fuss. But you Sir, made the best of this ideological expression by presenting it as launching plans to eradicate the state of Israel and mixed it, may I say respectfully, disingenuously with the lie about Iran having built or is about to build nuclear weapons to use against Israel… in order to justify an international ganging up of the strong against the weak so that the way is paved at the United Nations to sanction wiping the state of Iran off the map of the world. The problem of Islam-o-phobia in the West seems to have reached the point that even comparing Israel to a rotten tree triggers angry promises by the State Department that the US will make the G8 summit to declare sanctions to starve the people of Iran because their president does not like Israel. He certainly seems to have touched a raw nerve in Washington. On the other hand, let us assume for the argument’s sake that Iran has a nuclear bomb and wants to use it against Israel. How could anyone think that an Islamic state would dare to drop atomic bomb on Israel without causing catastrophe to Muslim nations of the Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, the densely populated areas of which are situated in such a close proximity of Israel’s population centres. The Israeli extremists have for obvious reasons suffered historically from the over-exaggerated fear of their safety and security. Even expression of doubt about the holocaust leads to imprisonment of a British historian for three years in a Western democracy, and telling a pestering Jewish reporter off will result in suspending for a month the office of the elected Maier of London. But publishing the optimum of insult against the prophet of Islam is covered by the freedom of speech???
On the other hand, by concocting fanciful statistics about the ethnic variations forming the nation of Iran, the naïve but over-zealous Michael Ladeen for instance, gathered together after your state of the union address of this year, all the wondering gangs of terrorists and separatists amongst Iranian Americans; elements who are openly on the pay of either the CIA (like MKO/MEK), or some Pan-Turkish and/or Pan-Arab sources, (like the Gray Wolf and Al-Ahvaz) encouraging them to fight for the disintegration of Iran. Meanwhile, your Secretary of State asks the Congress to allocate a budget of several million dollars to pay for the expenses of the activities of the gangs that are being used by all the president’s men and woman in order to wipe the state of Iran off the map. Your overzealous neo-con colleagues like Michael Ladeen are too naive to realize that these elements are consumed by their racially inclined ideas, and that playing with the fire of racism of their kind can be as dangerous to world peace and stability as playing with the fire of religious extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan proved to be. They seem not to have drawn any lesson from US experience of trying to use Islamic extremism in 1980s against Soviet Union in Afghanistan which has been the cause of all anti-West terrorism of our world of today.
Similarly, your allies in Britain and Canada have not learnt any lesson about the danger of playing with the fire of religious or racial extremism. Their leaders have met the leader of terrorist gang al-Ahvaz and promised support for him. The British have in fact went as far as granting this terrorist gang permission to place their head-office in London where it had attacked and occupied Iranian Embassy in 1980 when they were invented by Saddam Hussein at the start of his war against Iran. The siege of the Embassy was crashed in the famous SIS operation and the gang was officially branded as ‘terrorist’ by the British authorities. Now that this gang is revived and is actively engaged in bombing campaign in Iran which has caused great harm to our brother Iranian Arabs of Khuzestan, your government described their terrorism as action in the defense of the rights of the Arab nation (in Iran), and asked Iran not to try and eradicate their terror against Iranian Arabs who were first to make so much sacrifice in the defence of their Iranian homeland in Saddam Hussein’s war. Similar request was made by the British who are supporting them in the hope that they will contribute to the US-Israeli-Canadian-British sponsored plot to wipe Iran off the map of the world. In other word: while President Ahmadinejad only expresses an ideological wish about the state of Israel, US, Israel, UK, and Canada actively endeavour to support those who are poised to wipe Iran off the map of the map.
But in the final analysis, may I ask if it is true that the costly and dangerous US efforts in making the idea of clash of Christian West with Muslim East a reality, is about America being committed to the defense of the state of Israel, or it is about defending the excesses of the regime in Israel and its desire to keep the lands they have stolen from their Arab neighbours? Is it really because Dr. Ahamdinejad wants to single-handedly wipe out the state of Israel, or the reality is that your government has been made to commit itself to grant the extremists like Ariel Sharon, his successor, and others like Netanyahu their atrocious wish of devastating any nation in the world of Islam who dares to support the Palestinian struggle to regain their homes, their dignity and their basic human rights in their own homeland?. When the majority of the Israelis sensibly enforced the policy of ‘land for peace’, the United States failed to adequately support that humane proposition by trying to prevent Zionist extremists from conspiring to overthrow that policy. Instead, your government supported Sharon’s overbearing policies even to the detriment of your own road map; your government failed to give proper support to the wise initiative of H. M. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and failed measurably to remember your own admission in the wake of September 11 that all these problems come from your blind support of people like Ariel Sharon in Israel and that you were going to modify your one-sided policies towards Arab-Israeli conflicts. Instead of remembering to do that, your government invaded and occupied Afghanistan; invaded and occupied Iraq, and now is threatening to invade Iran while completely complacent about the impracticality of the task and its terrifying consequence in the form of realization of the clash of civilizations (clash of Christian West with Muslim East) etc.
As far as Iran is concerned, the United States started, from the time of the emergence of the Islamic Republic, to use any kind of excuses to enforce a regime change even at the price of devastating Iran and its neighbouring nations. The first excuse was that Iran was exporting its revolution to the neighbouring states and US friends and allies in the West and in the region bought that hilarious claim without asking themselves how could any revolution be exported. A war with more than one million dead and well over a thousand billion dollars of devastation was encouraged and supported by the West against Iran with no result for anyone except that it united the people of Iran with the revolutionary Islamic Republic, which in turn guaranteed its survival in its shaky start.
Now, by wanting to repeat the same adventure, this time not using the Saddams of the region, but directly, your government is repeating the same mistake by making an excuse of Iran’s nuclear energy program to justify your incomprehensible threats of new wars and devastation in the Muslim Middle East. For this, of course you have the support of a handful of right-wing extremists like John Howard of Australia and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy with their psychopathic views of Islam and other races. But as far as world opinion is concerned, please do not let your naïve Secretary of State and her British counterpart prevent you from knowing the fact that the world considers the United States of America under the neo-cons as a new Empire that has become the main source of threat against global security, and its president, may I respectfully say, as a war-monger who would do only the pleasure of those in Israel and USA suffering from their Islam-o-phobia.
On the other hand, in order to paint a legal colour to disguise these war-mongering and to achieve an international justification for your said plan against Iran and its people, your ally in Britain, H. E. Premier Blair argued (on 9th March 2006) that: Obligations that are entered into in the international community should be kept, and if they aren't that's a serious situation and that's the reason for reporting Iran to UNSC. But he failed to make it clear as to how Iran's voluntary undertaking in the temporary Paris agreement of 2004 for the interim period of Iran-EU3 negotiations, has in his judgment amounted to Iran's international obligations of permanent nature? In the face of such ambiguity in reference one can only assume that Mr. Blair refers to Iran's withdrawal of voluntary undertakings, when she was enticed to voluntarily suspend its uranium enrichment process for as long as negotiations with EU3 went on. I hope I will not be considered as too presumptuous to propose that before accusing Iran of not honouring its so-called international obligations, Mr. Blair needed to make it clear firstly; weather or not Iran's agreement to suspend all activities regarding uranium enrichment was a voluntary or an obligatory undertaking. Certainly the undertaking could not have been obligatory and imposed upon her under duress as it would be totally against NPT and other international laws and regulations. But on the other hand, if the undertaking was voluntary, then we seem to have differences of opinion as to what a voluntary undertaking would mean. English dictionary tell us that a voluntary undertaking is a state of affairs that could be: Arising, acting, or resulting from somebody's own choice or decision rather than because of external pressure or force. Should this definition be acceptable then surely a voluntary undertaking and an international obligation are mutually exclusive and present contradiction in terms.
Secondly, it is of consequence that Misers Blair & Chirac and Ms. Merkel made it clear if there was a time-limit in the Paris agreement for Iran's suspension of uranium enrichment activities, for if no time-limit was provisioned then it could not have been considered as a finally concluded legal instrument that required no further negotiations. But as talks went on after the signing of that agreement, then it could not have been but an interim legal instrument only designed to better shape the negotiations which were hoped to arriving at a treaty according to which both the West would build confidence with Iran’s nuclear program and Iran would be allowed to enjoy its established rights under the terms of NPT (Article IV) to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. And that the nuclear states of the West would be obligated to assist the non-nuclear Iran with the development of nuclear energy, while they could legally observe her to make sure that Tehran did not deviate from peaceful use of nuclear energy.
On the other hand, in spite of confirmation by all international onlookers that US-Indian nuclear deal of March 2006 has seriously weakened the proliferation regime by making a mockery of the NPT regulations, Mr. El-Baradei, the obliging Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) praised that unjustifiable deal on March 2, 2006 as "would boost non-proliferation efforts". By so serving the pleasure of the United States, he ignored the plane fact that that deal allows India, which has already developed nuclear weapons, to keep its secret strategic nuclear sites away from any inspection by IAEA. This is the UN official who, under the US and EU3 pressure reported Iran to the UN Security Council on the basis of innuendos such as: Iran was not completely honest in its disclosure of everything some time in the past: yet he declined to state the truth that IAEA investigations eventually found out everything about Isfahan and Natanz, which proved those sites to be problem-free and formed the integral parts of Iran's rights to peaceful nuclear energy, and that failure of their disclosure was because of administrative mismanagement than anything else. Or; in her cooperation with the IAEA investigation Iran showed some reluctance in allowing agents to inspect some of its military bases: But, he fails to remember that in his reports of investigations he repeatedly praised Iran for cooperating with the task of investigation. He also fails to mention that this reluctance is normal as no other state welcomes any prospect of its sensitive military sites being intrusively looked at by foreign agents who would not give any real guarantee for the confidentiality of information that are deemed to be vital for national security of the state being investigated. These are, at best, debatable issues for IAEA Board of Governors. UN Security Council is not the forum to debate them, but why you Sir, and your obliging friends in London, Paris and Bonn insist it to be referred to the United Nations? Can the answer be anything but what Ambassador Bolton has promised his AIPAC friends?
Mr. El-Baradei reported the case of Iran’s nuclear energy program to the UN Security Council solely to make it possible for John Bolton to inflict his promised pain on Iran, in spite of the fact that the UN Security Council’s job is to find solutions to real threats to world peace from rebel states like Israel, not to condemn a member nation like Iran to war and devastation on the basis of a decided crisis over her future nuclear energy plans; a nation that has not even threatened another country for the past two centuries. This gentleman has bravely discarded the embarrassment that the file he reported to the UN Security Council not only contained no evidence of wrong doing on the part of Iran, but also puts on full display before the world opinion his own repeated official reports of investigation of all sites in Iran and verification that no evidence had been found to incriminate Iran of any plan for developing nuclear weapons. Yet, he unashamedly asked the Security Council to deal with Iran’s case for the purpose of ‘inflicting pain’ on its people on the basis of the said innuendos. In returning El-Baradei’s report to him the UN Security Council returned to him for implementation of the idea of giving Iran 30 days to deprive itself of an independent nuclear energy research for all eternity; a demand that cannot be acceptable even to the weakest of nations. No government in the world can decide to deprive all future generations of its nation from their established rights. But when it comes to a point as incomprehensible as this, UN Security Council is to be asked to verify that asking Iran to indefinitely deprive itself of nuclear research activities would not effectively mean to paralyse the NPT protection of Iran, and that its membership of the treaty is lost, and her continued membership is just as good as withdrawn.
Sir in the final assessment of what the governments of the neo-cons have done so far, I have to regretfully say, that it amounts to no less than total destruction of America’s post-World War II credibility as a power that supports peace, democracy and human rights in the world. To destroy this highly praised position, the neo-cons had to ignore the facts of history and principles of civility; In order to make their imperialistic desire of New World Order in the wake of the collapse of the by-polar world order, they ignored the advice of those wiser amongst the Americans like Professor Russell Kirk who observed: Our prospects in the world of the twenty-first century are bright – supposing we Americans do not swagger about the globe, proclaiming our omniscience and our omnipotence…. Any American New World Order will likely cause the United States to be more detested – beginning with the Arab peoples (Muslims) – than the Soviet Union ever was.
From the point of view of the Iranians, all your Excellency’s government has done by ganging up US and EU3 against the established rights of the people of Iran, was to unite this people behind the Islamic Republic once again, but this time in a way that has no precedence in Iran’s history. Apart from those involved in terrorism, all those in the camp opposed to the IRI have united to defend Iran’s legitimate rights; the national right that you and your European colleagues are pressing the IRI to suspend indefinitely without even thinking how could it be possible for any government to sign a document that deprives even the unborn generations of its nation of nuclear energy. No state can make such a pledge, but the atrocious demand has motivated an all out national unity, which at this particular junction of our national debate for democracy, can only slow done this debate that is vitally important for the future of peace and stability of Iran and the neighbouring nations.
Yours sincerely
Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh Ph.D.
Professor of Political geography and Geopolitics – Tehran
Chairman of Urosevic Research Foundation - London
590 Field End Road, Middlesex HA4 0QZ, UK
Tel/Fax: +44-20 8422 7992
E-mail: pirouzmojtahedzadeh@hotmail.com
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His Excellency President George W. Bush
The White House
Washington DC.
United States of America
16 April 2006
Mr. President
I am writing to you in the name of peace and in the name of human dignity. And in the absence of a balanced debate in Western political, academic and media circles on the issue of Iran’s nuclear energy program, I would humbly invite Your Excellency to spend a few minutes of your most valuable time to read an alternative argument about the said issue for the sake of peace and preservation of human dignity.
I wrote to you once before (5/2/2002) to say that as an academic of Iranian origin in Great Britain, I was seriously offended by your remarks in your state of the union address of that year about our nation being a member of the so-called axis of evil. In that letter I stated that Iran was not Afghanistan or Iraq to have been created by the former British Empire for their geo-strategic needs of the time and/thus it is not be meddled with by new powers when desired. It is a nation of about 70 million with a long history of civilization; a major contribution to the progress of mankind and a substantial cultural influence in the region. It is equipped with a strong sense of national identity and patriotism. Perhaps Iran’s eight years of relentless defense in the face of Saddam Hussein’s war that was encouraged by Washington and supported by the Soviet Union and almost all who profess to be US ally, including Britain, France, Germany, Israel etc. who directly or otherwise breached the UN imposed ban on supply of arms to the belligerent states and armed Saddam Hussein with all kinds of military hardware and intelligence, as well as soldiers and countless of billions of dollars from Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The world witnessed that against all these and in spite of its defense ability having been seriously undermined in the process of revolution that preceded the war, the Iranians staged a resistance of the kind that had no precedence in the history of mankind. With their bare foot they marched on Iraq of Baath Party and with their hands deprived of any advanced weaponry they effectively defeated Saddam Hussein and all those who backed him, chasing them back to where they had come from. I think that unmatched display of national unity and pride made it clear to all that Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq of former description.
I also pointed out that as a nation-state of today; Iran has come a long way. Exactly a century ago, when all of Asia was still living in dark ages this nation began its eventful journey to the modern world of human dignity, social equality, political integrity and economic prosperity. In this long journey, Iran has experienced many ups and downs, but never succumbed to the indignity of accepting outside interests deciding for its destiny. The task of democratization of Iran might not have, as yet, been completely successful, but Sir, when you talk about wanting to spread your brand of democracy to the so-called Greater Middle East or creating democracy in Iraq in order to influence Iran, you could have taken into consideration the fact that first; democracy is real and sustainable when it is home-grown. Second; the US version of democracy, in which the lobbies are gradually replacing the demo, leaves much to be desired, as your Excellency has appointed two of former US presidents to study ways of improving on its election system. Third, there is not any symbol of democracy in the Middle East to be modeled on by the others; in reality, there is no democracy in the Middle East; Israel is a state that deprives a large segment of its population of the basic human rights; sends tanks and helicopters to fight women and children; invades its neighbours to grab their lands; pays no attention to repeated UN resolutions to behave responsibly etc. Turkey, though has managed to construct a façade of democracy as a result of pressure from the US and EU, its military junta decides how the Turks and non-Turks are to live there. The mockery of the concept of democracy US friends have created in places like Jordan and Egypt, cannot be acceptable even by Washington.
It seems Sir, your advisers either do not have the necessary knowledge or do not find it discernable to explain that apart from Bahrain, Iran is the only country in the Middle East that has made some progress towards a real democracy; it still has many problems, but the society is debating a democracy that cannot be sustainable unless it is home-grown. Moreover, given Iran’s millennial civilizational and cultural influence in West Asia, it is more likely that Iran’s progress in democracy influenced Iraq and others in that part of the world to develop their own homogenous democracy, if only the West stops meddling in the internal affairs of Iran and others in Muslim Middle East. Having said all that, it is no denying however, that we Iranians still have a long way to go to achieve our final national goals in this respect, but that has very little to do with outside powers, and for that matter, I would not even bore you explaining what these problems are. In fact, US interference in support for those involved in democratic debates will inevitably brand our hard work as being inspired or instructed by a power that unfortunately leaves no stone unturned in proving to be our national enemy.
Sir, evidently you have heeded these parts of my said letter and on some occasions you indeed repeated the fact that Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan, and/thus promised to treat Iran differently. You even went as far as stating in your ‘state of the union’ address of 31 January 2006 that: Tonight, let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran. But Sir; did you really mean that America respects our nation and that you respect our country? Or your government’s frantic endeavor to construct an internationally acceptable case to justify destruction of our country by war or worldwide economic sanction is their way of respect for Iran as a nation? Are we to believe that your efforts and those of your Secretary of State for instance to get India to retreat from Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline deal which is vitally important to the economy of all three, is your way of showing respect for the Iranians; a project that has nothing to do with Iran’s strategic policies and nuclear program? Surly you know that each time Washington threatens Iran of military options, the business world in Iran looses large portions of its hard earned business, which has nothing to do with the ruling clergy. Is this your government’s way of expressing respect for Iran as a nation?
Sir, in their shortsighted views, your neo-con aids and advisers may think of Iran as a terrorist nation who cannot be trusted to have nuclear weapon while India, Pakistan and Israel who are constantly at war can have it. But it is sad that the President of the United States is not advised by wise people that America has never been short of, that under any kind of regime, Iran has not even threatened any nation in the past 200 years, and/or there has not been even one single Iranian involved in so many terrorist activities of the recent years. Iran is a civilized nation that is fully aware that nuclear weapon is not to be used; that it is for regional and global deterrence and balance of power for peace. Iran is fully aware that even international villains like Stalin, Hitler did not use their nuclear weapons. Even Ariel Sharon did not threaten to use nuclear weapon against those he considered as enemies of his country; but the United States of America did use it at the end of World War II. Not only America has failed to justify use of this evil tool to the satisfaction of human conscience, but also is using the bunker buster variety of it in its military adventure in Iraq and is threatening to use it against our country. Iran believes that even as deterrence, nuclear weapon cannot guarantee lasting peace and security in the world and/thus what is needed for the Middle East at least, is a nuclear disarmament that would make her age-old desire of a nuclear free zone in that volatile region a reality.
Sir, may I respectfully assure you that very few Iranians have been influenced by your promise of respect for our country and our right to choose our own future. This was more like asking us to ignore what we see in your government’s fierce global endeavour to get our nation condemned internationally, not because it is really developing nuclear weapon, but because of the Islam-o-phobic fear of a few in Israel that Iran might decide sometime in future to develop nuclear weapon and might decide to use it against Israel. Your UN Ambassador, John Bolton, promised the AIPAC meeting of Zionist Lobby on 7 March 2006 to inflict pain on Iran in that international forum. When making that promise, he twisted his fist in gesture to display his hatred of Iran and the sadistic desire to inflicting pain on a nation that his boss had claimed to have respect for.
Moreover, you have made the best of President Ahmadinejad’s ideological remarks about the state of Israel ought to be wiped off the world map; a non-practical proposition; an expression of ideological wish which was not supported by proposing any practical plan or policy for carrying it out; an ideological rhetoric that had been repeated many times before him in the world of Islam without having caused such a fuss. But you Sir, made the best of this ideological expression by presenting it as launching plans to eradicate the state of Israel and mixed it, may I say respectfully, disingenuously with the lie about Iran having built or is about to build nuclear weapons to use against Israel… in order to justify an international ganging up of the strong against the weak so that the way is paved at the United Nations to sanction wiping the state of Iran off the map of the world. The problem of Islam-o-phobia in the West seems to have reached the point that even comparing Israel to a rotten tree triggers angry promises by the State Department that the US will make the G8 summit to declare sanctions to starve the people of Iran because their president does not like Israel. He certainly seems to have touched a raw nerve in Washington. On the other hand, let us assume for the argument’s sake that Iran has a nuclear bomb and wants to use it against Israel. How could anyone think that an Islamic state would dare to drop atomic bomb on Israel without causing catastrophe to Muslim nations of the Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, the densely populated areas of which are situated in such a close proximity of Israel’s population centres. The Israeli extremists have for obvious reasons suffered historically from the over-exaggerated fear of their safety and security. Even expression of doubt about the holocaust leads to imprisonment of a British historian for three years in a Western democracy, and telling a pestering Jewish reporter off will result in suspending for a month the office of the elected Maier of London. But publishing the optimum of insult against the prophet of Islam is covered by the freedom of speech???
On the other hand, by concocting fanciful statistics about the ethnic variations forming the nation of Iran, the naïve but over-zealous Michael Ladeen for instance, gathered together after your state of the union address of this year, all the wondering gangs of terrorists and separatists amongst Iranian Americans; elements who are openly on the pay of either the CIA (like MKO/MEK), or some Pan-Turkish and/or Pan-Arab sources, (like the Gray Wolf and Al-Ahvaz) encouraging them to fight for the disintegration of Iran. Meanwhile, your Secretary of State asks the Congress to allocate a budget of several million dollars to pay for the expenses of the activities of the gangs that are being used by all the president’s men and woman in order to wipe the state of Iran off the map. Your overzealous neo-con colleagues like Michael Ladeen are too naive to realize that these elements are consumed by their racially inclined ideas, and that playing with the fire of racism of their kind can be as dangerous to world peace and stability as playing with the fire of religious extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan proved to be. They seem not to have drawn any lesson from US experience of trying to use Islamic extremism in 1980s against Soviet Union in Afghanistan which has been the cause of all anti-West terrorism of our world of today.
Similarly, your allies in Britain and Canada have not learnt any lesson about the danger of playing with the fire of religious or racial extremism. Their leaders have met the leader of terrorist gang al-Ahvaz and promised support for him. The British have in fact went as far as granting this terrorist gang permission to place their head-office in London where it had attacked and occupied Iranian Embassy in 1980 when they were invented by Saddam Hussein at the start of his war against Iran. The siege of the Embassy was crashed in the famous SIS operation and the gang was officially branded as ‘terrorist’ by the British authorities. Now that this gang is revived and is actively engaged in bombing campaign in Iran which has caused great harm to our brother Iranian Arabs of Khuzestan, your government described their terrorism as action in the defense of the rights of the Arab nation (in Iran), and asked Iran not to try and eradicate their terror against Iranian Arabs who were first to make so much sacrifice in the defence of their Iranian homeland in Saddam Hussein’s war. Similar request was made by the British who are supporting them in the hope that they will contribute to the US-Israeli-Canadian-British sponsored plot to wipe Iran off the map of the world. In other word: while President Ahmadinejad only expresses an ideological wish about the state of Israel, US, Israel, UK, and Canada actively endeavour to support those who are poised to wipe Iran off the map of the map.
But in the final analysis, may I ask if it is true that the costly and dangerous US efforts in making the idea of clash of Christian West with Muslim East a reality, is about America being committed to the defense of the state of Israel, or it is about defending the excesses of the regime in Israel and its desire to keep the lands they have stolen from their Arab neighbours? Is it really because Dr. Ahamdinejad wants to single-handedly wipe out the state of Israel, or the reality is that your government has been made to commit itself to grant the extremists like Ariel Sharon, his successor, and others like Netanyahu their atrocious wish of devastating any nation in the world of Islam who dares to support the Palestinian struggle to regain their homes, their dignity and their basic human rights in their own homeland?. When the majority of the Israelis sensibly enforced the policy of ‘land for peace’, the United States failed to adequately support that humane proposition by trying to prevent Zionist extremists from conspiring to overthrow that policy. Instead, your government supported Sharon’s overbearing policies even to the detriment of your own road map; your government failed to give proper support to the wise initiative of H. M. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and failed measurably to remember your own admission in the wake of September 11 that all these problems come from your blind support of people like Ariel Sharon in Israel and that you were going to modify your one-sided policies towards Arab-Israeli conflicts. Instead of remembering to do that, your government invaded and occupied Afghanistan; invaded and occupied Iraq, and now is threatening to invade Iran while completely complacent about the impracticality of the task and its terrifying consequence in the form of realization of the clash of civilizations (clash of Christian West with Muslim East) etc.
As far as Iran is concerned, the United States started, from the time of the emergence of the Islamic Republic, to use any kind of excuses to enforce a regime change even at the price of devastating Iran and its neighbouring nations. The first excuse was that Iran was exporting its revolution to the neighbouring states and US friends and allies in the West and in the region bought that hilarious claim without asking themselves how could any revolution be exported. A war with more than one million dead and well over a thousand billion dollars of devastation was encouraged and supported by the West against Iran with no result for anyone except that it united the people of Iran with the revolutionary Islamic Republic, which in turn guaranteed its survival in its shaky start.
Now, by wanting to repeat the same adventure, this time not using the Saddams of the region, but directly, your government is repeating the same mistake by making an excuse of Iran’s nuclear energy program to justify your incomprehensible threats of new wars and devastation in the Muslim Middle East. For this, of course you have the support of a handful of right-wing extremists like John Howard of Australia and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy with their psychopathic views of Islam and other races. But as far as world opinion is concerned, please do not let your naïve Secretary of State and her British counterpart prevent you from knowing the fact that the world considers the United States of America under the neo-cons as a new Empire that has become the main source of threat against global security, and its president, may I respectfully say, as a war-monger who would do only the pleasure of those in Israel and USA suffering from their Islam-o-phobia.
On the other hand, in order to paint a legal colour to disguise these war-mongering and to achieve an international justification for your said plan against Iran and its people, your ally in Britain, H. E. Premier Blair argued (on 9th March 2006) that: Obligations that are entered into in the international community should be kept, and if they aren't that's a serious situation and that's the reason for reporting Iran to UNSC. But he failed to make it clear as to how Iran's voluntary undertaking in the temporary Paris agreement of 2004 for the interim period of Iran-EU3 negotiations, has in his judgment amounted to Iran's international obligations of permanent nature? In the face of such ambiguity in reference one can only assume that Mr. Blair refers to Iran's withdrawal of voluntary undertakings, when she was enticed to voluntarily suspend its uranium enrichment process for as long as negotiations with EU3 went on. I hope I will not be considered as too presumptuous to propose that before accusing Iran of not honouring its so-called international obligations, Mr. Blair needed to make it clear firstly; weather or not Iran's agreement to suspend all activities regarding uranium enrichment was a voluntary or an obligatory undertaking. Certainly the undertaking could not have been obligatory and imposed upon her under duress as it would be totally against NPT and other international laws and regulations. But on the other hand, if the undertaking was voluntary, then we seem to have differences of opinion as to what a voluntary undertaking would mean. English dictionary tell us that a voluntary undertaking is a state of affairs that could be: Arising, acting, or resulting from somebody's own choice or decision rather than because of external pressure or force. Should this definition be acceptable then surely a voluntary undertaking and an international obligation are mutually exclusive and present contradiction in terms.
Secondly, it is of consequence that Misers Blair & Chirac and Ms. Merkel made it clear if there was a time-limit in the Paris agreement for Iran's suspension of uranium enrichment activities, for if no time-limit was provisioned then it could not have been considered as a finally concluded legal instrument that required no further negotiations. But as talks went on after the signing of that agreement, then it could not have been but an interim legal instrument only designed to better shape the negotiations which were hoped to arriving at a treaty according to which both the West would build confidence with Iran’s nuclear program and Iran would be allowed to enjoy its established rights under the terms of NPT (Article IV) to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. And that the nuclear states of the West would be obligated to assist the non-nuclear Iran with the development of nuclear energy, while they could legally observe her to make sure that Tehran did not deviate from peaceful use of nuclear energy.
On the other hand, in spite of confirmation by all international onlookers that US-Indian nuclear deal of March 2006 has seriously weakened the proliferation regime by making a mockery of the NPT regulations, Mr. El-Baradei, the obliging Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) praised that unjustifiable deal on March 2, 2006 as "would boost non-proliferation efforts". By so serving the pleasure of the United States, he ignored the plane fact that that deal allows India, which has already developed nuclear weapons, to keep its secret strategic nuclear sites away from any inspection by IAEA. This is the UN official who, under the US and EU3 pressure reported Iran to the UN Security Council on the basis of innuendos such as: Iran was not completely honest in its disclosure of everything some time in the past: yet he declined to state the truth that IAEA investigations eventually found out everything about Isfahan and Natanz, which proved those sites to be problem-free and formed the integral parts of Iran's rights to peaceful nuclear energy, and that failure of their disclosure was because of administrative mismanagement than anything else. Or; in her cooperation with the IAEA investigation Iran showed some reluctance in allowing agents to inspect some of its military bases: But, he fails to remember that in his reports of investigations he repeatedly praised Iran for cooperating with the task of investigation. He also fails to mention that this reluctance is normal as no other state welcomes any prospect of its sensitive military sites being intrusively looked at by foreign agents who would not give any real guarantee for the confidentiality of information that are deemed to be vital for national security of the state being investigated. These are, at best, debatable issues for IAEA Board of Governors. UN Security Council is not the forum to debate them, but why you Sir, and your obliging friends in London, Paris and Bonn insist it to be referred to the United Nations? Can the answer be anything but what Ambassador Bolton has promised his AIPAC friends?
Mr. El-Baradei reported the case of Iran’s nuclear energy program to the UN Security Council solely to make it possible for John Bolton to inflict his promised pain on Iran, in spite of the fact that the UN Security Council’s job is to find solutions to real threats to world peace from rebel states like Israel, not to condemn a member nation like Iran to war and devastation on the basis of a decided crisis over her future nuclear energy plans; a nation that has not even threatened another country for the past two centuries. This gentleman has bravely discarded the embarrassment that the file he reported to the UN Security Council not only contained no evidence of wrong doing on the part of Iran, but also puts on full display before the world opinion his own repeated official reports of investigation of all sites in Iran and verification that no evidence had been found to incriminate Iran of any plan for developing nuclear weapons. Yet, he unashamedly asked the Security Council to deal with Iran’s case for the purpose of ‘inflicting pain’ on its people on the basis of the said innuendos. In returning El-Baradei’s report to him the UN Security Council returned to him for implementation of the idea of giving Iran 30 days to deprive itself of an independent nuclear energy research for all eternity; a demand that cannot be acceptable even to the weakest of nations. No government in the world can decide to deprive all future generations of its nation from their established rights. But when it comes to a point as incomprehensible as this, UN Security Council is to be asked to verify that asking Iran to indefinitely deprive itself of nuclear research activities would not effectively mean to paralyse the NPT protection of Iran, and that its membership of the treaty is lost, and her continued membership is just as good as withdrawn.
Sir in the final assessment of what the governments of the neo-cons have done so far, I have to regretfully say, that it amounts to no less than total destruction of America’s post-World War II credibility as a power that supports peace, democracy and human rights in the world. To destroy this highly praised position, the neo-cons had to ignore the facts of history and principles of civility; In order to make their imperialistic desire of New World Order in the wake of the collapse of the by-polar world order, they ignored the advice of those wiser amongst the Americans like Professor Russell Kirk who observed: Our prospects in the world of the twenty-first century are bright – supposing we Americans do not swagger about the globe, proclaiming our omniscience and our omnipotence…. Any American New World Order will likely cause the United States to be more detested – beginning with the Arab peoples (Muslims) – than the Soviet Union ever was.
From the point of view of the Iranians, all your Excellency’s government has done by ganging up US and EU3 against the established rights of the people of Iran, was to unite this people behind the Islamic Republic once again, but this time in a way that has no precedence in Iran’s history. Apart from those involved in terrorism, all those in the camp opposed to the IRI have united to defend Iran’s legitimate rights; the national right that you and your European colleagues are pressing the IRI to suspend indefinitely without even thinking how could it be possible for any government to sign a document that deprives even the unborn generations of its nation of nuclear energy. No state can make such a pledge, but the atrocious demand has motivated an all out national unity, which at this particular junction of our national debate for democracy, can only slow done this debate that is vitally important for the future of peace and stability of Iran and the neighbouring nations.
Yours sincerely
Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh Ph.D.
Professor of Political geography and Geopolitics – Tehran
Chairman of Urosevic Research Foundation - London
590 Field End Road, Middlesex HA4 0QZ, UK
Tel/Fax: +44-20 8422 7992
E-mail: pirouzmojtahedzadeh@hotmail.com
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4/28/2006
تامين امنيت در ورزشگاهها خصوصاً براي بانوان محترم با مشكلات جدي مواجه است
ظاهرا جامعه مدرسین قم طبق معمول شکرخوری کرده و گفتند که" تامين امنيت در ورزشگاهها خصوصاً براي بانوان محترم با مشكلات جدي مواجه است". یکی نیست بگه آخه مملکتی که نتونه نظم یه ورزشگاه داخل خاک خودش رو بر قرار کنه چه کارش به جنگ و شاخ و شونه کشیدن و گه خوری زیادی کردن؟؟؟
4/26/2006
روسپیگری در تایلند, بخش یک
این مقاله پیش درآمدی است به مقوله روسپیگری (در میان ایرانیان و تاجیکها و ازبکها) در شهر بانکوک. کلیه اطلاعات بر اساس مشاهدات نویسنده میباشد.
در طی سفر اولم به بانکوک2003-2004 با پدیده روسپیگری در سطح صنعتی آشنا شدم و قبل از آن از عمقش کاملا بی اطلاع بودم. چندی نگذشت که بزرگی و اندازه این غول پر درآمد مرا متعجب و به فکر واداشت. در طی مدت اقامت چند ماهه ام مسایلی را دیدم که بازگو کردن آنرا لازم میدانم؛ باشد که خوانندگان از آن سود ببرند.
بسیارشنیده بودم از دبی و سهم بزرگ ایرانی جماعت در صنعت سکس آنجا و اینکه چگونه عرب و عجم از این میوهای خدادادی استفاده و شکرگذار خالق یکتا و برادران غیور در سمت کارگذاران کشورند که بانی خیر شده و این نعمات الهی را به این شهر سرازیر کرده اند.همیشه در افکارم غوطه ور میشدم و سعی در تصور افراد؛محیط و زندگیشان داشتم. روزی از یکی از دوستان پرسیدم که آیا تا به حال ایرانیهایی را دیده است که به این حرفه در بانکوک مشغولند و در کمال ناباوری جواب مثبت شنیدم. از او پرسیدم اگر او تا به حال به چشم خود دیده است یا فقط شنیده ؛ گفت که به چشم خود دیده و مرا هم میتواند به آنجا ببرد.
قصه دراز کوتاه کنم, دو سه شب گذشت و به آنجا رفتیم.
کلاب "تونیز" در خیابان "نانا نوآ"* طبقه پایین هتل"تونیز"* نبش کوچه بیمارستان "بم رونگراد" * قرار دارد. 250 بت ورودی برای هر نفرو نوشیدنیهایی که سه برابر قیمت جاهای دیگر. در بدو ورود محیط کاملا شبیه به نایب کلاب معمولی است با نور کم و موزیک بلند. دور تا دور بر سر هر میز چندین دختر نشسته است. شمارشان تقریبا 25-30 نفر. همگی لباس شب پوشیده با آرایشهای نه چندان آنچنانی بعضی سیگار به لب و بعضی گیلاس به دست. هم بلوند و هم تیره. همگی انگلیسی را با لهجه بلغور میکنند و بعضا فارسی (هم تاجیکی و هم دری)و روسی در میان مکالماتشان به گوش میرسد. اینان همگی تاوان بی درایتی سیاستمداران و رهبران کشورهاشان را با تن فروشی میدهند چه آنان که از کشورهای تازه استقلال یافته اند و چه ایرانیان.
از قانون و عرف این مکان و چگونگی انجام معامله بگذریم و به ایرانیان اغلب معصوم غوطه ور در این مکان بپردازیم. آن شب هفت دختر ایرانی آنجا بودند ، سنشان از 21 بود تا 28. بیشترشان (به جز یکی) ازاستانهای جنوبی ایران(خوزستان ، هرمزگان و سیستان) بودند.
چهار نفرشان برای مدتی در دبی کار کرده بودند ، یکی در بلغارستان و دو خواهر پس از در به در شدن توسط قاچاقچیان مسافر(آدم پرانها) در بانکوک و از دست دادن آنچه با خود داشتند به این کار روی آورده و گذران زندگی میکردند.
آنها برای گذران زندگی و در امان ماندن از پلیس تایلند و هراس از دستگیر و برگردانده شدن به ایران تن به کار در دارو دسته اوکراینیها داده بودند. معامله با آنها از طریق رییس گروه انجام میشد و آنها هیچ گونه دخالتی در قیمت ، مدت و سایر متغیرهای معامله نداشتند. رییس گروه (که ظاهرا مسلح هم بود ) چهار چشمی همه چیز را میپایید و هیچ یک ازآنها تا ساعتی که در کلاب بودند حق انجام معامله شخصی با کسی نداشتند اما پس از ساعت کار (دو پس از نیمه شب) اجازه کار به طور شخصی داشتند. کار شخصی برایشان تقریبا $55 در آمد دارد اما تمامی خطرات و ریسکها به عهده خودشان است ، از طرف دیگر کار کردن در کلاب $15 تا $20 به دستشان میرساند اما امنیتشان گارانتی شده است. آنها اغلب در گروههای دو – سه نفری در محله های شرق "سوخومویت"* یا خیابانهای منتهی به "هتل گریس"* پرسه میزنند. اغلب مشتریانشان اعراب هستند اما تک و توکی مشتری دایم تایلندی هم دارند.
خیلی دوست داشتم که داستان زندگی تمام آنها را بشنوم ؛ اما آنچنان کار آسانی نبود چون که من مذکر،جوان و ایرانی بودم و تمامی این خصوصیات مرا خریداری فضول جلوه میداد اما با یاری دوستم و کمی پررویی توانستم جوابی برای سوالاتم پیدا کنم.
همگی آنها جامعه مرد محور ایران اسلامی وعدم درک نیازهای جوانان را بانی کشیده شدنشان به سمت این حرفه میدانستند.
هیچ کدام فکر بازگشت به ایران را نداشتند و این عمل را خودکشی محض میدانستند ، اگر چه پیغام و پسغام هایی از رابطهای سفارت شنیده بودند که حاکی از برآورده کردن امنیت آنها در ایران بود.
همگی به جز یک نفرشان حاضر به ازدواج و شروع زندگی در کنار همسرشان بودند ، اما امکان ازدواج با ایرانی را غیر ممکن میدانستند ( با توجه به پیشینه اشان) و حاضر به ازدواج با غیر ایرانی هم نبودند و توجیهشان این بود که اگر قرار باشد که تا آخر عمر با زبان نافهمان سر و کله بزنیم همان بهتر که یار ساعتیشان بمانیم و مبادله را به نرخ روز بکنیم.
کار در این کلاب را بهتر از جاهای دیگر میدانستند و اربابشان قول دیگر کشورهای آسیایی(ازجمله هنگ کنگِ چین) را به آنها داده بود.
فقط یک نفرشان پاسپورت غیر ایرانی داشت و راحت تر از دیگران قادر به سفر بود و تنها او بود که از همه به شغلشان حرفه ایی تر نگاه میکرد. بقیه کارشان را از سر درماندگی میدانستند.
ادامه دارد
*
Tonys Hotel
Bumrungrad Hospital
Nana Nua
Sukhumvite
Grace Hotel پاتوق ایرانیها و اعراب
4/18/2006
Facing Down Iran
Mark Steyn
Our lives depend on it.
Most Westerners read the map of the world like a Broadway marquee: north is top of the bill—America, Britain, Europe, Russia—and the rest dribbles away into a mass of supporting players punctuated by occasional Star Guests: India, China, Australia. Everyone else gets rounded up into groups: “Africa,” “Asia,” “Latin America.”
But if you’re one of the down-page crowd, the center of the world is wherever you happen to be. Take Iran: it doesn’t fit into any of the groups. Indeed, it’s a buffer zone between most of the important ones: to the west, it borders the Arab world; to the northwest, it borders NATO (and, if Turkey ever passes its endless audition, the European Union); to the north, the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation’s turbulent Caucasus; to the northeast, the Stans—the newly independent states of central Asia; to the east, the old British India, now bifurcated into a Muslim-Hindu nuclear standoff. And its southern shore sits on the central artery that feeds the global economy.
If you divide the world into geographical regions, then, Iran’s neither here nor there. But if you divide it ideologically, the mullahs are ideally positioned at the center of the various provinces of Islam—the Arabs, the Turks, the Stans, and the south Asians. Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there’s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.
That moment of ascendancy is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported: “Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.” Hmm. I’m not a professional mullah, so I can’t speak to the theological soundness of the argument, but it seems a religious school in the Holy City of Qom has ruled that “the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to sharia.” Well, there’s a surprise. How do you solve a problem? Like, sharia! It’s the one-stop shop for justifying all your geopolitical objectives.
The bad cop/worse cop routine the mullahs and their hothead President Ahmadinejad are playing in this period of alleged negotiation over Iran’s nuclear program is the best indication of how all negotiations with Iran will go once they’re ready to fly. This is the nuclear version of the NRA bumper sticker: “Guns Don’t Kill People. People Kill People.” Nukes don’t nuke nations. Nations nuke nations. When the Argentine junta seized British sovereign territory in the Falklands, the generals knew that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power, but they also knew that under no conceivable scenario would Her Majesty’s Government drop the big one on Buenos Aires. The Argie generals were able to assume decency on the part of the enemy, which is a useful thing to be able to do.
But in any contretemps with Iran the other party would be foolish to make a similar assumption. That will mean the contretemps will generally be resolved in Iran’s favor. In fact, if one were a Machiavellian mullah, the first thing one would do after acquiring nukes would be to hire some obvious loon like President Ahmaddamatree to front the program. He’s the equivalent of the yobbo in the English pub who says, “Oy, mate, you lookin’ at my bird?” You haven’t given her a glance, or him; you’re at the other end of the bar head down in the Daily Mirror, trying not to catch his eye. You don’t know whether he’s longing to nut you in the face or whether he just gets a kick out of terrifying you into thinking he wants to. But, either way, you just want to get out of the room in one piece. Kooks with nukes is one-way deterrence squared.
If Belgium becomes a nuclear power, the Dutch have no reason to believe it would be a factor in, say, negotiations over a joint highway project. But Iran’s nukes will be a factor in everything. If you think, for example, the European Union and others have been fairly craven over those Danish cartoons, imagine what they’d be like if a nuclear Tehran had demanded a formal apology, a suitable punishment for the newspaper, and blasphemy laws specifically outlawing representations of the Prophet. Iran with nukes will be a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist.
If we’d understood Iran back in 1979, we’d understand better the challenges we face today. Come to that, we might not even be facing them. But, with hindsight, what strikes you about the birth of the Islamic Republic is the near total lack of interest by analysts in that adjective: Islamic. Iran was only the second Islamist state, after Saudi Arabia—and, in selecting as their own qualifying adjective the family name, the House of Saud at least indicated a conventional sense of priorities, as the legions of Saudi princes whoring and gambling in the fleshpots of the West have demonstrated exhaustively. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue—though, as the Royal Family has belatedly discovered vis-à-vis the Islamists, they’re somewhat overdrawn on that front. The difference in Iran is simple: with the mullahs, there are no London escort agencies on retainer to supply blondes only. When they say “Islamic Republic,” they mean it. And refusing to take their words at face value has bedeviled Western strategists for three decades.
Twenty-seven years ago, because Islam didn’t fit into the old cold war template, analysts mostly discounted it. We looked at the map like that Broadway marquee: West and East, the old double act. As with most of the down-page turf, Iran’s significance lay in which half of the act she’d sign on with. To the Left, the shah was a high-profile example of an unsavory U.S. client propped up on traditional he-may-be-a-sonofabitch-but-he’s-our-sonofabitch grounds: in those heady days SAVAK, his secret police, were a household name among Western progressives, and insofar as they took the stern-faced man in the turban seriously, they assured themselves he was a kind of novelty front for the urbane Paris émigré socialists who accompanied him back to Tehran. To the realpolitik Right, the issue was Soviet containment: the shah may be our sonofabitch, but he’d outlived his usefulness, and a weak Iran could prove too tempting an invitation to Moscow to fulfill the oldest of czarist dreams—a warm-water port, not to mention control of the Straits of Hormuz. Very few of us considered the strategic implications of an Islamist victory on its own terms—the notion that Iran was checking the neither-of-the-above box and that that box would prove a far greater threat to the Freeish World than Communism.
But that was always Iran’s plan. In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact disintegrating before his eyes, poor beleaguered Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block: “I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan,” Ayatollah Khomeini wrote to Moscow. “I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.”
Today many people in the West don’t take that any more seriously than Gorbachev did. But it’s pretty much come to pass. As Communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Africa and south Asia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay who’d have been “Marxist fantasists” a generation or two back are now Islamists: it’s the ideology du jour. At the point of expiry of the Soviet Union in 1991, the peoples of the central Asian republics were for the most part unaware that Iran had even had an “Islamic revolution”; 15 years on, following the proselytizing of thousands of mullahs dispatched to the region by a specially created Iranian government agency, the Stans’ traditionally moderate and in many cases alcoholically lubricated form of Islam is yielding in all but the most remote areas to a fiercer form imported from the south. As the Pentagon has begun to notice, in Iraq Tehran has been quietly duplicating the strategy that delivered southern Lebanon into its control 20 years ago. The degeneration of Baby Assad’s supposedly “secular” Baathist tyranny into full-blown client status and the replacement of Arafat’s depraved “secular” kleptocrat terrorists by Hamas’s even more depraved Islamist terrorists can also be seen as symptoms of Iranification.
So as a geopolitical analyst the ayatollah is not to be disdained. Our failure to understand Iran in the seventies foreshadowed our failure to understand the broader struggle today. As clashes of civilizations go, this one’s between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive war—wealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers. (Its sole resource, oil, would stay in the ground were it not for foreign technology, foreign manpower, and a Western fetishization of domestic environmental aesthetics.)
For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?
For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?
Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration has begun promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a reassuring name. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs—our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower—their strengths, and our great weakness. Even a loser can win when he’s up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it’s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us? If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.
What, after all, is the issue underpinning every little goofy incident in the news, from those Danish cartoons of Mohammed to recommendations for polygamy by official commissions in Canada to the banning of the English flag in English prisons because it’s an insensitive “crusader” emblem to the introduction of gender-segregated swimming sessions in municipal pools in Puget Sound? In a word, sovereignty. There is no god but Allah, and thus there is no jurisdiction but Allah’s. Ayatollah Khomeini saw himself not as the leader of a geographical polity but as a leader of a communal one: Islam. Once those urbane socialist émigrés were either dead or on the plane back to Paris, Iran’s nominally “temporal” government took the same view, too: its role is not merely to run national highway departments and education ministries but to advance the cause of Islam worldwide.
If you dust off the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Article One reads: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.” Iran fails to meet qualification (d), and has never accepted it. The signature act of the new regime was not the usual post-coup bloodletting and summary execution of the shah’s mid-ranking officials but the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by “students” acting with Khomeini’s blessing. Diplomatic missions are recognized as the sovereign territory of that state, and the violation thereof is an act of war. No one in Washington has to fret that Fidel Castro will bomb the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Even in the event of an actual war, the diplomatic staff of both countries would be allowed to depart.
Yet Iran seized protected persons on U.S. soil and held them prisoner for over a year—ostensibly because Washington was planning to restore the shah. But the shah died and the hostages remained. And, when the deal was eventually done and the hostages were released, the sovereign territory of the United States remained in the hands of the gangster regime. Granted that during the Carter administration the Soviets were gobbling up real estate from Afghanistan to Grenada, it’s significant that in this wretched era the only loss of actual U.S. territory was to the Islamists.
Yet Iran paid no price. They got away with it. For the purposes of comparison, in 1980, when the U.S. hostages in Tehran were in their sixth month of captivity, Iranians opposed to the mullahs seized the Islamic Republic’s embassy in London. After six days of negotiation, Her Majesty’s Government sent SAS commandos into the building and restored it to the control of the regime. In refusing to do the same with the “students” occupying the U.S. embassy, the Islamic Republic was explicitly declaring that it was not as other states.
We expect multilateral human-rights Democrats to be unsatisfactory on assertive nationalism, but if they won’t even stand up for international law, what’s the point? Jimmy Carter should have demanded the same service as Tehran got from the British—the swift resolution of the situation by the host government—and, if none was forthcoming, Washington should have reversed the affront to international order quickly, decisively, and in a sufficiently punitive manner. At hinge moments of history, there are never good and bad options, only bad and much much worse. Our options today are significantly worse because we didn’t take the bad one back then.
With the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a British subject, Tehran extended its contempt for sovereignty to claiming jurisdiction over the nationals of foreign states, passing sentence on them, and conscripting citizens of other countries to carry it out. Iran’s supreme leader instructed Muslims around the world to serve as executioners of the Islamic Republic—and they did, killing not Rushdie himself but his Japanese translator, and stabbing the Italian translator, and shooting the Italian publisher, and killing three dozen persons with no connection to the book when a mob burned down a hotel because of the presence of the novelist’s Turkish translator.
Iran’s de facto head of state offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for a whack job on an obscure English novelist. And, as with the embassy siege, he got away with it.
In the latest variation on Marx’s dictum, history repeats itself: first, the unreadable London literary novel; then, the Danish funny pages. But in the 17 years between the Rushdie fatwa and the cartoon jihad, what was supposedly a freakish one-off collision between Islam and the modern world has become routine. We now think it perfectly normal for Muslims to demand the tenets of their religion be applied to society at large: the government of Sweden, for example, has been zealously closing down websites that republish those Danish cartoons. As Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said, “It is in our revolution’s interest, and an essential principle, that when we speak of Islamic objectives, we address all the Muslims of the world.” Or as a female Muslim demonstrator in Toronto put it: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”
If that’s a little too ferocious, Kofi Annan framed it rather more soothingly: “The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.”
If you’ve also “recently acquired” a significant Muslim population and you’re not sure how to “adjust” to it, well, here’s the difference: back when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated to the host country. As Kofi and Co. see it, today the host country has to assimilate to the immigrants: if Islamic law forbids representations of the Prophet, then so must Danish law, and French law, and American law. Iran was the progenitor of this rapacious extraterritoriality, and, if we had understood it more clearly a generation ago, we might be in less danger of seeing large tracts of the developed world being subsumed by it today.
Yet instead the West somehow came to believe that, in a region of authoritarian monarchs and kleptocrat dictators, Iran was a comparative beacon of liberty. The British foreign secretary goes to Tehran and hangs with the mullahs and, even though he’s not a practicing Muslim (yet), ostentatiously does that “peace be upon him” thing whenever he mentions the Prophet Mohammed. And where does the kissy-face with the A-list imams get him? Ayatollah Khamenei renewed the fatwa on Rushdie only last year. True, President Bush identified Iran as a member of the axis of evil, but a year later the country was being hailed as a “democracy” by then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage and a nation that has seen a “democratic flowering,” as State Department spokesman Richard Boucher put it.
And let’s not forget Bill Clinton’s extraordinary remarks at Davos last year: “Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.” That’s true in the very narrow sense that there’s a certain similarity between his legal strategy and sharia when it comes to adultery and setting up the gals as the fall guys. But it seems Clinton apparently had a more general commonality in mind: “In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.” America’s first black President is beginning to sound like America’s first Islamist ex-president.
Those remarks are as nutty as Gerald Ford’s denial of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. Iran has an impressive three-decade record of talking the talk and walking the walk—either directly or through client groups like Hezbollah. In 1994, the Argentine Israel Mutual Association was bombed in Buenos Aires. Nearly 100 people died and 250 were injured—the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. An Argentine court eventually issued warrants for two Iranian diplomats plus Ali Fallahian, former intelligence minister, and Ali Akbar Parvaresh, former education minister and deputy speaker of the Majlis.
Why blow up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires? Because it’s there. Unlike the Iranian infiltration into Bosnia and Croatia, which helped radicalize not just the local populations but Muslim supporters from Britain and Western Europe, the random slaughter in the Argentine has no strategic value except as a demonstration of muscle and reach.
Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:
contempt for the most basic international conventions;
long-reach extraterritoriality;
effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);
an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.
Yet the Europeans remain in denial. Iran was supposedly the Middle Eastern state they could work with. And the chancellors and foreign ministers jetted in to court the mullahs so assiduously that they’re reluctant to give up on the strategy just because a relatively peripheral figure like the, er, head of state is sounding off about Armageddon.
Instead, Western analysts tend to go all Kremlinological. There are, after all, many factions within Iran’s ruling class. What the country’s quick-on-the-nuke president says may not be the final word on the regime’s position. Likewise, what the school of nuclear theologians in Qom says. Likewise, what former president Khatami says. Likewise, what Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, says.
But, given that they’re all in favor of the country having nukes, the point seems somewhat moot. The question then arises, what do they want them for?
By way of illustration, consider the country’s last presidential election. The final round offered a choice between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an alumnus of the U.S. Embassy siege a quarter-century ago, and Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council, which sounds like an EU foreign policy agency but is, in fact, the body that arbitrates between Iran’s political and religious leaderships. Ahmadinejad is a notorious shoot-from-the-lip apocalyptic hothead who believes in the return of the Twelfth (hidden) Imam and quite possibly that he personally is his designated deputy, and he’s also claimed that when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year a mystical halo appeared and bathed him in its aura. Ayatollah Rafsanjani, on the other hand, is one of those famous “moderates.”
What’s the difference between a hothead and a moderate? Well, the extremist Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” while the moderate Rafsanjani has declared that Israel is “the most hideous occurrence in history,” which the Muslim world “will vomit out from its midst” in one blast, because “a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.” Evidently wiping Israel off the map seems to be one of those rare points of bipartisan consensus in Tehran, the Iranian equivalent of a prescription drug plan for seniors: we’re just arguing over the details.
So the question is: Will they do it?
And the minute you have to ask, you know the answer. If, say, Norway or Ireland acquired nuclear weapons, we might regret the “proliferation,” but we wouldn’t have to contemplate mushroom clouds over neighboring states. In that sense, the civilized world has already lost: to enter into negotiations with a jurisdiction headed by a Holocaust-denying millenarian nut job is, in itself, an act of profound weakness—the first concession, regardless of what weaselly settlement might eventually emerge.
Conversely, a key reason to stop Iran is to demonstrate that we can still muster the will to do so. Instead, the striking characteristic of the long diplomatic dance that brought us to this moment is how September 10th it’s all been. The free world’s delegated negotiators (the European Union) and transnational institutions (the IAEA) have continually given the impression that they’d be content just to boot it down the road to next year or the year after or find some arrangement—this decade’s Oil-for-Food or North Korean deal—that would get them off the hook. If you talk to EU foreign ministers, they’ve already psychologically accepted a nuclear Iran. Indeed, the chief characteristic of the West’s reaction to Iran’s nuclearization has been an enervated fatalism.
Back when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now a state openly committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we shrug: Can’t be helped. Just the way things are. One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get ’em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran’s head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that’s part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.
The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going nuclear. Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr. Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did nothing. And I would wager that’s still how he looks at the world. And, like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of a Jew-free Middle East. The Palestinians and their “right of return” have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat’s uncle, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.
But it doesn’t have to come to that. Go back to that Argentine bombing. It was, in fact, the second major Iranian-sponsored attack in Buenos Aires. The year before, 1993, a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 29 people and injured hundreds more in an attack on the Israeli Embassy. In the case of the community center bombing, the killer had flown from Lebanon a few days earlier and entered Latin America through the porous tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Suppose Iran had had a “dirty nuke” shipped to Hezbollah, or even the full-blown thing: Would it have been any less easy to get it into the country? And, if a significant chunk of downtown Buenos Aires were rendered uninhabitable, what would the Argentine government do? Iran can project itself to South America effortlessly, but Argentina can’t project itself to the Middle East at all. It can’t nuke Tehran, and it can’t attack Iran in conventional ways.
So any retaliation would be down to others. Would Washington act? It depends how clear the fingerprints were. If the links back to the mullahs were just a teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager would the U.S. be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might—but an administration of a more Clinto-Powellite bent? How much pressure would there be for investigations under UN auspices? Perhaps Hans Blix could come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through Security-Council coalition-building, with the secretary of state making a last-minute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its vote.
Perhaps it’s unduly pessimistic to write the civilized world automatically into what Osama bin Laden called the “weak horse” role (Islam being the “strong horse”). But, if you were an Iranian “moderate” and you’d watched the West’s reaction to the embassy seizure and the Rushdie murders and Hezbollah terrorism, wouldn’t you be thinking along those lines? I don’t suppose Buenos Aires Jews expect to have their institutions nuked any more than 12 years ago they expected to be blown up in their own city by Iranian-backed suicide bombers. Nukes have gone freelance, and there’s nothing much we can do about that, and sooner or later we’ll see the consequences—in Vancouver or Rotterdam, Glasgow or Atlanta. But, that being so, we owe it to ourselves to take the minimal precautionary step of ending the one regime whose political establishment is explicitly pledged to the nuclear annihilation of neighboring states.
Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no “surgical” strike in any meaningful sense: Iran’s clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country’s allegedly “pro-American” youth. This shouldn’t be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment—and incarceration. It’s up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime—but no occupation.
The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it’s postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.
A quarter-century ago, there was a minor British pop hit called “Ayatollah, Don’t Khomeini Closer.” If you’re a U.S. diplomat or a British novelist, a Croat Christian or an Argentine Jew, he’s already come way too close. How much closer do you want him to get?
Our lives depend on it.
Most Westerners read the map of the world like a Broadway marquee: north is top of the bill—America, Britain, Europe, Russia—and the rest dribbles away into a mass of supporting players punctuated by occasional Star Guests: India, China, Australia. Everyone else gets rounded up into groups: “Africa,” “Asia,” “Latin America.”
But if you’re one of the down-page crowd, the center of the world is wherever you happen to be. Take Iran: it doesn’t fit into any of the groups. Indeed, it’s a buffer zone between most of the important ones: to the west, it borders the Arab world; to the northwest, it borders NATO (and, if Turkey ever passes its endless audition, the European Union); to the north, the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation’s turbulent Caucasus; to the northeast, the Stans—the newly independent states of central Asia; to the east, the old British India, now bifurcated into a Muslim-Hindu nuclear standoff. And its southern shore sits on the central artery that feeds the global economy.
If you divide the world into geographical regions, then, Iran’s neither here nor there. But if you divide it ideologically, the mullahs are ideally positioned at the center of the various provinces of Islam—the Arabs, the Turks, the Stans, and the south Asians. Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there’s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.
That moment of ascendancy is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported: “Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.” Hmm. I’m not a professional mullah, so I can’t speak to the theological soundness of the argument, but it seems a religious school in the Holy City of Qom has ruled that “the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to sharia.” Well, there’s a surprise. How do you solve a problem? Like, sharia! It’s the one-stop shop for justifying all your geopolitical objectives.
The bad cop/worse cop routine the mullahs and their hothead President Ahmadinejad are playing in this period of alleged negotiation over Iran’s nuclear program is the best indication of how all negotiations with Iran will go once they’re ready to fly. This is the nuclear version of the NRA bumper sticker: “Guns Don’t Kill People. People Kill People.” Nukes don’t nuke nations. Nations nuke nations. When the Argentine junta seized British sovereign territory in the Falklands, the generals knew that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power, but they also knew that under no conceivable scenario would Her Majesty’s Government drop the big one on Buenos Aires. The Argie generals were able to assume decency on the part of the enemy, which is a useful thing to be able to do.
But in any contretemps with Iran the other party would be foolish to make a similar assumption. That will mean the contretemps will generally be resolved in Iran’s favor. In fact, if one were a Machiavellian mullah, the first thing one would do after acquiring nukes would be to hire some obvious loon like President Ahmaddamatree to front the program. He’s the equivalent of the yobbo in the English pub who says, “Oy, mate, you lookin’ at my bird?” You haven’t given her a glance, or him; you’re at the other end of the bar head down in the Daily Mirror, trying not to catch his eye. You don’t know whether he’s longing to nut you in the face or whether he just gets a kick out of terrifying you into thinking he wants to. But, either way, you just want to get out of the room in one piece. Kooks with nukes is one-way deterrence squared.
If Belgium becomes a nuclear power, the Dutch have no reason to believe it would be a factor in, say, negotiations over a joint highway project. But Iran’s nukes will be a factor in everything. If you think, for example, the European Union and others have been fairly craven over those Danish cartoons, imagine what they’d be like if a nuclear Tehran had demanded a formal apology, a suitable punishment for the newspaper, and blasphemy laws specifically outlawing representations of the Prophet. Iran with nukes will be a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist.
If we’d understood Iran back in 1979, we’d understand better the challenges we face today. Come to that, we might not even be facing them. But, with hindsight, what strikes you about the birth of the Islamic Republic is the near total lack of interest by analysts in that adjective: Islamic. Iran was only the second Islamist state, after Saudi Arabia—and, in selecting as their own qualifying adjective the family name, the House of Saud at least indicated a conventional sense of priorities, as the legions of Saudi princes whoring and gambling in the fleshpots of the West have demonstrated exhaustively. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue—though, as the Royal Family has belatedly discovered vis-à-vis the Islamists, they’re somewhat overdrawn on that front. The difference in Iran is simple: with the mullahs, there are no London escort agencies on retainer to supply blondes only. When they say “Islamic Republic,” they mean it. And refusing to take their words at face value has bedeviled Western strategists for three decades.
Twenty-seven years ago, because Islam didn’t fit into the old cold war template, analysts mostly discounted it. We looked at the map like that Broadway marquee: West and East, the old double act. As with most of the down-page turf, Iran’s significance lay in which half of the act she’d sign on with. To the Left, the shah was a high-profile example of an unsavory U.S. client propped up on traditional he-may-be-a-sonofabitch-but-he’s-our-sonofabitch grounds: in those heady days SAVAK, his secret police, were a household name among Western progressives, and insofar as they took the stern-faced man in the turban seriously, they assured themselves he was a kind of novelty front for the urbane Paris émigré socialists who accompanied him back to Tehran. To the realpolitik Right, the issue was Soviet containment: the shah may be our sonofabitch, but he’d outlived his usefulness, and a weak Iran could prove too tempting an invitation to Moscow to fulfill the oldest of czarist dreams—a warm-water port, not to mention control of the Straits of Hormuz. Very few of us considered the strategic implications of an Islamist victory on its own terms—the notion that Iran was checking the neither-of-the-above box and that that box would prove a far greater threat to the Freeish World than Communism.
But that was always Iran’s plan. In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact disintegrating before his eyes, poor beleaguered Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block: “I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan,” Ayatollah Khomeini wrote to Moscow. “I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.”
Today many people in the West don’t take that any more seriously than Gorbachev did. But it’s pretty much come to pass. As Communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Africa and south Asia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay who’d have been “Marxist fantasists” a generation or two back are now Islamists: it’s the ideology du jour. At the point of expiry of the Soviet Union in 1991, the peoples of the central Asian republics were for the most part unaware that Iran had even had an “Islamic revolution”; 15 years on, following the proselytizing of thousands of mullahs dispatched to the region by a specially created Iranian government agency, the Stans’ traditionally moderate and in many cases alcoholically lubricated form of Islam is yielding in all but the most remote areas to a fiercer form imported from the south. As the Pentagon has begun to notice, in Iraq Tehran has been quietly duplicating the strategy that delivered southern Lebanon into its control 20 years ago. The degeneration of Baby Assad’s supposedly “secular” Baathist tyranny into full-blown client status and the replacement of Arafat’s depraved “secular” kleptocrat terrorists by Hamas’s even more depraved Islamist terrorists can also be seen as symptoms of Iranification.
So as a geopolitical analyst the ayatollah is not to be disdained. Our failure to understand Iran in the seventies foreshadowed our failure to understand the broader struggle today. As clashes of civilizations go, this one’s between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive war—wealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers. (Its sole resource, oil, would stay in the ground were it not for foreign technology, foreign manpower, and a Western fetishization of domestic environmental aesthetics.)
For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?
For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?
Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration has begun promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a reassuring name. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs—our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower—their strengths, and our great weakness. Even a loser can win when he’s up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it’s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us? If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.
What, after all, is the issue underpinning every little goofy incident in the news, from those Danish cartoons of Mohammed to recommendations for polygamy by official commissions in Canada to the banning of the English flag in English prisons because it’s an insensitive “crusader” emblem to the introduction of gender-segregated swimming sessions in municipal pools in Puget Sound? In a word, sovereignty. There is no god but Allah, and thus there is no jurisdiction but Allah’s. Ayatollah Khomeini saw himself not as the leader of a geographical polity but as a leader of a communal one: Islam. Once those urbane socialist émigrés were either dead or on the plane back to Paris, Iran’s nominally “temporal” government took the same view, too: its role is not merely to run national highway departments and education ministries but to advance the cause of Islam worldwide.
If you dust off the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Article One reads: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.” Iran fails to meet qualification (d), and has never accepted it. The signature act of the new regime was not the usual post-coup bloodletting and summary execution of the shah’s mid-ranking officials but the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by “students” acting with Khomeini’s blessing. Diplomatic missions are recognized as the sovereign territory of that state, and the violation thereof is an act of war. No one in Washington has to fret that Fidel Castro will bomb the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Even in the event of an actual war, the diplomatic staff of both countries would be allowed to depart.
Yet Iran seized protected persons on U.S. soil and held them prisoner for over a year—ostensibly because Washington was planning to restore the shah. But the shah died and the hostages remained. And, when the deal was eventually done and the hostages were released, the sovereign territory of the United States remained in the hands of the gangster regime. Granted that during the Carter administration the Soviets were gobbling up real estate from Afghanistan to Grenada, it’s significant that in this wretched era the only loss of actual U.S. territory was to the Islamists.
Yet Iran paid no price. They got away with it. For the purposes of comparison, in 1980, when the U.S. hostages in Tehran were in their sixth month of captivity, Iranians opposed to the mullahs seized the Islamic Republic’s embassy in London. After six days of negotiation, Her Majesty’s Government sent SAS commandos into the building and restored it to the control of the regime. In refusing to do the same with the “students” occupying the U.S. embassy, the Islamic Republic was explicitly declaring that it was not as other states.
We expect multilateral human-rights Democrats to be unsatisfactory on assertive nationalism, but if they won’t even stand up for international law, what’s the point? Jimmy Carter should have demanded the same service as Tehran got from the British—the swift resolution of the situation by the host government—and, if none was forthcoming, Washington should have reversed the affront to international order quickly, decisively, and in a sufficiently punitive manner. At hinge moments of history, there are never good and bad options, only bad and much much worse. Our options today are significantly worse because we didn’t take the bad one back then.
With the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a British subject, Tehran extended its contempt for sovereignty to claiming jurisdiction over the nationals of foreign states, passing sentence on them, and conscripting citizens of other countries to carry it out. Iran’s supreme leader instructed Muslims around the world to serve as executioners of the Islamic Republic—and they did, killing not Rushdie himself but his Japanese translator, and stabbing the Italian translator, and shooting the Italian publisher, and killing three dozen persons with no connection to the book when a mob burned down a hotel because of the presence of the novelist’s Turkish translator.
Iran’s de facto head of state offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for a whack job on an obscure English novelist. And, as with the embassy siege, he got away with it.
In the latest variation on Marx’s dictum, history repeats itself: first, the unreadable London literary novel; then, the Danish funny pages. But in the 17 years between the Rushdie fatwa and the cartoon jihad, what was supposedly a freakish one-off collision between Islam and the modern world has become routine. We now think it perfectly normal for Muslims to demand the tenets of their religion be applied to society at large: the government of Sweden, for example, has been zealously closing down websites that republish those Danish cartoons. As Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said, “It is in our revolution’s interest, and an essential principle, that when we speak of Islamic objectives, we address all the Muslims of the world.” Or as a female Muslim demonstrator in Toronto put it: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”
If that’s a little too ferocious, Kofi Annan framed it rather more soothingly: “The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.”
If you’ve also “recently acquired” a significant Muslim population and you’re not sure how to “adjust” to it, well, here’s the difference: back when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated to the host country. As Kofi and Co. see it, today the host country has to assimilate to the immigrants: if Islamic law forbids representations of the Prophet, then so must Danish law, and French law, and American law. Iran was the progenitor of this rapacious extraterritoriality, and, if we had understood it more clearly a generation ago, we might be in less danger of seeing large tracts of the developed world being subsumed by it today.
Yet instead the West somehow came to believe that, in a region of authoritarian monarchs and kleptocrat dictators, Iran was a comparative beacon of liberty. The British foreign secretary goes to Tehran and hangs with the mullahs and, even though he’s not a practicing Muslim (yet), ostentatiously does that “peace be upon him” thing whenever he mentions the Prophet Mohammed. And where does the kissy-face with the A-list imams get him? Ayatollah Khamenei renewed the fatwa on Rushdie only last year. True, President Bush identified Iran as a member of the axis of evil, but a year later the country was being hailed as a “democracy” by then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage and a nation that has seen a “democratic flowering,” as State Department spokesman Richard Boucher put it.
And let’s not forget Bill Clinton’s extraordinary remarks at Davos last year: “Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.” That’s true in the very narrow sense that there’s a certain similarity between his legal strategy and sharia when it comes to adultery and setting up the gals as the fall guys. But it seems Clinton apparently had a more general commonality in mind: “In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.” America’s first black President is beginning to sound like America’s first Islamist ex-president.
Those remarks are as nutty as Gerald Ford’s denial of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. Iran has an impressive three-decade record of talking the talk and walking the walk—either directly or through client groups like Hezbollah. In 1994, the Argentine Israel Mutual Association was bombed in Buenos Aires. Nearly 100 people died and 250 were injured—the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. An Argentine court eventually issued warrants for two Iranian diplomats plus Ali Fallahian, former intelligence minister, and Ali Akbar Parvaresh, former education minister and deputy speaker of the Majlis.
Why blow up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires? Because it’s there. Unlike the Iranian infiltration into Bosnia and Croatia, which helped radicalize not just the local populations but Muslim supporters from Britain and Western Europe, the random slaughter in the Argentine has no strategic value except as a demonstration of muscle and reach.
Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:
contempt for the most basic international conventions;
long-reach extraterritoriality;
effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);
an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.
Yet the Europeans remain in denial. Iran was supposedly the Middle Eastern state they could work with. And the chancellors and foreign ministers jetted in to court the mullahs so assiduously that they’re reluctant to give up on the strategy just because a relatively peripheral figure like the, er, head of state is sounding off about Armageddon.
Instead, Western analysts tend to go all Kremlinological. There are, after all, many factions within Iran’s ruling class. What the country’s quick-on-the-nuke president says may not be the final word on the regime’s position. Likewise, what the school of nuclear theologians in Qom says. Likewise, what former president Khatami says. Likewise, what Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, says.
But, given that they’re all in favor of the country having nukes, the point seems somewhat moot. The question then arises, what do they want them for?
By way of illustration, consider the country’s last presidential election. The final round offered a choice between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an alumnus of the U.S. Embassy siege a quarter-century ago, and Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council, which sounds like an EU foreign policy agency but is, in fact, the body that arbitrates between Iran’s political and religious leaderships. Ahmadinejad is a notorious shoot-from-the-lip apocalyptic hothead who believes in the return of the Twelfth (hidden) Imam and quite possibly that he personally is his designated deputy, and he’s also claimed that when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year a mystical halo appeared and bathed him in its aura. Ayatollah Rafsanjani, on the other hand, is one of those famous “moderates.”
What’s the difference between a hothead and a moderate? Well, the extremist Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” while the moderate Rafsanjani has declared that Israel is “the most hideous occurrence in history,” which the Muslim world “will vomit out from its midst” in one blast, because “a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.” Evidently wiping Israel off the map seems to be one of those rare points of bipartisan consensus in Tehran, the Iranian equivalent of a prescription drug plan for seniors: we’re just arguing over the details.
So the question is: Will they do it?
And the minute you have to ask, you know the answer. If, say, Norway or Ireland acquired nuclear weapons, we might regret the “proliferation,” but we wouldn’t have to contemplate mushroom clouds over neighboring states. In that sense, the civilized world has already lost: to enter into negotiations with a jurisdiction headed by a Holocaust-denying millenarian nut job is, in itself, an act of profound weakness—the first concession, regardless of what weaselly settlement might eventually emerge.
Conversely, a key reason to stop Iran is to demonstrate that we can still muster the will to do so. Instead, the striking characteristic of the long diplomatic dance that brought us to this moment is how September 10th it’s all been. The free world’s delegated negotiators (the European Union) and transnational institutions (the IAEA) have continually given the impression that they’d be content just to boot it down the road to next year or the year after or find some arrangement—this decade’s Oil-for-Food or North Korean deal—that would get them off the hook. If you talk to EU foreign ministers, they’ve already psychologically accepted a nuclear Iran. Indeed, the chief characteristic of the West’s reaction to Iran’s nuclearization has been an enervated fatalism.
Back when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now a state openly committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we shrug: Can’t be helped. Just the way things are. One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get ’em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran’s head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that’s part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.
The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going nuclear. Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr. Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did nothing. And I would wager that’s still how he looks at the world. And, like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of a Jew-free Middle East. The Palestinians and their “right of return” have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat’s uncle, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.
But it doesn’t have to come to that. Go back to that Argentine bombing. It was, in fact, the second major Iranian-sponsored attack in Buenos Aires. The year before, 1993, a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 29 people and injured hundreds more in an attack on the Israeli Embassy. In the case of the community center bombing, the killer had flown from Lebanon a few days earlier and entered Latin America through the porous tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Suppose Iran had had a “dirty nuke” shipped to Hezbollah, or even the full-blown thing: Would it have been any less easy to get it into the country? And, if a significant chunk of downtown Buenos Aires were rendered uninhabitable, what would the Argentine government do? Iran can project itself to South America effortlessly, but Argentina can’t project itself to the Middle East at all. It can’t nuke Tehran, and it can’t attack Iran in conventional ways.
So any retaliation would be down to others. Would Washington act? It depends how clear the fingerprints were. If the links back to the mullahs were just a teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager would the U.S. be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might—but an administration of a more Clinto-Powellite bent? How much pressure would there be for investigations under UN auspices? Perhaps Hans Blix could come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through Security-Council coalition-building, with the secretary of state making a last-minute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its vote.
Perhaps it’s unduly pessimistic to write the civilized world automatically into what Osama bin Laden called the “weak horse” role (Islam being the “strong horse”). But, if you were an Iranian “moderate” and you’d watched the West’s reaction to the embassy seizure and the Rushdie murders and Hezbollah terrorism, wouldn’t you be thinking along those lines? I don’t suppose Buenos Aires Jews expect to have their institutions nuked any more than 12 years ago they expected to be blown up in their own city by Iranian-backed suicide bombers. Nukes have gone freelance, and there’s nothing much we can do about that, and sooner or later we’ll see the consequences—in Vancouver or Rotterdam, Glasgow or Atlanta. But, that being so, we owe it to ourselves to take the minimal precautionary step of ending the one regime whose political establishment is explicitly pledged to the nuclear annihilation of neighboring states.
Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no “surgical” strike in any meaningful sense: Iran’s clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country’s allegedly “pro-American” youth. This shouldn’t be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment—and incarceration. It’s up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime—but no occupation.
The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it’s postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.
A quarter-century ago, there was a minor British pop hit called “Ayatollah, Don’t Khomeini Closer.” If you’re a U.S. diplomat or a British novelist, a Croat Christian or an Argentine Jew, he’s already come way too close. How much closer do you want him to get?
4/17/2006
انقلاب
ياد آن زمان كه چندي از شور انقلابي
هرگز نبود يكدم در ديده خواب مارا
تا مرگ شاه خائن، نهضت ادامه دارد
گفتيم و از مسلسل، آمد جواب مارا
برديم ماديان را، از بهر فحل دادن
بر عكس آرزو ها شد مستجاب مارا
كوني و كله قندي داديم و باز گشتيم
ديگر نماند وامي ازهيچ باب مارا
گر انقلاب اين است باري به ما بگوئيد
ما انقلاب كرديم، يا انقلاب مارا
4/16/2006
یک نماینده مجلس:رفتاردختران ایران زشت ترازفاشیست های نژادپرست است
عنوان خبر یک نماینده مجلس:رفتاردختران ایران زشت ترازفاشیست های نژادپرست است :
»محمد عباسپور" که در مورد طرح های مجلس در برخورد با بدحجابی دختران در فصل تابستان اعلام رسمی نیروی انتظامی مبنی بر برخوردهای جدی با بدحجاب ها در فصل تابستان را غیر اجرایی دانست. او با طرح انتقادی از نیروهای انتظامی و نمایندگان مجلس می گوید: «در حال حاضر مجلس هیچ برنامه خاصی در دستور کار خود برای برخورد با بدحجابان ندارد. نیروی انتظامی هم اگر نگوییم تا کنون ناکارآمد بوده لااقل باید بگوییم که با مسامحه از کنار موضوع بدحجابی رد شده است.
حالا باید ببینیم آیا بعد از گذشت 27 سال از انقلاب چه کرده ایم که حتی تعریف مشخصی از بی حجابی هم نداریم. نماینده ارومیه به آسیب شناسی مقوله بدحجابی می پردازد .از نظر او وضعیت پوشش امروز دختران ایرانی باید در یک «جریان سوم» بررسی شود. او می گوید: این حجاب و پوشش نه حجاب کامل است و نه بی حجابی کامل. این یک جریان سوم است که اصلا در شأن ما نیست.عباسپور مصادیق این خط سوم را «شال از وسط سر پوشیده، شلوارک های بالا کشیده و پاشنه های خوابیده کفش ها. می داند و در مقابل آن مصداق پوشش مناسب را بنا به تجربه خود در سفرهای خارجی به پاکستان، کشورهای عربی، تایلند، اندونزی و حتی چین عنوان می کند. او می گوید: باور نمی کنید که 600 میلیون زن چینی از حجاب بهتری برخوردار هستند که بر مبنای سنت های ملی خودشان است و نه مثل ما که به مسخره گرفتن و دهن کجی سنت ها نشانه تمدن و فرهنگ شده است. انتقادات این نماینده مجلس البته تنها شامل پوشش و حجاب نمی شود. او تبعات بدحجابی را در مکانهای عمومی نیز مورد نظر قرار می دهد. «سگ های خانگی» محور اصلی انتقادات اوست که مرزها را می شکافد و تا کشور آلمان می رسد. عباسپور با گلایه می گوید: «امروز این سگ های خانگی متداول شده. در پارک و فروشگاه در رستوران هااشخاصی را می بینید که سگ ها را بغل می کنند و مقابل چشم دیگران آنها را می بوسند. این آزادی است؟ خب اگر سگ دوست دارند، ببرند در خانه خود، در رختخواب خود و نه در معابر عمومی» او اضافه می کند: "من این رفتارها را که برخی از دختران ایرانی انجام می دهند در هیچ کجا ندیده ام. حتی در آلمان. حتی گروه های فاشیست که نژاد پرستند و خود را نژاد برتر می دانند، لائیک هم هستند و با هزار جور کثافت کاری تابع هیچ قید و بند اجتماعی هم نیستند، چنین رفتارهایی را از آنها ندیده ام. این رفتارها بی آبرویی است." عباسپور رفتارهای اجتماعی امروز را تا حدودی «پیامد استفاده از ماهواره» می داند. به نظر او «خانواده های ایرانی نیز بی مبالات شده اند.» و رفتار بعضی از جوانان نیز «ایجاد چندش» می کند. او این رفتارها را «شفافیت بی مایه» می داند و قتل و جنایت را بدترین رهاورد استفاده از ماهواره عنوان می کند. او معتقد است که باید غرب را در مقابل فرهنگ ملی خود از پای در آوریم نه اینکه ما در مقابل فرهنگ آنان از پا بنشینمیم و به عنوان نمونه می گوید: «همین انرژی هسته ای که امروز داریم. مال کشور خودمان است اگر این 10 تا نیروگاه را هم بزنند، باز ما دانش و علم آن را داریم. مال خودمان است و با زور و اسلحه هم نمی توان آن را گرفت".عباسپور امیدوار است که همچنان بتوان با برخوردهای فرهنگی راه را برای اصلاح و تربیت باز کرد. او «برخورد با بدحجابان» را وظیفه نیروی انتظامی و مشروط به «عبور از خط قرمزها» می داند. به هرحال، با آغاز فصل گرما بحث حجاب نیز داغ تر می شود. چندی پیش نیروی انتظامی اعلام کرد که از اول اردیبهشت ماه با زنان بدحجاب در تهران برخورد جدی صورت می گیرد. مجلس نیز حدود یکسال است درگیر طرح ملی مد و پوشش است و هنوز با تمام جنجال ها این طرح نیز به جایی نرسیده است. آیا بدحجابی، بحران اجتماعی بی پایانی است که کسی قادر به گذاشتن نقطه پایان بر این موضوع همیشه داغ نیست؟
4/13/2006
کیک زرد و شیرینی گل محمدی
دم این برادران ایرانی شیکمو گرم. اول که طی یک اقدام انقلابی اسم شیرینی دانمارکی رو گذاشتن شیرینی "گل محمدی" ( چه جوری به این اسم رسیدند رو خدا داند) , بعد هم که به لطف خدا به کیک زرد(همون اورانیوم غنی شده خودمون) دست پیدا کردند. اینها فقط ذره ای از عملیات شکم پروری دوستان است. اینم عکساشون
×××××××××××××
بنده خدا همچین دوگنبدانش رو زده زمین اینگار منتظر چایی نشسته که با کیک زرد بزنه تو رگ.
4/12/2006
آمریکا باز هم دست این سوراخ اون سوراخ می کند
خیلی مسخره است ؛ آمریکا باز شکرخوری زیادی کرده و به دیگران امر و نهی کرده. اینبار به چین در مورد آلودگی هوا در پکن (که پایتخت چین هست) هشدار داده. حق آمریکا به همون رییس جمهور منتخب ایران آقای احمدی نژاد (ان) که اهمیت به حرف باباش هم نمیده چه خواسته به آمریکا.
4/10/2006
Pre-emptive genocide? Nuking Iran will morally bankrupt humanity
ثریا سپاهپور
The foxy neo-cons, with fangs out for a kill, have outwitted the world. After 27 years of violating the bi-lateral Algiers Agreement, finding itself in a quagmire in Iraq, the United States decided to bring on board other countries to attack Iran, or at the very least, have their blessings. Falsely accusing Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program and using the NPT, it succeeded.
Clearly, the aim of this administration is regime change. However, its propaganda, the continuous revelations about the audacious lies that led it to illegally invade Iraq and cause the death of over 100,000 human beings, including thousands of Americans, has left us inert and emotionally inept to extract the neo-cons’ fangs and put a stop to their incessant demise of nations. This is exactly what they count on – this allows them to persist.
Their next heinous plan – nuking Iran, will morally bankrupt humanity and be the next chapter of genocide in our history books. But in their shrewdness, they have even planned the murder of an entire civilization based on a preemptive genocide!
A senior intelligence officer interviewed by the renowned journalist, Seymour Hirsch, (See his article in The New Yorker), spoke of resultant mushroom clouds above Iran – radiation, mass casualties, and contamination for years that are being planned by this Administration. The nuclear confrontation with Iran is a fight for a regime change. “Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”
There is no excuse for what Ahmadinejad said , however, several things are worth mentioning and pondering. Iran does not have an atomic bomb. Even according to Israel’s intelligence, it will not have the ability to manufacture it for several years. At best, even if it does acquire nuclear weapons in 5-10 years, it will be no match for Israel’s nuclear arsenal – nor indeed its nuclear-armed submarines. Attacking Israel at that point, would be illogical. Especially given that Israel has the backing of the US!
Further, both Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position of theirs is not consistent with Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, least of all by using nuclear arms which would endanger the very Palestinians whom they want to protect.
Finally, is it not the Bush Administration that bears resemblance to Adolf Hitler by planning a nuclear attack on Iran? The radiation, mass casualties, and contamination not only of the Persians, but the 2% minority (1,300,000) groups living in Iran, a large number of whom (30000 ews) live in Isfahan near the Bushehr power plant is. Or perhaps by some miracle they will be told to leave before the bombing campaign, or maybe the nukes will avoid hitting them!
It may be that the West holds no value for Moslems. Somehow, the anger of the Moslems was deliberately incited with the hideous cartoons that affronted them. This anger, which combined religious zeal with decades of economic frustration, oppression, inequality, and Western domination, found a release valve to express itself having been slighted by the Western societies. This of course, played well into the hands of the sly neo-cons who now wish to nuke the Islamic Republic of Iran – though God knows we are hardly theocratic! After all, the whole world (mis)judged the Moslem world as uncontrollable, dangerous mobs. It is said ‘The devil is in the detail’ – indeed, in this instance, the devil was in the timing.
It is important for us all to recall that when the Holocaust was taking place, no one stood up to defend the Jews, including America who turned back ship after ship from their shores. Today, Iranians have become the ‘jews’ of the past – the atomic bomb is the gas chamber that they are condemned to. Their crime is their struggle for sovereignty. The attitude that prevailed at that time, reflected for eternity on a monolith at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, should remind us that we are all part of humanity and that the Bush Administration is taking us on a path of no return:
They came first for the Communists,and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.Then they came for the Jews,and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.Then they came for the trade unionists,and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.Then they came for the Catholics,and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.Then they came for me,and by that time no one was left to speak up.
---Martin Niemoeller ---
Today, the world has the chance to avoid the crimes of the past. We need not allow the bloody fangs of neo-cons rob us of our morality and forever throw us in purgatory. There is time for choice. Every voice can tap into another conscious and sound the sirens of danger that is surrounding the Iranian people as well as the future of the American civilization. Our march of sanity can, will, and must overcome the will of the immoral Administration planning on the destruction of our future.
(1) Algiers Accords signed between the governments of the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran on January 19, 1981, as part of the hostage crisis resolution. Point I.1 of this Accord is non-intervention in Iranian affairs: “The United States pledge that it is and from now will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.” Per Article VI of the Algiers Accords, the violated party, Iran, has the right to refer the matter to the Tribunal at Hague, the Netherlands, where the International Court of Justice will have jurisdiction.
The foxy neo-cons, with fangs out for a kill, have outwitted the world. After 27 years of violating the bi-lateral Algiers Agreement, finding itself in a quagmire in Iraq, the United States decided to bring on board other countries to attack Iran, or at the very least, have their blessings. Falsely accusing Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program and using the NPT, it succeeded.
Clearly, the aim of this administration is regime change. However, its propaganda, the continuous revelations about the audacious lies that led it to illegally invade Iraq and cause the death of over 100,000 human beings, including thousands of Americans, has left us inert and emotionally inept to extract the neo-cons’ fangs and put a stop to their incessant demise of nations. This is exactly what they count on – this allows them to persist.
Their next heinous plan – nuking Iran, will morally bankrupt humanity and be the next chapter of genocide in our history books. But in their shrewdness, they have even planned the murder of an entire civilization based on a preemptive genocide!
A senior intelligence officer interviewed by the renowned journalist, Seymour Hirsch, (See his article in The New Yorker), spoke of resultant mushroom clouds above Iran – radiation, mass casualties, and contamination for years that are being planned by this Administration. The nuclear confrontation with Iran is a fight for a regime change. “Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”
There is no excuse for what Ahmadinejad said , however, several things are worth mentioning and pondering. Iran does not have an atomic bomb. Even according to Israel’s intelligence, it will not have the ability to manufacture it for several years. At best, even if it does acquire nuclear weapons in 5-10 years, it will be no match for Israel’s nuclear arsenal – nor indeed its nuclear-armed submarines. Attacking Israel at that point, would be illogical. Especially given that Israel has the backing of the US!
Further, both Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position of theirs is not consistent with Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, least of all by using nuclear arms which would endanger the very Palestinians whom they want to protect.
Finally, is it not the Bush Administration that bears resemblance to Adolf Hitler by planning a nuclear attack on Iran? The radiation, mass casualties, and contamination not only of the Persians, but the 2% minority (1,300,000) groups living in Iran, a large number of whom (30000 ews) live in Isfahan near the Bushehr power plant is. Or perhaps by some miracle they will be told to leave before the bombing campaign, or maybe the nukes will avoid hitting them!
It may be that the West holds no value for Moslems. Somehow, the anger of the Moslems was deliberately incited with the hideous cartoons that affronted them. This anger, which combined religious zeal with decades of economic frustration, oppression, inequality, and Western domination, found a release valve to express itself having been slighted by the Western societies. This of course, played well into the hands of the sly neo-cons who now wish to nuke the Islamic Republic of Iran – though God knows we are hardly theocratic! After all, the whole world (mis)judged the Moslem world as uncontrollable, dangerous mobs. It is said ‘The devil is in the detail’ – indeed, in this instance, the devil was in the timing.
It is important for us all to recall that when the Holocaust was taking place, no one stood up to defend the Jews, including America who turned back ship after ship from their shores. Today, Iranians have become the ‘jews’ of the past – the atomic bomb is the gas chamber that they are condemned to. Their crime is their struggle for sovereignty. The attitude that prevailed at that time, reflected for eternity on a monolith at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, should remind us that we are all part of humanity and that the Bush Administration is taking us on a path of no return:
They came first for the Communists,and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.Then they came for the Jews,and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.Then they came for the trade unionists,and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.Then they came for the Catholics,and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.Then they came for me,and by that time no one was left to speak up.
---Martin Niemoeller ---
Today, the world has the chance to avoid the crimes of the past. We need not allow the bloody fangs of neo-cons rob us of our morality and forever throw us in purgatory. There is time for choice. Every voice can tap into another conscious and sound the sirens of danger that is surrounding the Iranian people as well as the future of the American civilization. Our march of sanity can, will, and must overcome the will of the immoral Administration planning on the destruction of our future.
(1) Algiers Accords signed between the governments of the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran on January 19, 1981, as part of the hostage crisis resolution. Point I.1 of this Accord is non-intervention in Iranian affairs: “The United States pledge that it is and from now will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.” Per Article VI of the Algiers Accords, the violated party, Iran, has the right to refer the matter to the Tribunal at Hague, the Netherlands, where the International Court of Justice will have jurisdiction.
4/05/2006
The Final Countdown by Europe
یادش بخیر...
We're leaving together
But still it's farewell
And maybe we'll come back To earth,
who can tell I guess there is no one to blame
We're leaving ground (leaving ground)
Will things ever be the same again
It's the final countdown...
The final countdown
Ooh oh
We're heading for Venus (Venus)
And still we stand tall
Cause maybe they've seen us
And welcome us all (yeah)
With so many light years to go
And things to be found (to be found)
I'm sure that we'll all miss her so
It's the final countdown...
The final countdown
The final countdown (the final countdown)
Ooh ooh oh
The final countdown
Ooh oh
I'ts the final countdown
The final countdown
The final countdown (the final countdown)
Ooh It's the final countdown
We are leaving together
The final countdown
We're leaving together
But still it's farewell
And maybe we'll come back To earth,
who can tell I guess there is no one to blame
We're leaving ground (leaving ground)
Will things ever be the same again
It's the final countdown...
The final countdown
Ooh oh
We're heading for Venus (Venus)
And still we stand tall
Cause maybe they've seen us
And welcome us all (yeah)
With so many light years to go
And things to be found (to be found)
I'm sure that we'll all miss her so
It's the final countdown...
The final countdown
The final countdown (the final countdown)
Ooh ooh oh
The final countdown
Ooh oh
I'ts the final countdown
The final countdown
The final countdown (the final countdown)
Ooh It's the final countdown
We are leaving together
The final countdown
4/04/2006
موشک بالا ، نفت خام بالا، بنزین بالا
واقعا مسخره است. ایران دو تا موشک ضد زیردریایی رو آزمایش کرده و این دلیل برای شرکتهای نفتی هست که قیمت بنزین رو بالا ببرند. راه دور نریم، توی همین نیوزیلاند خودمون شرکت "بریتیش پترول" دیروز شش سنت قیمت بنزین رو برد بالا. خلاصه مطلب اینکه "چیز" خیلی به شقیقه کار داره
4/03/2006
World Cup "Allah" on The Cup
I was looking through th enet and got to this page. What amazed me is the "الله" of Iranian flag ended up on the left boob of the Chinese beauty. hmmmmmmmm, Nice hey?؟؟!
دوستان/میخوانم
300 the movie تالار گفتمان چینی
اخبار به چینی
روز آنلاین
حودر
صفا
میداف
گیله مرد
Dan Wei
من کیم؟
بعد از انقلاب در شیراز به دنیا اومدم ٫سالهای آخر مدرسه و دوره دانشگاه رو در نیوزیلاند گذروندم به امید اینکه کمالاتم زیاد شه ٫ زهی خیال باطل. به قول ایرونیها کارشناس ارشد آی تی هستم کارم هم همینه ٫اما علاقه شدیدی به تاریخ و زبان چینی دارم و به طور نیمه وقت در دانشگاه مسّی زبان چینی میخونم. به سیاست هم علاقه دارم امّا مثل بقیه ایرانیها کنار گود خیلی میشینم٫ توی این وبلاگ هم اغلب قیل و قال میکنم نق میزنم و به خیال خودم صحبتهای کارشناسانه میکنم ٫ پس شما هم جدّی نگیرید گفتم که کمالاتم هنوز کار داره
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تمپلت این بلاگ متعلق به سایکو است و متون فارسیش اغلب در لامپ ادیتور قدیم یا همان «آریا نویس» جدید تایپ میشود ٫ در ضمن مطالب کپی رایت هم دارند یه چیزی تو مایه های پشم