Iran is not a dictatorship. It's a theocracy because there are clerics who always hold control of part of the government (it's one of the branches). However, it does have a parliament and prime minister and accompanying elections. When Khatami took over, it was a good, clear sign that progress was occurring. If you've ever actually read anything about the day-to-day lives there you would realize that there is a real undercurrent of change. Have things regressed as the clerics tried to reestablish their authority in the past few years (which ironically coincided with the US attempts to democratize the Middle East)? Yes, but it's funny how their push back didn't take away all the freedoms - the young and progressive members of the population kept their gains. Things will keep going in this manner. It won't happen overnight. Because this is true, you want to go in and "transform the country". Please tell us how this can be done without pissing people off since we already did this to its neighbor. The case you're making is the same one that was made for Iraq. No difference (especially not now, since the Bush administration claims that a "democratic Society" was the reason for war, not WMD or al-Qaeda or anything else). What makes you think the path to resolution will not be the same (going in with troops)? Has there been some sort of press conference where Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, Rice, or anybody else in the adminstration has indicated that their mindsets have changed?
Iran is a dictatorship. khatami has no power. the Supreme leader controls th Armed forces and every other thing that hinders any kind of reform. most Reformers in iran have given up and they know until the " Supreme leader" is around that country will allways remain a dictatorship. also the candidates fo Parliament have to be ok by the Gurdian Council. so in effect the paliasment theory is flawed. the Candidates are not the peoples choices.
Well the neocons are chomping at the bit to invade Iran as they intially planned. The Likudniks in Washington are egging them on. Unfortunately for them the resistance in Iraq has slowed them down. They do have the 2004 Election to worry about. As we saw the other day, Bush has proclaimed himself the "peace president" until Nov 2004. A vote for Bush is probably a vote for an Iran invasion, the collapse of the volunteer army and the institution of a draft.
Iran in Bush's Sights The same techniques used to get up the Iraq war are now being applied by the political Right in the United States, including President Bush, to Iran. These include innuendo, guilt by association, vague fears, and hyped capabilities. If Bush gets a second term, it seems very likely that his administration will make war on Iran. The current round of sabre rattling by Washington against Tehran began with some passages in the report of the 9/11 commission, leaked to Time magazine, that revealed that 8 to 10 of the largely Saudi "muscle" or "newskin" hijackers sent by Bin Laden (to help control the flight attendants and passengers for the al-Qaeda pilots) had passed through Iran on their way to the United States over a period of several months. This passage would be unremarkable in and of itself. The 9/11 commission maintains, however, according to Time magazine, that Iranian officials had issued specific instructions to facilitate the passage of al-Qaeda members across Iranian borders, beginning in October, 2000. The commission also alleges that Iranian officials came to al-Qaeda after the bombing of the USS Cole and suggested they team up to attack the US, but that Bin Laden turned down the offer for fear of alienating his Wahhabi supporters in Saudi Arabia by associating himself with Shiite Iran. One problem with all these allegations is that they are sourced only to al-Qaeda detainees, Iranian defectors, and NSA electronic intercepts. It is the same as with Iraq in 2002. For all we know, there is an Iranian Chalabi who is behind these reports, hoping to get the US to overthrow the regime in Iran so that he can take over. As for the al-Qaeda detainees or those under electronic surveillance, the letter of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has already made it clear that some radical Sunni elements that fought in Afghanistan dream of provoking a Shiite-American struggle. Al-Qaeda detainees are notorious for providing the US with disinformation aimed at furthering their plots. Iran is a notorious enemy of Wahhabism and al-Qaeda and the Taliban. How sweet it would be to provoke a war between the US and Iran by hanging 9/11 on Tehran! (It should be remembered that NSA intercepts also showed that Saddam had biological and chemical weapons, presumably because Saddam ordered his officers to talk them up in the vain hope of deterring a US attack). Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin has already admitted that a) the US has known for a long time that al-Qaeda operatives travelled through Iran, and b) that there is no evidence that Iran knew beforehand about the 9/11 plot. Iranian officials have acknowledged that the al-Qaeda men passed through its territory, but point out that Iran's borders are long and porous, and insisted that the al-Qaeda operatives came through "illegally." Iran’s intelligence minister, Ali Yunesi, said on Saturday that "The Intelligence Ministry has identified and dismantled all the Iranian branches of the Al Qaeda movement . . . We have stopped the terrorist acts of Al Qaeda. If we had not done so, we would have had security problems.” Another problem is that Iran does not have a tight, unified government. The Iranian state consists of a number of competing power centers. In recent years the president, Mohammad Khatami, has supported more civil liberties and an opening to the West. The Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei, is an old-style Khomeinist who revels in puritanical theocracy and hates the US. Even Khamenei, however, is not implicated in ever having planned direct action against US soil. Then there are the Basij and Revolutionary Guards and Quds Brigade paramilitaries, and it is unclear how much central control the state has over them. So even if some official in the Revolutionary Guards did let al-Qaeda operatives in (and this is by no means proven), it would not necessarily say much about the stance of the Iranian government(s). Some close US allies assert that Iran's role in fighting terrorism has been positive. Iraq's current ambassador to the United States, Rend Rahim Franke, said recently that Iran had prevented some 200 fighters from transiting its territory from Afghanistan to flood into Iraq and carry out terrorist attacks in her country, according to the Boston Globe: ' Iran so far has had a positive role in Iraq, and the Iraqi government recently asked it to cooperate even more on security, including sharing more intelligence, Rend al-Rahim Francke, chief of Iraq's diplomatic mission in Washington, said in an interview with the Associated Press. Rahim said she believes these overtures prompted Iran recently to capture 200 Afghan fighters who were trying to enter Iraq from Iran. She offered few details about the detentions, which had not been previously known. Last week, Iraq's human rights minister said only one Afghan was in custody -- one of 99 foreign fighters held in the country . . . Rahim rejected any suggestion that Iran supports terrorism in Iraq. ''It is not in Iran's interest for Iraq to be in turmoil," she said. ''If Iraq turns into a haven for terrorists, not only Iraq but all countries in the region will be affected." . . . ' The rightwing media in the US used to hang on Franke's every word when she was promoting a war against Iraq, but now that she is serving as witness for Iran's good behavior, they are completely ignoring her important testimony. (Franke seemed to be contradicted Tuesday by the Sunni ex-Baathists in the caretaker government, who worry about Iran supporting militant Shiite militias). Iran has admitted to having taken some al-Qaeda operatives captive after September 11, but it is holding them for some quid pro quos from the United States. In particular, Iran wants to ensure that the US does not allow the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) terrorist organization to continue to hit Iran from its bases in Iraq, and the al-Qaeda detainees are among its only bits of leverage over Washington in this regard. (Amazingly enough, there are political forces in Washington, including the Neocon-dominated, pro-Israeli "Washington Institute for Near East Policy," that support the MEK terrorist organization and want the Bush administration to, as well. Even scarier, WINEP, this supporter of a notorious terrorist group, is highly influential in Washington and US military and State Department personnel are actually detailed there to learn about the Middle East!). Iran's claim that the pre-9/11 al-Qaeda agents that came across its territory did so illegally should be easy to prove, right? If the operatives had come through Iran legally, there would have been Iranian stamps in their passports. But there weren't. If there had been, that would have triggered Immigration and Naturalization Service interviews with them and made it more difficult for them to get into the US. Ipso facto, Iran did not officially allow them through its passport control. But, as usual with these things, there is a counter-argument. Ali Nourizadeh, an expatriate Iranian journalist in London, published a piece in the London Saudi daily, Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, claiming that al-Qaeda fighters were given safe passage through Iran and allowed to avoid passport stamps by a sympathetic general of the Revolutionary Guards. Thus the lack of Iranian passport stamps in their passports, which would seem to exonerate Iran, is here used as proof of Iranian collusion! Nourizadeh in the past has attempted to play up an Iran - al-Qaeda connection, going so far as to allege that Iran's Revolutionary Guards allow al-Qaeda operatives like Sulaiman Abu Ghaith and Saif al-Adl to move freely in the country and to plan and carry out attacks on neighbors like Saudi Arabia. Nourizadeh's sources are always shadowy dissidents in the Iranian Foreign Ministry whom he declines to name, and he never gives any evidence for his assertions, many of which seem highly unlikely to be true, to say the least. As always in Middle East politics, we should begin with the Common Sense test and then go on to the "In who's Interest is this Odd Allegation?" test. Here is the Common Sense test: Usama Bin Laden is a fanatical Sunni Muslim surrounded by other fanatical Sunni Muslims and was nested in the Taliban, who are fanatical Sunni Muslims. Iran is Shiite, a branch of Islam that fanatical Sunni Muslims absolutely hate. In Afghan politics, 1996-2002, at the time it was dominated by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Iran was allied with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Iran was trying to overthrow the Taliban and crush them and al-Qaeda. Iran's allies in Afghanistan were the Tajiks, the Uzbeks and especially the Hazaras. The Hazaras are Afghan Shiites. They form about 15% of the Afghan population. The Hazaras' main political vehicle was the Hizb-i Vahdat or Unity Party, which was and is closely allied with Iran. Tajik warlords in the Northern Alliance like Ismail Khan, who are Sunnis, also have strong ties of language and patronage to Iran. Basically, Persian speakers in Afghanistan tended to side with Iran, especially Shiite Persian speakers. Whereas Pushtu speakers and immigrant Arabs tended to side instead with Pakistan. When the Taliban took Mazar-i Sharif, they massacred Iranian intelligence ("diplomatic") personnel in that city. Iran mobilized for war against the Taliban at that point, and a war was narrowly averted. Pakistan's Sunni fundamentalist-dominated military, especially its Inter-Services Intelligence or military intelligence, had more or less created the Taliban and heavily supported them with equipment, training, fuel and other goods. Iran and Pakistan were engaged in a regional struggle for influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia, in which Iran's Shiism and Pakistan's Sunnism were ideological tools. This struggle spilled over into Pakistan itself. The radical Sunni Sipah-i Sahabah or Companions of the Prophet, originating in Jhang Siyal in northern Punjab, has conducted a terrorist campaign of assassination against Shiites in Pakistan. Sipah-i Sahabah was one of the jihadi groups that got training in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and was allied with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Several other radical Pakistani jihadi groups were in the same position. They killed hundreds of Shiites in Pakistan, especially Karachi and the Punjab. At one point Iranian attaches at the Karachi embassy were assassinated, probably by these same groups. So in 1996-2002 there was a behind the scenes war between Shiite Iran and Sunni jihadis, with Afghanistan and Pakistan being the main battlefields. At one point in the late 1990s, it almost became a real, hot war. So then you come to me and say that in 2000 and 2001, Iran was actively helping al-Qaeda and was trying to ally with it. And I say, that sounds to me like complete gibberish and I would only accept it if you show me excellent documentary proof. It would be like saying that you had evidence that Roosevelt let German Nazi agents cross the United States to carry out an operation against Mao's forces in China during World War II. Well, on the face of it, the fascists would not have wanted the Communists to get China, so such a covert operation wouldn't be out of the question. And the US would certainly have in principle welcomed anything that would have helped the Nationalists. So you could argue yourself into thinking that the proposition isn't completely crazy. But if you just step back, you can see that geo-political speculation doesn't carry much weight in such a situation, and the whole idea is obviously crazy. That is how I feel about the idea that Khamenei cozied up to Bin Laden. The second test is Who is Helped by these Crazy Allegations? - The Likud lobby in Washington, especially Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin and other warmongers. They want the Tehran regime overthrown in part because it stands in the way of an Israeli annexation of southern Lebanon, with the Litani river as the long-sought prize. Iran is allied with Hizbullah in southern Lebanon, which forced the Israelis back out of Lebanon with a nearly 20-year long guerrilla struggle. They also want to force Hizbullah to pull back its support of the Palestinian uprising. Since Iran has substantially cut back on its support for Hizbullah, however, overthrowing Tehran would have little effect on such local political dynamics. (The Likud's Ariel Sharon should never have invaded Lebanon in 1982, which is what created Hizbullah, suicide bombings as a tactic, and radicalized Lebanese like 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah). - Old-time US intelligence and diplomatic officials who have a grudge with Iran over the Hostage Crisis and other Iranian actions against the US in the 1980s - The US military-industrial complex, which is frustrated at not being able to extract money from the potentially wealthy Iranian market - Iranian expatriates from families formerly allied with the deposed Shah of Iran, who are enormously wealthy and influential and are eager to play Chalabi in Tehran. Watch them as key sources of disinformation. - Al-Qaeda, which is seeking to "sharpen contradictions" by provoking serial fights between the US and Muslim powers. It would especially like to see a US- Shiite struggle, so that its two major enemies would both be weakened and pre-occupied with each other rather than Bin Laden. These five forces are, obviously, disparate and in other regards at odds with one another. But all would like to see a US war against Iran. We will see a process whereby any lie issuing from any of them is amplified by the others, creating a multiplier effect. In particular, AIPAC and the military-industrial complex have enormous weight with Congress and the White House, and can push for the war domestically even as the other forces feed US intelligence disinformation abroad. Iran is 3 times more populous than Iraq, however, and its population is highly mobilized and nationalistic. A US invasion force there will be greeted in a way that will make Iraq seem tame. Moreover, the fallout from Shiites in Lebanon, Bahrain and Iraq itself (who will almost universally side with Iran against the US in any war) will put US troops and citizens in enormous danger. And that, my friends, is a scenario we are very probably looking at if Bush gets back in. Juancole.com posted 7/21/04
A rant from the other end of the web... The Bible shows us a way to prove whether or not a person is the Antichrist. Rev 13:18 says: "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six." That is, the number 666.__St. John the apostle, the author of Revelation, was a Jew who wrote in Greek, but he thought in Hebrew._ He knew that every Hebrew letter has a numeric equivalent, and that's undoubtedly how the number 666 originated. Gematria is the process of adding up or counting the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in a word or name. _(note: the letter 'S' has a different value depending upon whether it's used to form a hard or soft sound as in 'bus' or 'bush'): If you add up the name 'George Bush' in Hebrew letters it comes out: G = 3 (gimel) e =_ 5 (heh) o = 70 (ayin) r = 200 (resh) g =_ 3_ (gimel) e =_ 5 (heh) B =_ 2 (beth) u = 70 (ayin) s = 300 (shin) h = 8 (cheth) total = 666 (Antichrist)
Who is Juan Cole? *Professional Positions Editor, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1999-2004. Professor of History, University of Michigan, 1995- Director, Center for Middle Eastern and N. African Studies, 1992-95 Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan,1990- Assistant Professor of History, University of Michigan, 1984-90 Journalist/Translator, Arabic-English, Monday Morning Co., Beirut, 1978-79 more
Come on Mulder,...we all know Al Gore is the anti-christ who almost took over...Everytime I see the man, I feel gravely uncomfortable...even today, without his ability to further manipulate the country. I shudder with repulsion at the sight or diabolical image of him... 666 or why Al Gore is the antichrist. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ASCII code: al gore = 97 + 108 + 32 + 103 + 111 + 114 + 101 = 666 Al gore also claims he invented the internet W is the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and, in the Hebraic number system, has traditionally stood for the number 6. WWW=666 Al gore is being controlled by Satan. Three times 666 passeth, Thousandfold on nations, Cometh fear and sudden death. Everywhere are lamentations, Sorrows and none are comforteth. Day by day their woes increase, Mine alone are blest with peace. For it is through numbers that God will prove his presence and identify those who defy Him. And the Righteous shall spurn the coins that are foisted upon them. That was found on a tablet buried by Jesus and Marys graves. This relates to the 3rd 666 500 yen + 100 yen + 50 yen + 10 yen + 5 yen + 1 yen = 666 yen Just like in the Roman Empire during the time of Jesus, the six different kinds of coins used in Japan add up to 666.
As much as I believe every thing that any kind of concocted numerology tells me your claim falls short. Since Al Gore never made such a claim, your numerology falls a little short.
This is a GOP lie. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.htm Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet. Status: False. Origins: No, Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The derisive "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs are misleading distortions of something he said (taken out of context) during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part): During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system. Clearly, although Gore's phrasing was clumsy (and self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible for helping to create the environment (in an economic and legislative sense) that fostered the development of the Internet. Al Gore might not know nearly as much about the Internet and other technologies as his image would have us believe, and he certainly has been guilty of stretching (if not outright breaking) the truth before, but to believe that Gore seriously thought he could take credit for the "invention" of the Internet — in the sense offered by the media — is just silly. (To those who say the words "create" and "invent" mean the same thing: If they mean the same thing, then why have the media overwhelmingly and consistently cited Gore as having claimed he "invented" the Internet when he never used that word? The answer is that the words don't mean the same thing, but by substituting one word for the other, commentators can make Gore's claim sound [more] ridiculous.) However, validating even the lesser claim Gore intended to make is problematic. Any statement about the "creation" or "beginning" of the Internet is difficult to evaluate, because the Internet is not a homogenous entity (it's a collection of computers, networks, protocols, standards, and application programs), nor did it all spring into being at once (the components that comprise the Internet were developed in various places at different times and are continuously being modified, improved, and expanded). Despite a spirited defense of Gore's claim by Vint Cerf (often referred to as the "father of the Internet") in which he stated "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it," many of the components of today's Internet came into being well before Gore's first term in Congress began in 1977, and it's hard to find any specific action of Gore's (such as his sponsoring a Congressional bill or championing a particular piece of legislation) that one could claim helped bring the Internet into being, much less validate Gore's statement of having taken the "initiative in creating the Internet." It's true that Gore was popularizing the term "information superhighway" in the early 1990s (when few people outside academia or the computer/defense industries had heard of the Internet) and has introduced a few bills dealing with education and the Internet, but even though Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President Gore may always have been interested in and well-informed about information technology issues, that's a far cry from having taken an active, vital leadership role in bringing about those technologies. Even if Al Gore had never entered the political arena, we'd probably still be reading web pages via the Internet today. Last updated: 27 September 2000
I missed something. When exactly did we have credibility with the Islamic world before the intervention? When we stopped one Arab from invading another (Kuwait)? Nope. When we stopped a Christian state from committing genocide on a Muslim state (Bosnia)? Nope. Please elaborate. Iran has a democratic movement, and the clerics are not a hard point impediment to reform like Saddam was. Different situation entirely I believe. I think we encourage reform and work through the UN to make sure they don't go nuclear, but there won't be an invasion. Not in Iran or Syria. Its just chicken left rhetoric.
After 9/11. We had the support of the vast majority of the world. Arab nations across the globe came out and trashed OBL for it. We kept that support when we built a case for attacking the Taliban. We did not use questionable intelligence, we gave them a chance to hand over OBL, and when they didn't, we went in and kicked Taliban a$$. That action was supported by everyone, Arab and American alike. We squandered that good will by attacking Iraq based on questionable "intelligence." Then why is the idea getting so much traction in right wing circles?
At this point, invading Iran should be the last thing on Bush's agenda. They have years of work to do in Iraq before that mess gets figured out. If thats the case, it would take them a century to invade and take care of Iran.
Not true at all. Although the general population would like to see a change, they are not at a breaking point. Most civilians are content with the way things are going and any invasion by an outside force would cripple their situation. With due time, the government will crumple without "war".
Sure. That's why they set deadlines for Saddam to turn over all documents and let the UN inspectors back to inspecting... FIRST. He also asked the Taliban to hand over OBL and gave a deadline... FIRST. Per YOU... Ooops! OWNED, Whatever. Any blind man can see facts for what they are. "The sky is falling!!" -Chicken Leftist Little
Despite your taunting, we did give them a deadline. They did let inspectors in, and even agreed to let the suveilance planes have unrestricted airspace in the end. W refused to give the inspectors the time they had asked for, and decided to attack.
Official support of a government is much different than that of the common citizen or of, say a cleric. The US has not had support or credibility with those in a long time, if ever. Remember when 9/11 and many in the Islamic world said 'its tragic but its what they deserve?' That doesn't sound like a high credibility quotient to me. To say that we had high cred completely ignores situations like Israel/Palestine which have nothing to do with Iraq. Simply put, not much has changed as a result of Iraq. This concept of world support and high credibility is just a myth. Its revisionist to say we were all good with Islam before and now its terrible because of Iraq. As far as Afghanistan, again it is just not true to say we had worldwide support. There were plenty who decried the overthrow of the Taliban by the expansionist Christian US. If its the support of governments that's important, not the 'people,' then the coalition of the willing is fairly legitimate by that standard. I think action against Saddam was inevitable, and not so in Iran. I don't think its a serious consideration for this administration. It would be political suicide IMO.
We had support of peoples as well as governments, I've rehashed it many times on this forum and I don't feel like doing it again, but its true. If you don't want to believe me then too bad.. There's a world of difference by being disapproved of by 50% of a populace as opposed to 95%, because several hundred million people who are then willing to look the other way next timie somebody wants to do soemthing bad.. The "well they all hate us anyway" argument is a dead end,; it's not true and it just leads to more crap in the end.
That must also be why they ignored Saddam's offer to allow the CIA and FBI into Iraq to confirm what the weapons inspectors found...namely, NOTHING. Yes, and I supported him and thought he was doing a great job at the time. He did the right thing in Afghanistan, which is the reason he enjoyed the support of the VAST majority of the world. He didn't get that kind of support for the action in Iraq and as a result, America is far less safe. Yes, you certainly seem to be... Apparently that isn't the case or you wouldn't have your head in the sand. OK, trader_junior, as I have repeatedly said before, I am not a leftist, I am a hardcore centrist. You would have to talk to my father to get a real liberal.
Gee, how can I not be convinced by such stellar logic? If I don't believe you then 'too bad.' I have to say, Sam, that I've come to expect better from you. And....you're wrong. Whatever the exact percentage is, and its not 95%, is really irrelevant. Those same percentage of people, and its not 95%, would disapprove of unilateral US action no matter what the cause. As such I find it difficult to use that as a barometer for what we should or should not do. It is true and its only a dead end for those who propose that we somehow had some credibility surplus before Iraq. Its simply is false.
