Iran

Yeah, it's great stuff. I think a liberated Iraq really gave them confidence.

 

Wrong, it was because of the President's tax plan that puts money in your pocket.

 

My mom is in Tehran right now. She needs to get her butt on the plane and come back to Htown.

 

Theocracies and Dictatorships are prone to popular up-risings--I hope these students make some headway against the religious thugs of Iran and garner world attention and support. Interestingly enough, It was angry, religious students/zealots who over threw the Shaw(is that the correct spelling?) and made Iran what it is today..

 

It's nice to see this, but I fear that it will just be crushed by the Revolutionary Guards. Just like all of the other "uprisings" that have been staged throughout the past decade...

They need some outside help.

 

They are ready for California. They do protest drive throughs...

http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters06-17-105604.asp?reg=MIDEAST

\Iranians take to cars for pro-democracy protests



TEHRAN, June 17 — It's two o'clock in the morning and nose-to-tail traffic clogs the streets of a normally quiet residential area in Tehran.
Has there been an accident? A traffic light broken? No, it's a protest against clerical rule.


More a massive traffic jam than a full-blooded rally, the protests have dwindled in size in recent nights as fear of attack from hardline Islamic vigilantes first forced most demonstrators into their cars and then off the streets altogether.
In a city known for its horrendous congestion problems and choking smog, the car-bound protests have a certain irony.
''Maybe Iran is the only country in the world that people launch protests while sitting in their cars,'' said a French journalist at the scene.
''They sit in traffic for an hour to get to work, another hour to get home, and then they go out in the middle of the night to do it again for a protest,'' he said.
Iran has blamed Washington for orchestrating the protests which U.S. President George W. Bush has called the start of a ''free Iran.''
After three nights of growing unrest centred around a Tehran University dormitory, hardline militants fiercely loyal to Iran's conservative clerical leaders took to the streets in force.
Wielding metal bars, chains and knives, the vigilantes raced around in pick-up trucks and on motorbikes, terrorising the protesters as police stood by and watched.
After that night most people preferred to stay in their cars.
''I have no intention of being beaten up, inside the car is safer,'' said Houshang, 23, while listening to Western pop music and smoking a cigarette in his car.

NEW WAY OF PROTESTING
Windows wound down, the ''protesters'' chat to one another as their cars edge forward.
''I came here to protest against political and social pressures in this country,'' said a young woman.
''We are inventing a new way of demonstrating which is demonstrators inside cars!'' she said, before using a mobile phone to call a friend and pass on the latest news from the front line.
Occasionally drivers dare to honk their horns in unison in a sign of support for the protests.
But the sudden appearance of a group of tough-looking vigilantes, recognisable by their beards and untucked shirts, is enough to ensure complete quiet is restored.
Earlier in the protests, the vigilantes set up checkpoints and would search and question many of the cars' occupants thoroughly. Those without a good excuse to be driving around the area risked being detained or beaten.
Some protesters had to hand over their mobile phones to see whether they had used them to call U.S.-based Iranian exile satellite channels which were cheering on the demonstrators and getting on-the-spot reports from callers in Iran.
But in a sign of the lessening tension, young policemen watched a group of young men playing soccer on Monday night behind the gates of the university campus which has been the focal point of the protests.

 

Think we can find some WMDs there?

 

There's about a 100% chance of that, Tex.

 

Why don't we look in Arizona or Utah?

Bet we could find some there too!

 

That's an interesting opinion since the people we liberated want a religious theocracy.

 

Those Shiites in Iraq who are on Iran's payroll certainly want one. Normal Iraqis (about 95% of them) want nothing to do with Iran's current government, and certainly don't want to replicate it.

 

Here's one on Iraq's Shiites from a far more reliable source than the NYT's elite bashers (Taheri is a Shiite):

What Iraqis Think
by Amir Taheri
New York Post
April 27, 2003

Before the start of the campaign to liberate Iraq, pundits and exiles had cast the Shiite community as an almost unconditional ally of the United States. Iraqi Shiites were supposed to be as keen to rise against Saddam Hussein as the so-called "Arab street" was sizzling to explode in his support.

In the event, however, there was little or no uprising of the Shiites. Terrorized by Saddam's machinery of fear, the community did not wish to repeat its tragic experience of 1991 - when it rose and, abandoned by America, was crushed by the regime.

Less than two weeks after the liberation the tune has changed: The same pundits and exiles now claim that Shiites represent the biggest threat to U.S. plans in Iraq.

That claim is supported by TV footage of last week's pilgrimage by hundreds of thousands of Shiites to the shrine of Imam Hussein at Karbala, 80 miles south of Baghdad.

The gathering was impressive by any standard, as was the pilgrims' fervor. Coming on the occasion of Arba'in, the 40th day of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein over 1,300 years ago, the pilgrimage attracted the faithful from all over Iraq.

For the first time in 32 years, Iraqi Shiites were able to perform a pilgrimage that had been banned by the Ba'athist regime. It was also the first free mass gathering in Iraq in almost half a century not to be crushed by the regime's tanks and helicopters.

Was all that a show of anti-Americanism or, at least, a "warning" to Washington, as some pundits claim?

On the contrary: The gathering showed how isolated anti-American groups are among Iraqi Shiites.

Throughout Arba'in, small bands of militants, some freshly arrived from Iran, were posted at the entrance of streets leading to the two main shrines. They carried placards and posters calling for an "Islamic republic" and shouted anti-American slogans. But few pilgrims were prepared to join them.

All the pilgrims that this reporter could talk to expressed their "gratitude and appreciation" to the United States and its British allies for having freed them from the most brutal regime Iraq had seen since its creation in 1921.

Needless to say, most TV cameras were focused on the small number of militants who had something "hot," that is to say anti-American, to say.

After days of talking to Shiites in Karbala and Najaf, it is clear to this reporter that there is virtually no undercurrent of anti-Americanism in the heartland of Iraqi Shi'ism. Even some clerics who have just returned from exile in Iran were keen to advertise their goodwill toward the United States.

All that, however, could quickly change.

The advent of liberty has unleashed energies that could both create and destroy. Here you have millions of people, mostly aged below 25 and never allowed to make the smallest decision without the fear of political authority, who suddenly feel no one is in charge.

"We have been freed from a despotic father and feel like orphans: both happy and terrified," says Mahdi Khadhim, a Karbala schoolteacher, expressing a widely held sentiment.

Many find it puzzling that America is not telling them what to do or not to do. One question persistently asked is whether the Americans or "at least the British" have a plan for Iraq?

"Where do we go from here?" asks Hassan Naqib, a theology student just back from Iran. "Are we supposed to sort things out as we like?"

The United States and its allies impressed the Iraqis by the efficiency of their military machine. (Although little noticed by the media, few Iraqis outside Baghdad, and to a lesser extent Basra, directly experienced the war.) Yet some Iraqis wonder whether that efficient military machine might lack a political brain.

The political vacuum created by the collapse of the Ba'athist regime widens by the day, and there are no signs that the United States (or anybody else for that matter) might have a clue as to how to fill it.

Having no jobs or schools to go to, millions of young men gather at teahouses or at private homes to discuss politics, something they had never dared indulge in. The atmosphere is charged with expectation and uncertainty.

These young men want to be heroic and revolutionary, the makers of a history of which they had always been mere objects. For the time being, few are looking toward Iran either as model or as a source of inspiration. But that, too, could change.

During the past week or so, hundreds of Iranian "revolutionary agents" have slipped into Iraq with vast sums of money, small arms and propaganda material, including portraits of the late Iranian firebrand Ruhallah Khomeini.

An extraordinary number of crisp U.S. dollar bills is in circulation in the "holy" cities, most of it coming not from Uncle Sam, but from the mullahs in Tehran. In the absence of Iraqi radio and TV networks, and with the failure of the Americans to set up their own channels, many have to tune in to broadcasts from Iran.

And much current U.S. "political" activity among the Shiites consists of an extension of the fight within the Bush administration about who to promote as the interim leader for Iraq. This leads to comical scenes. A local mullah is first approached and offered money by an American "contact" in exchange for supporting Ahmad Chalabi, a former exile leader now back in Baghdad. Later, another American "contact" calls on the same mullah and offers him money not to support Chalabi.

Some U.S. "contacts" have forged a dialogue with the so-called Badr Brigade, a militant armed group backed by Iran. The group's leader, Abdelaziz Hakim, returned to Karbala with a bodyguard of 200 men last week and has had several meetings with American "contacts." He has promised to change the name of his group's political wing, The High Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), by replacing the word "revolution" with "democracy" to please the Americans.

At the same time, another group of American "contacts" are warning Iraqi interlocutors not to go near Hakim and his group.

Hakim's men, meanwhile, are trying to persuade shopkeepers in Karbala and Najaf to display portraits of Khomeini alongside those of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqer Hakim, who is still in exile in Tehran, so far with little success.

There is a widely held impression that rival factions in Washington are prepared to forge alliances even with the devil, which in this case could mean the mullahs of Tehran, to sabotage each other's plans.

President Bush needs to get a grip on this situation before it runs out of control. He must decide who is in charge of the political aspect of the Iraqi project. And, indeed, what that project consists of.

http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/352

 

So the New York Post, a tabloid whose headline today reads...

RAT LINE: City Wants NYers to snitch

...and which, each and every day, has an entire section of it's front page devoted to GOSSIP from Liz Smith...

...is "a far more reliable source than the NYT's elite bashers"??

Sapling, put the maple syrup can down. You've obviously overdosed!

Personally, I'll take the New York Times over tabloid trash every day of the week. The New York Post is a better source of information for people who can't handle multi-syllable words.

 

Tree,

The thing that bugs me the most is that we still have not set up Radio and TV...WTF is that?

DD

 

The freaking POST treeguy? Are you kidding me? you mean the paper whose biggest scoop last year was the Mike Piazza is gay saga, is a "far more reliable source" than the Gray Lady? Have you even seen the post? I'll fill you in, its the kind of paper where nothing happens without 18 inch bold faced headlines and exclamation points.

 

Tex:

Curiously, the NY Post hasn't had any recent scandals involving reporters just making up sh*t and editors signing off on it because it fits their political agenda... Have they? I'd say that puts them at least a notch above the NYT on the credibility ladder. You know, that whole thing about honesty and journalistic integrity? No, I suspect those are alien terms to you...

BTW, I was talking about the author. Do you have something relevant to say about Mr. Taheri, or are you just piping it out the ass again?

My bet goes to the "ass" answer.

DaDakota:

I am not sure about TV, but I do know that at least three US-sponsored radio stations are on air and being heard. Just another in the long list of items that our friends in places like the NYT feel doesn't warrant accurate reporting...

Go to CENTCOM's website for daily updates of what is going on. You'll get all the meat without the spin.

http://www.centcom.mil/

 

Sorry, treeboy, you are wrong yet again:

Edit: and here's another where they fired a reporter for either (1) making stuff up, according to them, or (2) because she pissed off Disney, according to her; neither of which was a palatable outcome for good journalism, no?
.http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0212/cotts.php


Oh, hey look, here's them outing Sandy Koufax in February!

And that's just a small sampling. Did you ever consider that the reason why the NYT scandal is a big deal and the misdeeds of the Post are unnoticed is becasue the Times, the best newspaper in America, has slightly higher standards than a schlocky Rupert Murdoch tabloid?


The fact that you are holding up the New York Post as a shining example of journalism is buffoonish. You should seriously pick your battles in a bit wiser fashion and save yourself some credibility. It's not going to kill you to concede that every single thing written in the New York Times is not a partisan lie

 

What credibility? Am I missing something here?

 

In regards to the article posted and the Shia - political situation in Iraq.........it appears to be fairly close in line with recent articles in other publications.

<a HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/13/international/worldspecial/13IRAQ.html?ex=1056081600&en=72b457a0660288ad&ei=5062">As Alliances Take Shape, Iraq Balances New Unity on a Fragile Foundation</a>

<i>In 1919, when the British adventurer Gertrude Bell pondered the threat of disintegration in Iraq from the ethnic and religious strife that prevailed as its boundaries were drawn, she saw the inchoate state slipping toward the abyss.

"It's like a nightmare in which you foresee all the horrible things which are going to happen and can't stretch out your hand to prevent them," she told a friend.

In 2003, many experts warned that the toppling of Saddam Hussein would unleash the same forces of disintegration. The traditionally influential Sunni Muslims would be pitted against the majority Shiites, the Kurdish chieftains of the north against Turkmen. Without the steely control of Mr. Hussein over the diverse plain of Mesopotamia, without a strongman from the warrior class of the Sunni Muslim tribes of central Iraq, the country would fly apart and self-interested neighbors — Iran, Turkey, Syria — would even go to war over the spoils.

So far, there is no sign of national disintegration under the new occupation by 140,000 mostly American and British troops.

"We are for democratic elections, we are with the democratic spirit," a leading tribal sheik, Majid Hatem al-Sayhoud, said this week. Despite anti-American and antidemocratic sermons by some Shiite clerics, and attacks on American soldiers apparently carried out by Hussein loyalists, this sentiment is being repeated by the ayatollahs in the holy Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala, by the Sunni elites of Baghdad and by the Kurdish overlords of the mountainous north.

In a devastated land that has seen three wars over the last two decades, a strong sense of Iraqi national identity — and unity — is emerging in the politics of post-Hussein Iraqi society, interviews here in the last month suggest.

In the weeks that have followed the end of major hostilities here, the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani has made a pilgrimage to the Shiite bastion of Najaf — his first such since 1967 — to declare a political alliance with leading ayatollahs. The leader of the Shiite Dawa Party, Ibrahim Jafari, and Adnan Pachachi, a leading Iraqi diplomat of the 1960's, traveled to the Kurdish stronghold of Erbil this week to affirm common principles of democracy and pluralism in the formation of a new Iraq.

The disparate forces of Iraqi opposition exiles who worked to overthrow Mr. Hussein over the last decade have functioned as a unified board of directors for more than a year, speaking to the Bush administration with one voice.

For many Iraqis, it is still a fragile foundation, one that merely papers over forces of disintegration similar to those that tore apart the old Yugoslavia as Communism collapsed.

"We may need the Americans and British here forever," said Muhammad Lilu, 59. "If they leave us, there will be fighting."

A retired air force brigadier and fighter pilot, Mr. Lilu dropped bombs on his Kurdish compatriots during their rebellion in the early 1970's. With the new allied domination, he said, such wounds will have to be healed.

"We want the Americans and British to stay and supervise this new authority," Mr. Lilu added. "We could build a government, form a parliament, but the American and British should stay and show them."

Some experts think it may be naïve to assume that Kurdish chiefs can move beyond the warlord traditions of the north, that Shiite clerics can subordinate medieval conventions of Islamic law to Western concepts of civil society or that the Sunni tribes can accept a system in which all Iraqis are equal before the law.

But Iraqi political figures are not just speaking the language of democratic transformation. They are also applying steady pressure on Washington and London to speed up the process of democratization.

They are meeting some resistance from the occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, largely because he and his British advisers think that it will take months, perhaps a year or more, before the Iraqis can adapt to representative government.

"When historians look back 50 years from now," a senior American official here said recently, this initial period of political transition "will not be the thing that people focus on." It may seem hugely important now, he said, but the real test will be the constitutional process that sets the agenda for the first free elections here and puts in place the first democratic government.

Not everyone agrees, and no one in the occupation authority can say when elections will take place.

"For a lot of people, in the hierarchy of their needs, they are not focused on the democratic process," the official insisted. "They want stability," he said, meaning security and a functioning economy. "You can't eat the constitution."

The occupation powers are loath to move too quickly — in part, they concede — because the price of failure could be catastrophic for the Iraqis and for the fortunes of the Bush administration and the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

New newspapers are appearing every week, but the media remains largely undeveloped for national politics. "There is still no national framework for political parties," a British official said, except the discredited Baath Party of Mr. Hussein, whose leaders are still being hunted. "The climate is not suitable at the moment for a free and open democratic process."

On the campus of Baghdad University, a young Shiite student is worried about delay.

"Iraq's new political process needs to work quickly because Iraqi society has been living for a long time behind high walls," said Mazen al-Yasseri, 20, as other students celebrated the first post-Hussein graduation. "If people begin to dwell on their political suffering when they are trying to build a new country," he said, Iraq could lapse into the grievance politics of the past — which in turn could propel another tyrant to power to hold Iraq together.

The democratic instinct is strong now, Mr. Yasseri said, but poorly understood. "The people want something, but they cannot appreciate the price they will have to pay for it," he said.

In order for Iraq to stay united and become democratic, the Shiite religious leaders will have to make concessions to secular government, the secular Sunnis and Shiites will have to make concessions to Iraq's Muslim character, the Kurds will have to give up their private armies, their smuggling networks and their internecine warlord struggles for dominion over resources.

Still, long before anyone casts a ballot here, Iraqis are crossing political lines.

At the Democratic Student Movement office on Baghdad's largest campus, Abdul Amir Kazzim, 35, a Shiite who said he was suspended from university three times under Mr. Hussein, said he would consider voting for Mr. Pachachi, a Sunni, to lead Iraq. "He gives the impression of independence and he is really working to help Iraq," Mr. Kazzim said.

Another student who did not give his name said he would support a Kurdish chieftain because the Kurdish parties had the longest record of opposing Mr. Hussein.

Mr. Yasseri said he thought that if elections were held today, the Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's 23 million people, might elect a religious leader, like Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, as president. But Mr. Yasseri said he would support a secular Shiite leader like Iyad Alawi of the Iraqi National Accord, one of the exile groups that has returned to Iraq.

Some Iraqis wonder whether the United States and Britain, having made the the largest investment in regime change and nation building since World War II, will really be able to let go, or whether they will be more like a British official described by Margaret Macmillan in her book "Paris 1919," who said: "What we want is some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves."
</i>

<hr>

<a HREF="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF04Ak04.html">Enter the Iraqi Islamic Republic. Not quite yet</a>

<i>
TEHRAN - It has become fashionable to say that Saddam Hussein's fall would prompt Shi'ite-dominated Iran to export its kind of Islamic government to Iraq, but analysts say this is too simplistic - and reflects a poor understanding of the mix of religion and politics in the Middle East.

This "theory" has been bruited about during the US-led war on Iraq. It was further fueled by the May 10 return to that country of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer Hakim, leader of Iraq's best-known opposition group, the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, after 23 years in Iran.

Reports of how Iraqi Shi'ites this month took to Baghdad's streets, some carrying pictures of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, added to this perception. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has also urged Shi'ite clerics in Iraq to have more say in a post-Saddam Iraq, saying any form of a secularized version of Islam is "American Islam".

But academics and ordinary Iranians say that the newfound freedom of Iraqi Shi'ites, who make up the majority of the country's population but were long oppressed under Saddam's Sunni-dominated government, would not automatically translate into support for an Islamic republic - or any united desire by Iranians to see this emerge across the border.

"The pivotal question in a post-Saddam regime will be 'how powerful is Shi'ite politics'?" asked Mohsen Abdulli, a former Marxist who has spent five years in jail. "Viewing the infighting and inner conflicts of Shi'ite politicians for and against the Islamic regime in Iran, and their taking different versions of political Islam within the established reading of the Shi'ite religion, I can assert that Shi'ism as an ideology is bankrupt," he said. "It cannot be marketed and exported as easily as the beginning of Iran's Islamic Revolution."

In an article this month, Emadeddin Baqi, who has been jailed for his research on Iranian dissidents and intellectuals, wrote: "Even those clerics who were already pro-Islamic government are not advocating an Iranian Islamic-style government."

Shi'ite Muslims are followers of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, after whose death these two strands of Islam emerged to follow different revered leaders. Iraq's Najaf and Karbala cities are the symbols of martyrdom for Shi'ites.

There is a mix of factors behind why Iraq is not necessarily going Iran's way, despite the Shi'ite links between them, and why Iran may not necessarily be pushing this openly either. There are differences between Shi'ites in Iran and Iraq, and between the two countries, like there are differences between various tribes in the region, experts say.

Even within Iran itself, there are differences between the clergy's and politicians' views of post-Saddam Iraq. The Islamic clergy in Iran have varying views on Iraq and the role of Shi'ites there as well. While Khamenei appears to want Shi'ite clerics in Iraq to flex their political muscle, Hakim, on his arrival in Basra in southwest Iraq, said: "I am a religious clergyman, not a specialist in politics."

"The enlightened and disillusioned mullahs are clever enough not to repeat the same mistake in Iraq by pursuing an Iranian Islamic model of government in Iraq," explained Hamid Reza Jalaeepour, political science professor at Tehran University. "If Hakim had not expressed his disavowal of politics, he would not have received the figurative passport to go to seminary schools in Najaf and Karbala," Baqi said in an interview.

He recalled that Khomeini, an exile in Iraq in the 1960s, had not been able to go to Najaf until he made a commitment not to engage in politics against the Iranian monarchy at the time. "Ironically, Hakim and Khomeini discreetly avoided politics in order to be accommodated in Iraq," Baqi said.

"The survival secret of the seminary schools and Shi'ite institutions in Iraq and even in Qom, Isfahan and Mashhad [in Iran] is their standing aloof from political challenges in both Iraq and Iran," he said, explaining that Shi'ite institutions may now well prefer to stick to religious matters.

"The Najaf and Karbala seminary schools in Iraq will go back to tradition and focus on Islamic jurisprudence and precepts," added Seyyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad, the 56-year-old grandson of the founder of the seminaries in the Iranian holy city of Qom 82 years ago.

Traditionally, seminary schools have received direct contributions from Shi'ite people and rejected government financial help to keep their independence "and now in the post-Saddam regime there is a chance for that tradition to prevail", added Damad.

"Those who advocate an Islamic republic in Iraq are in the minority," said Ahmad Helli, an Iraqi refugee from Najaf who was a sociology teacher and has been a fish peddler in Qom for the past 12 years. "Even Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer Hakim, who was warmly welcomed in Iraqi Shi'ite cities, was booed in Qom in Iran by some Iraqi refugees."

Not that Shi'ism does not make for a very strong bond. Shi'ites have the same rituals, many based around Imam Hussein, who was killed in Karbala in 680. Territorial borders do not limit Shi'ite clerical institutions. In remarks that show how Iranian Shi'ites hardly think of Najaf or Karbala as cities in another country, Abbas Hasani, a student at a Qom seminary, said: "Inshallah [if God is willing], I would like to go to Najaf or Karbala for my advanced studies."

"Shi'ite clerical establishments have no motherland. Shi'ite clergymen, based on their textbooks in seminary schools, are not expected to believe in a modern nation-state," explained Mahmoud Sa'riulqalam of Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran.

But tribalism among people from different regions creates divisions that affect Shi'ite groups. Helli said that the Iraqi Shi'ite refugees in Qom, hailing from different areas in Iraq, could not even have a coordinated procession of lamentation for Imam Hussein to mark Saddam's departure, so "how will they establish an Islamic Shi'ite government in Iraq?"

"History teaches us that whenever intrusions were made to Mesopotamia [Iranian in 539 BC and Greek in 331], and when Baghdad was invaded [by Timur the Lame in 1401, by the Persians in 1509 and by the Turks in 1534], the impacts were great in the Middle East," said Hoshang Shokranian of the University of Kermanshah in western Iran, a two-hour drive from the Iraqi border. "The schism in Shi'ite politics is the latest one thanks to US President [George W] Bush's war against Saddam's regime," he added.
</i>

<hr>

There is also noted factionalism amongst the Shia leaders:

<a HREF="http://slate.msn.com/id/2082980/">A Guide to Iraq's Shiite Clerics"</a>

<hr>

If there is credible evidence proving the initial article about Iraq and the Shia - political situation wrong, present it here.