Iran

Further interesting point...do you remember who overthrew the Shah's popularly elected political counter point ( in a British styled Parlimentary Monarchy) back in '51, and gave the Shah back his absolute power?

 

Mango, I don't really care about your big long article, I haven't really been participating in this thread all that much, until Treeboy led off the article you are now daring us to disprove with this incredibly asinine comment:

and then followed up with another classic:

I think I made it abundantly clear in my post that that was what I was addressing. I responded because 1. Treeman brought it up; and 2. his standard operating procedure, whenever presented with information that is contrary to his worldview or makes his arguments look ill considered or illogical, is to dismiss the source (usually the Times) as unreliable and biased. And here, he made a direct comparison between the Post and the Times as far as credibility goes. Again, I think that was made pretty clear from the text of what I wrote. I'm not sure why you saw fit to single me out.

So I don't really care for your little challenge about presenting evidence about Iraqi Shi'as and have no plans to respond to it. If you want to assume treeman's mantle that the Post is a more credible source of information than the Times, then go for it. I'm pretty comfortable with that argument.

 

Calling Iran a Theocracy is fine. I have no problem with that. But it is not a Dictatorship. Unlike all of our allies in the Mid East, it is a Republic. It and Israel are the only Mid East nations that have actual elections. Although Israel doesn't let everyone vote...

 

Excellent freaking post.


( although, to be strictly accurate, neither does Iran...but still.)

 

Oh please. Iran has a sham democracy, and everyone knows it (not least of whom are its own citizens). The mullahs control the military, the Revolutionary Guards (used for internal suppression of unrest), the press, the judiciary, the press, they regularly dissolve elections that they don't like... Get real and be honest for once, guys.

 

you first.

 

I think Iran is a perfect example of why we should be wary of getting into other people's business. The Shah (complete dictator) was overthrown, then they became a Religous Democracy, but the state was still able to overrule elections etc. Yet, now the people have tasted freedom and that ability to vote and voice their opinion and are fighting for more. They are beginning to fight for freedom and eventually the plight of the people will come to fruition, especially when you have a young, educated population.

If we label Iran an "Axis of Evil" or try to push our goals, then the people well forget fighting within themselves and as nationalism tends to do, focus on the outside threat.

This country is a religious democracy, much like Israel, but absolute dictatorships such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar recieve more US support.

 

Here we go again. Treeman and the neocons want to attack another country.

Since he posts approvingly articles saying who cares about wmd or lack thereof in Iraq, why bother with the wmd ruse with respect to Iran or other countries that you wish to attack?

BTW didn't you at one point say you would feel like the Iraq War was a mistake if we are still trying to pacify them in two years?

 

Believe me when I say that I am FLOORED to be in step with tree over Iran! However, any illusion to Iran as a democracy is a sham at the very least. Saying that Iranians have voting rights is like saying Stalin was elected by a popular vote of the people...Israel is nothing like the Iranian Theocracy--Israel is a far more secular state in practice and make-up.

 

Thanks bro. Talked to her early this morning and things are okay.

 

Before you all get too trigger happy about invading Iran we have the little problem of finishing Iraq and Afghanistan:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2084514/

Why Are We Still Fighting in Iraq?
The military doesn't know how to end a war.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 4:39 PM PT


Seven weeks after President Bush's May Day victory declaration, the war in Iraq is not yet over. More than 50 American soldiers have died in Iraq since then, almost as many as were killed in the three weeks of formal combat. The deaths have come not just from sniper potshots, but also in the course of sizable U.S. raids, at least one (in Fallujah, outside Baghdad) involving a full Army brigade.


What has gone wrong here? Much of it is related to the administration's famously inadequate preparation for postwar reconstruction; if civil discord weren't so seething (over lack of water, electricity, jobs, money, and so forth), the guerrillas might have demurred from such bold attacks. However, much of the current situation is the result of a more generic problem—the failure of U.S. military strategists to think much about how wars end.

Huba Wass de Czege (pronounced HOO-ba VOSS de-say-ga) is a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who has given some thought to these matters lately. To the extent the Army has evolved into a more agile fighting force, Wass de Czege has been a major influence: In the early 1980s, he rewrote the Army's official field manual on operations, replacing the old book's doctrine of attrition and firepower with the ancient but forgotten concepts of maneuver warfare, deep-strike offensives, and combined air-land battle. He then founded the Army's School for Advanced Military Studies, an elite, yearlong postgrad program, to inculcate the new concepts in the next generation's officer corps.

Last year, Wass de Czege observed two big official war games, the Army's "Vigilant Warrior" and the Air Force's "Global Engagement." Shortly afterward, he wrote and privately circulated a memo, called "02 Wargaming Insights," that Donald Rumsfeld would have done well to read. (The general recently sent me a copy.)

These sorts of war games "tend to devote more attention to successful campaign-beginnings than to successful conclusions," he wrote. "War games usually conclude when victory seems inevitable to us (not necessarily to the enemy), at about the point operational superiority has been achieved and tactical control of strategically significant forces and places appears to be a matter of time."

Winning a war, he noted, doesn't mean simply defeating the enemy on the battlefield. It means achieving the strategic goals for which we've gone to war in the first place. In both war games, he wrote, the question of how to achieve those strategic goals couldn't be answered because the war game ended too soon.

This is unfortunate, he went on, because, important though it is to understand the early stages of a military campaign, "it is just as important to know how to follow through to the resolution of such conflicts." He added that, if the game managers did follow through the next time they play, they would learn that they—and, by extension, U.S. military commanders generally—have underestimated "the difficulties of 'regime change' and the magnitude of the effort required to achieve strategic objectives."

All these observations, written well before Gulf War II, seem painfully prescient in retrospect. They are also consistent with a long-standing shortfall in American military thinking. There seem to be no U.S. Army field manuals on the subject of what used to be called "war termination." I know of only one book on the general subject that's still in print: Fred Ikle's Every War Must End, written in 1971 (with a final chapter added for a 1991 revised edition).

Except when chronicling the endings of specific wars, scholars have shied away from the subject, perhaps a legacy of the farce that greeted Paul Kecskemeti, an analyst at the Rand Corp. who wrote a book in 1958 called Strategic Surrender: The Politics of Victory and Defeat. It was mainly a case study of the German, Japanese, and Italian surrenders at the end of World War II, but a few right-wing politicians were so panic-stricken by the book's title—they thought it advocated surrendering to the Communists—that they forced a bill through Congress outlawing government funding of any study even mentioning the word "surrender." (Rand was, at the time, funded mainly by the Air Force.)

In fairness to our current crop of officers and their civilian authorities, how to end wars has not been a hot issue in American military history. World War II was fairly straightforward: The enemy surrendered unconditionally, and the rest of the world didn't seem to mind our subsequent occupation. Korea was a stalemate, Vietnam a rout. The hemispheric wars have been minor and manageable. The first Gulf War was a roaring battlefield success that ended—it soon seemed clear—badly, a mixed phenomenon that should have prompted attention to the matter, but didn't; Desert Storm's shady aftermath (the survival of Saddam, his repression of the rebels) could easily be attributed to the involvement of the United Nations since its mandate left no room for missions beyond ousting Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

So here we are, still fighting a war because Saddam's last loyalists, perhaps aided by other anti-American forces, have refused to recognize our war-gamed definition of when the war is done.

Late last March, halfway through the official phase of the war, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, raised a stink when he told a reporter, "The enemy we're fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against." In a sense, different from the one he meant but far more troubling, he was right.

 

In the be careful for what you wish for department, give these guys a free press and you get guys calling for American and non burka'ed womens' heads:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0619/p01s01-woiq.html


In volatile Iraq, US curbs press

US issues an order against inciting attacks on minorities or US troops.

By Ilene R. Prusher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BAGHDAD – The once occasional attacks on US soldiers here are growing deadlier, and more frequent: Wednesday, a US soldier was killed and another wounded in a drive-by shooting. And outside the former Republican Palace, now the headquarters of the US administration, US troops killed two Iraqis during a protest by former Iraqi soldiers that spiraled out of control.
At least some of the fuel for the anti-American fire, US officials here charge, is being pumped out by new Iraqi media outlets.


L. Paul Bremer, the top US official here, says a new edict prohibiting the local media from inciting attacks on other Iraqis - and on the coalition forces - is not meant to put a stopper on the recently uncorked freedom of speech.

"It is intended to stop ... people who are trying to incite political violence, and people who are succeeding in inciting political violence here, particularly against women," Bremer said at a press conference Tuesday.

Iraqi journalists are not taking kindly to the restrictions. Among the scores of new publications that have flooded Iraq's newsstands since the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, the broadsheet As-Saah is one of the most widely read. In a front-page editorial Wednesday, the paper's senior editor let readers know what he thought of the country's liberators: "Bremer is a Baathist," the headline reads.

In an interview, editor Ni'ma Abdulrazzaq says the press edict decreed by Bremer lays out restrictions similar to those under Mr. Hussein. Not long ago, an uppity writer could easily be accused of being an agent for America or Israel. "Now they put plastic bags on our heads, throw us to the ground, and accuse us of being agents of Saddam Hussein," the editorial reads. "In other words, if you're not with America, you're with Saddam."

"Mr. Bremer, you remind us of Saddam," the column continues. "We've waited a long time to be free. Now you want us to be slaves."

It is not clear whether or not such incendiary language would be considered a violation of the new media policy that Bremer, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), recently introduced. According to CPA Order Number 14, media are prohibited from broadcasting or publishing material that incites violence against any individual or group "including racial, ethnic, religious groups, and women"; encourages civil disorder; or "incites violence against coalition forces." Violators, if convicted, will be fined up to $1,000 or sentenced to up to one year in prison.

To be sure, many papers are full of scathing rebuke for the US forces, and sometimes peppered with far-fetched and incendiary reports. The average Iraqi reader might be led to believe that American soldiers are raping Iraqi girls, and undressing Iraqi women with night-vision goggles. Other reports allege that soldiers steal money during house searches.

For decades, Iraqis have lived in a state in which all news outlets were controlled by Mr. Hussein, and by his son Uday in particular. Testing the waters, the first papers to start publishing after the regime's fall tended to be affiliated with formerly exiled political parties. But now the market is awash in newspapers, some of them put out by journalistic novices. "Candy merchants in the markets have become publishers, and junior writers have become senior editors," says Mr. Abdulrazzaq, sitting in his newspaper office, his television tuned to al-Manar, a satellite channel run by Lebanon's Hizbullah movement.

Not unlike al-Manar, which reports with a fundamentalist Islamic slant, As-Saah was founded in late April under the aegis of a Muslim religious movement. But the paper recently decided to break away from the Unified National Movement, a Sunni Muslim group, says Abdulrazzaq, so it could be totally independent of pressures to conform to its outlook.

For Abdulrazzaq, working as a journalist under Hussein's regime was like writing in a self-imposed straight jacket. Abdulrazzaq says he was arrested "only" twice. Reporters knew where the red lines were and wouldn't dare cross them, he says, but even reporters who praised Hussein would sometimes wind up in jail - or dead. Now, he fears, journalists who should be learning how to break out of the boundaries of the past are learning to keep practicing self-censorship.

For example, he says, he had already pulled two articles which he feared would result in action against his newspaper. A story he postponed but plans to run this Saturday, he says, centers on "American soldiers saying bad things about the Koran and insulting it."

Criticism of the new guidelines has grown, although some of the frustration may be based more on rumor about what the policy entails, rather than on reality. The edict on "Prohibited Media Activity" was released last week in English - but only Wednesday in Arabic.

Bremer has reiterated that the point of the new press policy is not to hamper free speech or stifle criticism of the US-led administration here. "We very much believe that the freedom of expression should apply to Iraq," Bremer said. "But we need to balance that with a need to protect minorities from violence."

 

I think we should send everyone that is critical over there to help out.

I mean, why b**** when you can lend a hand?

Right guys?



DD

 

Buck, you have a point and I am sorry for my name calling in this thread. I'll try to tone it down.

NOw as to your article. Many people in Iran have been resisting the religious fundamentalists both before and after the wmd ruse and the current neocons starting to sell us middle east wars. I certainly am all for discouraging fundamentalist religion both at home and abroad.

I remember as a student back in the very early 1980'd they had Iranian student groups at the U of H protesting Khomeini and the strict religious nutsos.

Iran was moving toward democracy before 9/11 and continues to do so. This is widely known. If we do a typical CIA number and try to fund the student groups it will lead to them being discredited as US backed traitors to Iran. This won't be helpful.

The same neocon crew here at home wants to overthrow the government of Iran by force in the fantasy that they will then support Republican free market policies and be in favor of Sharon type policies in Israel. This is just not realistic, but if these guys believe it you can't blame them for trying, it just has to be resisted by the rest of us..

Their analysis is that we can't just go and invade Iran like we did in Iraq because 1) our military is already stretched pretty thin trying to occupy Afhanistan, and Iraq, and fight wars in Columbia, the Philippines and other locales 2) Iran is about three times the population of Iraq and woould put up more of a fight.

I have seen where we hope to use the Azeris sp? a small ethnic group the way we used the Northern Alliance to fight, destabilize and perhaps overthrown the government, backed by US airpower and perhaps special forces troops. If this fails it could lead to genocide against this small group, but no big deal I guess since they are just Iranians. It is sort of like when we encouraged the Kurds and Shiites to revolt, but left them hanging under Papa Bush's administration. As long as Americans are not killed in great numbers this is polcitically acceptable so who cares.

 

Or even better, whoever smelt it, dealt it.

Tree, Heath, DD, your flight to Baghdad International is waiting so you can go help nationbuild.

 

Bush Will Not Tolerate Iran Nuclear Arms
Jun 18, 2:55 PM (ET)

By SCOTT LINDLAW

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush said Wednesday that he and other world leaders will not tolerate nuclear weapons in Iran and he urged Tehran to treat protesters seeking the ouster of the Islamic government with "the utmost of respect."

Iran is thought to be developing nuclear weapons, though the government denies it.

"The international community must come together to make it very clear to Iran that we will not tolerate construction of a nuclear weapon," Bush told reporters at the end of a meeting in the White House Cabinet Room. "Iran would be dangerous if it had a nuclear weapon," he said.Bush said he had brought the matter of nuclear weapons up with other leaders at the G-8 meeting of industrial powers, plus Russia, earlier this month.

"There was near-universal agreement that we all must work together to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon," he said.

Iran also has an advanced missile program and maintains ties to terrorist groups, possibly including al-Qaida, the administration has asserted, and is run by conservative mullas who are deeply hostile toward the United States.

Bush labeled Iraq a threat to U.S. national security before invoking his revised U.S. defense posture which called for pre-emptive attack in such a case.

Bush did not say what he would do if international inspectors found Iran in violation of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Bush administration is banking on diplomatic pressure to encourage Iran to rethink its nuclear program. It is confident that the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, meeting this week, will find Iran to be in violation.

Such a step that could put the issue before the U.N. Security Council.

Tehran and other cities saw violent clashes last week as pro-government forces put down student-led protests demanding an end to clerical rule. Those protests have largely died down in the past few days.

Bush paid tribute to "those courageous souls who speak out for freedom in Iran."

"They need to know America stands squarely by their side, and I would urge the Iran government to treat them with the utmost of respect," he said.

The Iranian government has accused Washington of interfering in its internal affairs - and some opponents of the regime also say that public criticism by American leaders does not help their cause.

Reformist lawmaker Fatemeh Haqiqatjou said she and 200 other reformists signed a statement Tuesday against the U.S. comments. "Iranians want change and that change has to be brought by Iranians themselves, not foreigners," she said. "America's involvement only undermines the slow pace of reforms in Iran."

------

I would be surprised if Bush actually cared what any Iran reformist thought, except for those that want the US to invade and put them into power.

 

glynch:

Please. I have said on numerous occasions (every time I've commented on it) that I do not think that military action against Iran would either be necessary or desirable. If you draw "well, treeman just must want to attack Iran" from that, then... Well, I don't know what to say other than thanks for putting words in my mouth, and being dishonest about it to boot - again. Not the first time. Or the second. Or the twenty-fourth.

BTW, here's a wonderful account from an Iranian student of Iran's 'democracy' in action:

June 17, 2003, 8:30 a.m.
The Blood of Iranians
Fighting our way to regime change.

By Koorosh Afshar

TEHRAN, IRAN — During the past few nights, we Iranian youth have been agitating — at great risk to our lives — to remove the 24-year-old plague that has stricken our homeland. Our goal is to topple the theocratic regime of the mullahs. Our opponents are barbarian vigilantes — members of Ansaar-e-Hezbollah — who are backed by heavily armed Iranian riot police.

Westerners may have difficulty imagining what these people are like. In fact, it's quite easy: Simply remember the Taliban. The only difference is that they don't wear Afghani clothes.

In the past few nights, my peers — and our mothers and sisters — have poured into the streets of our city. Some of us have been arrested and many have been injured by the ruthless attacks of Ansaar-e-Hezbollah. These people attack whomever they see in the streets with tear gas, sticks, iron chains, swords, daggers, and, for the last two nights, guns.

It has become almost routine for us to go out at night, chant slogans, get beaten, lose some of our friends, see our sisters beaten, and then return home.

Each night we set to the streets only to be swept away the next dawn by agents of the regime. Two nights ago, on Amirabad Street, we wrote "Down with Khomeini" on the ground. Before long, the mullah's vigilantes attacked us on their motorcycles. They struck a female student before my eyes so harshly that she was no longer able to walk. As she fell to the ground, four members of Ansaar-e-Hezbollah surrounded her, kicking her. When I and two other students threw stones at them so that they would leave her alone, they threatened us. We escaped into a lane and hid in a house whose owner, an old lady, had left the door open for us. A few minutes later, we saw the young lady being carried away by riot police, her feet dragging on the ground, her shattered teeth hanging out of her still-bleeding mouth.

At least three of my best friends have been detained; nobody knows anything about their fate.

Yesterday I heard that the prosecutor of Tehran has announced that most of the detainees are hooligans with criminal records. What sort of criminal record does he mean? Perhaps the crime of walking with a person of the opposite sex? Of wearing Western clothes or playing a cassette in the car?

I was just talking to a friend who lives in a dormitory called Allammeh tabatabayee. He told me about what happened three nights ago when Ansaar-e-Hezbollah attacked the dormitory:

It started just before 10 P.M. We were chanting slogans against the regime, specifically the so-called leader. At first we were behind the gate of the dorm, inside the yard. When we went to the highway in front of the dormitory, a group of around 100 riot police arrived and started throwing stones at us. We retaliated from the roof of the dormitory building. At 2 A.M. Ansaar arrived.

They got shields from the police and entered the dormitory. There were about 600-700 of them — armed with swords, sticks, daggers, iron chains, and tear-gas guns — to 700 of us students, mostly in pajamas. We had run out of stones to resist any longer….

They entered the dormitory and shot tear gas, sending all the students fleeing to their rooms; then they entered the buildings, and started kicking in and breaking down the doors....

They were shouting "Rahbaraa az maa bepazir" — "Leader accept this from us." They captured my roommate and tried to stab him in the stomach with a dagger. He managed to grab the blade of the dagger, holding it tightly in his hands. His attackers pulled it out and struck him on the back. He now has a wound 15 centimeters long and 3 centimeters deep. As a result, he has been hospitalized, his thumbs almost detached from his hands....

Three attackers found an unlucky student alone in his room. Two held his hands at his sides while a third sodomized him with a dagger, inflicting a wound 12 centimeters deep. The student was taken to a Shariati hospital and bled for hours. He is still fighting for his life....

In another room, a student jumped from a third-floor balcony to the ground when he saw the tip of an attacker's sword breaking through the door to his room....

I visited the dormitory myself. The blood spots were still there. The doors were mostly broken. But we will continue to shed our blood, if that is what it takes to obtain the freedom we seek.

— Koorosh Afshar is a pseudonym for a student in Tehran. His name has been changed for his protection.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-afshar061703.asp

 

I would be surprised if you could even tell the difference between an Iranian reformer and an Iraqi Shiite hardliner, ya ignorant toad's ass. You don't even know what a "reformer" in Iran is.

 

Iran's nukes and Freedom Spring

Things continue to grow increasingly uncomfortable for the mullahs running the show in Tehran. At this writing, there have been seven straight nights of mass demonstrations throughout the country demanding that the clerics implement democratic reform. The government has responded with an iron fist, attacking demonstrators with guns, knives, machetes and clubs. American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen, writing in National Review Online, reports that so many members of the military and the Revolutionary Guards are supporting the demonstrators that the regime has had to resort to importing "Afghan Arabs" (i.e., supporters of Osama bin Laden) to suppress them.

Meanwhile, the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors, meeting in Vienna, Austria, is preparing to take up Washington's complaints about Tehran's covert nuclear weapons program. On Monday, the IAEA, under heavy pressure from Washington, called on Tehran to sign a special protocol to the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which bars signatories from developing nuclear weapons. The protocol would allow the agency to inspect all suspected nuclear sites in Iran — not just those approved by the government.

For Iran, efforts to develop nuclear weapons became a priority following the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah. Russian aid has been indispensable in helping Iran build a reactor in Bushehr, which could enable the regime to produce plutonium by 2005. Also, over the past 20 years, Iran has become the top customer for missiles and nuclear technology from North Korea (aside from Iran, the lone remaining "axis of evil" state mentioned by President Bush in last year's State of the Union address).

Dating back to the Clinton administration, Washington's policy has largely focused on using diplomacy to delay Iran's nuclear program. This means, for example, that Washington has sought to persuade Russia to curtail (or preferably discontinue) its nuclear assistance to Iran. The United States also has been pushing the IAEA to take a more assertive public stance in highlighting instances of Iranian non-cooperation with international inspectors.

The pressure may be having the desired effect. The IAEA's latest report on Iranian nuclear weapons, published on Friday, confirms what critics have been saying for years about Tehran's non-cooperation. "Iran has failed to meet its obligations" with respect to "the reporting of nuclear material, its subsequent processing and use of that material and the declaration of facilities where the material was stored and processed," the IAEA said. Other examples of Iranian failures highlighted by the IAEA include the failure to declare that it had imported natural uranium. Iran also failed to declare the production of nuclear material and what was done with the resulting waste.

While Iran, under pressure from the IAEA, has belatedly moved to provide some of the required information in recent months, the agency also says that "the number of failures by Iran to report the material facilities and activities in question in a timely manner" is "a matter of concern."

The demonstrations at least suggest that the mullahs' days as rulers of Iran may be numbered. That would probably cause a shift in the correlation of forces in the war on terror. That's the good news. The danger is that they will be able to produce a nuclear weapon or two before their regime collapses. In the short term, Washington can reduce this danger by continuing to work with the IAEA to force Iran to come clean, while leaning forward in support of the popular uprising. (For more information on the Iranian freedom protests, check out the student Web site at www.daneshjoo.org.)

http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20030617-094528-1074r.htm