بیستون - BEHISTUN

THE BEHISTUN INSCRIPTIONS[Bisuton], AN OPEN DOOR TO THE PAST.

This Behistun [Bhagasthana, meaning "the god's place or land") also known as Bisitun or Bisutun in Modrn Farsi]Mount is located above a spring-fed pool of water on the old carven road from Ecbatana to Babylon. The rock is really the last peak (3,800 feet high) of a long, narrow range of mountains that skirt the Plains of Keneanshah on the East. The name Behistun is derived from the village of Besitun located at its foot.

A large relief (5½ x 3 meters) depicting king Darius, his bow carrier Intaphrenes and his lance carrier Gobryas. Darius overlooks nine representatives of conquered peoples, their necks tied. A tenth figure, badly damaged, is laying under the king's feet. Above these thirteen people is a representation of the supreme god Ahuramazda. This relief is based on older monuments, further along the road, at Sar-e Pol-e Zahab.

Underneath is a panel with a cuneiform text in Old Persian, telling the story of the king's conquests (translated below). The text consists of four columns (#1, #2, #3, #4) and an appendix (#5) and has a total length of about 515 lines.

Another panel telling more or less the same story in Babylonian. The appendix ("column five") is missing.

A third panel with the same text in Elamite (the language of the administration of the Achaemenid empire). This translation of the Persian text has a length of 650 lines. Again, the appendix is missing.

The inscription includes three versions of the same text, written in three different cuneiform script languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. Babylonian was a later form of Akkadian: unlike Old Persian, they are Semitic languages. In effect, then, the inscription is to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptian hieroglyphs: the document most crucial in the decipherment of a previously lost script.

According to Thompson, R. Campbell: Two of the most important events in the advancement of historical knowledge have been the discovery of the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone and the deciphering of the cuneiform inscriptions on the Rock of Behistun. The former opened the door to the Wonderland of Egyptian history, and the latter brought daylight into the dark places of antiquity in the Middle East, revealing to the modern world the vanished civilizations of Mesopotamia in all the truth of contemporary record." (Thompson, R. Campbell, The Rock of Behistun, Wonders of the Past, Edited by Sir J. A. Hammerton, Vol. II, New York: Wise and Co., 1937, p. 761).


http://www.livius.org/be-bm/behistun/behistun03.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script
http://www.mabelvalechurchofchrist.org/gg/vol%2017-3/thebehistun.htm

Sanction: A Prelude to War and Case of Iranian Patriotism

Sanction: A Prelude to War and Case of Iranian Patriotism

On August 6, 1990, reaffirming Resolution 660 (1990) and noting Iraq's refusal to comply with it and Kuwait's right of self-defense, the Council took steps to implement international sanctions on Iraq under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. This was the second resolution by the Security Council over the invasion of Kuwait.

On Saturday 4 March 2000 John Pilger Reported on Guardian UK :

Squeezed to death

[Half a million children have died in Iraq since UN sanctions were imposed - most enthusiastically by Britain and the US. Three UN officials have resigned in despair. Meanwhile, bombing of Iraq continues almost daily.
When asked on US television if she [Madeline Albright, US Secretary of State] thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children [from sanctions in Iraq] was a price worth paying, Albright replied: “This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.”]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2000/mar/04/weekend7.weekend9

In an interview with Amy Goodman, published on Democracy Now with Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, he was asked about 500,000 Iraqi Children in addition to 1,000,000 adults who had died as a result of sanction…..

[.........AMY GOODMAN: But the U.N. sanctions, for example, the sanctions led to the deaths of more than a half a million children, not to mention more than a million Iraqis.

GOVERNOR RICHARDSON: Well, I stand behind the sanctions. I believe that they successfully contained Saddam Hussein. I believe that the sanctions were an instrument of our policy.

AMY GOODMAN: To ask a question that was asked of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright, do you think the price was worth it, 500,000 children dead.

GOVERNOR RICHARDSON: Well, I believe our policy was correct, yes...............]

http://www.democracynow.org/2005/9/22/governor_richardson_calls_for_an_exit

Enter Iran’s alleged and unproven nuclear bomb ambition, AKA yet another bogyman in the region that might be a treat to Israel and or US ambitions in the region.

In a commentary by Jennifer Rubin a well known “bomb Iran” crowd, we see how worried these crowd are about alleged [Targeted Sanction] not being able to KILL enough Iranians by noting:

[….such sanctions reflect the administration’s misguided desire to “avoid being too harsh, too effective, or inflict too much damage”. Instead of genuinely “crippling sanctions,” the weak-kneed administration “[doesn’t] want to topple the regime nor inflict much damage, just target those ‘elements’ they think are the really bad guys.”…..]

This is hardly a surprise, since the ugly truth under the disguise that is coming from war mongering neoconservatives and foreign lobby groups such as AIPAC about the [Crippling Sanctions] in which the main objective of such sanctions would be to INFLICT horrendous amount of pain and suffering to the nation, in whose behalf [demonstrators and nation as a whole] they claim to speak.

One might try and attempt to rationalize this twisted logic when it comes from groups such as neoconservatives and foreign affiliated groups [i.e. AIPAC]. But this logic truly takes a new evil form when it comes from so called Iranians, more so from group who to arrogantly and undeservingly name themselves Patriots.

In their twisted and treacherous logic, they are led to believe that IF enough pain and suffering can be brought upon a nation and IF they are sufficiently RAVAGED and IMPOVERISHED, they will rise up in earnest and overthrow the Islamic Regime. Fact of the matter is though, as was seen during Iraq Sanction, minimal of suffering was brought upon Saddam’s regime itself.

Of course, the fact that these so called Iranian patriots are calling for innocent civilians to be starved and immiserated does not prevent THEM from engaging in POMPOUS and self-congratulatory rhetoric about their great devotion to “the Iranian people, who are risking life and limb against a regime they know all to well is evil” and “Ancient Persian heritage, that they all claim to be the sole guardians of”.

It would be hard to think of a better example of the profound dishonesty underlying what these treacherous group that starving Iranian people is their new found LOVE and devotion to the Mother Land.

White moderates and greens

http://www.payvand.com/news/10/jan/1297.html

American pundits who pontificate on the internal affairs of others only reveal themselves as irrelevant and ridiculous, writes Hamid Dabashi

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice -- Martin Luther King, Jr, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," 16 April 1963

The only reason the world at large should take notice of what American pundits think of the Green Movement in Iran is that their self-indulgent pontificating reveals much about the troubled world we live in and that they think they must lead. Indeed, one of the most magnificent aspects of the unfolding civil rights movement in Iran is that it acts as a catalyst to expose the bizarre banality of American foreign policy commentary and its limitations in dealing with the rest of the world. Those in American circles that are of the "bomb Iran" persuasion are lost causes just like the Ku Klux Klan. It is the equivalent of what in a different context Martin Luther King Jr called "the white moderates" that warrants more attention.

Perhaps the single most important problem with American politics, policymakers and pundits -- left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican -- is that they think that anything that happens anywhere in the world is about them or is their business. The imperial hubris that seems definitive of the DNA of this political culture wants either to invade and occupy other people's homelands and tell them what to do, or else disregard people's preoccupation with their own issues and impose, demand and exact "engagement" with them, whether they want it or not.

Take the most recent piece of nonsense published on the civil rights movement in Iran by Flynt and Hillary Leverett, "Another Iranian Revolution? Not Likely" ( The New York Times, 5 January 2010), which has absolutely nothing to do with or seriously to say about the Green Movement, and yet everything to reveal about the pathology of American politics as determined inside the self-delusional Beltway cocoon.

As early as mid-June 2009, the Leveretts defending the fraudulent election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ("Ahmadinejad won. Get over it," Politico, 15 June 2009). That millions of Iranians had poured into their streets and put their lives on the line did not seem to bother the Leveretts. In addition to a condescending tone, in which the Leveretts partake freely when talking about a groundbreaking civil rights movement about whose origin and disposition they are categorically ignorant, the chief characteristic of their take is that they keep fabricating non-existent targets and then shooting them down. The result: what say has everything to do with the besieged and bunkered mentality inside the Beltway and absolutely nothing to do with the Green Movement. Chief example: "The Islamic Republic of Iran," they believe, "is not about to implode. Nevertheless, the misguided idea that it may do so is becoming enshrined as conventional wisdom in Washington."

Whoever said it was? No scholar or otherwise serious and informed observer of Iran writing in Persian or any other language and still in her or his right mind can predict -- or has predicted -- that the Islamic Republic will or will not fall, and even if it did, one way or another, it would have nothing to do with what "conventional wisdom in Washington" opts to enshrine or not to enshrine. If there are folks inside the Beltway who think the Islamic Republic will fall any day now, Abbas Milani will become the American ambassador to Iran, or the Iranian ambassador to the US, depending on the season of his migrations to the left or right, and Lolita will soon become required reading in Iranian high schools, well that's their problem, and yet another sign of their dangerously delusional politics. That hallucination has nothing to do with the Green Movement, and thus the Leveretts need not have sought (in vain) to discredit a monumental social uprising of whose origin and destination they are oblivious.

These Washingtonians live in a world of their own. A massive civil rights movement has commenced in a rich and diversified political culture of which people trapped inside the Beltway have no clue. Thus what American pundits make of it is entirely irrelevant. This is a civil rights movement some two hundred years in the making, whose course and contours will be determined inside Iran and by Iranians. No Iranian could care less what people in halls of power in the United States think of their uprising, unless and until they start harming it. There are two sorts of harm: economic sanctions, covert operations and military strikes, advocated by the likes of Milani; or else engaging with the illegitimate and fraudulent government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as the Leveretts advocate. These are both interferences in the domestic affairs of Iran. Mr and Mrs Leverett ought to know they will be remembered in Iranian history as the 21st century equivalent of Kermit Roosevelt if they persist, as they have since the commencement of the Green Movement in June 2009, in actively siding with what in Iran is called "the coup government of Ahmadinejad".

The supreme irony of the Leveretts' position is that while the ghastly propaganda machinery of the Islamic Republic accuses anyone who utters a word against their criminal atrocities of being "an agent of CIA", here is an ex- CIA agent acting as the greatest proponent of their theocratic terrorism. The Leveretts' main concern is with President Obama hurrying up to "engage" Ahmadinejad before it is too late. To pre-empt neocon belligerent chicanery the Leveretts seek to push the president in the direction of diplomacy with Ahmadinejad's administration. That legitimate and even laudable and noble concern, however, soon degenerates into an arrogant and ignorant dismissal of an entire civil rights movement as something ephemeral and even non- existent.

The best thing that President Obama has done so far, in fact, is not to engage with the fraudulent and criminal government of Ahmadinejad, listening carefully to the masses of millions of Iranians chanting "Obama, Obama, you are either with them or with us!" And "them" is the brutal theocracy whose security apparatus kidnaps, tortures, rapes and murders its own citizens, when it is not busy putting their political and intellectual leaders on show trials in Kangaroo courts -- facts inconsequential to the Leveretts' realpolitik and yet concerning men -- like Mehdi Karrubi, Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mohamed Khatami -- who have been at the heart of the Islamic revolution, leading it for the last 30 years and who are still deeply committed to the Islamic Republic. It would be utterly catastrophic (both for Iranians and for long term US-Iran relations) if President Obama were to listen to and do as the Leveretts tell him to do.

The entire argument of the Leveretts dwells on a silly number game, like belligerent teenagers comparing the size of their vanities, all set in a prep school adolescent debating club mentality, questioning the numbers of antigovernment and pro-government rallies. Comparing and contrasting the two massive demonstrations in the holy months of Muharram, one against the government and the other orchestrated by it, the Leveretts sound entirely identical with the propaganda machinery of the Islamic Republic that dismisses one as insignificant and peripheral and celebrates the other as "possibly the largest crowd in the streets of Tehran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's funeral in 1989." In this bogus assessment the Leveretts ignore the fact that in one of these demonstrations people were beaten up, shot at, run over by armoured trucks, or else arrested and taken to the dungeons of the Islamic Republic to be tortured, raped and murdered, while in the other they are provided with complementary food and beverages, paraded on national television, and given the day off from work and school.

This is not to suggest that all who went to the staged rally did so just because their livelihood and monthly paycheques were at stake, for their religious sensibilities were equally manipulated by a sinister and abusive regime. But this entire number game is a silly and useless diversion, and of interest only to discredited expatriate oppositional groups or else to the propaganda machinery of the Islamic Republic, which the Leveretts now echo. Neither do all those who participated in the Ashura demonstrations wish to topple the Islamic Republic, nor are all those who were manipulated to join the counter-demonstrations supporters of Ahmadinejad. This fixation with numbers is played on the false field of a supposition that the Islamic Republic is about to fall, whereas for the last seven months anyone who knows anything about Iran has insisted that this is not a revolution but a civil rights movement; a marathon, not a 100-metre sprint.

Another equally useless and diversionary goose chase that the Leveretts play -- a game that shows they are completely out of touch -- is when they start talking about the seventh day memorial of one death or another. What happened in the seventh day commemoration of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri's death on 27 December 2009, which coincided with the Ashura on 10th of the holy month of Muharram 1431, is integral to a succession of mass rallies that began on 12 June and has taken any occasion to pour into streets, demand and exact their rightful public space, and show their discontent. Come next anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in February, or the next Chahar Shanbeh Suri, Noruz, or Sizdah Bedar in March, people will do exactly the same. The Islamic Republic may or may not last, under pressure from its own internal contradictions that it may or may not be able to rectify. But that possibility, or even eventuality, is irrelevant to the civil liberties that this movement is demanding and will exact from this or any other regime.

The Leveretts are led to believe that their trump cards are three earth- shattering questions: "Those who talk so confidently about an 'opposition' in Iran as the vanguard for a new revolution," they say, putting the word "opposition" in quotation marks as a way of belittling, ridiculing and dismissing it, "should be made to answer three tough questions: First, what does this opposition want? Second, who leads it? Third, through what process will this opposition displace the government in Tehran?" Well, for one thing the whole world knows by now that the triumvirate of Mousavi, Karrubi and Khatami collectively constitute the core of what literate observers have called, in Persian, rahbari-ye ghaltan, a "rotating leadership". This "leadership" is not, as the Leveretts assume, of the revolutionary model of Khomeini in 1979. These "white moderates"

As for what the movement wants, Mousavi has specified five very clear objectives -- subsequently expanded to 10, ranging from the resignation of Ahmadinejad to freeing all political prisoners and unconditional freedom of the press -- in a historic document that every Iranian around the globe is now discussing but has evidently been kept hidden from the Leveretts. As to how this is to happen, again Mohsen Kadivar, a leading clerical opponent of the Islamic Republic who despite his young age is in fact superior in his juridical rank and learning to the "leader" of the Islamic Republic, has just told Le Monde specifically, in three itemised moves, how they are going to achieve their ends. In this interview, Kadivar recommends a referendum with three options: an Islamic Republic without velayat-e faqih (rule of the clergy); a republic minus the adjective Islamic; or the Islamic Republic with velayat-e faqih. As in any other civil rights movement, Kadivar of course does not speak for the whole movement. But in terms of the sorts of objectives that are now on the table, his language is in the main ballpark.

There is a reason that a gargantuan security and intelligence apparatus, magnified by billions of more dollars after 9/11, is still so incompetent, as just angrily admitted by President Obama, that it cannot even prevent a deranged mind like Umar Farouk Abdel-Mutallab boarding a plane headed to the United States when the man's own father had approached US and Nigerian authorities telling them that his son was about to commit a terrorist act. The Leveretts' myopia is not exclusive to them: it is endemic to the American intelligence community and political punditry. Their failure in understanding the civil rights movement in Iran is predicated on the fact that at best their thinking is mechanical (not organic) and synchronic (not diachronic).

Consider, for example, the Leveretts' most obvious blind spot. They are very particular to inform people that there is no popular revolution in the offing that may topple the Islamic Republic, and yet fail to notice that the Islamic Republic is in fact far more in danger of a naked military coup by the Revolutionary Guard, following what millions of Iranians -- including the very founders of the Islamic Republic -- believe to have been an electoral coup. What about that possibility? Should the Obama administration also deal with a military junta (as it does in Pakistan) while a massive civil rights movement is unfolding? How is this realpolitik different from becoming a mouthpiece for a fanatical theocratic absolutism? Are Iranians thought not to deserve or to know any better?

What is happening in Iran is a "revolution," though not in a mundane politics of despair but in form, in language, in style, in decorum, in demeanour, in visual and performative sublimity. This is a movement that began with song and dance, with poetry and drama, with colour and choreography, with joy, laughter, and hope; with an open-ended hermeneutics of what is possible beyond the written text, or the spoken word, or the mandated morality, or legislated signs. This civil rights movement will change the very alphabet of the region, from form to content, from rhetoric to logic, from Iran across the Arab and Muslim world, and beyond. Student activists from Ohio to Beijing are learning from their Iranian counterparts. In inner city schools around New York there is a new idiom, "going Iranian", meaning not remaining passive in the face of nonsense. This movement is iconoclastic, puts veils on men's head, places women in the front row of rallies, showers cool water and love over security forces that come to beat up their own brothers and sisters.

But all of that is beyond the bunkered banality that passes for punditry in the United States. To speak the inner language of the Beltway, there is not an iota of difference between Bush's waging war on Afghanistan and Iraq and the Leveretts' recommendation for an imperial decree for "engagement" with the Islamic Republic, no matter what diabolic regime flaunts that dubious epithet. But the good news is that Iranians could not care less. If the Leveretts want to fight against their country's immoral, illegal and fattening warmongering they have their work cut out for them inside their own country. They have no business imposing their imperial prescription on a people busy doing some housecleaning of their own. Whether this Green Movement attains its objective a year from now or 10, whether the Islamic Republic will accommodate those civil liberties and survive or fails to do so and joins other political dinosaurs, is none of Leveretts' business, or the American government's for that matter. A people, once again, have arisen to demand and exact their civil liberties. So please, if you don't mind, step aside.

cannot think of a country like Iran having a civil rights movement; in their estimation Orientals are only capable of revolution or military coup.

About the writer: The writer is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.

... Payvand News - 01/30/10 ... --

Anniversary of Revolution, next rally call for Iran opposition forces

Iranian opposition forces flooded the web with calls for election protesters to join massive demonstration on the anniversary of Iran's 1979 Revolution on February 11.

Despite repeated warnings by the government that they will confront any more disruptions with no leniency, the messages defiantly suggest that the planned February 11 demonstrations could become the climactic point of all the protests and street confrontations that have marked every significant date on the Islamic Republic calendar in the past several months.

The wave of web postings also reveals that the opposition can circumvent the government's tight control on web activity and still harness the capabilities of the internet to get organized as they have done in the past several months.

In the past seven months, according to the government, over 40 people were killed in the protests, but the opposition puts the number at about 80. Thousands of people have been arrested in an attempt to quell the unrest and prominent reformists have been sentenced to long prison terms ranging from 2 to 15 years.

Five people arrested in connection with Ashura Day protests on December 27 were put on trial today facing the death penalty.

The government has made every effort to portray the protests as a foreign-backed conspiracy to topple the establishment but since the opposition leaders are prominent figures of the establishment, the authorities have refrained from arresting and prosecuting them.

While one, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was fired from his government post at the Academy of Arts and the other, Mehdi Karroubi, has been the repeated target of physical and even armed attacks, they have defiantly refused to accept the legitimacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government which they claim was fraudulently re-elected in the June presidential elections.

The Islamic Republic establishment has been dealing with deep divisions over its current crisis and even a significant section of the clergy have come out in favour of protesters and their demands.

... Payvand News - 01/19/10 ... --

SOURCE: http://www.payvand.com/news/10/jan/1170.html

Think Again: Iran's Green Movement It's a civil rights movement, not a revolution.

Think Again: Iran's Green Movement
It's a civil rights movement, not a revolution.
BY HOOMAN MAJD | JANUARY 6, 2010


"The Green Movement Is Winning."
Yes, but over time. The answer depends on what "winning" means. One thing Western observers should have learned from 30 years of second-guessing Iran and Iranians is that second-guessing Iran and Iranians is often a mistake, and predicting the imminent demise of the Islamic theocracy is unrealistic.

What is evident is that if we consider Iran's pro-democracy "green movement" not as a revolution but as a civil rights movement -- as the leaders of the movement do -- then a "win" must be measured over time. The movement's aim is not for a sudden and complete overthrow of Iran's political system. That may disappoint both extremes of the American and Iranian political spectrums, left and right, and especially U.S. neoconservatives hoping for regime change.

Seen in this light, it's evident that the green movement has already "won" in many respects, if a win means that many Iranians are no longer resigned to the undemocratic aspects of a political system that has in the last three decades regressed, rather than progressed, in affording its citizens the rights promised to them under Iran's own Constitution.

The Islamic Republic's fractured leadership recognizes this, as is evident in its schizophrenic reaction to events since the disputed June election. Although the hard-liners in power may be able to suppress general unrest by sheer force, the leadership is also aware that elections in the Islamic state can never be held as they were in 2009 (even conservatives have called for a more transparent electoral system), nor can the authorities completely silence opposition politicians and their supporters or ignore their demands over the long term.

It augurs well for eventual democratic reform in Iran that the green movement continues to exist at all. Despite all efforts by the authorities to portray it as a dangerous counterrevolution, the green movement continues to attract supporters and sympathizers from even the clergy and conservative Iranians.

"The Green Movement Is Radicalizing."

Only in part. It's important to remember that Iran's green movement began well before protests broke out in June 2009. The origins were in the mowj-e-sabz, also known as the "green wave," a campaign to support the presidential bid of reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who ran against conservative incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The green wave's goals were to wrest the presidency and executive power away from radical hard-liners whose term in office had been marked by economic incompetence, foreign-policy adventurism, and an ideological doctrine that included new limits on civil rights and that Mousavi's supporters believed was unsuited to Iranian interests in the 21st century.

After the disputed election results, the green movement morphed from a political campaign into a campaign to annul the presidential election -- and then, more broadly, into a movement to restore the civil liberties promised by the 1979 Islamic Revolution. With every instance of recent government tyranny, from show trials of opposition politicians and journalists to the beatings and murders of some demonstrators on Iran's streets, the movement has grown more steadfast in its demands for the rights of the people.

Over time, and particularly with the government's continued use of brutal force against its citizens, some Iranians are no longer satisfied with the stated goals of the green movement, but are looking to topple the Islamic regime altogether. For instance, we hear in the Western media many instances of Iranians clamoring for an "Iranian," rather than Islamic, republic (a call that Mousavi has disavowed) or for "death to the supreme leader." Meanwhile we see on YouTube and our TVs footage of Iranians violently confronting security forces.

However, the radical elements claiming to be a part of the green movement only speak for a small minority of Iranians. The majority still want peaceful reform of the system and not necessarily a wholesale revolution, bloody or otherwise. That's why, in the most recent Ashura demonstrations, for example, large groups of peaceful marchers actually prevented some of the movement's radicalized elements from beating or attacking security forces. Although accurate polling information is not available, based on what we hear and see of the leaders of the green movement and many of its supporters, radicalization is still limited to a minority of protesters.

The green movement's leaders recognize that any radicalization on their part will only bring down the state's iron fist. They are also cautious because they know that if movement leaders call for regime change rather than reform and adherence to the Constitution, they will only have proven the government's assertion that the movement's goal all along has been to topple the system.

"The Revolutionary Guards Will Do Anything to Keep Khamenei in Power."

Don't bet on it. The Revolutionary Guards are tasked with protecting the legacy of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and its embodiment in the vali-e-faqih, the supreme leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Guard's top leaders are military men who have served many years in the ranks and as such are unlikely to disobey the orders of their commander in chief. Their view, as they have expressed repeatedly in public fora, is that the green movement and its leaders are a threat to the revolution and to the supreme leader. But they are probably more concerned with protecting the position of the leader (and their own power and pervasive influence in Iranian business and politics) than they are in protecting a particular individual.

There are many former top commanders of the Guards, such as Mohsen Rezai (a defeated candidate in the presidential election), Mohammad Qalibaf (Tehran's popular mayor), and Ali Larijani (speaker of the parliament), who oppose Ahmadinejad (and have influence with the Guards), but have not so far challenged the supreme leader. That doesn't mean, though, that they would not look to replace Khamenei should it become apparent that he is an obstacle to the regime's stability. Although any moves against the supreme leader are highly unlikely at this point (and he still has the support of the majority of the members of the Assembly of Experts, the body that elects, monitors, and can even impeach him), that doesn't mean that such a challenge could never happen.

"The Time for Compromise Is Over."

Not in Iran, it ain't. The supreme leader, the Revolutionary Guards, and almost all of the hard-liners in government have said that they will tolerate no more dissent; they have said that there will be no compromise and that the green movement's demands will not be met. But that doesn't actually mean that some form of compromise isn't possible.

For starters, the green movement's leaders may recognize that they could become irrelevant if they are unwilling to either become more revolutionary (as some of their supporters already have), or compromise to protect the longevity of their movement as a civil rights campaign.

On Jan. 1, Mousavi listed the green movement's demands on civil rights and other reforms, but significantly he was no longer calling for an annulment of the 2009 election. Meanwhile, at the most recent meeting of the Expediency Council, the body that arbitrates disputes between Iran's executive and legislative branches, Mohsen Rezai, the conservative challenger to Ahmadinejad in the 2009 election, suggested that the government should listen to Mousavi's demands, describing them as "constructive." (Some Iran observers say the green movement is leaderless and argue that a headless movement will ultimately fail. And yet we're still hearing chants of "Ya Hossein, Mir Hossein!" at every protest. That's Mousavi.)

Both sides realize that the continuing unrest threatens the country's stability and that neither side is looking to reform the regime into oblivion. The current standoff makes no one happy. The odds aren't horrible that some form of compromise might occur in 2010, a compromise that would allow both sides to claim advances if not outright victory.

"The Green Movement Wants or Needs Foreign Support."

Dead wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is insulting and patronizing to suggest, as many commentators do, that without foreign help or support the green movement cannot be successful, that Iranians on their own are incapable of commanding their own destiny.

U.S. President Barack Obama has so far expressed only moral support for Iranians fighting for their civil rights and has rightly articulated the unrest in Iran as a purely Iranian affair. Lacking relations with Iran, Obama can do little to help the green movement, but plenty to hurt it. Coming out squarely on the side of the opposition in Iran is likely to undermine its credibility, and perhaps even lend credence to the government's assertion that the movement is a foreign-inspired plot that will rob Iran of its independence.

That the green movement has survived, and even grown, in the absence of foreign support (even moral support in its inception) is evidence that Iranians are perfectly capable of maintaining a civil rights movement and agitating for democratic change without the prodding, influence, or support of foreigners. Furthermore, if there is only one aspect of the Islamic Revolution that almost all Iranians can agree on as positive, it's that key events, such as the spontaneous unrest after the election and all the way back to the revolution itself, have happened independent of foreign influence.

The most potentially damaging accusation the government has made against the green movement is that it is a foreign plot to foment a "velvet" or "color" revolution that will once again render Iran subservient to a greater power. But this accusation has not stuck because the movement's leaders have always eschewed any foreign support and framed their fight as a purely Iranian one.

The idea that foreign support is either necessary or important to the green movement's ability to achieve its goals is as preposterous as imagining, say in 1965, that overt Soviet support of the civil rights movement in the United States was necessary for that movement to be successful.

For observers sitting in the United States or anywhere outside Iran, it is tempting to draw conclusions about the green movement or even the health of the Islamic regime based on what little information we are able to gather and what various analysts believe, given the extreme restrictions Iran has placed on journalists and reporting from Iran. However, Iran often defies expectations and has proven maddeningly immune from adhering to conventional wisdom. Listen to an Iranian exile opposed to the Islamic regime for five minutes and you'll be convinced that the regime's days are numbered not in years, but in months. Listen to a regime apologist for five minutes and you might be persuaded that Western powers are indeed fomenting the revolt and that the government will weather the storm and emerge as powerful as ever.

The truth, of course, always lies somewhere in between. The green movement is most definitely real, cannot be completely suppressed, and will undoubtedly have a long-term effect on the politics of the Islamic Republic. What began with the election of reformist President Mohammad Khatami in 1997 has finally culminated in a civil rights movement that by any name will continue to put pressure on the regime to reform, pressure that it can only ignore at the peril of its own demise.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/06/think_again_irans_green_movement?page=0,0

Iran's mullahs could fold under new demands for justice

By ROUZBEH PARSI and TRITA PARSI
The Daily Beast

With the government growing increasingly desperate — and violent — the new clashes on the streets in Iran may very well prove to be the breaking point of the regime. If so, it shows that the Iranian theocracy ultimately fell on its own sword. It didn't come to an end due to the efforts of exiled opposition groups or the regime change schemes of Washington's neo-conservatives. Rather, the Iranian people are the main characters in this drama, using the very same symbols that brought the Islamic Republic into being to close this chapter in a century-old struggle for democracy.

Protests flared up again because of Ashura, the climax of a month of mourning in the Shiite religious calendar. It is a day of sadness for the death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussain, who was martyred in 680. And this year the commemoration coincided with the seventh day after the death of dissident Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, adding to the significance of the day. Ashura is also a reminder that the eternal value of justice must be defended regardless of the odds of success. This has provided the relentless Green movement with yet another opportunity to outmaneuver the Iranian government by co-opting its symbols and challenge its legitimacy through the language of religion.

This battle cry for justice in all its simplicity is where most political conflagrations start. It is the deafness of the powers that be that often make them the kernel of something larger and more earth shattering. It is testimony to the arrogance of power that a simple and rather modest call for accountability and justice is beaten down only to return, demanding more, and less willing to compromise and accommodate.

And it wouldn't be the first time. In 1906, the call for a house of justice went unheeded and was followed by demonstrations, and eventually transformed into a demand for a written constitution. Similarly Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, in his imperial ineptitude, brought on himself an increasingly anti-monarchical coalition, ranging from liberals and communists, to the victorious Islamists who forged the Islamic Republic in 1979.

Ashura, with its story of perseverance and martyrdom in the face of overwhelming force of oppression, was a perfectly stylized allegory for the struggle between the mighty state of the Shah and the revolutionaries at the end of the 1970s. The Shiite mourning rituals with their revisiting of the dead on the 3rd, 7th and 40th day of death provided the demonstrators then, as well as now, with the opportunity to both remember those who died for the cause as well as re-iterating their opposition and condemnation of that state repression. This played an important role in bringing the simmering political discontent to a boiling point and wearing down what was perceived as the all-powerful Pahlavi state in 1977-78.

It is even more important this time around since there is no extensive leadership structure that steers the opposition. The ability to bring out crowds for important days of the calendar, religious and revolutionary ones, reminds everyone that they are not alone in their opposition to the current government.

No one can predict a revolution nor say with certainty when an authoritarian state loses its footing if not its grip. For it is not necessarily its ability or will to repress that will falter as much as ordinary people's unwillingness to allow themselves to be cowed and intimidated. It is a battle of wills where, on the one hand, the constant mobilization and tension pervading a discontented and rebellious society tests the state machinery's ability to endure as they try to perform their functions (including repression). Weighing in on the other side of the balance is the patience and capacity to stomach pain and suffering of the protesters and their sympathizers in all quarters of society.

Today a significant number of the original revolutionaries of 1979 are imprisoned or being harassed by shadowy groups from the borderlands of state authority. The constituency of the Islamic Republic is becoming increasingly alienated as the hard line faction ruling Tehran demands loyalty to an increasingly surreal understanding of, and vision for, Iranian society. Not much is left of the dynamism and visions that fuelled the revolution of 1979 — but having learned from that experience the demands of the reformist movement today are much more sophisticated and their abstention from violence so much more promising for the future.

The state's ability to use the language of religion to repress these developments is failing. Again and again religion has proven itself to be much better suited as a language of resistance than governance. This became increasingly clear to Khomeini himself after the success of the revolution. In the constant bickering within the revolutionary elite, Khomeini increasingly invoked reasons of state for justifying actions, demoting religion to the role of ideological veneer. By the end of his life he stated that the state could abrogate the basic principles of Islam if it deemed necessary for the survival of the Islamic Republic.

Instead of a system where religious thinking controlled and wielded state power he ended up with an arrangement where the state utilized religion for its own purposes, emptying religion and its language of substance, discarding it on the growing heap of unfulfilled promises of the revolution.

Ashura, the commemoration and the principle it invokes, proves to be relevant yet again, as those who hold the reins of power in Tehran unleash violence against their own people. Undoubtedly the people of Iran will persevere in their quest for greater freedom and justice through their non-violent transformation of the system from within. It will indeed be ironic if the Iranian theocracy begins to crumble on the most important religious day of the Shiite calendar.

Rouzbeh Parsi is a research fellow at the European Institute for Security Studies. Trita Parsi is the president of the National Iranian American Council and the 2010 Recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

Obama 'bearing witness' is crucial to Iran

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/12/29/dabashi.iran.bearing.witness/

By Hamid Dabashi, Special to CNN

December 30, 2009 1:58 p.m. EST

New York (CNN) -- If someone asked me six months ago what would change on the national, regional or global front after Iran's presidential election in June, I would have said that nothing would. And I'm supposed to know better.

Before events in Iran unfolded over the second half of 2009, national politics had become all but irrelevant in that troubled region.

From Pakistan and Afghanistan to Israel-Palestine, from Central Asia to Yemen, geopolitics was locked in a terrorizing balance of power, a stifling politics of despair.
More presidential, parliamentary and city council elections have been held in Iran over the past 30 years than probably the entire Arab and Muslim world put together. But these elections were not the signs of a healthy democracy. They were the attempts of the Islamic Republic to legitimize its deeply troubled theocracy using the simulacrum of democratic institutions.

All that was exposed to the light by one simple edict this past fall. Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, the revered jurist who died in 2009 and was posthumously dubbed the moral voice of the anti-government Green Movement, said the Islamic Republic was neither Islamic nor a republic.

Outside Iran, national elections are either a ceremonial joke (from Morocco and Tunisia, through Libya and Algeria to Egypt and Sudan, to Jordan and Syria) or else barely consequential or positively damaging regionally (from Turkey to Israel).

But not in Iran this year. Not since June, when the Islamic Republic emerged as the ground zero of a civil rights movement that will leave no stone unturned in the moral earth of the modern Middle East.
The Green Movement, helped by Twitter and Facebook, has taken the show onto a big stage, and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to distract this global attention away from his domestic troubles.

Paradoxically, the man who could help Ahmadinejad in his determination to turn everyone's attention away is President Obama.

One photograph of Obama with Ahmadinejad would be a dagger to the heart of the Green Movement that would be remembered longer than the CIA-engineered coup of 1953. It would traumatize U.S.-Iran relations for another half century.

The creative civil rights movement the June presidential election in Iran unleashed is writing a new page in modern history of the country and its troubled environs.

The children of the Islamic revolution, those who one cultural revolution after another has sought to brainwash, are turning the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic on its own head. These Iranians are using every occasion since the last June election to challenge each mendacity they have been taught.

This is a cosmopolitan uprising, forming in major Iranian cities. It is a gathering storm in the capital of Tehran, and spilling into a cyberspace rebellion.

In a New York cab on my way to CNN for an interview, I received an e-mail from the streets of Tehran and read it on my iPhone. I used the message in the analysis I offered 10 minutes later to a global audience. Then my former student in Tehran wrote back to say he liked my analysis -- "and the cool color of my tie."

As the Green Movement gains ground, the regime is fighting back with all it has -- kidnapping people off the street, murder, torture, rape, kangaroo courts. Official Web sites and news agencies are failing to report the truth, distorting it, ridiculing or else attributing it to phantom foreigners. They have all failed.

The Islamic Republic is cornered; the public space is appropriated. Iranians in and out of their country, young and old, men and women, rich and poor, pious or otherwise, are all coming together.

Obama's reaction to the violent crackdown on protesters during the holy days of Tasu'a and Ashura has been measured. He has condemned "the iron fist of brutality," but continues to insist, and rightly so, that "what's taking place in Iran is not about the United States or any other country. It's about the Iranian people."

At the same time, he vows, "We will continue to bear witness to the extraordinary events that are taking place" in Iran.

That "bearing witness" means and matters more than the president's critics can dream.
The pressure on Obama "to do more about Iran," especially when it comes from a "Bomb, Bomb Iran" mentality, is hypocritical.

Iranian people have every right to peaceful nuclear technology within Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regulations. And the international community has every right to doubt the trustworthiness of Ahmadinejad's government.

The worst thing that Obama can do now, not just to the best interests of Iranians but also to his own stated ideal of a regional and global nuclear disarmament, is to sit down and negotiate with Ahmadinejad.

It will legitimize an illegitimate government and will never produce a binding or trustworthy agreement. The alternative to suspending direct diplomacy with Ahmadinejad is neither more severe economic sanctions nor a military strike, which will backfire and hurt the wrong people.

The only alternative for the American president is to believe in what he has said -- bearing witness.
But carry that rhetoric further: Americans should send delegations of civil rights icons, film and sports personalities, Muslim leaders, human rights organizations, women's rights activists, labor union representatives and student assemblies to Iran. Let them connect with their counterparts in Iran and expose the illegitimate government that has suffocated the democratic aspirations of a nation for too long.

"Bearing witness" is an investment in the future of democracy in a country that is destined to change the moral map of a troubled but vital part of a very fragile planet.

The opinions expressed in the commentary are solely those of Hamid Dabashi.

Editor's note: Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, writes frequently on politics and world affairs.  

 

Change Iran at the Top

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/opinion/31iht-edcohen.html

Change Iran at the Top


By ROGER COHEN
Published: December 30, 2009

It has come to this: The Islamic Republic of Iran killing the sons and daughters of the revolution during Ashura, adding martyrdom to martyrdom at one of the holiest moments in the Shiite calendar.

Nothing could better symbolize Iran’s 30-year-old regime at the limit of its contradictions. A supreme leader imagined as the Prophet’s representative on earth — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s central revolutionary idea — now heads a militarized coterie bent, in the name of money and power, on the bludgeoning of the Iranian people. A false theocracy confronts a society that has seen through it.

The emperor has no clothes.

Still, let us give this theocracy credit. It has brought high levels of education to a broad swathe of Iranians, including the women it has repressed. In a Middle East of static authoritarianism, it has dabbled at times in liberalization and representative governance. It has never quite been able to extinguish from its conscience Khomeini’s rallying of the masses against the shah with calls for freedom.

The result, three decades on from the revolution, is precisely this untenable mix of a leadership invoking transplantation from heaven as it faces, with force of arms and the fanaticism of militias, a youthful society far more sophisticated than the death-to-the-West slogans still unfurled.

Nowhere else today in the Middle East does anything resembling the people power of Iran’s Green movement exist. This is at once a tribute to the revolution and the death knell of an ossified post-revolutionary order.

Something has to give, someone has to yield. If the Islamic Republic is incapable of honoring both words in its self-description — that of a religious and representative society — it must give way to an Iranian Republic.

The former course, of reform rather than overthrow, would be less tumultuous and so, I suspect, more attractive to a people weary of tumult and flanked by mayhem in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yes, something has to give. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whose death this month carried heavy symbolism in a land where symbols are potent, intuited the revolution’s unsustainable tensions two decades ago. It was then that the cleric once designated as Khomeini’s successor lambasted an earlier round of bloody repression and then that he began to criticize the office of the supreme leader.

Montazeri had been instrumental in 1979 in the creation of the system of Guardianship of the Jurist, or velayat-e-faqih, placing a leader interpreting God’s word atop circumscribed republican institutions. But he later apologized for his role in the establishment of the position and argued that he had conceived of it as exercising moral rather than executive authority.

His anger came to a head after the June 12 election, hijacked by the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Montazeri then declared: “Such elections results were declared that no wise person in their right mind could believe, results that based on credible evidence and witnesses had been altered extensively.” He lambasted what he called “astonishing violence against defenseless men and women.”

I witnessed that violence — a putsch in the spurious name of God’s will grotesquely portrayed by Khamenei as a glorious democratic moment — and it was clear at once that Iran’s leadership had taken a fatal turn. It had shunned the pluralistic evolution of the Islamic order in favor of a lockdown by the moneyed cadres of the New Right, personified by the Revolutionary Guards with their cozy contracts and pathological fears of looming counter-revolutions of the velvet variety.

You can do many things to the Iranian people but you insult their intelligence at your peril. The astonishing, taboo-breaking cry of “Death to Khamenei” echoing from the rooftops of Tehran signaled a watershed.

It is time to rethink the supreme leader’s office in the name of the compromise between religious faith and representative governance that the Iranian people have sought for more than a century. It is time for Iran to look West to the holy Shiite cities in Iraq, Najaf and Karbala, places from which Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani exercises precisely the kind of moral authority and suasion — without direct executive authority — that Montazeri favored for Iran.

If the Guardianship of the Jurist can be rethought through compromise the Islamic Republic can move forward. If not, I cannot see the current unrest abating.

The Green movement is a loose coalition of divergent aims — much like the revolutionary alliance of 1979 — but is united in its demand for an end to the status quo.

A commander-in-chief transplanted from heaven is not what the Iranian people want, not after June 12; a moral guide, rooted in the ethics and religion of Persia, a guarantor of the country’s independence, may well be. It is time for a Persian Sistani.

The sons and daughters of disappointed revolutionaries do not seek renewed bloodshed. They seek peaceful change that will give meaning to the word “republic.” Khamenei, bowing to superior learning, in the best tradition of Shiism, should listen to the wisdom of Iran’s late turbulent priest.

Iran would thereby preserve its independence, the proudest achievement of the revolution, while better reflecting the will of its people, who overwhelmingly favor normalized relations with the United States.

It is time to retire the stale slogans of a bygone era. It is time for Iran to follow China’s example of 1972 in adapting to survive. Perhaps Khomeini, like Mao in Deng Xiaoping’s famous formula, was 70 percent right — and some brave Iranian leader could say that. He would thereby open the way for one of the Middle East’s most hopeful societies to move forward.

Speaking of tired slogans, it is also time for the United States — and especially Congress — to set aside formulaic thinking on Iran. Shiite Iran is not America’s enemy; Sunni Al Qaeda is, whether in Yemen, Nigeria or Pakistan. New sanctions against Tehran would only throw a lifeline to Khamenei and further enrich the Revolutionary Guards. President Obama’s outreach is still the smartest approach to Iran, a nation whose political clock has now trumped its erratic, wavering nuclear clock.

Back in February, I wrote: “The Islamic Republic has not birthed a totalitarian state; all sorts of opinions are heard. But it has created a society whose ultimate bond is fear. Disappearance into some unmarked room is always possible.” That was too much for the Iran-as-Nazi-incarnation-of-evil school, who cast me as an appeaser.

I also wrote that, “The irony of the Islamic Revolution is that it has created a very secular society within the framework of clerical rule. The shah enacted progressive laws for women unready for them. Now the opposite is true: Progressive women face confining jurisprudence. At some point something must give.”

With the birth of the Green movement, and in the spirit of Montazeri, something has given. The further, critical “giving” has to come in the supreme leader’s office, where the 30 percent error of 1979 has entrenched itself and so denied Iran the governance and society its vibrant population deserves.

Photos from Bloody Sunday Ashura in Tehran Dec. 27, 2009

Video clip of Police car running over peaceful demonstrators in Tehran Sunday 12-27-2009