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.

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

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.

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