Eye On Iran

[Rasputin]

Eye of the Storm: Security Council to Iran: Go for it

Last week the United States ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton had a message for Teheran: Take note of the Security Council's resolution imposing sanctions on North Korea.

Bolton had reason to be proud. He had piloted the passage of the resolution in record time. Nevertheless, his advice to Teheran will fall on deaf ears - and for a reason.

The resolution on North Korea was not placed under the famous Chapter Seven of the UN Charter that allows the use of military force. Worse still, the resolution forbids military action against Pyongyang, pending the passage of a second, and highly improbable, resolution. Even then, the resolution has been further weakened because China announced it opposed the provision under which North Korean ships could be searched for dual-use materiel.

The resolution on North Korea belongs to a new set of UN decisions that diplomats refer to as "half-pregnant." These, though impressive on paper, are subject to "ifs and buts" that render them useless in practice.

THE PROBLEM as always is that the five permanent members of the Security Council do not agree on the nature of the problem. China, and to some extent Russia, see North Korea as a misbehaving juvenile to be calmed down with a mixture of advice and threat. The United States, and to some extent Britain, see the North Korean regime as a dangerous and unpredictable criminal who, unless restrained by forceful action, could do a great deal of harm all around. (France, as always, tries to cultivate its exception by adopting a median position.)

To complicate matters further, Russia, China and France, are convinced that if North Korea ever tried to do really big mischief, the United States would always be on hand to deal with it. There is, therefore, no reason for Russia, China and France to appear as parties to an American "plot" to change the regime in Pyongyang. And, why should Russia, China and France help install a pro-American regime in North Korea?

With all that in mind, Bolton's advice to Iran, as already noted, is misplaced. When the text of the North Korean resolution was published, Teheran's reaction was a sigh of relief. Their response went something like this: if this is all the UN can do against a regime that admits having tested a nuclear device, there is little that it can do against the Iranian regime that swears it does not want the bomb.

Teheran is certain that China and Russia will prevent the adoption of even a "half-pregnant" resolution.

Here too, Russia and China are convinced that if the Islamic Republic did try big mischief the US would deal with it, and that, in the meantime, there is no reason why they should help install a pro-American regime in Teheran.

MANY IN Washington regard the Russian and Chinese attitudes as merely mercenary. But that is a partial reading of a complex reality.

China is trying to emerge as a major power while Russia is dreaming of a comeback. Both see the power game as played with no sentimental considerations. Russian and Chinese decision-makers are not hounded by lobbyists and opinion-makers with particular agendas and ideological preferences. They don't care if the North Korean or for that matter the Iranian regime are tough on their own folk.

They believe they have no business preaching human rights and multi-party elections to either the North Korean Stalinists or the Khomeinists. The Russian and Chinese approach to big power politics is a new version of what the British, in their heyday of empire, called benign neglect. Put simply, this means: We don't give a damn what the natives do among themselves or to each other as long as they do not threaten our interests.

And, as far as the Islamic Republic is concerned, both China and Russia have immense interests in the perpetuation of the Khomeinist regime. The duo are among Iran's top four business partners and account for almost 80 percent of the Islamic Republic's imports of military hardware. Without the Iranian market, some production lines in the Russian and Chinese hardware industries could become too costly to continue.

Separately, Iran has signed contracts with Russia and China to develop a range of missiles, armored vehicles and tactical aircraft. Russia is also committed to helping the Islamic Republic build 22 nuclear power plants by 2020, something that has given the moribund Russian nuclear industry a second life.

The Islamic Republic has signed contracts with China and Russia to the total value of $70 billion each.

With US and European universities closed to students from the Islamic Republic, China and Russia are becoming popular destinations for young Iranian scholars. In 1979 there were just 30 Iranians studying in China. This year they number 7,800. Almost twice as many are in Russia.

That China and Russia regard the Islamic Republic as a strategic partner was highlighted earlier this year when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to attend the summit of the Shanghai Group, whose principal task is fighting terrorism!

IN THE longer-term, China's relations with the Islamic Republic are more important than Teheran's ties to Moscow. There are several reasons for this. Iran harbors bitter memories of Russia as an enemy with which it fought at least four major wars, ending in huge losses of territory by the Iranians. Iran and Russia are also rivals for influence in Trans-Caucasia, the Caspian Basin and Central Asia. As an oil and gas producer, Russia has no need of Iran whereas China, ever thirstier for energy, looks to the Islamic Republic as a long-term source of supply.

According to some estimates, China imports 19% of its oil from Iran. Preliminary talks have also taken place for building a gas pipeline linking Iranian fields in the Persian Gulf to China via Pakistan. An old plan, drafted under the Shah in the 1970s and envisaging a massive Iranian presence in downstream activities in China, is being revived. The centerpiece of the plan is the creation of a strategic reserve of Iranian crude oil on Chinese soil. This is advantageous to both sides. The Chinese will have an emergency source of supply in case the US tries to cut their oil in a conflict over Taiwan. The Iranians would benefit by being able to produce more than their OPEC quota, and being able to supply their customers outside China in case the US tries to stop Iranian exports from the Strait of Hormuz.

So the truth is that any "half-pregnant" UN resolution aimed at Iran would only encourage Teheran in its defiance. Teheran would factor the whole thing in its overall strategy and, supported by China, Russia, and to some extent the European Union, might even intensify whatever it is doing.

In a sense, having no resolution is better than ending up with a "half pregnant" one. The absence of a resolution would have at least one advantage: it would keep Teheran guessing what might hit it next.

[Rasputin]

Defiant Iran

At the beginning of 2002, President George W. Bush tried to punish Iran for supporting anti-Israel militants, for refusing to adopt a Western-style democracy, and for allegedly trying to produce weapons of mass destruction. He included Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, in the "axis of evil." Among foreign diplomats and journalists in Tehran, it became fashionable to speak of the coming "implosion" of the Islamic Republic, Iran's revolutionary state. Weakened by a power struggle between reformists and conservative hard-liners, Iran was now, or so it was said, acutely vulnerable to the sort of threat that the United States, whose forces had easily toppled the Taliban and scattered al-Qaeda, seemed to represent.

The fear of intervention by the US in Iran became more urgent among Iran's leaders when America invaded Iraq the following year. Indeed, it later became known that, in early 2003, the Iranian Foreign Ministry quietly sent Washington a detailed proposal for comprehensive negotiations, in which the Iranian government said it was prepared to make concessions about its nuclear program and to address concerns about its ties to groups such as Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, in return for an agreement from the White House to refrain from destabilizing the Islamic Republic and start lifting long-in-effect sanctions. The US rejected this overture out of hand. It seemed that Bush didn't want to offer guarantees to a regime that he intended, at a later date, to try to destroy.

Nowadays, it is hard to imagine the Iranian government repeating this sort of offer. Such is their apparent strength and good fortune that they take a provocatively long time to respond to diplomatic overtures, such as the proposal that the US, Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia offered them in June, and which they rejected. The six powers had offered a series of incentives—including nuclear technology whose peaceful application can be verified, a very modest relaxation of US sanctions, and diplomatic support for Iran's bid to join the World Trade Organization—as an inducement to Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program. If you ask an Iranian conservative what during the past four years has caused the upturn in Iranian confidence, he or she will probably dwell on the eclipse of the reform movement of the former president, Mohammad Khatami, and his replacement in last year's election by a hard-liner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has promised to return Iran to the state of unsullied revolutionary purity that he imagines existed during the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.


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Ahmadinejad's populism finds expression in dirigiste economics and nationalist rhetoric about Iran's right to nuclear power. Last year, in a private meeting that was filmed and made public, apparently against his wishes, he intimated that he enjoys the favor of Mahdi, the twelfth Shia imam, who disappeared in the eighth century. Most Shias believe that Mahdi will return after the world has been plunged into chaos, heralding a period of divine rule followed by the end of the world. Ahmadinejad's domestic opponents accuse him privately of being a member of a shadowy group whose aims apparently include generating chaos with a view to hastening Mahdi's return, accusations that his supporters have denied. The President's main domestic political promises, to redistribute wealth and better the lot of normal Iranians, owe more to socialism than they do to Shia eschatology.



Ahmadinejad has incensed many people outside the country with his extreme verbal attacks on Israel and the West and his widely denounced dismissal of the veracity of the Holocaust. In October 2005, the Iranian government organized a "World Without Zionism" conference for Iranian students, in which Ahmadinejad said that Israel should be "wiped off the map." In following months, he made a series of remarks in speeches and in interviews in which he challenged Western laws against publicly denying the Holocaust. In July, during the Israel– Lebanon conflict, he compared the Israeli offensive to the actions of Hitler. And in August, Ahmadinejad reiterated that "the main solution" to the Middle East crisis is "the elimination of the Zionist Regime."

In his contemptuous indifference to the Holocaust and its place in the collective Western conscience, and in his argument that the Holocaust has been used to justify Israeli repression, Ahmadinejad reflects the views of many Iranians, who have hardly been exposed to historical literature about the Holocaust. For all the notoriety that his comments earned him, however, it is far from certain that Iranians share his apparent obsession with the issue, which seems to serve calculated political aims. In August, in avowed retaliation against the earlier publication in European newspapers of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, the government staged an exhibition of cartoons about the Holocaust. When I visited this exhibition, which featured some grotesquely anti-Semitic cartoons, a handful of Western journalists and I had the place to ourselves. More recently, in New York, when asked his opinion of the Holocaust by a Newsweek interviewer, he said "We know this was a historical event that happened..."

For all his rhetoric of social reform and making the state more Islamic, the truth is that Ahmadinejad has not changed Iran very much. It is the same inefficient, partially democratic, near theocracy that it was during Khatami's presidency. Its economy remains, if anything, even more dependent on revenues from oil, by far the country's most important commodity. The prominent elements of Ahmadinejad's vague program of general "upliftment"—to spend oil revenues to help the common man and increase the state's already considerable control over the economy—seem designed mainly to reinforce the status quo that the reformists tried to challenge.

Why, then, do Iran's leaders speak with new confidence about the future? One answer is that as recently as 2003, after two neighbors, Afghanistan and Iraq, fell to American forces, Iran's region of the world seemed dark and foreboding. But now it is full of promise, and the reasons for this are the means the Bush White House has employed to pursue its ambition of reshaping the Middle East and, in particular, its disastrous occupation of Iraq. Bush apparently wanted to force the Islamic Republic to moderate its behavior dramatically and to weaken it internally to the point where it would collapse. On both counts, he has achieved more or less the opposite of what he intended.

Iran's hardening attitude toward Israel illustrates this failure. Around the time of Bush's proclamation of the "axis of evil," some Iranian politicians, including members of the reformist Khatami government that was then in office, regarded Iran's traditional refusal to acknowledge Israel's right to exist as an ideological relic that, sooner or later, would have to be scrapped. Within the Iranian establishment, which consists of unelected clerics who occupy senior positions, the elected government and parliament, and the armed forces, there were intense disagreements, of which the public was only partly aware, over the value of maintaining Iran's rejection of Israel's legitimacy.

In 2002, Iran's foreign minister offered guarded encouragement to Saudi proposals that Israel be offered peace in return for withdrawing to its pre-1967 borders. As recently as the beginning of 2004, Iranian officials said that Iran was on the verge of reestablishing full diplomatic relations with Egypt, whose peace deal with Israel and subsequent cooperation with it had been treated with contempt by Iranian revolutionaries. A reformist member of parliament's foreign affairs commission predicted to me early in 2004 that the Islamic Republic would soon undergo a "strategic realignment." It would, he said, establish closer relations with such countries as Jordan and Egypt, which have relations with Israel, to the disadvantage of Syria, its erstwhile partner in truculent opposition to a two-state solution in Palestine.

The debate in Iran was at its liveliest when the US seemed to pose a serious threat. Proponents of more pragmatic policies emphasizing diplomacy could argue that Iranian interests were being harmed by the efforts of radicals to thwart Bush. But as the ramifications of the war on terror became clear, the perceived threat to Iran receded and those radicals felt stronger. They were further strengthened by Ahmadinejad's election victory in 2005, although Iran had already decided to resume uranium enrichment before his inauguration and foreign policy was not much discussed in the campaign.

After having temporarily rid Afghan-istan of the militantly anti-Shia Taliban, the US has stood by while Shia Iran expanded its influence in that country, especially among Persian-speaking Shia Afghans. Similarly, it is clear that Iran, by cultivating extensive links with the armed militias, clergy, and traders in Shia-dominated southern Iraq, has benefited from America's dislodging of Saddam Hussein, an oppressively anti-Shia Sunni leader. In the words of a new study of Iran's foreign relations by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, "Iran has superseded [the US] as the most influential power in Iraq."

[Rasputin]

During the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the admiration of many Sunni Arabs for any government that stands up to what they see as Israel's callous behavior allowed Iran, a non-Arab Shia state that borders neither Lebanon nor Israel, to assert it had vital interests in the conflict. From the outbreak of fighting, Iran's conservative establishment celebrated Hezbollah's exploits as if they were their own. During and for some weeks after the conflict, the streets of Teh-ran were festooned with photographs of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who studied at the Iranian seminary in Qom; newspapers reprinted photographs of him genuflecting in a gesture of subservience to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during a recent trip to Tehran.

It cannot be said with confidence that Nasrallah was acting under Khamenei's orders when Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers. There is further room for skepticism if we assume that Hezbollah was surprised by the Israeli response, which seems to have been the case. It is unlikely that Hezbollah would consult Iran on particular operations; more likely they would do so on strategy. But the transport of Iranian arms to Hezbollah, often through Turkish airspace to Damascus and then across Syria's land border with Lebanon, has been well documented, and Western experts agree that Iranian backing has been crucial to Hezbollah's military buildup on the northern border of Israel since the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. In part thanks to these arms, Hezbollah emerged from the recent fighting with its military reputation enhanced. After the ceasefire, more than two hundred deputies in the Iranian parliament thanked Khamenei, whom they elevated to "The Guardian of the Affairs of Muslims," for the vital moral "role" that he had played in the Hezbollah "triumph." In an interview with a Tehran newspaper on August 3, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, who, as Iran's ambassador to Syria, helped found Hezbollah after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, boasted of the military experience that Hezbollah fighters gained while fighting alongside Iran during the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s. Although Iran continues to deny that it is a major supplier of Hezbollah rockets, Mohtashamipour acknowledged that Hezbollah has medium-range Zelzal-2 missiles and short-range Katyusha rockets, which are both made by Iran. He also referred to the Hezbollah militia as Khomeini's "spiritual offspring."
The upshot is that this anti-American regime, its prestige rising in proportion to its refusal to do the US's bidding, does not seem likely to bow to the Bush administration and renounce its right, guaranteed in an international treaty to which it is party, to become a producer of nuclear fuel.
In and out of Iran, few were surprised when the Iranians, on August 22, responded with a longwinded rejection of a United Nations Security Council resolution calling on them to suspend their uranium enrichment or face the possibility of sanctions. The Iranian communiqué contained a request for clarification of the incentives that the council's permanent members, along with Germany, had offered in return for a suspension. While ruling out the immediate suspension of enrichment that the six powers had demanded, the Iranian statement left open the prospect that a suspension might result from further negotiations.

This emboldened Russia and China, two permanent members of the Security Council, to reiterate their longstanding reluctance to impose sanctions that would threaten their commercial interests in Iran. Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, started fresh talks with Iran's nuclear negotiator, and on September 17, France's president, Jacques Chirac, made it clear that the EU no longer regarded an Iranian suspension as a precondition for a new round of formal negotiations aimed at reaching a lasting settlement. During future negotiations, he suggested, the six powers could formally remove Iran's nuclear dossier from the Security Council's agenda, and the Iranians could simultaneously renew their suspension.[4] On September 21, the US agreed to extend an August 31 deadline the UN Security Council had set for Iran to suspend enrichment, to allow time for Solana's new diplomatic initiative. But by early October, even the most sanguine of the Europeans had all but given up hope that Iran would suspend enrichment, and a discussion of sanctions in the Security Council seemed inevitable.

Among American and Israeli government officials, and some of their allies, there is a fear that Iran is playing for time. Iran's technicians still have several years' work ahead of them before they can produce enough fuel to run a reactor and, if ordered to, build a bomb. It seems likely that Iran's leaders have calculated that there is little appetite, even in the Security Council, for serious punitive action. Even if the US and its allies manage to impose sanctions, these will very likely be limited to the transfer of some nuclear and nonnuclear military technology, travel restrictions on senior officials, and the freezing of Iranian assets abroad—instead of the far more threatening possibility of restrictions on nonmilitary trade or an oil embargo. Iran, Ahmadinejad has said, will not give up "an iota of its nuclear rights."

For many in the US, Europe, and Israel, Iran's determination to produce nuclear weapons in defiance of the world's significant powers seems clear. Some go further, suggesting that Iranian leaders who have a bomb will be temperamentally inclined to use it. One proponent of this view is Bernard Lewis, a distinguished scholar of the Middle East who was influential in winning over US public opinion to supporting the invasion of Iraq. In a recent Wall Street Journal article Lewis argued that Ahmadinejad's millenarian beliefs should undermine any assumption that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, the Middle East will be protected from nuclear catastrophe by the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). According to Lewis, since Ahmadinejad and his followers "clearly believe" that the time for a "cosmic struggle" and "the final victory of the forces of good over evil" is nigh, MAD has no meaning. "For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement..."

[Rasputin]

In fact, Ahmadinejad, and every other Iranian politician and official who speaks on the subject, takes elaborate, even ritual, care to reiterate Iran's longstanding claim that it has no intention of developing nuclear weapons, and that the program is exclusively peaceful. The US national intelligence director, John Negroponte, has predicted that Iran "might be in a position to have a nuclear weapon" at some time between 2010 and 2015.

2.
The verbal attacks of Iran's leaders, Ahmadinejad in particular, on Israel and America have rightly received much attention and criticism. Equally, some Western analysts have noticed a tendency on the part of the US government and its allies to misrepresent Iran in order to generate support for tough action against the Islamic Republic. In the "ritual condemnation of Iran," laments Ali Ansari, the author of a new book on Iran's troubled relations with the US, "no rhetorical flourish, no level of hyperbole, seems excessive." Iran is "not just a member of the Axis of Evil, but the founding member, the chief sponsor of state terrorism, or to use a more recent characterization, the central banker for terrorism." Ansari is a British academic of Iranian birth who is often invited by the press to comment on contemporary Iranian affairs. He is no friend of the Islamic Republic, but he regards many of these epithets as exaggerated or undeserved.

The Iranian leaders that Ansari describes in Confronting Iran are more predictable than the Islamic zealots often portrayed by neoconservatives. As much as its Islamist ideology, Ansari finds, collective memories of hurt and humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, nationalist sentiments, and the instinct of Iranian leaders for self-preservation shape the Islamic Republic's foreign policy. As a fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, a prestigious British institution with close relations to the Foreign Office, Ansari was privy to sensitive information when Britain, France, and Germany tried, from 2003 onward, to dissuade Iran from carrying through its plans to produce nuclear fuel, while the US skeptically stood aside. In Ansari's account, these efforts failed both because of opposition in Iran and the US's failure to support negotiations when they had a chance of succeeding. When the US finally threw its weight behind the talks, Ansari writes, it offered Iran no more than "technological scraps," for example, access to commercial aircraft parts.

"After all," Ansari writes, "Iran, unlike Iraq, had not invaded anyone, nor had it been defeated in war." Many in the West saw Iran's refusal to continue to allow intensive spot inspections as evidence that the Iranians were hiding a nuclear weapons program; Ansari understands it primarily as part of Iran's struggle to evade Western dominance, a struggle it has been waging since the end of the nineteenth century. Ansari does not ascribe Iran's opposition to the now-defunct Middle East peace process solely to ideology; "an underlying motive for Iran's...obstructionism," he writes, "was the fact that it had not been invited to the table."

In Ansari's analysis, Iran's pugnacious behavior is partly designed to underscore its claims to be a regional power that could, if treated respectfully, use its influence benignly. For example, in diplomatic meetings with the Europeans and others, Iranian officials have repeatedly suggested that they could use their influence over Hezbollah to secure peace between Palestinians and Israel. Iran has reportedly offered to help arrange prisoner swaps between Hezbollah and Israel.[6]

Ansari's belief that Iran's behavior can be understood by studying national ambition and self-interest, rather than the ideological proclamations of Ahmadinejad, is shared by another expert on Iran, Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in Washington, D.C. In his new book, Hidden Iran, Takeyh writes that three elements, "Islamic ideology, national interests and factional politics," contribute to Iran's national policies; but even now, in the Ahmadinejad era, he believes that calculation and self-interest are more important than the religious fervor that was a driving force for Iran during its war with Iraq in the 1980s. As an example of Iranian pragmatism, he cites Iran's silence in the face of Russian atrocities against Chechen Muslims. In return for this surprisingly accommodating Iranian attitude, and for Iran's acquiescence in Russia's dominance over much of Central Asia, the Russians provide the Islamic Republic with diplomatic support, conventional arms, and nuclear know-how. (Russia has built Iran's sole, and still unused, nuclear reactor at Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf coast.)

As for Iran's nuclear program, which he believes is designed to produce weapons, Takeyh writes:

The Islamic Republic is not an irrational rogue state seeking such weaponry as an instrument of an aggressive, revolutionary foreign policy designed to project its power abroad...for Iran this is a weapon of deterrence, and the relevant question is whether its possession will serve its practical interests.
According to Takeyh, "the unpredictable nature of developments in Iraq has intensified Iran's anxieties and further enhanced the utility of the nuclear option." Looking east, he says, Iran sees "a nuclear-armed Pakistan with its own strain of anti-Shiism." Most important of all, in my opinion, Iran, he says, may be able to "play the nuclear card to renegotiate a more rational relationship" with the United States.

[Rasputin]

Underlying both authors' analyses of Iran's internal politics, and their relatively calm appraisals of its regional ambitions and abilities, is their sense of Iran's complicated power structure and Ahmadinejad's place in it. Some American commentators refer to Ahmadinejad as if he were synonymous with the Islamic Republic and its policies. In the US, where the president can veto laws and order invasions, that would be natural enough; in Iran, where he can be challenged and overruled by elected institutions such as the parliament as well as by unelected officials gathered around the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it is misleading. As head of the government, Ahmadinejad has broad control of the country's finances and many domestic policies. His influence can be seen, for instance, in the government's decision to set up a large fund to help needy Iranians, and in continuing the gradual purge of secular-minded professors from the nation's universities —itself a disturbing development.

In matters of internal security and public order, however, Ahmadinejad's authority is restricted by several supervisory bodies, the most important of which are dominated by representatives of the supreme leader. There is also the unofficial veto power of the senior clergy, theologically conservative grand ayatollahs who do not hold political office. They recently forced Ahmadinejad to back down on his pledge to allow women to attend soccer matches. Ahmadinejad officially presides over the powerful Supreme National Security Council; but here again Khamenei's word is final.

On major decisions concerning foreign and military policy, we can assume that Ahmadinejad's views are no more than advisory. He does not set the Islamic Republic's policy toward Israel any more than he would decide whether to use nuclear weapons should Iran eventually acquire them. Strategic and important tactical decisions are taken by the supreme leader and his advisers, who include Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, and senior officers in the Revolutionary Guard.


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Despite Ahmadinejad's threatening anti-Israeli rhetoric, Iran's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has long been defined by what Takeyh calls its "unwillingness to commit forces to the actual struggle against the Jewish state." That has not changed. Before the recent conflict in south Lebanon, Iran supplied rockets and other weapons to Hezbollah; but the Iranians conspicuously failed to dispatch to the front the "suicide battalions" that they had organized, with much fanfare, earlier this year. The batallions come under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, and were officially established for "defense"—a defense that one volunteer told me could mean the defense of Islam—i.e., Palestine or Lebanon if need be. The battalions were much covered in the Iranian press, but are generally regarded as an empty gesture —fat boys giggling for the cameras.

Khamenei is an inscrutable politician; his rhetoric can be extreme, but Iran has greatly moderated its foreign policy since he succeeded Khomeini in 1989. Iran's policies toward Israel remain opaque, somewhere, perhaps, between Ahmadinejad's most venomous anti-Israel comments and his assurance on August 27 that "Iran is not a threat to anybody, not even to the Zionist regime."

The deterioration of the US position in Iraq, and Hezbollah's ability to withstand Israel, have done much to free Iran's leaders from their old fear of Bush. They have also encouraged Ahmadinejad to develop his quixotic, pseudophilosophical worldview. Ahmadinejad is opinionated but not intellectually inquisitive, quite unlike his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, whose presidency was symbolized by his call for a "dialogue among civilizations," and by his winning, gallant manners. Ahmadinejad has an ideologue's disdain for competing or alternative views. He defines his job in language that refers to the divine and the revelatory. On his provincial tours he touches sick children with a rapt look that is reminiscent of a religious healer. He sends discursive letters to the leaders of other countries on what is wrong with the world. These seem expressions of his belief in his own destiny and divine mission. He does not see himself as an ordinary president, and he is determined that his presidency should not be judged by mundane standards.


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In the revealing long letter that he sent to Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor, in July, Ahmadinejad suggests that the Germans, a proud people who have contributed much to"knowledge, philosophy, literature, art and politics," are being prevented from achieving their potential by efforts on the part of countries that defeated them in World War II to keep "a black cloud of humiliation and shame" hanging over their heads, and to ascribe to them responsibility for the "sins of their forefathers." In this letter, Ahmadinejad avoids questioning whether the Holocaust happened, but he positions Germany today in opposition to the powers that defeated it in the war, and to Israel, "the greatest enemy of humanity."

From here, Ahmadinejad leaps—as he has done in speeches in the past—to question the conditions in which Israel was established, and to ask why Britain and other supporters of Zionism, "if they felt responsibility towards the survivors of the Holocaust, did not give sanctuary to them in their own countries." He criticizes the control that the US and the UK, along with the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, continue to exercise over the affairs of the world. This, he says, has contributed to the spread of oppression, injustice, and weapons of mass destruction. Ahmadinejad goes on to propose a partnership between Iran and Germany, founded on shared "exalted visions" and aimed at instituting divinely sanctioned justice and ending "the distortions that are present in the world."

[Rasputin]

In directly addressing Western leaders and asking them to change their ways, Ahmadinejad is following a familiar Islamic path. In his letter to Merkel, and an earlier (also unanswered) letter to Bush, in which he berated the American president for his policies and for betraying the principles of Jesus Christ, Iranians are reminded of Ayatollah Khomeini's famous invitation to Mikhail Gorbachev to study Islam, itself an echo of the letters that the Prophet Muhammad during his mission in the seventh century sent to three contemporary rulers, urging them to become Muslims.

If we assume that the Iranian president knows very little about Europe and the West, he must nonetheless have been advised that his letter, and its confiding, complicit tone, would shock the representative of a people that is, more than sixty years after the event, still trying to come to terms with the Holocaust. For more than a month after it was sent, Ahmadinejad's letter to Merkel was not made public in either country. The President's decision to release it, at the end of August, suggests that he was addressing it not only to Merkel but also to Iranian citizens. The day after the letter appeared in the Iranian press, Ahmadinejad announced that he was inviting George Bush to debate with him the best way to run the world. "The time has come," he told journalists, "for us to respect the intelligence and opinions of the peoples of the world."

There is little in Ahmadinejad's letter to Merkel to suggest that his political positions are based on his millenarian beliefs; rather, his attention seems fixed on changes that he believes should be made to the existing world order. Ahmadinejad does not seem to have a clear or coherent idea of what these changes should be, or how they might be brought about. Even if he did, the Islamic Republic has not given him the means to attempt the transformation that he proposes so vaguely. This explains why Ahmadinejad's pronouncements often have an illusionary, theatrical quality, and why most of them pass unnoticed in the West.

Ahmadinejad has been described to me by an experienced observer of Iranian politics as a man who "thrives in a crisis," often of his own making. Although many Iranians sympathize broadly with his anti-Israel feeling and his defense of the nuclear program, they are increasingly unhappy that, so far, they have received little of the oil revenues that he promised to distribute to them. Meanwhile, he seems to derive pleasure from the appalled bewilderment he elicits in the West. In a recent interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel, he reiterated at length his doubts about the Holocaust. In the words of Hubert Kleinert, a German political scientist and former member of the Bundestag, whose comment accompanied the interview, this conversation was "without precedent: a living Iranian president—not some neo-Nazi or obscure fringe theorist—expounding in a lengthy interview about the alleged uncertainty of the Holocaust.... It's as if Mr. Ahmadinejad wants to position himself as a worldwide symbol of the neo-Nazi movement."[7]

It is likely that Ahmadinejad has different aspirations. He seems to covet a position of leadership among Islamists everywhere and, to achieve this, he is prepared to say what few other Muslim leaders, especially those who have relations with the US, dare to say. For Ahmadinejad, saying outrageous things wins him the admiration of Israel-haters everywhere, while concealing the fact that little of his fuzzy program of "upliftment," for Iran and the world, can be realized.

4.
A recent opinion poll found that Ahmadinejad is the third-most-admired politician among Egyptians, after Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and Hamas's leader, Khaled Meshaal. Among Lebanon's Shias, the prestige of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose photograph is often displayed in Hezbollah-dominated areas, is higher than ever. This has led some commentators, including Vali Nasr, in his new book, The Shia Revival,[8] to observe that Iran's leaders seek "great-power status."

If they achieved that, it would upset the conventional view that Iran, as a Shia country dominated by ethnic Persians, cannot realistically aspire to lead a region that is, on the whole, run by Sunni Arabs. That seemed to be a lesson from the 1980s, when Khomeini's revolutionary government failed in its repeated attempts to foment revolutions elsewhere. But among the Shias of Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran's influence is strong and seems bound to grow. Many ordinary Sunnis, especially those living under pro-American governments, admire Iran for standing up to the common enemy. By supporting the beleaguered Hamas government of the Palestinian Authority, the Iranians have won thanks from the Sunni Palestinians who voted for it.

Iran's ability to retain the goodwill it has gained rests on its staying above the sectarian violence that is tearing Iraq apart. Shia groups supported and perhaps armed by Iran, such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), are thought to be behind many sectarian killings. But Iran has not been directly implicated; and it has given no sign that it approves these murders. Iran's press, both government-run and independent, avoids inciting anti-Sunni feeling whenever there is a massacre of Shias in Iraq; it dwells instead on American neglect or perfidy. Iran may be reluctant to be perceived as being involved in Iraqi sectarian strife because of the effect that it might have on some of its own troubled peripheral provinces, some of which have large Sunni populations.

Even if Iran manages to avoid sectarian conflict, it is unlikely to become a "great power," for the same reasons that have prevented it from doing so in the past. If tensions between Israel and the Palestinians eventually diminish, and more voices are heard in favor of resuming the peace process, regional support for Iran's hard-line position will drop; and traditional divisions—between Persians and Arabs, and between Shias and Sunnis—will start to seem more important.

Right now, though, the Iranian government feels more confident than at any time since it was placed in the "axis of evil." The Iranian leaders calculate that Hezbollah's success in resisting Israel's attacks, assuming that it continues to be in a position to threaten Israel, may diminish the likelihood that America or Israel will attack Iran's nuclear facilities, as some commentators have suggested they intend to.[9] Iranian officials have made it clear that if there are strikes, they will respond by attacking American interests in the region. American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are obvious targets, though Iranian civilian and military leaders have also threatened to disrupt world oil supplies passing through the Straits of Hormuz.

By engaging itself militarily, politically, and morally across the Middle East, George Bush's America has become vulnerable. In the face of an overstretched competitor, Iran is less likely than ever to relinquish its nuclear program unless it gets something it wants in return. It is still far from clear that America's weakness will force it to accept Iran's demands, particularly the demand that the US relax its sanctions and end its efforts to destabilize the Islamic Republic. If the US does not, it is hard to imagine today's Iran suspending its enrichment program for very long.

[Rasputin]

Draft Iran Resolution Would Restrict Students

WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 — The United States and three European allies have given Russia and China a draft text for a Security Council resolution against Iran’s nuclear program. The proposal includes the extraordinary step of preventing Iranian students from studying nuclear physics at foreign universities and colleges.

The draft resolution would also prohibit any technical or financial assistance that could benefit Iran’s nuclear program, and would impose a visa ban on any Iranians involved in nuclear activities, according to European diplomats involved in the negotiations.

Bush administration officials and their European counterparts have been squabbling over details of the draft resolution for the past week, and the horse-trading will probably increase now that the Russians and the Chinese have been given the draft.

United Nations ambassadors from the six countries — the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany — are scheduled to meet Thursday to debate the resolution, officials said.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged the Security Council to move rapidly to adopt the resolution, saying the authority and standing of the international community were at stake.

“For the international community to be credible, it must pass a resolution now that holds Iran accountable for its defiance,” Ms. Rice said during a speech on Asia policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington policy research organization.

She said that Iran and North Korea had challenged international attempts to halt the proliferation of unconventional weapons, and cautioned that the Iranian leadership was assessing how strictly the world community would enforce recent United Nations sanctions on North Korea.

“The Iranian regime is watching how the world responds to North Korea’s behavior, and it can now see that the international community will confront this threat,” she said. “Iran can see that the path North Korea is choosing is not leading to more prestige and more prosperity or more security; it’s leading to just the opposite.”

But after five months of missed deadlines, counterproposals and diplomatic overtures on Iran, few officials from any of the six countries involved were willing to predict when a final sanctions resolution might pass the Security Council. “A matter of weeks,” one senior Bush administration official said. “Maybe.”

“Will it be the resolution that we would have if we had written it by ourselves? Probably not, but that’s part of multilateral diplomacy,” Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said. “We fully support this draft, and we look forward to its adoption.”

As is customary in diplomatic negotiations, officials who were most up to date on the talks would not allow themselves to be publicly identified by name or nationality. Those who discussed it on background came from several nations involved in the talks.

It was unclear just how far-reaching the proposed ban against nuclear education for Iranian students abroad would be, and the diplomats involved in the negotiations did not seem to have resolved that issue.

The prohibition would ban any training and education of Iranian citizens if it could eventually contribute to nuclear and ballistic missile programs. But whether such a ban would extend to all physics courses, or even to mathematics and other courses, remained undetermined.

The bickering of late has largely been tactical, with the United States on one side and Europe on the other, with both sides trying to decide how best to get the Russians and Chinese to sign on to tough sanctions.

The American ambassador to the United Nations, John R. Bolton, for instance demanded that the draft resolution bar Russia from continuing to build Iran’s first nuclear power plant — at Bushehr, in the southwest of the country — American and European negotiators said. While some American officials acknowledged that a provision against all work on Bushehr was unrealistic, Mr. Bolton wanted to put it on the table as a bargaining chip to get other Russian concessions, European diplomats said.

The French and British, however, disagreed with that approach, arguing that Bushehr was a “red line” for the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and there was no point in putting something in the draft that would come out anyway.

“It’s like a flea market,” said one European diplomat. “The Americans say, ‘We have to make the text even stronger because we know the Russians will water it down.’ But that’s not a productive way of thinking.”

The draft resolution states that sanctions would apply to fuel at Bushehr but not construction, diplomats said.

[Rasputin]

Regime change policy change

In recent months, Ms. Condoleeza Rice has emphasized the importance of using multilateral diplomatic channels in dealing with Iran. This change in policy stance toward Iran should be viewed with some caution given the preference of this administration for the use of force in the region. The change in the U.S. approach to Iran, however, may be seen more as a preparatory step in softening opposition to another limited military adventure.

One unfortunate ramification of the regime-change policy in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the relative paralysis in delivering the next stages of the transition to a more inclusive and participative model of governance and reconstruction. To avoid a further deepening and spread of the present crises, it is necessary to move away from the present state of militarized management of the conflict to developing democratic governance in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The body of evidence available to us so far suggests that existing policies are more likely to exacerbate the crisis in these countries rather than helping their governments to de-radicalize the segments of the population that have been passive supporters of the insurgents.

There is an increasing realisation in the rest of the world that the strategy of bomb-first, talk-last has not been capable of achieving its objectives of nation-building. There has been a failure to plan for the post-military stages of the conflicts and to devise strategies which respond quickly to the immediate needs of the indigenous populations and genuinely engages them in the reconstruction of their own villages, towns and countries.

Furthermore, the unwillingness of the Americans and the British to involve other members of G8 and/or regional players as partners has weakened the spirit of multilateralism and international cooperation and discredited the United Nations.

Despite these issues, the American and British policy makers seem to be even more determined to prepare the groundwork for a military strike against Iran as their last legacy in their now-defunct policy of nation-building. Recent visits by top policy-makers in the last few months to Washington and London seem to have been mostly about how to appear sufficiently engaged in the diplomatic aspects of resolving the situation.

At the same time, politician in Washington and London have been trying to apply maximum pressure to France and Germany to ensure their support for a policy that is almost certain to lead to a military attack on Iran. This attack is likely to take the form of surgical air strikes combined with a sea embargo that is supposed to expedite the demise of the regime in Tehran.

In Iran, Mr Ahmadinejad, through making inflammatory statements, seems to be a willing partner in providing the justification for the U.S. in its effort to move policy toward a military attack on Iran. For their part, American foreign policy-makers, through repeated threats of military action against Iran if it countinues with its nuclear research, have once again have provided the oppressive regime of Iran with an excuse, in the guise of "national security," to silence discontent.

The question that must be asked is one about the real beneficiaries of the policies pursued by the U.S. and Britain. Have these policies weakened the hardline mullahs in Iran and/or the jihadist Sunnis in Iraq and Afghanistan? Can we say that progressive journalists and politicians seeking a secular form of governance in the Islamic countries have benefited from regime-change policies?

Or have these policies led to the marginalization and imprisonment of those who might lead their countries in the Islamic world towards a more open, accountable, and socially inclusive society? Do we live in a safer world or are we, in the world community, more divided and suspicious of each other and less willing to talk with those who differ from us? We seem to be heading quietly but surely towards the next military engagement.

It is time to change policy and talk, yes, talk with whoever is prepared to engage in conflict resolution. Once the threat of war, surgical air strikes, and nuclear weapons recedes, we will see a re-emergence of those young Iranian women and men who will once again challenge the dogmatic policies of religious fanatics and fight to push back the reign of terror that has been ruling Iran.

Regime change is most effective and stable when it is instigated by internal forces who seek an open and free Iran, and who, unilaterally, will disengage from developing nuclear armaments. Iran has a generation of young, capable and highly educated women and men who have demonstrated their determination and willingness to fight for their rights and challenge the violent rule of the Ayatollahs and their theocratic allies. Their opposition to the regime should not be undermined by the launch of another military-cum-regime change debacle that could spread throughout the whole region, and very possibly further, for many years to come.

Instead, the focus of policy must be on exposing the abuses of human rights and the misdirection of oil revenues by the Iranian regime, as well as demonstrating the corruption that has become the way of governance in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

As the first practical step, Western governments should provide and publish a list of assets, particularly bank accounts, of the leaders of the regime in Iran, and their business partners in Europe and in the United States. This can give a tremendous impetus to the opposition groups in Iran to mobilize the urban population and seek fundamental changes.

Few Westerners can appreciate the far-reaching effects of this action and the divisions that it will create even within the ranks of the regime. There is no single solution to the problems that beset Iran. However, eroding the revolutionary credentials of the ayatollahs and their allies may be one of most effective means of loosening and eventually severing their grip over Iran and its people.

[Rasputin]

The National Iranian American Council has a great review of the current draft Security Council resolution on Iran which states, in part:

... all States shall prohibit specialised teaching or training of Iranian nationals, within their territories or by their nationals, of disciplines which would contribute to Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs...

NIAC currently summarizes:

If the draft resolution's academic sanctions provisions are approved, they could apply added pressure to all countries to follow a similar model, affecting certain Iranian youths wishing to attend foreign universities. What is more, depending on the interpretation of the resolution's language, all Iranian students (not just engineers or physicists) are likely to experience added scrutiny and suspicion as a result.

Obviously students studying nuclear science would be affected. But what about those studying material science, aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, or even biology? Clearly all of these studies are essential to a nuclear or ballistic weapons program? What about Iranian students who have dual citizenship and study in these area? How would they be affected? Let me summarize the wide effect of this resolution:

1. For students who have Iranian nationality, but no nationality in the country in which they study, and are studying a field which could contribute to nuclear or ballistic weapons, the country is obligated and required to deny you such education.

2. For students who have Iranian nationality and nationality in the country in which they study, and are studyign a field which could contribute to nuclear or ballistic weapons, the country has the right, but is not obligated, to deny you such education.

The expansive and broad language of the resolution and the potential impact it may have on innocent students and families are breathtaking. This is nothing short of a resolution designed not only to cripple Iran's nuclear program, but Iranians altogether, regardless of their association with the current government. During the recent Iranian Presidential elections, President Bush stated:

And to the Iranian people, I say: As you stand for your own liberty, the people of America stand with you. And to the Iranian people, I say: As you stand for your own liberty, the people of America stand with you.

If this was true, why is the administration pushing a resolution that would take away the very liberty it seeks to invest and support in Iranians? In both the short-term and long-run, this will do more to sustain this regime, then destroy it.

[Rasputin]

What Makes Tehran Tick? The Sources of Iranian Conduct

Can Republicans and Democrats find common ground on Iran? In his savvy and accessible Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic (Times, $25), Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations argues that administrations from both parties have already managed to unite around something rather basic about one of America's main foreign policy challenges: They all get Iran wrong.

That consistent misreading of the country's behavior arises, Takeyh argues, because a broad spectrum of U.S. leaders, from Jimmy Carter to Dick Cheney, has seen Islamist Iran as a grim totalitarian state with an arid political life akin to North Korea's. But Iran's domestic politics are in a state of constant churn, helping produce what Hidden Iran describes as a reasonably pragmatic foreign policy prone to spasms of baffling dogmatism and raving rhetoric. Tehran's national security apparatus, Takeyh writes, is riven by feuds that make the current U.S. splits between State Department and Pentagon officials look mild; in Iran, the disputes are driven by "three competing elements -- Islamic ideology, national interests, and factional politics -- all constantly at battle."

In the 1990s, an odd array of reformist clerics and cranky hard-liners -- with the blessings of the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- coalesced reluctantly "around the notion that Iran cannot remain isolated from the global order" and began reaching out to China, Russia and other major powers. But that overture is now under threat from a new generation of ascetic, doctrinaire mullahs who feel that the revolution has grown calcified and corrupt -- a cohort exemplified by the current rightist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who seems equally passionate about Islamist puritanism, economic populism and Holocaust-denying anti-Semitism.

Takeyh has written a shrewd, timely guide to Iran's schisms, interests and ambitions, as well as offering a bracing and often nicely acerbic look at U.S.-Iranian relations -- from the 1953 CIA-backed coup that overthrew Iran's popular, nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, to the politics of the Persian Gulf in the post-9/11, post-Saddam Hussein era.

So how can America get Iran right? Takeyh urges U.S. policymakers to "to set aside the chimera of regime change," acknowledge the durability of the theocratic republic, resign themselves to a mature U.S.-Iranian relationship that combines competition and cooperation, and start direct talks on such crucial issues as Iran's nuclear program, its sponsorship of Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, its reported willingness to harbor al-Qaeda fugitives and its drive for greater influence over the Shiite majority of neighboring Iraq. Takeyh sees Iran as "a problem to be managed," not solved. But, he warns, Washington doesn't have much margin of error left.

[Rasputin]

France, the United States and Japan slip further Mauritania and Haiti gain much ground

North Korea, Turkmenistan, Eritrea: The worst violators of press freedom


New countries have moved ahead of some Western democracies in the fifth annual Reporters Without Borders Worldwide Press Freedom Index, issued today, while the most repressive countries are still the same ones.

“Unfortunately nothing has changed in the countries that are the worst predators of press freedom,” the organisation said, “and journalists in North Korea, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Burma and China are still risking their life or imprisonment for trying to keep us informed. These situations are extremely serious and it is urgent that leaders of these countries accept criticism and stop routinely cracking down on the media so harshly.

"Each year new countries in less-developed parts of the world move up the Index to positions above some European countries or the United States. This is good news and shows once again that, even though very poor, countries can be very observant of freedom of expression. Meanwhile the steady erosion of press freedom in the United States, France and Japan is extremely alarming,” Reporters Without Borders said.

The three worst violators of free expression - North Korea, bottom of the Index at 168th place, Turkmenistan (167th) and Eritrea (166th) - have clamped down further. The torture death of Turkmenistan journalist Ogulsapar Muradova shows that the country’s leader, “President-for-Life” Separmurad Nyazov, is willing to use extreme violence against those who dare to criticise him. Reporters Without Borders is also extremely concerned about a number of Eritrean journalists who have been imprisoned in secret for more than five years. The all-powerful North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, also continues to totally control the media.

Northern European countries once again come top of the Index, with no recorded censorship, threats, intimidation or physical reprisals in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands, which all share first place.

Deterioration in the United States and Japan, with France also slipping

The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.

Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf was imprisoned when he refused to hand over his video archives. Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, who works for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, has been held without trial since June 2002 at the US military base at Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been held by US authorities in Iraq since April this year.

France (35th) slipped five places during the past year, to make a loss of 24 places in five years. The increase in searches of media offices and journalists’ homes is very worrying for media organisations and trade unions. Autumn 2005 was an especially bad time for French journalists, several of whom were physically attacked or threatened during a trade union dispute involving privatisation of the Corsican firm SNCM and during violent demonstrations in French city suburbs in November.

Rising nationalism and the system of exclusive press clubs (kishas) threatened democratic gains in Japan, which fell 14 places to 51st. The newspaper Nihon Keizai was firebombed and several journalists physically attacked by far-right activists (uyoku).

Fallout from the row over the "Mohammed cartoons”

Denmark (19th) dropped from joint first place because of serious threats against the authors of the Mohammed cartoons published there in autumn 2005. For the first time in recent years in a country that is very observant of civil liberties, journalists had to have police protection due to threats against them because of their work.

Yemen (149th) slipped four places, mainly because of the arrest of several journalists and closure of newspapers that reprinted the cartoons. Journalists were harassed for the same reason in Algeria (126th), Jordan (109th), Indonesia (103rd) and India (105th).

But except for Yemen and Saudi Arabia (161st), all the Arab peninsula countries considerably improved their rank. Kuwait (73rd) kept its place at the top of the group, just ahead of the United Arab Emirates (77th) and Qatar (80th).

Newcomers to the top ranks

Two countries moved into the Index’s top 20 for the first time. Bolivia (16th) was best-placed among less-developed countries and during the year its journalists enjoyed the same level of freedom as colleagues in Canada or Austria. But the growing polarisation between state-run and privately-owned media and between supporters and opponents of President Evo Morales could complicate the situation.

Bosnia-Herzegovina (19th) continued its gradual rise up the Index since the end of the war in ex-Yugoslavia and is now placed above its European Union member-state neighbours Greece (32nd) and Italy (40th).

Panama (39th) is enjoying political peace which has helped the growth of a free and vigorous media and the country moved up 27 places over the year.

War, the destroyer of press freedom

Lebanon has fallen from 56th to 107th place in five years, as the country’s media continues to suffer from the region’s poisonous political atmosphere, with a series of bomb attacks in 2005 and Israeli military attacks this year. The Lebanese media - some of the freest and most experienced in the Arab world - desperately need peace and guarantees of security. The inability of the Palestinian Authority (134th) to maintain stability in its territories and the behaviour of Israel (135th) outside its borders seriously threaten freedom of expression in the Middle East.

Things are much the same in Sri Lanka, which ranked 51st in 2002, when there was peace, but has now sunk to 141st because fighting between government and rebel forces has resumed in earnest. Dozens of Tamil journalists have been physically attacked after being accused by one side or the other of being biased against them.

Press freedom in Nepal (159th) has shifted according to the state of the fighting that has disrupted the country for several years. The “democatic revolution” and the revolt against the monarchy in April this year led immediately to more basic freedoms and the country should gain a lot of ground in next year’s Index.

Disparities in the Americas

Three journalists were killed in each of Colombia (131st) and Mexico (132th). A Mexican reporter also disappeared along the US border, where drug-traffickers threaten the media. Cuba (165th) remains the world’s second biggest prison for journalists, with 24 in jail, and still does not allow an independent media.

The other surprise, along with Bolivia’s good position, was the slipping of Brazil (to 75th place) and Argentina (to 76th). One journalist was killed in Brazil over the past year and physical attacks on local media are still numerous. Relations between Argentina’s national media and the presidency are still very bad and cutting off state subsidies is no longer the only way used to cow media outlets. Suspensions and dismissal of journalists are sometimes the result of direct pressure by politicians. The atmosphere is still tense in Peru (113th) and in Venezuela (115th), where the consequences of the “media war” between supporters of opponents of President Hugo Chávez persist.

Changes of ruler are sometimes good for press freeedom, as in the case of Haiti, which has risen from 125th to 87th place in two years after the flight into exile of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in early 2004. Several murders of journalists remain unpunished but violence against the media has abated.

Except for Guatemala (90th), Central America as a whole has good rankings despite the gap between countries such as Costa Rica (29th), Panama (39th) and El Salvador (41st), and Honduras (64th) and Nicaragua (69th). The few physical attacks on journalists also shows that self-censorship is at work.

[Rasputin]

Iran sounds an awful lot like Iraq

There is a disturbing sense of déjà vu in Washington's actions and rhetoric.
By Jon Sawyer, Jon Sawyer is director of the Washington-based Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He has reported from Iran and throughout the Middle East.
October 29, 2006


AN EMBATTLED president, a Congress distracted by a sex scandal, looming midterm elections — and yet overwhelming agreement, with scant debate or publicity, on fateful legislation that set the nation on a path to war.

It happened eight autumns ago, when three-quarters of the House of Representatives and every single senator voted for regime change in Iraq.


Four weeks ago, Congress enacted and President Bush signed the Iran Freedom Support Act, a resolution very much in the spirit of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act. It mandates sanctions against any country aiding Iran's nuclear programs, even those to which that country is legally entitled under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The new law got virtually no coverage in the congressional rush to adjourn and amid the controversy surrounding e-mails between Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) and teenage boys serving in the House page program. It has been overshadowed since by North Korea's explosion of a nuclear device and the world's debate about how to respond.

But if the confrontation over Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program ends in war — initiated by this administration or the next — you can bet this law will be cited as proof that Congress was onboard all along.

The congressional action isn't the only sign of déjà vu. Recent months have seen the creation of an "Iran directorate" at the Pentagon, using some of the same personnel as the Office of Special Plans, the shadowy Pentagon outfit led by former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith that was accused of massaging raw intelligence on Iraq to make the case for war look far more solid than in fact it was.

Iran has now supplanted Iraq as the greatest single threat to the United States, according to the National Security Strategy released earlier this year. Articles in the New Yorker and Time describe an accelerated rate of contingency military planning in an environment in which many senior officials — on the military and civilian sides — consider war with Iran more a question of when rather than if.

As in the run-up to the Iraq war, there are assertions of a broad consensus of experts' views that Iran is intent on developing a nuclear weapons capability; and, just as in 2003, there are muted voices questioning how definitive the evidence is. (The most recent National Intelligence Estimate found that Iran's progress toward weapons capability was actually slower than previously thought, and Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte says that, in his view, Iran is still four to nine years away from having the bomb.)

Once again, U.S. officials are discounting the work of U.N. weapons inspectors on site, and, once again, those inspectors — and the agencies for which they work — are saying that the best way to contain the nuclear threat is to keep them in place.

"People confuse knowledge, industrial capacity and intention," Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Newsweek magazine in an interview last week. "A lot of what you see about Iran right now is assessment of intentions."

He and other IAEA officials warn that the Bush administration's hard-line suspicions of Iran could make reading those intentions even harder. Tehran has already suspended IAEA access to some nuclear facilities and could expel the international inspectors entirely. It happened in Iraq in 1998 — and the vacuum that followed made possible ever-more speculative estimates as to Iraq's imagined progress toward fielding weapons of mass destruction.

The run-up to possible war is also marked, yet again, by the absence of firsthand knowledge of the enemy.

The war to topple Saddam Hussein came 12 years after the rupture of diplomatic relations, with U.S. policymakers dependent on questionable exile groups long removed from direct knowledge of conditions inside the country. In the case of Iran, the gap is longer still — nearly 27 years since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power.

Assistant Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns announced earlier this year that State Department diplomats would be based in Dubai and elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe to monitor Iran, in a move he likened to Riga Station, the Latvian capital where, during the 1920s and 1930s, diplomats such as George Kennan kept tabs on the Soviet Union. The effort comes late. As Burns himself acknowledged, as recently as early last year, "there were exactly two people focusing full time on Iran" at the State Department.

To be sure, war with Iran is nowhere near as inevitable as the neoconservative proponents of aggressive action would make it appear. The U.S. military is mired in Iraq. The combination of vast oil reserves and 70 million people make Iran a formidable adversary, one that has shown itself more than willing to rely on groups such as Hezbollah or Hamas to wage terrorism on the United States, Israel and allied nations. Here at home, meanwhile, public opinion surveys show little appetite for another go at preventive war.

In the face of those hurdles, and the acknowledged gaps in proven facts, it is remarkable that the neoconservative handmaidens of the Iraq war are so assertive on Iran, as to the inevitability of war and the rightness of waging it.

Last April, the Weekly Standard ran an article nearly 8,000 words long laying out the case for war, why diplomacy and sanctions are doomed to fail and why letting Tehran actualize its nuclear weapons potential would be more threatening to the U.S. and to the world than the consequences of whatever it takes — even land invasion on the scale of Iraq — to prevent that from happening. The article's author was Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA Middle East specialist and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has a record of being articulate, confident and — in the case of Iraq — wrong.

An issue brief that Gerecht wrote for the American Enterprise Institute in August 2002 predicted that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would likely prompt "simultaneous uprisings" by freedom-seeking Iranians. A November 2002 column dismissed concerns that war with Iraq would destabilize the Middle East. "The one truly unsettling thing a second Persian Gulf war might unleash," Gerecht wrote, "is Iraqi democracy." In February 2003, he brushed aside concerns that the Iraq war might inspire acts of terrorism by Muslims in Europe. "The coming war in Iraq," he wrote, "will probably diminish, not enhance, the odds that young Muslim males will become holy warriors…."

But at a time when a majority of Americans have turned against the Iraq war, when Bush's long advantage on national security issues is under fire and when Democrats dream of wresting control of not just the House of Representatives but the Senate too, the most extraordinary parallel to the pre-Iraq-war environment is that so many Democrats have given the administration a vote on Iran that amounts to yet another blank-check endorsement of U.S. unilateralism — even as diplomats struggle in New York to craft a multilateral approach to Iran.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) voted for the Iran Freedom Support Act. So did House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.). So did all but 21 members of the House and every member of the Senate, which approved the measure by unanimous voice vote.

The law they backed codifies existing U.S. sanctions against Iran — and extends those sanctions to any countries or companies deemed to have aided Iran in the development or acquisition of nuclear weapons or of "destabilizing numbers and types" of advanced conventional weapons. It states the sense of Congress that the United States shall not enter into any form of cooperation with the government of any country that so aids Iran, unless and until Iran has suspended all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing-related nuclear activity and has "committed to verifiably refrain from such activity in the future" — even though such activities are permitted under the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Democrats who voted for the measure were at pains to distinguish it from the Iraq Liberation Act, noting, for example, that the legislation specifically rejected military aid to opponents of Iran's current government, and that it calls for Iran's "democratic transformation," not regime change. Among those who favor both, however, this is seen as little more than a wink and a nod.

Michael Ledeen, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, has beaten the Iran war drums for years. He told the House International Relations Committee in testimony last March that he was untroubled that the new law stops short of explicitly calling for regime change. "People are just afraid of coming out and using the language," he said. "You cannot have freedom in Iran without bringing down the mullahs, so what are we talking about?"

In 1998, the Clinton administration went along with the Iraq Liberation Act reluctantly, fearing that the law's stark anti-Saddam Hussein line would tie its hands. Republican leaders were demanding a tough line, and Democrats, facing midterm elections in the shadow of President Clinton's pending impeachment, were eager to go along.

For all its bellicose rhetoric on Iran, the Bush administration appeared to have similar reservations about the Iran Freedom Support Act. It staved off congressional action for more than a year, contending that mandatory sanctions would short-circuit the delicate diplomacy of taking Iran to the U.N. Security Council. To critics within the administration, the law raised the specter of U.S. unilateralism at a moment when Washington needed allies more than ever.

[Rasputin]

Almost twenty eight years have passed from the establishment of theocratic regime in Iran which has been responsible for many calamities imposed on our nation during this period. Apart from deprivation of our people from peace and prosperity which they enjoyed prior to cleric rulers of Iran, most of Islamic regime's authorities from top to bottom have been involved in many serious crimes against Iranians. Widespread looting of national resources and corruption at different levels of government along with use of extremely suppressive forces against people has left no choice for most Iranians to either leave the country if they can or settle with the misery that is forced upon them.

During the past 27 years, double digit unemployment and struggle with poverty has driven the nation to a depression and change of fundamental moral values in a society which has a long history with dignity and honor. More than 40 percent of Iranians live below poverty line even based on Islamic regime's standards and they have hard time in every minute of their daily lives in order to make the ends meet!

It is under such dreadful conditions which Islamic rulers have decided one more time to drag our nation into a crisis and conflict to satisfy the system which is founded on deception and lies with its divine mission to impose rules of Allah on earth! Islamic regime of Iran that has failed to accomplish anything positive for any Iranian other than those who are affiliated with ruling clerics and their families, has made freedom of Palestinian lands and destruction of Israel their number one priority!

In early 1980's, leaders of Islamic regime in Iran welcomed the attack of Iraqi army to our country as a gift from god which would help them to silence and destroy any voice of opposition that had already started to gather momentum since the first few weeks from Islamic revolution in February of 1979. Similar to those days, leaders of Islamic regime today declare the imposition of international sanctions against our nation as a cause for celebration and in this way, they are ready to turn Iran into another North Korea in which laughter is a rare commodity and some people are dying on the streets from disastrous living condition under dictatorship of Kim Jong-il.

One day, war became a gift from god and another day Islamic rulers celebrate international sanctions on Iran to show their disregard for any humane values and our people's rights. It is obvious that with this mentality and with war mongering policies of Islamic regime's rulers as representatives of Allah on earth, we will soon be witnessing another gift package from god in which for Iranians there will be more misery, more corruptions and more humiliations. There is no need to be an expert in any field in order to see the coming storm that will destroy anything on its path. What else do Iranians need to see in order to get their act together and do something for the sake of saving themselves from disaster rather than waiting to see what others will do?

Situation in Iraq and Afghanistan clearly shows it will be very hard to reach stability for any government after invasion and attack by foreign forces. Moreover, Iran is a totally different territory and conditions are much different. Islamic rulers have kept the nation in deep misery and corruption so they can buy their way out using the enormous wealth at their exposal whenever they need. There are still some people whose sincere religious beliefs could be manipulated and taken advantage of by ruling clerics to make everything difficult for others. And of course there are those who care for nothing other than their own petty interests which they believe could be achieved through association or dealing with rich mullahs.

There is ample amount of reasons to justify prompt action in direction of removal of clerical tyranny in our country. Military intervention by foreign nations will do no service to the interests of Iranian nation and will push Iran back into dark ages while Islamic rulers can survive such attack without much trouble. For years, Iranian opposition groups and individuals residing outside the country have been neutralized by manipulative propagandas of Islamic regime in promotion of this unrealistic notion that no one from outside the country can "prescribe" any action and have serious effect inside!

Unfortunately, many of Iranians inside and outside the country have simplistically fallen for this nonsense which has disabled a good portion of opposition forces to consider more active approach to the question of regime change in Iran. It is a patriotic duty of any Iranian who loves his/her country to speak up and participate in any action that could contribute to the liberty of our nation and no one is exempted! In the absence of democratic options to bring possible changes in politics of our nation, every Iranian, specially political groups and activists have the right to "prescribe" what they believe is beneficial in direction of removing Islamic tyranny from our nation and creating a democratic establishment that serves the national interests rather than an ideology. It is better to speak up now and avoid future regrets.

The constitution of Islamic republic regime in Iran is nothing but a cycle of doom which starts from "velayat faghih" (absolute rule of mullah) and ends with "velayat faghih". More than 9 years ago Iranian people elected a president whom they thought would be helpful in bringing the much needed change in the country. This was the ultimate show of democracy, Islamic republic style, in which Iranians went against the wishes of "vali faghih" by electing a clergyman from whom they heard what they wished for in his political campaign. People participated in that game to try the last possible resort in order to bring the peaceful changes they wished for but soon enough they had to deal with broken promises, outburst of chain killings and increasing stoning and other inhumane punishments to remember one more time that by whom they are ruled!

All attempts in the past 27 years to bring slightest political change in Iran have been brutally confronted and suppressed by clerical rulers and every door has been slammed in the face of Iranian people. It is under such condition and in the absence of a competent opposition inside and outside that many Iranians are desperately waiting for a savior from the western world to make things right in Iran! Iranian opposition groups have no choice but to stand up and provide Iranians with clear directions and guidance with no ambiguity on how to react.

It's time for Iranian opposition groups and leaders to show their sincerity rather than hanging to cliché and political correctness without fear of being labeled. It is only in critical times when a leadership can establish its legitimacy by showing courage and wisdom. It is time to call upon the nation to act on their own behalf without being afraid of old and obsolete "prescription" propaganda! It's time for strike rather than wait and regret the inaction later! Iranian people welcomed the call by foreign based opposition groups about two years ago with widespread boycott of presidential election. It's time to step up the action through a laud and clear call for a general strike against policies of tyrannical regime by every single opposition group or leader. It is time to be specific and to the point!

[Rasputin]

U.S. intelligence on Iran

The man who ran the CIA`s covert activities in Europe during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq says U.S. intelligence needs to be better insulated from political influence if the nation is to avoid another disaster in Iran.

'I can see the same thing happening with (intelligence on) Iran,' Tyler Drumheller told United Press International in an interview about his just-published book, 'On the Brink.'

He said there was 'a core of intelligence professionals who can do the job if they`re allowed to.' But there was a real risk of repeating what he said was the two-pronged failure on Iraq: policy-makers brought their preconceptions to the table and senior intelligence officials failed to confront them with uncomfortable truths.

Policy-makers, he said, had to learn that, 'When someone doesn`t agree with your preconceptions, you can`t interpret that as disloyalty or stupidity.' But they must also be able to 'rely on intelligence officials to tell them things they don`t want to hear.'

He said that recent reforms of the structure of U.S. intelligence, including the appointment of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, were 'an impediment, not an improvement.'

'On the Brink,' offers a few fresh details about several episodes of the now familiar tale of how U.S. officials ended up making a case for war based on inaccurate statements about Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

'The White House took our work and twisted it for its own ends,' he writes, accusing then-CIA Director George Tenet of having 'set a tone whereby people knew what he and the White House wanted to hear. The bureaucratic imperative was to prove one`s worth by supporting the president`s case for war.'

CIA Spokesman Mark Mansfield declined to comment on the book beyond saying that Drumheller no longer worked for the agency and was 'expressing his own opinion.'

Colleagues have defended Tenet from similar charges in the past, pointing out that the published reports of two inquiries into the matter have concluded that there was no politicization of the CIA`s analysis on his watch, but rather a failure of analytic creativity, and the predominance of so-called 'groupthink.'

Drumheller`s book also echoes the conclusions of the special presidential commission that probed pre-war intelligence failures on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, in placing much of the blame for the errors on the CIA`s Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control center, known as WINPAC.

'The truth is (Tenet) over-empowered WINPAC,' he writes.

The presidential commission last year recommended a fundamental overhaul of the center. 'We didn`t quite say, `Bulldoze it,` but we came close,' a commission official told UPI at the time.

Mansfield praised the center`s analysts as 'smart, extraordinarily dedicated officers' and said changes had been made there.

'We have improved our analytical tradecraft and our intelligence-sharing (with people working the issue at different agencies),' he said, adding that the center was doing more analysis focused on the research U.S. adversaries are doing on weapons development.

He said a so-called Red Cell, or alternative analysis team, had been put in place at the center. 'We are including alternative analysis in many more of our products, and are bolstering (intelligence) efforts to improve interdiction capabilities.'

He said WINPAC analysts had predicted both North Korea`s missile test in July and its recent effort to detonate a nuclear bomb.

'We have taken the lessons learned from the Iraq episode,' he said, 'and are applying them every day.'

One congressional staffer with access to intelligence products agreed. 'I have seen no evidence that the intelligence community is being pushed or is shaping their analysis' on Iran, the staffer told UPI.

'They have in fact learned fairly well the lessons of Iraq,' the staffer went on. 'They are much clearer about the degree of confidence they have in their judgments, much readier to acknowledge uncertainty, much better at laying out what they don`t know.'

But Drumheller is not alone in his concerns. Many critics of the administration have discerned a similar tunnel vision on the part of senior officials as was evident in the run up to war with Iraq.

Negroponte has said it is the consensus assessment of U.S. intelligence that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, and is five to 10 years away from developing one.

In August, the GOP Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, released titled, ' Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States.'

'We lack critical information needed for analysts to make many of their judgments with confidence about Iran, and we don`t know nearly enough about Iran`s nuclear weapons program,' read the report.

'I would suspect we do know quite a bit about what`s going on in Iran, but it`s not what they want to hear, so they say, `We`re blind,`' Drumheller said.

The report was slammed by critics, including the International Atomic Energy Authority, as presenting an overblown and exaggerated picture of the threat.

The authority`s former head, Hans Blix recently gave evidence to a congressional panel, and told them that Iran was 'not a threat today. It could become (one) later on.'

He said U.S. intelligence analysts looking before the war at Iraq`s weapons programs had 'chose(n) to replace question marks by exclamation marks,' and urged against repeating that error on Iran.

He said it was not certain that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon. 'I think there have been some indications pointing in that direction, but I don`t think it is conclusive. And I think that after the experience we have had in Iraq, one should be a little careful to jump to conclusions.'

[Rasputin]

VOTE AGAINST THE EVIL OF HYPOCRISY

As Iranian-Americans, voting and exercising civic responsibility are not among our strong points. For example, on this eve of midterm elections only a handful of us are devoting sufficient time and effort to this vital issue. Only by voting we can restore and defend the values that prevailed in America when we chose to make it our adopted home. We have to wake up because it is too late to leave and displace our children and grandchildren for whom this is the primary home.

Unfortunately American history is going through a dark period and hopefully will snap out of it. A time when all American Ideals are trampled upon; double and multiple standards rather than equality and justice are becoming the norm in all sectors regardless of public or private. Ethnic profiling and search and seizure and longer lines at the airports for and waste of the tax-payers’ money to justify the so called War on Terror is only terrorizing America and the world and energizing rather than discouraging dictatorial regimes in the world. The leaders are so incompetent that their actions are, increasingly becoming laughing stocks for the late night talk show hosts. The most recent one is about the erection of a wall in Mexican American border. It is reported that after the passage of this ridiculous law they found out that there is no cheap labor in America and they would have to import labor from Mexico! Good bye to the hard earned status of global village, strength through diversity, the nation of immigrants, and hello to ignorance, arrogance and hypocrisy and another world war.

We as Iranian-Americans have been having more than our share of bum wrap, often for no other reason than we were born in a country hypocrites decided to call axis of evil. We are getting the lion’s share of ethnic profiling, wiretapping, surveillance and even soon-to-be enacted barring our children from studying in schools in certain fields-but practically in every field, since all fields are inter-related! Destruction of our other homeland is next in the agenda as if our leaders have not learned any lesson from destroying other countries. Welcome to a system of one-man rule from which we ran away. Welcome to the 13th century and Genghis Khan rule!

Let us find out the cause of our apathy and try to eliminate it. It is a matter of survival! I see two major reasons for our apathy. First, for those of us who had our formative years in pre-revolutionary Iran voting did not mean much. Second, most of us in our adopted country tend to emulate the American public that has increasingly become apathetic with little or no interest in voting for good reasons. In this “nation of immigrants” hypocrisy and tyrannical and divisive acts are taking the heaviest toll than ever that can be stopped with our voting. Only the people can do this before the word “people” is totally eliminated from the “government of the people.” It is a sink or swim situation.

The American public that is among the most decent in the world has been turned off from voting because it cannot tolerate the mockery that is made of democracy by hypocrisy. Many will find it hard to believe that voter turnout in America is about 140th in the world instead of the first. It is also reported that most women in America do not even bother to vote. Perhaps they are turned off because no woman in America has been allowed to become vice president whereas even in developing countries women have assumed the role of prime ministers and presidents. The whole America and not only Iranian Americans should be concerned about such destructive trend. Thomas Patterson, director of the Vanishing Voter Project at Harvard University says, “Experts long assumed that voter turnout would increase when education and income rose.” He wonders why this has not been the case in America!

With all due respect for Mr. Patterson I have the answer to his curiosity. He only has to recall Thomas Jefferson’s words; “Enlighten people and tyranny of body and mind will disappear like evil spirit in the dawn of a day” are still true and will be to the end of the time.




The success of the American Revolution was a testament to that truth. To me, Patterson’s mistake has been that he has considered the American public education as “effective education” and America’s eight trillion dollars national debt as an asset and income! How can we count $3,000 per American share of national debt as an income? The hidden reality is that America is the biggest debtor nation and not the wealthiest because the policy of tax and waste has not worked. In short, if the American public was not kept in the dark we would never have the degree of public apathy to the extent that we have now. In fact runaway hypocrisy has reached a level that it turns off a lot of citizens.

It is indeed sad that the public in the most technologically advanced country has been made to be among the least informed in the world-the weakest in basic sciences and even history and geography of not only the world, but those of America. We have an innocent public that through no fault of its own is deprived of basic education. A public that does not know simple things like, what, how much and when to eat; a public that can change its mind about anything under the influence of 30 second commercials. Nowhere in the world is the public such an easy prey for exploitation by hypocrisy.

I emphasize that this is by no means denigrating my fellow-American pubic. It does underscore the fact that public by definition needs effective education and exemplary leaders to be effective citizens. Think of broken homes, public education in disarray, the uninformed public and leaders who constantly betray the public trust and you have the answer to apathy and relinquishment of participatory democracy. To find out how hypocrisy has taken the public education as a hostage by spending more and educating less, just look at the influx of effective human resources into America from developing countries whose best schools are less equipped than the worst schools in America.

The bottom line is that almost all progress in America is due to the hard work of a relatively small group of self-motivated Americans and their foreign counterparts. In other words America remains as sleeping giant until it takes effective public education more seriously. The whole world is aware of alienation of American public from their government. That is why, contrary to hypocrisy’s claim and their false propaganda, the whole world still loves the American people. Tell the people the truth and a good and even half-way decent leader and America, this sleeping giant(sedated by hypocrisy) will not be taken as a hostage in the name of ‘War on Terror.”

Finally, those of us who conveniently ignore America’s problems to appease to the establishment are doing the greatest harm to America, their mother land and the world at large. Only those who truly love America know that the biggest enemy of America is runaway hypocrisy and right here at home. We need to remember Thomas Jefferson’s words, “An empire collapses more from within than from without.” The saying that “as America goes so does the world’ is still true and a positive change in America will be emulated all over in no time.

The fact that hypocrisy is a common denominator in both of our major parties does not keep me from voting. I just vote for the better of the two evils! And since I cannot change the world I settle for making it a little better! I am sure that if we all did that our world would be a lot better.
If you are reluctant to vote because you are only one individual or a member of a small group, recall Margaret Meads: “Never doubt that a group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” Remember that the American Revolution carried out by a handful of men changed the world for better-the very same revolution that is now hijacked by runaway hypocrisy.