The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.”

…

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. (full article…)

Seymour Hersh published this report in the New Yorker back in 2008. The group in question – Jundallah – is now claiming responsibility for the recent suicide attack in Iran which killed over 40 people. Yet predictably, the US media is now dismissive of any connection… I can’t think of a better example of the media’s deference to power.

Amnesty International has condemned the execution of Behnoud Shojaee, a 21-year-old Iranian, at Tehran’s Evin Prison at dawn on Sunday, for a murder he was accused of having committed when he was 17. (full article…)

Israel continues to threaten to invade Iran. (full article…)

For all the recent uproar over Iran’s nuclear program, little attention has been paid to the fact that the country which first provided Tehran with nuclear equipment was the United States.

In 1967, under the “Atoms for Peace” program launched by President Eisenhower, the US sold the Shah of Iran’s government a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor. This small dome-shaped structure, located in the Tehran suburbs, was the foundation of Iran’s nuclear program. It remains at the center of the controversy over Iranian intentions, even today. (full article…)

Not all are persuaded. Glenn Greenwald, an author and a left-leaning blogger for the online magazine Salon, called the parallels with the charges that Iraq had so-called weapons of mass destruction in 2002 “substantial and disturbing.”

“The administration is making inflammatory claims about another country’s W.M.D. program and intentions without providing any evidence,” he said.

Gary Sick, an expert on Iran at Columbia University, said that ever since 1992, American officials had claimed that Iran was just a few years away from a nuclear bomb. Like Saddam Hussein, the clerical government in Iran is “despised,” he said, leading to worst-case assumptions.

“In 2002, it seemed utterly naïve to believe Saddam didn’t have a program,” Mr. Sick said. Now, the notion that Iran is not racing to build a bomb is similarly excluded from serious discussion, he said. (full article…)

Iran’s not in violation of anything. Iran is in compliance and the IAEA has stated this. The IAEA has said that the fact that Iran was in compliance with the old code 3.1 subsidiary agreement – the old safeguards agreements – means that you can’t find them to be in noncompliance with this new set of arrangements. The key here isn’t the technicality of the legal documents. It’s about the diversion of nuclear material and the IAEA has a 100% accounting for the totality of Iran’s nuclear material. So even if Iran produces this new facility – which by the way is not in operation and won’t be in operation for over a year – though nuclear material has been diverted, there still is a full material balance and the IAEA is in complete control of the situation. Iran is not in violation; this is not a reason to panic. This is much ado about nothing. But again, we come back to the original premise: this is about political hype. (full article…)

A new organization of several Israeli and Jewish student groups is working to help young people who are thousands of kilometers away — in Iran. Ahead of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s upcoming address at the United Nations General Assembly, Israelis have increased their PR activity in favor of Iranians being oppressed by their regime. (full article…)

Most Iranians express acceptance of the outcome of the Presidential election. Eighty-one percent say they consider Ahmadinejad to be Iran’s legitimate president, and 62 percent say they have a lot of confidence in the declared election results, while 21 percent say they have some confidence. Just 13 percent say they do not have much confidence or no confidence in the results. In general, eight in 10 (81%) say they are satisfied with the process by which authorities are elected, but only half that number (40%) say they are very satisfied. (full article…)

“We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?” he told the news site ‘The Beast’. (full article…)

The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites. (more…)

The United States, Mr. Biden said in an interview broadcast on ABC’s “This Week,” “cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do.” (more…)

An Israeli submarine sailed the Suez Canal to the Red Sea as part of a naval drill last month, defense sources said on Friday, describing the unusual maneuver as a show of strategic reach in the face of Iran. (more…)

Iranian officials stepped up efforts to crush the remaining resistance to a disputed presidential election on Wednesday, as security forces overwhelmed a small group of protesters with brutal beatings, tear gas and gunshots in the air. (more…)

Somehow, I don’t think the Western press has ever referred to Israel’s weekly beating of demonstrators in the West Bank as “brutal”. Apparently, there are good thugs and bad thugs…

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Wednesday that “the predatory nature of Tehran’s regime has been exposed” (more…)9

These reasons explain why over recent weeks while the Iran elections were happening there has been virtually no coverage in most media of demonstrations numbering in the tens of thousands in Georgia or Peru. It has even been reported in Peru that dozens of persons have been killed during the protests, or “clashes” as they’ve also been labeled (since more than a dozen police have also been killed), more than the reported number killed in Iran. (more…)

The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale. (more…)

As’ad AbuKhalil, Lebanese politics professor at California State University, said Iranian opponents of Ahmadinejad — if they come out on top — would still likely promote a nationalist agenda that Riyadh sees as a threat to its interests. Opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi was prime minister under the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “The site of public demonstrations by the thousands against their leaders …troubles all Arab leaders,” AbuKhalil said, pointing to the lack of popular democracy on a par with that of Iran in most of the Arab countries. “Arab regimes may also fear that if the Iranian regime feels cornered and pressured, it may lash out, and Saudi Arabia may be the first to feel the wrath of the regime,” he said. (more…)

It is frustrating that everyone I talk to from Pakistan to Egypt loves Ahmadinejad and is shocked to hear that many Iranians think he is ineffective and embarrassing. Meanwhile every Westerner seems to think that Mousavi is a great reformist or revolutionary, and some kind of saintly figure beloved by all. He’s an opportunist crook. (more…)

“It’s a lot more complicated.” He added that the real reason for the deadlock “is not occupation, not settlements and not settlers.” Nor, he said, is it the Palestinians. The biggest obstacle, he said, is “the Iranians.” (more…)

“Sooner or later, the world will realize that Iran wishes to take over the Middle East, and that it has colonial ambitions,” Peres said. (more…)

For some reason, Peres’s talk of “colonial ambitions” strikes me as either facetious or deeply cynical. Can anyone tell me why?

April 9 was the sixth anniversary of the fall of the Saddam Hussein government in Iraq. The date passed without much remark in the United States, which is consumed with its own domestic economic problems and high rates of unemployment, rendering a distant foreign misadventure virtually invisible. Gone are the debates over whether a US military occupation could jump-start democratization throughout the Middle East, creating a shining city on a hill rather than an economic and political basket case. Gone are the confident assertions that the path to peace in Israel/ Palestine goes through Baghdad. Gone is the quixotic sabre-rattling against neighboring Iran, which was premised on the false notion that the US did not need Tehran to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

All gone, to be replaced by a yawning silence on this side of the Atlantic, with perhaps a touch of regret or shame among the sliver of observers who remembered the date at all. (more…)

In 2008, at least 2,390 people were known to have been executed in 25 countries and at least 8,864 people were sentenced to death in 52 countries around the world. As in previous years, the five countries with the highest number of executions in 2008 were China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States of America (Fig. 1). Together these five countries carried out 93 per cent of all executions carried out in 2008. These countries provide the greatest challenge towards global abolition of the death penalty. (more…)

In American politics, you can’t do anything in the Middle East without the approval of Tel Aviv, at least on some level. It’s impossible. I mean, I cannot think of a country that is so beholden to a small country like this, even a superpower, in all of history. I can’t even think of it. (more…)

Obama had thousands of clergy to choose from, and the choice of Warren is not only a slap in the face to progressive ministers toiling on the front lines of advocacy and service, but a bow to the continuing influence of the religious right in American politics. Warren vocally opposes gay marriage, does not believe in evolution, has compared abortion to the Holocaust and backed the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (more…)

I have been trying to avoid writing this review, not because of the book’s subject matter (this is not a profound book any sense of the word) but because it has been done so many times before and has by now become quite dated in the ephemeral world of controversy. But I finally read the book more than two years after downloading the original working paper of the same title from the Kennedy School of Government’s website—and at least a year since the book itself was published. I had put off reading the expanded argument because I was already familiar with both the working paper and the version published in the London Review of Books—plus, I was aware that Mearsheimer and Walt had based their arguments entirely on secondary research and I am already very familiar with the topic.

First, let me just address a minor issues: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (henceforth M/W) must be congratulated for their attempts at initiating a serious debate about this absurdly sensitive issue (at least in the United States). Considering their argument is neither new to anyone familiar with the subject, the book’s only real contribution is its success at reaching a wide audience. Had similar arguments been published by less reknowned academics and pundits (which they have been), “the Lobby” would surely have buried them in a mountain of obsolescence, ignored and forgotten without concern (which they have). But M/W cannot be dismissed as ideologues and so, the likes of Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz and other apologists for Israeli/U.S. crimes immediately went on the offensive by attempting to undermine the credibility and authority of the authors when faced with hard facts from a wide array of scholars. (more…)

Barack Obama has assembled a team of rivals to implement his foreign policy. But while pundits and journalists speculate endlessly on the potential for drama with Hillary Clinton at the state department and Bill Clinton’s network of shady funders, the real rivalry that will play out goes virtually unmentioned. The main battles will not be between Obama’s staff, but rather against those who actually want a change in US foreign policy, not just a staff change in the war room.

When announcing his foreign policy team on Monday, Obama said: “I didn’t go around checking their voter registration.” That is a bit hard to believe, given the 63-question application to work in his White House. But Obama clearly did check their credentials, and the disturbing truth is that he liked what he saw.

The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush’s time in office to the present. (more…)

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton’s White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama’s team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn’t lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."
(more…)

If the presidential debate Friday night told us anything, it was that whichever of these candidates is elected, we can expect more wars, or at least more conflicts that put U.S. forces or citizens in danger for dubious reasons. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama came close to questioning the "bipartisan" consensus on U.S. foreign policy, that the U.S. should be the prime mover and shaker in the world at large. They differ, and in some ways that are fairly important, on details. But on the central question of whether it is the United States’ job to go out there and fix the world, there was no disagreement.

To be sure, taking candidates at their word during a debate is not necessarily advisable for one who would be so foolish as to try to predict what they will do once in office. Politicians as a breed are not noted for being especially candid on the campaign trail, of course. Furthermore, every president faces unexpected foreign-policy challenges (Truman didn’t expect Korea, Carter didn’t expect Iran, Dubya didn’t expect 9/11, etc.). Still, the Bushlet has left some open sores out there in the rest of the world. So the next president is likely to have to deal with winding down the war in Iraq and figuring out what to do in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which will require reaching some kind of accommodation with Iran. Neither candidate seems to realize this, so they competed to see who could say the most childishly nasty things.

(more…)

More than five years have passed since the invasion of Iraq, since President Bush stood under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on that aircraft carrier. While these fifth anniversaries got some notice, another did not: the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad by a U.S. Army tank on April 8, 2003. The tank attack killed two unembedded journalists, Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television network Telecinco. Couso recorded his own death. He was filming from the balcony and caught on tape the distant tank as it rotated its turret and fired on the hotel. A Spanish court has charged three U.S. servicemen with murder, but the U.S. government refuses to hand over the accused soldiers. The story might have ended there, just another day of violence and death in Iraq, were it not for a young U.S. military intelligence veteran who has just decided to blow the whistle.

Adrienne Kinne is a former Army sergeant who worked in military intelligence for 10 years, from 1994 to 2004. Trained in Arabic, she worked in the Army translating intercepted communications. She told me in an interview this week that she saw a target list that included the Palestine Hotel. She knew that it housed journalists, since she had intercepted calls from the Palestine Hotel between journalists there and their families and friends back home (illegally and unconstitutionally, she thought). (more…)

In the chronology of the Bush administration’s record of manipulation and willful distortion of evidence, the apparent revelation – revealed in a recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate – that Iran ceased its nuclear program in 2003 promises to usher in a renewed phase of White House propaganda. While the cautious pundits and news anchors of the television media may predict this new information to initiate a sea-change in Washington’s antagonistic posturing, I am more skeptical. This administration will somehow find a way to interpret the development as “proof” of their wolf-crying.

Leaving aside the obvious outrage we should express at the government’s failure to rely on solid evidence and the colossally ignorant manner in which Bush threatened to launch WWIII based on shoddy intelligence, it would be prudent to review the case Washington has made against Iran thus far… (more…)