Open Left - Iran

Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy

Zachary Karabell — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:10:41 GMT

The economic relationship between China and the United States is the defining issue of our day. While debates over health care are vital to American society, and while challenges ranging from Iran to Afghanistan to North Korea are real, nothing will determine the arc of the coming decades - or will shape domestic life and prosperity in the United States - more than the emergence of China as a global economic superpower unrivalled except by America.

The rise of China is hardly a secret, but because it is a complex economic that is constantly evolving, it gets less attention than hot-button issues. Absent a real crisis between the two, the relationship is more about the flow of capital and the nature of global business than it is about heated battles inside the Beltway or on Main Street. And while the rise of China and America's increased dependency on Chinese loans to fund its deficits certainly generates anxiety, it's mostly amorphous barring some specific issue to focus it.

How that relationship came to be is the subject of my new book, Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends On It. While this economic fusion has taken more than two decades to evolve, with the crisis of the past year, it has become both a tighter embrace and one more fraught with tension. It's to the credit of both governments - for now - that those tensions have not boiled over.
For their part, the Chinese are concerned about the viability of the American economic system and about the long-term value of their more than $1 trillion of investments in American bonds. They are also dependent on the market even a recession-mired America offers, with exports to the United States still near $300 billion a year. Americans are worried about the effect of lower-cost Chinese labor on U.S. jobs, even though most of the lost jobs were lost long ago and have as much to do with the corrosive effects of technology on labor as they do with cheap production in China. Meanwhile, China offers turbo-charged growth for American companies, as the Chinese government turns to companies like Caterpillar and GE to help with the industrial build-out and as Chinese consumers buy more goods - even a bankrupt GM sold 1.6 million cars in China this year, more than in the United States.

But tripwires abound. The Treasury Department just submitted one of its many required reports to Congress, this one on currency and the Chinese currency especially. The Treasury, Secretary Geithner and by extension the Obama administration decided not to label China a currency manipulator, though the report did express serious concerns that the value of the Chinese currency pegged to the dollar left it undervalued and hence responsible for continued global imbalances.

These reports are dry in nature and are nothing if not wonky. But make no mistake: this was a delicate decision and a consequential one. If the Obama administration had labeled China a manipulator, the next step would be automatic sanctions. That in turn might have generated a domino effect of epic proportions. And given how entwined the U.S. and Chinese economies have become, any negative ripples threaten to halt what is for now a very delicate and incomplete global economic recovery.

For now, the relationship between the two economies is symbiotic, and is providing a degree of stability to both societies. In the absence of Chinese money, the Obama administration could not be spending its way out of recession, and without American companies operating in China and without Americans purchasing Chinese goods, China wouldn't have the money to lend and spend. But no country likes to see its sovereignty eroded and its ability to be master of its own fate undermined - and that is precisely what the economic relationship between the China and the United States does to their respective governments. National sentiment in both countries is also strongly suspicious, and that is likely to intensify.

But for now and for many years to come, we are joined at the hip, China and the United States, and how that relationship is managed by both will determine whether the world ahead is one of increased prosperity or ever-more conflict between winners and losers, between haves and have-nots, and between powers on the rise and powers on the decline.

For a look at additional blogs and other writings of mine, feel free to visit River Twice Research.

Sorry Israel, no Iran war or crippling sanctions 4U

fairleft — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:50:18 GMT

I've said a few times in comments recently that I'm pretty optimistic, from my antiwar and similar perspective, on the Iran and sanctions issue. The reasons are various, but centered on the analysis of India career diplomat M K Bhadrakumar, who also believes the sanctions effort will fail. More on those ideas a couple paragraphs down.

As for my perspective, first of all, not that it's stopped the U.S. before but there is pretty much zero justification for U.S. saber-rattling, as indicated by the mundane headlines (i.e., Iran vows to stick with low-level nuclear enrichment) only two days after the three imperials (Obama, Sarkozy, Brown) news conference about a 'secret' low-grade nuclear 'facility' that was neither secret nor a facility, since it won't be a functioning one till construction ends 18 months from now. This is weak soup for crippling sanctions, naval blockades, and worse. Today, even weaker stuff, 'IRAN TESTS (short-range) MISSILES! Oh my gawd y-a-w-n, weak stuff for scaring us up and dealing death.

Secondly, and Bhadrakumar's analysis is critical here, despite Beltway pundits fishing for wish fulfillment, both China (emphatically) and Russia oppose sanctions on Iran. And this time the U.S. needs international cover, imho, or its 'X must prove it doesn't have WMD' campaign (Hillary Clinton) won't have the outcome (severe sanctions and an attack on Iran's nuclear power facilities) desired by the U.S. & Israeli military-industrial complexes.

Bhadrakumar makes three major points in Moscow holds the line on Iran sanctions:
1. Russia's Medvedev has not meaningfully shifted from his pre-missile-radar-removal stance on sanctions:

The big question, therefore, is whether Medvedev's remark that "in some cases sanctions are inevitable" represents a policy shift by Moscow. Has Obama "wrung a concession" from Medvedev to consider tough new sanctions against Iran - to use the words of New York Times' Helene Cooper? . . .
Surely, there is no tectonic shift in the Russian position on Iran. Arguably, there is nothing new in what Medvedev said in New York. He said much the same in a meeting with the West's Russia experts a month ago [and also in a Russian proposal September 9; sanctions have always been on the table as a very last resort]; he then explained it at some length in the CNN interview.

Bhadrakumar's perspective was confirmed yesterday by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in another nicely headlined article, Russia Urges Restraint Over Iran Nuclear News:

Lavrov . . . questioned assumptions that Tehran was hiding anything and accused Western governments of withholding knowledge of a second Iranian uranium-enrichment plant.
"As far as I understand there's no clarity regarding the legal aspects of this situation," Lavrov said. "I don't want to go into legalistic analysis -- it has to be provided by IAEA -- but don't forget that Iran did notify the agency about its intentions, about its plans to construct a new facility, and we are convinced that whatever is being constructed under the Iranian nuclear program must be brought under the monitoring of IAEA."
Lavrov's statements appeared aimed at easing pressure on Moscow to take a tougher line against Iran when the UN Security Council's veto-wielding members meet next week . . .

2. China, likely coordinating its stance with Russia, continues to strongly oppose sanctions.

"We always believe that sanctions and pressure are not the way out. At present, it is not conducive to diplomatic efforts," Jiang [Yu, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson] said at a briefing in Beijing on Thursday.
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi also repeated Beijing's stance that the issue of Iran's nuclear program was best resolved peacefully through dialogue. Given the close coordination by Moscow and Beijing on major international issues, China wouldn't have spoken out of turn.

3. The anti-nuclear proliferation resolution already shows the sanctioneering imperialists fail versus Russia and China:

In the final analysis, the new UN Security Council resolution passed on Thursday calling for an end to nuclear proliferation did not name Iran - despite robust canvassing by the US and Britain - and that was because Russia and China wouldn't allow that to happen. Also, the resolution stopped well short of authorizing forced inspections of countries believed to be developing weapons.

Where would no meaningful sanctions on Iran plus the U.S. pull back on missile and radar facilities in Eastern Europe leave the world? In a more peaceful, common-sense place, a place where the military option is considerably more off the table than it was a few months ago.

Could it be that St. Barack has hoped for exactly the coming scenario to transpire, and that in a couple weeks he will report to AIPAC and Israel that "I tried my best, but Russia and China blocked me. Please don't cut off the campaign contributions, nothing could be done! But yeah, sorry we couldn't get your war on. Peace."

Nahhhh.

P.S. -- In looking for Bhadrakumar stuff, found this essential atimes article: Fabrication of anti-Iran nuclear 'evidence' covered up. Here's an excerpt:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says its present objective regarding Iran is to try to determine whether the intelligence documents purportedly showing a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program from 2001 to 2003 are authentic or not. The problem, according to its reports, is that Iran refuses to help clarify the issue.
But the IAEA has refused to acknowledge publicly significant evidence brought to its attention by Iran that the documents were fabricated, and has made little, if any, effort to test the authenticity of the intelligence documents or to question officials of the governments holding them, Inter Press Service (IPS) has learned.
[For example,] Iran has submitted serious evidence that the documents are fraudulent. Iran's permanent representative to the United Nations in Vienna, Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS. He said he had pointed out to a team of IAEA officials in a meeting on the documents in Tehran in early 2008 that none of the supposedly top-secret military documents had any security markings of any kind, and that purported letters from Defense Ministry officials lacked Iranian government seals.

Obama lies again about Iran's nuclear program.

Michael Kwiatkowski — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:43:57 GMT

And the lies just keep on coming. When Iran announced the existence of its second nuclear site, something the U.S. has apparently known about for years, Barack Obama once again followed Bush-Cheney policy by lying about Iran's nuclear activities.

Obama joined the leaders of Britain and France in accusing the Islamic republic of clandestinely building an underground plant to make nuclear fuel that could be used to build an atomic bomb. Iranian officials acknowledged the facility but insisted it had been reported to nuclear authorities as required.

Obama should try reading intelligence reports, like 2007's National Intelligence Estimate (the combined consensus report by all sixteen known U.S. intelligence agencies), which stated quite clearly that there is no concrete evidence of a weapons program in Iran. In July and August of this year, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed the lack of evidence although it refuses to state anything definitively. Yet still Obama, the D.C. political establishment, and the corporate media continue to lie to the contrary.

We've already been lied into one failed war, lied into ramping up another failed war, are so hurting for fresh soldiers that the Pentagon is now actively accepting white supremacists, yet still the establishment seeks to lie us into another conflict. And some people have wondered why my signature now has an image of Obama and Bush morphed into one unholy beast. Now you know.

Corporatocracy 'news' on Gaza, Iran, and then some real news

fairleft — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:46:59 GMT

News is 'news' in our corporatacracy. Currently, for example, we have the Israeli-Warmongers-Only-Perspective 'News'. See below for how the release of a UN report on the war criminal conduct on both sides of the Gaza war is widely headlined in the mainstream news (to see how news of 320 dead Gazan children in that massacre is handled (hint: 'not at all'), see NPR's Linda Gradstein):

Israel fights 'perverse' UN report on Gaza
The funniest part is this sentence --
Both sides of the Gaza conflict criticised the report for putting them on the same footing.

-- followed by 5 paragraphs of Israeli criticism of the report, and then the article ends.

Just a reminder that it is possible to headline the release of the UN report fairly: Israel, Hamas called to account. Now was that so hard?

Related is the 'Anything to get "Iran's Got Nukes!" Into the Headline' 'News':

Iran is a nuclear power: Ahmadinejad aide
Where the Iranian spokesperson is allowed to dispel the headline's glaring implication in paragraph 20:
Javanfekr said Iran is ready to face the six powers and "during the talks we will definitely speak of banning nuclear arms globally because it is not a problem for us as we do not possess any nuclear arms."

So, obviously 'nuclear power' means 'nuclear power power'. Some of you got your war on before you realized that, right? That was the intent.

Meanwhile, McClatchy continues to be a source of news. Here it provides some reality on the domestic side, first the real health care catastrophe:

Family health costs outpace inflation and wage growth
The article links to this chart:

The news article, being news, appropriately doesn't tell us that Obama's health care proposal will do nothing about health care's skyrocketing cost, since doing something would bother the profits of heavy campaign contributors like the insurance and hospital industries. Hey, it would be nice if there were more of that from the mainstream liberal punditocracy or even from obscure blue blogs, but that is where Obamalove generally continues to reign.

Finally, there's this, also from McClatchy:

Americans are getting poorer, and it's going to get worse
Nice comment at the bottom by LuckyTN:
LuckyTN wrote on September 14, 11:41 AM:
Politicians are able to "fix" things if they are not bought off by corporations. Our government is becoming less and less democratic and more and more resembling an corportocracy-oligarchy. We are allowing the following discourse to prevail: he who makes the most noise wins. Willing ignorance of facts, lack of civil discourse, collective paranoia, and a prevalence of fear of the"other" are destroying our government and society. We appear to be willing dupes as corporations as well as a bought and paid for governmental structure dismantle our society in the name of profits from low wages, outsourcing jobs, little or no regulation governing business practices, and destruction of the environment.

Keeping our eye on the prize, ending corporate control of our 'democracy', is easy when the real news is as bad as it is, and never has it contrasted more sharply with the 'news'.

My little bit

nssmit2 — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:30:18 GMT

I don't know if anyone will read this, but if you do, I am selling t-shirts to raise money for amnesty. They can be found at www.everthustodeadbeats.etsy.com

They picture ahmadinejad with a caption of 'demockracy'. I will donate 50% of any profit to amnesty international, or perhaps a more specific charity if someone can point me in that direction. I would donate more but I have to miss work to make the shirts and like most on here I'm pretty close to hand to mouth living. Anyways, peace.

Iran As Mirror/Lover

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Iran's meaning is dense, dynamic, complex and immediate-it is half like a mirror to us, half like a lover ("I'll Be Your Mirror" as Nico sang.)
--"Changing More Than Congress--Altering The Online/Offline Ecology Of American Politics "

I'll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you dont know
Ill be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that youre home
When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside youre twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
cause I see you
--Lou Reed

Velvet Revolution:
The term Velvet Revolution was coined by a journalist after the first events and it caught on in world media and eventually in Czechoslovakia. The media, riding on an infotainment wave, saw this success and started the tradition of inventing and assigning a poetic name to similar events - see color revolution.
It is believed that the term originated from the various communist opposition groups which met in theaters such as the Laterna Magika, velvet referring to the velvet ropes found in all these theaters.[citation needed]
Another theory is that the revolution took its name from The Velvet Underground, an influential American rock and roll band. Václav Havel is a great fan of the Velvet Underground, and is a friend of Lou Reed, who was the principal singer-songwriter of the group, and told Reed after the collapse of communism, "Because of you, I am President."[13] The significance of music as an influence in the revolution is reflected in Frank Zappa (of whom Havel was also a lifelong fan), being asked by Havel to serve as a consultant for the government on trade, cultural matters and tourism.

It wasn't Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War. It was Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. And Nico.

May it be so again.

America's Big Assist To Iranian Leadership

danps — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:12:29 GMT

Little-noticed authority granted to the president several decades ago may be helping the architects of the crackdown in Iran. The unintended consequences are enough to justify a second look at whether those powers should stay in place.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Last week digby posted on a report that the CIA is now looking to recruit Wall Street financial analysts to offer their guidance on economic matters. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the CIA's retirement program is a government pension and not a 401(k). She followed up this week by pulling a May 2006 Business Week article from Dawn Kopecki back from the memory hole. The BW piece reports on a 1977 amendment to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that allows the president to exempt companies from accounting and reporting requirements in the name of national security. (Think presidents Bush or Obama have considered national security at stake during the economic crisis?) One of the comments to the article is fascinating:

...It makes perfect sense. If you want to keep an operation black, you have to prevent any public record of any kind from existing. Look at how enemy-loving activists were able to troll records of landings and takeoffs and from that figure out the pattern of CIA rendition flights. It is easy to see how financial records can open up similar vulnerabilities, especially when ostensibly small companies undertake large black projects that involve a lot of federal expenditure. While a big operation like General Dynamics probably doesn't need this, an small operation might. So might [companies] that are wholly government owned and pretend to be investor owned as a ruse. Remember, the CIA has the authority to create dummy companies, and some of these [companies] might issue stock as a ruse to hide their real ownership from foreign targets. The CIA might also run financial black ops against our enemies to wipe out enemies financially, and need a way of keeping investigators at bay.

It is the prospect of such an operation that is putting us at a disadvantage in Iran. One of our most pressing international issues at the moment has been actively harmed by a report of CIA involvement: Almost a year ago Seymour Hersh wrote (via) that the agency had received around $400 million to destabilize Iran's leadership. That story has taken on new life as it gets referenced in the Muslim world and Iranian Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsuli repeats it for popular consumption. Given the heavy level of censorship there it does not matter that Barack Obama says such claims are "patently false," what matters is whether the Iranian people believe it. In this critical moment where traditional media is blockaded and new media is not widely distributed or reliable we have provided the mullahs a propaganda windfall. The fact that state-run outlets can point to a prior report by a prestigious American journalist of CIA meddling contributes greatly to their cause. No one knows what we did with that money. Maybe nothing ever got off the ground, or there was some modest and fruitless effort, or a Bay of Pigs style bungle, or an attempt to catalyze unrest into actual demonstrations. The bottom line is, they simply toss the claim out there and let their citizens' imaginations fill in the rest. Given our history we should not expect those details to be flattering.

It seems like the only time we learn about CIA covert activity abroad the details are not good, and spare me the talk of hidden successes. One of the logical devices I am officially out of patience with is the argument that some top secret bit of intelligence or operations has been fabulously productive in advancing the national interest, but unfortunately is too sensitive to share with the unwashed masses. We need to draw a line: if it is not in the public domain it does not exist. We have been far too willing to let officials get by with dark intimations of security breaches in order to skip the inconvenient exercise of carrying a debate via persuasion. If you can't tell us about it and we cannot ask questions about it or dig into it, then don't even bring it up.

Moreover, even if such triumphs really do exist we do not ever seem to account for the simple trust- and credibility-destroying quality that the mere existence of CIA those operations cause us. We never discuss the price we pay in terms of lost goodwill or increased suspicion. The fact that it is working so decisively against us in such a crucial moment should prompt a re-examination, though. There is a strong case to be made that the president should not have the power to launch such intrigues abroad, and certainly should not have been granted the authority to secretly bend the law at home. The two are linked, and perhaps both should be taken away from the executive branch.

On Looking Deeper, Or, Things About Iran You Might Not Know

fake consultant — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:41:44 GMT

It has been an amazing week in Iran, and you are no doubt seeing images that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago.

For most of us, Iran has been a country about which we know very little...which, obviously, makes it tough to put the limited news we're getting into a proper context.

The goal of today's conversation is to give you a bit more of an "insider look" at today's news; and to do that we'll describe some of the risks Iranian bloggers face as they go about their business, we'll meet a blogging Iranian cleric, we'll address the issue of what tools the Iranians use for Internet censorship and the companies that could potentially be helping it along, and then we'll examine Internet traffic patterns into and out of Iran.

Finally, a few words about, of all things, how certain computer games might be useful as tools of revolution.
The first task for today...let's talk about blogging:

It turns out that bloggers in Iran risk running afoul of the Press Law of 1986, which, in addition to requiring the licensing of media outlets, reads in part:

Article 6: The print media are permitted to publish news items except in cases when they violate Islamic principles and codes and public rights as outlined in this chapter...
...5. Encouraging and instigating individuals and groups to act against the security, dignity and interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran within or outside the country...
...7. Insulting Islam and its sanctities, or, offending the Leader of the Revolution and recognized religious authorities (senior Islamic jurisprudents);
8. Publishing libel against officials, institutions, organizations and individuals in the country or insulting legal or real persons who are lawfully respected, even by means of pictures or caricatures; and
9. Committing plagiarism or quoting articles from the deviant press, parties and groups which oppose Islam (inside and outside the country) in such a manner as to propagate such ideas (the limits of such offenses shall be defined by the executive by-law)...
... Article 25: If a person, through the press, expressly and overtly instigates and encourages people to commit crimes against the domestic security or foreign policies of the state, as specified in the public penal code, and should his/her action bear adverse consequences, he/she shall be prosecuted and condemned as an accomplice in that crime. However, if no evidence is found on such consequences he/she shall be subject to a decision of the religious judge according to Islamic penal code.
Article 26: Whoever insults Islam and its sanctities through the press and his/her guilt amounts to apostasy, shall be sentenced as an apostate and should his/her offense fall short of apostasy he/she shall be subject to the Islamic penal code.
Article 27: Should a publication insult the Leader or Council of Leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran or senior religious authorities (top Islamic jurisprudents), the license of the publication shall be revoked and its managing director and the writer of the insulting article shall be referred to competent courts for punishment.

(In Iran, the penalty for apostasy is death.)

Those bloggers who are not licensed can still be prosecuted under the Penal Code, as the OpenNet Initiative reports in an excellent article they've just posted on the subject.

In 2008 the Iranian parliament passed a law which provides for the death penalty for bloggers who engage in non-permitted activities, a situation faced today by Yaghub Mehrnahad, who publishes the "Mehrnahad" blog.

(Interestingly, this blog can be reached in Persian, but an attempt to access the same URL with Google Translate returns this message:

"You are not authorized to view this page
The Web server you are attempting to reach has a list of IP addresses that are not allowed to access the Web site, and the IP address of your browsing computer is on this list."

More about that later.)

There is also the risk of torture: a problem noted by the BBC at least as far back as 2005.

Ironically, Mohammad Ali Abtabi, a cleric and former Vice-President of Iran whom you may have recently seen on "The Daily Show" maintains a blog in which he does criticize Iranian society on a regular basis, including his assessment of the recent election as "a huge swindling"...which has now caused the authorities to place him under arrest.

So how does Iran manage to control Internet access?

What they aren't doing is employing the simplest method possible: cutting off all access. This is presumably because of the negative impact on the Iranian economy that would be caused by business being unable to do what they need to do online.

There are several methods being employed, including a requirement that all Internet Service Providers in the country connect to the state-owned Data communication Company of Iran (DCI) for international access, that all ISPs put in place "filtering" and monitoring technologies, and that households be blocked from having access to high-speed Internet connections.

As of this writing the fastest Internet connection now available for an Iranian household is 128k, about double the speed of a dial-up connection...and as you might guess, not fast enough to allow Iranians to use such services as YouTube. A 6MB cable Internet connection, not uncommon in the US, would be roughly 50 times faster. Because of this the total capacity of Iran's international Internet connections are roughly 12GB per second. Normal traffic is about 5GB per second, which, we are told, is about the same as a mid-size American city.

OpenNet reports that after an initial period of reliance upon foreign monitoring software, the government decided to create an "in-house" capability, and as a result there are locally developed software packages designed to allow access to the actual data packets in messages-meaning that authorities can read such things as e-mails and instant messages after they are sent and before they pass through the DCI "gateway".

There has been a conversation regarding the role of Western equipment suppliers in all of this; and it is alleged that a Nokia/Siemens joint venture (Nokia/Siemens Networks) has sold to the Iranians equipment that is used to monitor the Internet use of Iranian citizens. The company denies this, however.

They also want you to know that the joint venture has been sold to a third party, and that, as their press release tells us: "providing people, wherever they are, with the ability to communicate ultimately benefits societies and brings greater prosperity".

Another method of blocking access is to deny connections to certain sets of IP addresses, and this is why, presumably, I could not access the translated version of the "Mehrnahad" blog. This method would also allow the Iranians to block access to and from inside the country to sites like the BBC, Google, and Blogspot.

There is a way around "address blocking" which involves setting up "relays" and "bridges" that can be accessed by people in Iran-and this is something you yourself can do that can be of considerable benefit to Iranians trying to reach out to the rest of us.

The Iranian Government is also trying to locate and isolate those with Twitter accounts that are set to the Tehran time zone...and you can help make that process tougher by either setting up a Twitter account and setting the time zone to Tehran, or changing your existing account's time zone.

The next few minutes are going to get a bit geeky, and for this I apologize in advance.

In order for your computer to use certain services that involve communicating with other computers the operating system utilizes a series of "ports" (this is all in the software, so don't bother looking at the back of the machine to find them).

Some quick examples: the TCP/IP connection your computer is using to access the Internet is through Port 80 and the FTP service runs on Port 21.

There are two kinds of ports-TCP and UDP-and there is no reason to explain here why or how they differ.

There are thousands of ports, the ports used are usually specific to a particular service, and there are giant lists of assigned ports that everyone can access. A service can (and usually does) use more than one port for two-way communication with a computer, which is why the Federal Emergency Management Agency Information System uses TCP Port 1777 and UDP Port 1777.

The routing data that packets of information display as they travel through the Internet includes the port that the packet is seeking to access...and that data is accessible to all routers...and if you controlled the gateway through which all inbound and outbound Internet traffic was passing through you could block packets that seek to utilize certain ports.

Experts are suggesting that this is exactly what is happening today in Iran, with more than 80% of traffic bound for ports using the Adobe Flash Player being blocked, nearly 75% of the POP Service (e-mail) traffic being blocked, and roughly 70% of traffic bound for ports used by "proxy servers" being intercepted. (Proxy servers, by the way, are the same type of connections we discussed earlier that you can set up at home to help Iranians trying to reach the Internet.)

Voice over IP (VoIP), the Internet "telephone" service, is proving to be a troublesome issue for censors, as it has legitimate business purposes and is difficult to censor without either having someone listening on the other end of the line or installing a monitoring system worthy of the National Security Agency.

Interestingly, with the exception of the few hours immediately following the vote, the amount of Internet blockage, overall, seems to be fairly close to what it was just before the voting. However, the amount of "instability" has been highly variable, suggesting that certain blocks of IP addresses have been temporarily "withdrawn" from the Internet's address structure, for want of a better term, and then once again made known to that same addressing infrastructure.

It is suggested that this may be because the Iranian Government has been able to institute a sufficient level of monitoring on those address blocks so as to make them comfortable with again allowing the users of those addresses access to the Internet.

In one of the oddest developments I've heard so far, there are reports that certain communications protocols used by some games are not being blocked. We will not go into specifics here, but it seems strange indeed that the video game your mother didn't want you playing all day might actually be a tool for surreptitious communication.

And with all that said, let's wrap it up for today.

Here's what we've learned: it is indeed hazardous to be a blogger in Iran.

Despite the fact that it can get you tortured or get you the death penalty, there are those who take the risk-including a former Vice-President who now finds himself under arrest.

We can help Iranian citizens by installing software on our own computers that helps them obtain uncensored Internet access, and about 1/3 of that traffic is getting through.

The regime is not attempting to permanently shut down all Internet traffic-and in fact, that would be a cure that might be as bad as the disease.

The Iranian Government, instead, is developing and operating a sophisticated system of Internet blocking, but it is not perfect...and there are odd connections that could be used that most people would never think of as useful for the purpose.

Finally, a Western company is accused of selling equipment to Iran that could be used for Internet monitoring, but the company in question denies that the gear they sold Iran can perform the tasks the accusers say it can.

It is rare indeed to be able to see two revolutions taking place at the same time--but as you're watching the news from the newest Iranian Revolution...keep an eye on the news of the Internet Revolution as well.

WARNING-Self-promotion ahead: I am competing for a Netroots Nation scholarship, and I was not selected in the first round of voting. There are two more chances to be selected...with an announcement due this week...so even if you've done so before, I still have to ask you to stop by the Democracy for America site and click on the "Add your support" link to offer your support for me again. Thanks for your patience, and we now return you to your regular programming.

Republicans Urge Obama to Support Iranian Theocracy

Chris Bowers — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:40:35 GMT

For the past few weeks, I have made a concerted effort to cease all attacks on Republicans. (See my article "Target Landrieu, not Limbaugh," for more.)
As progressives, the governing problem we face right now does not come from the relatively powerless Republican minority, but rather from conservative Democrats and an often too timid leadership. In fact, taking a page from the Blue Dogs, it is actually through real threats to side with Republicans that progressives might be able to win real bargaining power in Congress. (See my article "The Progressive Block" for more.)

However, in response for Republican calls for Americans to take a more active role in supporting the Iranian protesters, tonight I am going to make an exception. More in the extended entry.
Republicans seem to want President Obama to start making public statements in favor of the causes of the Iranain protesters, and not just their right to protest. They suddenly want us to be like France, too:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others noted that Western leaders, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have demanded a recount or more forcefully condemned the government crackdown.

"I'd like to see the president be stronger than he has been, although I appreciate the comments that he made yesterday," McCain said. "I think we ought to have America lead."

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said a slow or muted U.S. response risks undermining the aspirations of Iranian voters to change or question their government.

"If America stands for democracy and all of these demonstrations are going on in Tehran and other cities over there, and people don't think that we really care, then obviously they're going to question, 'do we really believe in our principles?'" Grassley said.

The single most effective way to quash the protest movement in Iran, and to strengthen the Iranian theocracy, would be for President Obama to start demanding a new election in Iran. To demonstrate this, McCain and Grassley should take a refresher course about what happened when foreign activists tried to play a role in the 2004 presidential election in the United States.

In a campaign dubbed "Operation Clark County," the left-leaning Guardian in the UK organized readers to send in letters to residents of Clark County, Ohio. The goal was to convince undecideds in the uber-swing state to vote for John Kerry. After streams of hate mail decrying foreign meddling were sent back across the Atlantic, here was the predictable final result:

The most significant stat here is how Clark County compares to the other 15 Ohio counties won by Gore in 2000. Kerry won every Gore county in Ohio except Clark. He even increased Gore's winning margin in 12 of the 16. Nowhere among the Gore counties did more votes move from the blue to the red column than in Clark.

To no one's surprise, voters in Clark County, about one in five of whom received a letter from overseas, became more supportive of the Bush administration as a result of this campaign. If the Obama administration were to start making vocal support for the causes, and not just the rights, of the Iranian protesters, it would have exactly the same effect in Iran.

That Republicans are missing this fairly obvious point is enough to make you think that they actually want to strengthen the Iranian theocracy. Then again, given both the invasion of Iraq and the bellicose language directed at Iran during the Bush administration, it has seemed for a long time that Republicans wish to actively prop up the Iranian theocracy.

Or, rather than wanting to support the Iranain theocracy, maybe Republicans just find it frustrating that we are unable to take direct action that would benefit the protesters. That is kind of frustrating, actually. However, it probably seemed frustrating to most of the world that they were unable to reshape the American government under the Bush administration. In fact, Bush won a second term significantly due to American resentfulness at the rest of the world.

Or, maybe Republicans just said something stupid while ineffectively trying to score political points, and we should all refocus our attention on how to pass progressive legislation. I'm going with this one, and returning to my regularly scheduled attacks against Democrats and advocacy organizations tomorrow.

Gloves Come Off In Iran--Police w/ Tear Gas, Water Cannons Clash w/ Protesters

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Below: What Obama gets and doesn't get about what a progressive foreign policy means.

Events in Iran have taken a sharp turn towards confrontation, as the regime's attempt to shut down all demonstrations with a show of armed force met fierce resistance.

Armed police forces are being used to prevent the formation of large-scale demonstrations--two were scheduled for today--but thousands of demonstrators have repeatedly clashed with police.

From Nico Pitney's HuffPo Live Blog:

10:22 AM ET -- The demonstrators' dilemma. From an Iranian via reader Samira: "All streets are full of basiji and police. they have blocked all the streets. You can not go south of Felestin street. So if one stops to ponder what to do next, they attack and beat!"
....
10:15 AM ET -- AP: Dozens of protesters "seriously beaten." "The witnesses told The Associated Press that between 50 and 60 protesters were seriously beaten by police and pro-government militia and taken to Imam Khomeini hospital in central Tehran. People could be seen dragging away comrades bloodied by baton strikes. Helicopters hovered over central Tehran. Ambulance sirens echoed through the streets and black smoke rose over the city. Tehran University was cordoned off by police and militia while students inside the university chanted 'death to the dictator,' witnesses said."
10:11 AM ET -- AFP: Unrest at Tehran University. "One to two thousand protestors have gathered in front of Tehran University, which is close to the site of a mass rally planned on Saturday, a witness told AFP."
10:01 AM ET -- AP reports "fierce clashes."
Eyewitnesses described fierce clashes near Revolution Square in central Tehran after some 3,000 protesters chanted "Death to the dictator!" and "Death to dictatorship!" Police responded with tear gas and water cannons, the witnesses said. [...]

English-language state TV said a blast at the Tehran shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had killed one persona and wounded two but the report could not be independently confirmed due to government restrictions on independent reporting. [...]

Web sites run by supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi said he planned to post a message, but there was no statement by the time of the planned street protests at 4 p.m. (7:30 a.m. EDT, 1130 GMT).

There are also reports of at least two alleged acts of violence by protesters, though such claims are highly suspicious, to say the least....
First, the blast at the Khomeini Shrine:

9:40 AM ET -- State media claims 2 injured at Khomeini shrine explosion.
NBC's Ann Curry tweets: "Iran state tv claims explosion at tomb of revered Ayatollah Khomeini. Would incite anger against protesters. Is it true? ... Remember Iran govt is the only source of this explosion report. NO independent confirmation and misinformation is dangerous."
A reader, speculating that the government set the bomb, writes, "The mullahs did something similar in August 1978 in Iran - they set a cinema in Abadan ablaze and blamed the Shah. That was the turning point of that revolution as the people bagan to see the Shah as ruthless."
....
9:24 AM ET -- CNN: "Blast" at mausoleum. CNN, citing state-run media, is reporting a "blast" at a mausoleum.
Update: CNN reporting that the explosion was at the Imam Khomeini Mausoleum "about 20 minutes outside of the city."

And, more recently:

10:19 AM ET -- Timing of reported blast. Many are reporting a message on Twitter claiming that the alleged suicide bombing at a shrine in southern Tehran was reported by state media before it actually occurred. There is no confirmed evidence of this. I'll update if I see any.
....
10:04 AM ET -- Shrine bombing attributed to suicide bomber. "More on that explosion at the shrine: 'A suicide bomber was killed at the northern wing of Imam Khomeini's shrine. Two people were injured,' Fars news agency said, according to Reuters. Khamenei talked about the threat of terrorism in his speech yesterday. 'Street demonstrations are a target for terrorist plots. Who would be responsible if something happened?' he said."

And a second incident:

10:40 AM ET -- Ahmadinejad building set on fire. Reuters, via reader Larry:
"Supporters of Iran's defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi on Saturday set on fire a building in southern Tehran used by backers of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a witness said. The witness also said police shot into the air to disperse rival supporters in Tehran's south Karegar street."

Had this happened a week ago, this would probably be the end of it. But with days on end of mass demonstrations bringing out hundreds of thousands, if not a million or more protesters, there is not just an enormous mass movement for change, there is also a tremendous loss of legitimacy for the regime--a loss of the legitimacy that today's use of force may very well only deepen and accelerate.

Indeed, leading up to today, one of the emergent themes has been widening of cracks in the regime and its perceived legitimacy. For example:

7:41 PM ET -- Cracks in the foundation. The well regarded analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies offers his view on Iran's ruling conservatives, who he argues are "more divided than ever."
At the same time, while the Supreme Leader did firmly back Ahmadinejad and the legitimacy of the election in his Friday prayer, and he cannot put this genie back in the bottle. Khamenei has always had uncertain credentials as a religious scholar and he now has uncertain credibility as a leader. Everyone in Iran, the Middle East, and the world now has reason to question the legitimacy of every element of Iran's leadership and the Iranian revolution. The Iranian leadership now has to realize that it is more divided than was ever apparent before and that Iran's people and the world know it. It has to see just how much anger there is at the Mullah's level of social repression and the failures in the Iranian economy. The leadership can only quickly ease the social repression side of this equation. It would take years of effort to make a major difference in economic development. As a result, even apparent success by the current leadership will to some extent be lasting failure. This may not have a Berlin Wall kind of ending, but Iran is not China. The lasting impact is much more likely to be similar to the decades long impact of the repression of the uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

It also is impossible to rule out some form of Mousavi victory, both now and over the months to come. Whatever happens, if Ahmadinejad stays without a truly legitimate election, the result will fester, not go away. Every embarrassing new piece of excessive rhetoric, every new threat to Iran's neighbors, every new problem in the economy, and every new act of social repression will be a reminder of the fact that Iran's leadership has questionable legitimacy at best.

As today's scattered events filter in and people try to make sense of it, it also makes sense to reflect on America's response.

First of all, I can't help but note this rare example, proving that Peegy Noonan is actually capable of the sort of mature behavior she is so often falsely associated with:

12:24 PM ET -- Peggy Noonan bashes Republicans' Iran rhetoric. A pretty surprising column:
America so often gets Iran wrong. We didn't know when the shah was going to fall, didn't foresee the massive wave that would topple him, didn't know the 1979 revolution would move violently against American citizens, didn't know how to handle the hostage-taking. Last week we didn't know a mass rebellion was coming, and this week we don't know who will emerge the full or partial victor. So modesty and humility seem appropriate stances from which to observe and comment. ...

John McCain and others went quite crazy insisting President Obama declare whose side America was on, as if the world doesn't know whose side America is on. "In the cause of freedom, America cannot be neutral," said Rep. Mike Pence. Who says it's neutral? This was Aggressive Political Solipsism at work: Always exploit events to show you love freedom more than the other guy, always make someone else's delicate drama your excuse for a thumping curtain speech.

Nost substantively, however, I think, is the question of how deeply grounded is Obama's good sense. Not being warmongerish is certainly a good start. Knowing that overt expressions of outright support would only serve to undermine the Iranian people's demands is good common sense--something utterly lacking in the GOP. But as has happened before with Obama, there's a telling detail in how he expresses himself that betrays a lack of the sort of deep progressive framing that we would so desperately want to see coming from him:

11:56 AM ET -- Are U.S. officials being too quiet? I wanted to reexamine this question in light of some new comments today. First, from Spencer Ackerman:
Hadi Ghaemi of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said he has a hard time taking a strong stance one way or the other about the Berman-Pence Iran resolution currently being debated on the House floor. But it's wading awfully close into a "political act" for his taste "The text is not objectionable," Ghaemi told me. "But it will be seen as a political act" by the Iranian regime.

Second, via Andrew, comments by Amir Fakhravar, who has been "jailed and tortured in Iran for advocating democracy and speaking out against the Iranian government" and remains in touch with reformers:
"Right now, (Obama) could say, 'America stands for freedom and democracy, and as a United States president, I want to stand behind all of the freedom fighters in the world that are fighting peacefully to have democracy and freedom,'" Fakhravar said. "That's the American Dream. I don't know why he didn't say that. He said, 'this is none of our business.'"

The contrary argument, of course, is that if Obama or Congress speak out more aggressively, it will endanger the reformists in Iran and give ammunition to Khamenei and his allies.
Khamenei's speech today pushed me to reexamine this line of thinking. He didn't need an incendiary line from Obama to stir up anti-U.S. sentiments -- he just made one up. "It was said on behalf of the U.S. President that he was waiting for a day that people came out to streets," he claimed.

This analysis is flawed, I think, since the same could be said about US GOP hardliners--they, too, lie like dogs about Obama, but there's still an enormous advantage that flows from his judiciousness. In Iran, they can say whatever they want, but they don't have the videotape of Obama saying stuff like John McCain does, and that's a very, very good thing.

My problem is something else entirely. It's Obama's statement that 'this is none of our business' -- which he did, indeed say. And this clashes fundamentally with what George Lakoff argued before 9/11, in a paper I've discussed on several occasions, "The Mind and The World: Changing the Very Idea of American Foreign Policy" (PDF). As I wrote two weeks in "Why Not A Progressive Foreign Policy? Part 2: The Whole Enchilada":

In the paper, Lakoff starts off by observing that since the end of the Cold War, a broad range of international issues have emerged that don't don't fit into the traditional "foreign policy" framework, and could appear to be nothing more than a laundry list of unrelated issues--things like global warming, women's rights, global public health, etc. However, he goes on to argue that there is a very natural framework that encompases them all: the framework of moral norms. These are all issues that involve how a community of nations ought to conduct itself. Furthermore, Lakoff argues, the moral norms framework produces a better global neighborhood or environment than the traditional self-interest framework that foreign policy has traditionally used, the same way that an ordinary neighborhood is a better place to live when the people there treat each other according to a shared set of norms, rather than only looking out for their own self-interest.
The idea of operating within a framework of moral norms was present throughout Obama's Cairo speech, and indeed has long been a part of America's foreign policy outlook, though it has rarely been clearly articulated as such. Individual norms have been invoked often enough, but all too often there's been an ulterior motive, which only serves to build suspicion. But when a wide range of normative statements are made, as Obama did in his Cairo speech, there is a clear implication that something very different is afoot. Whether or not that comes to pass depends on many different things, not the least of which is developing a more broadly shared understanding of just what that means.

The "moral norms" framework stands in opposition to the "national interests" framework, and the very of what's "our business" and what's "none of our business" is central to the "national interests" framework. So when Obama says that what's happening in Iran is "none of our business" he is betraying the very essence of what he said in Cairo--or at least what he appeared to be saying.

And that is what I have a problem with.

What should he have said? That's a lot trickier question to try to answer. But I can give an example that can point us in the right direction. He could have said something like this:

self-determination

for that reason

This is not necessarily the ideal thing Obama could say. But it does clearly get us out of the "self-interest" framework and place us squarely in the "moral norms" framework, which is where we need to be operating from 24/7. If you're a progressive, that's what it means to be an American.

Voices From Iran

danps — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 09:51:32 GMT

Quotes from those involved in the events of the past week, taken from a variety of sources.

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

M.E. Dabiri:

A white-haired man emerged from the mosque to tell his wife who was standing in line in front of me, "There are about fifty people ahead of us."

As we entered the mosque, a guard who was standing at the door, looked down at the girls and said, "You have come to vote, too?"

I was essentially witnessing a nation voting for the first time in 2,500 years.

Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi (via Andrew Sullivan, whose coverage has been fantastic):

My request would be that in order that things calm down, these elections should be declared null and void and new elections should be organised under the supervision of international institutions.

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri (via):

These last days, we have witnessed the lively efforts of you, brothers and sisters, old and young alike, from every social category, for the 10th presidential elections.

Our youth, hoping to see their rightful will fulfilled, came on the scene and waited patiently. This was the greatest occasion for the government's officials to bond with their people.

However, unfortunately, they used it in the worst way possible. Declaring results that no one in their right mind can believe, and despite all the evidence of crafted results, and contrary to the people's protestations, in front of the eyes of the same nation who carried the weight of a revolution and 8 years of war, in front of the eyes of local and foreign reporters, attacked the children of the people with astonishing violence. And now they are attempting a purge, arresting intellectuals, political opponents and Scientists.

Anonymous Tehranian eyewitness to Tuesday's Demonstration for Mousavi:

Tehran is fast becoming two. In the late afternoon and lasting until around dinner time it is a place of peaceful civic celebration, a disneyland of political action for the whole family to participate. At night, the mood shifts abruptly, and the capital becomes a battleground, a city in which fear stalks on motorbikes mounted in helmeted pairs...

Photographer Newsha Tavakolian:

I went around on a motorbike, trying to look like any other girl who sits on the back of a motorcycle - the camera between me and the driver. Tehran has 18 million people and is a very busy city, so motorbikes are very convenient; also, when you need to get away quickly. When they ask me, I show my accreditations. As an Iranian, I know when to run and when not to.

Mir Hossein Mousavi (via Nico Pitney, whose HuffPo page has been invaluable - as has The Lede's coverage.):

Like you know, in the past few days, there have been clashes - legally and illegally - that have been violent between protesters of the election and their critics. A number of you have been injured and several have been martyred. I would first like to convey my condolences to you. At the same time, I would like you all to go to mosques and to places of worship in order to remember them and to pray for them. We will also commemorate them by our peaceful protests. I would like you to know that I will also be taking part in these protests and commemorations.

From Exile On Moan Street (via):

In response to Ahmadinejad's earlier speech calling the supporters of Mousavi "brushwood and thorns," Iran's most famous classical musician has ordered that Iranian government television/radio never play his music again. Mohammad Reza Shajarian told BBC Persian in an interview:Don't broadcast my voice on Seda va Sima [IRIB Music channel] ever again: my voice is like brushwood and thorns, and it will forever remain brushwood and thorns!

Mohammadreza Habibi, prosecutor-general in the central province of Isfahan:

We warn the few elements controlled by foreigners who try to disrupt domestic security by inciting individuals to destroy and to commit arson that the Islamic penal code for such individuals waging war against God is execution.

persiankiwi:

IRIB.ir said that we are all violent thugs - we are showing you everyday that we are peaceful Sea of Green.

Unidentified blogger, 14 June:

Today the orchestrators of the coup d'etat have removed their masks, today the ugly faces of those who have diverted the 30-year revolution have been revealed to the people, today the dark side of the criminal government which is seeking absolute power has been revealed.

Unidentified twitterer:

Will this be the Berlin Wall coming down or just another Tianenmen Sq.? I wonder to myself

Hossein, a 23-year-old member of the security forces

I would never [fire on protesters]. Maybe someone would, but I would never fire on any of these people myself.

Housewife Zahra Dadashi:

How can I ignore what's happening in the country and what they did last night to the students? I was young when Imam Khomeini came to Iran and ruled the country. I'm now very sure that this government and the supreme leader has nothing to do with Imam Khomeini, I can't close my eyes.

Before this, I was always hearing how cruelly the riot police are treating students and people, but now I have witnessed it with my eyes. Before, I was assuming it to be rumours, but now I'm 100% sure that this government has nothing to do with Islam. They are dictators.

The widespread, sustained, peaceful and courageous demonstrations by Iranians this week has been an astonishing and inspiring sight. In a way this feels like the anti-9/11.

#IranElection #gr88

Natasha Chart — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

If weren't following what followed the election in Iran over the weekend, that might be due to its not being televised, but Twittered and shared on other internet social media.

As I write this, the most retweeted (RT or rt) comments seem to be a call for protestors to wear black today in mourning for those killed by the security forces and a declaration that the only violent actions are being taken by the Basij/Baseej volunteer militia.

There are also calls for the crowds at rallies to remain quiet and calm, mixed with warnings that plainclothes Basij may mingle with the crowds and try to stir up trouble. Rachel Maddow's segment on the uprising last night shows what at least one crowd of demonstrators have been doing in response to police - sitting down. This clip shows another group calmly standing beside and talking with police:

The Maddow clip was also interesting, as it ended on a discussion with Reza Aslan, a contributor at The Daily Beast and a senior fellow at the Orfalea Center on Global and International Studies at UCSB, who talked about the power of mourning rallies, such as the one Mousavi has called for today, in honor of those killed by security forces. Aslan notes that successively larger mourning rallies, followed by even more repressive crackdowns, were what brought down the Shah.

Aslan also pointed out that Mousavi (a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad) and Rafsanjani were among the original leaders of the revolutionary movement, so not only do they know how to bring down a government, the current situation represents a serious split between the Iranian religous leadership. The two Grand Ayatollahs, Montazeri and Sanei, also among the original revolutionaries and publicly condemning election fraud, even outrank Khamenei in the religious hierarchy.

It's worth noting here, as the Obama administration seemed to realize even before the election, that the effects of any given outcome to this power struggle are "unpredictable" and "not wholly straightforward." All factions support talks with America. All the faction leaders have been long-time members of the ruling political establishment. This is not to say that it's a uniform polity, but as Robert Fisk says, (though I've been told that some particulars of this article are in dispute,) "[The protest] is absolutely not against the Islamic republic or the Islamic revolution."

No one at all knows what Iran is going to look like when things settle down again and even if it looks quite different, it isn't going to look like the US or Europe, even if it is as democratic as its people want it to be.

Still, chances are that if the protests are halted through successful government attempts to cut off communication among the crowds before an acceptable political solution is reached, this will go exactly as previous protests have gone and the uncoordinated, thinning crowds will be put down through a resurgence in violence. Right now, Twitter seems to be at least useful to them for some internal coordination as well as getting limited information out to the rest of the world now that the journalists are all being sent home.

As of yesterday, Mashable said the #IranElection tag reached 221,744 Tweets per hour at the peak. (They also offered a how-to guide on tracking the election through social media and blogs like Revolutionary Road.)

But there are issues. Aren't there always? For one thing, Twitter is just Twitter and you lose a lot of nuance in the medium - we'd all rather have social media be an adjunct to regular news, but that's slim pickings. These are the things I've been told, and a couple I've observed, can be done to help keep communication channels open so that Iranians can talk to each other:

- Watch out for these spam Twitter accounts that seem to be malicious, possibly operated by Iranian security forces, and spreading scurrilous or intimidating rumors.

- Do change your Twitter location to Tehran, GMT +3:30, or to another city in Iran, to help hide genuine Iranian accounts.

- Don't change your location to Kabul, this is government disinformation.

- Messages claiming that the rallies are all upper class, liberal kids, or that the security forces being called out are Hamas or Hezbollah, are disinformation. Don't RT these.

- Don't RT the names of Iranian bloggers or proxy IPs in public, replace the name with "RT from Iran", and only follow the #iranelection and #gr88 tags.

- Even the #iranelection and #gr88 tags may be subject to spamming. Take it as read that people calling for protests contrary to the country's Islamic law ('Iranian women should all remove their hejab'), accusing Iranian bloggers of being foreign agents, or calling for violence are illegitimate.

- Keep communications clear by using the tags only for pertinent information, no trivia or low info messages, but do RT the times and locations of marches (without the names of the bloggers attached) in order to help get the word out.

Anyway, that's about it from me. If you want more, check out the Guardian's Iran news feed, the Huffington Post's Iran page, and BoingBoing's reading list. Also, Chris Anderson of TED has more on Twitter and Iran from Clay Shirky (@cshirky), and Shirky recommends that everyone read this Rebecca MacKinnon article about internet censorship in democratic countries.

Iran in 2002: Hashem Aghajari

Natasha Chart — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:10:26 GMT

In 2002, a popular Iranian professor and disabled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war said something controversial, in calling for an Islamic Protestantism, while criticizing the clergy for corruption and the use of torture.

Aghajari was sentenced to death. This proved to be extremely unpopular and the student-originated protests lasted for weeks, spreading beyond Tehran and including people from many walks of life.

The protests had begun to be coordinated through a call-in program on the US-sponsored Radio Azadi (Freedom), a Farsi-language version of Radio Free Europe.

Jackson Diehl reported on the shutdown of Radio Azadi at the height of the protests in the Washington Post, but they don't preserve their online archives that far back, so I can only share with you the paragraphs I quoted from him at the time on my old blog:

"After an Iranian court sentenced the reformist academic Hashem Aghajari to death last month, the largest and most sustained student demonstrations in years erupted in Tehran. As they grew, day after day, U.S.-operated Radio Azadi, or Radio Freedom, was their favorite medium. Every day, student leaders would call by cellphone from the roiling campuses to the radio's headquarters in Prague and narrate the latest developments live. Each night the radio would broadcast a roundtable discussion, patching together students and journalists in Tehran with exiled opposition leaders to discuss where the reform movement was going. So instrumental to the rebellion-in-the-making did the radio become that pro-regime counter-demonstrators recently held up a placard reading "Who does Radio Azadi talk to?" -- a taunt taken by the station's staff as a badge of honor.
The protest movement, now five weeks old, rolls on, spreading from students to workers and from Tehran to other cities. Some see parallels to the popular movements that overthrew the Communist regimes of Europe in 1989 -- with a big dose of help from U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe. In this case, however, the tottering dictatorship has gotten a big break: Two weeks ago, Radio Freedom abruptly disappeared from the air. Iranians were no longer able to hear firsthand reports of the protests. Instead, after two weeks of virtual silence, the broadcasts are being replaced with tunes from Jennifer Lopez, Whitney Houston et al.
How did the mullahs pull off this well-timed lobotomy? They didn't: The U.S. government, in the form of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, did it. In an act that mixes Hollywood arrogance with astounding ignorance of Iranian reality, the board has silenced the most effective opposition radio station in Iran at a time of unprecedented ferment. In its place, at three times the expense, the United States now will supply Iran's revolutionary students with a diet of pop music -- on the theory that this better advances U.S. interests. ..."

The move was so obviously boneheaded, and so clearly hurt a genuine and spontaneous grassroots movement, that even Jesse Helms criticized the Bush administration over it.

Without some means of coordinating their protests, dissent was quickly mopped up. Ayatollah Khamenei insisted that the death sentence be reviewed. This didn't go so well at first, but Aghajari was eventually sentenced to a prison term and released in August of 2004.

It isn't clear, however, that the protests this time will be so easy to quell. For one thing, there's Twitter. For another, Khamenei's offer of a recount isn't going over well with protestors who are now demanding a new election.

This photo of a protest in Esfahan was posted to Twitpic today, and it's, well, wow. (Via @tommatzzie on Twitter.)

If history will repeat, I guess we'll know soon enough.

How can we help Iranians this time? Fortunately, there're a couple things that I think pass my own "very little" test:

First, via dr anonymous in Quick Hits, you can ask Congress to resist calls to take any aggressive action or enact further sanctions. In short, take some responsibility for the prime means in which our foreign policy has previously crippled reform efforts and allowed dissenters to be branded as enemies of the state.

Second, as we retweeted on @openleft today, if you have a Twitter account, you can help hide protestors by changing your Twitter location to Tehran, time +3:30 GMT, which it happens to be very easy to do. You can also, if you're retweeting information from what you suspect may be Iranian sources, replace their usernames with [redacted].

PS - If you're not on Twitter, why not? And no, 'it's buggy, frequently crashes, and doesn't do proper archiving,' isn't a good excuse.

Obama Gets It Right, Where Condi Got It Wrong With Iran

Jacob Freeze — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:09:42 GMT

Way back in May 2005, less than a month before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected President of Iran, the barking idiot Condoleeza Rice was prancing around the Middle East and threatening Iran with the sort of "major changes" which the United States had already inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The Iranians should not consider themselves immune from the major changes that are going on in the region, and we would hope that they would begin to engage in more stabilizing behavior," said Rice, speaking after a meeting with Kuwaiti's foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed al-Sabah.

Iranians voters, who were about to choose between the violently anti-American Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the much more conciliatory Mohammad Khatami, and the centrist Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, immediately understood that Condoleeza Rice was sending them a message!

"Elect that hard-liner Ahmadinejad and the biggest bully on the block will open a can of whip-ass on your sorry Islamic butts!"

Ahmadinejad immediately surged out of nowhere in the polls, and won the run-off election against Rafsanjani, because...

Contrary to what goddamned cowards and bullies like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Condoleeza Rice believe, the world is full of people whom you cannot intimidate!

Maybe you can kill them, maybe you can bomb their cities to smithereens and inflict a genocidal occupation on the ruins, but they will not get down on all fours and obey your stinking orders!

This is incomprehensible to the Bushes and Cheneys of the world, but a brilliant manipulator of public opinion like Barack Obama understands it without even thinking, and so...

When Obama set off on a junket around the Middle East a few weeks before the subsequent Presidential election in Iran, he made much more conciliatory noises at the Iranians, and in my opinion he knocked the main prop out from under Ahmadinejad and his crew of half-witted relatives and mullahs who have totally wrecked almost every segment the Iranian economy for the last four years.

Why bother to re-elect that gang of fanatical boobs when you don't have to make a statement to the bullies and infidels in faraway Washington?

I don't know how the post-election turmoil in Iran will eventually be resolved, but even if Ahmadinejad survives, his authority has been seriously undermined, and that is already a brilliant success for Barack Obama and his foreign-policy advisors.

On That Iranian Poll

Chris Bowers — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Today's Washington Post op-ed by Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty concerning a public opinion survey they conducted in Iran on that nation's presidential election is both worth a read, and highly disturbing for what it omits. Here is the first paragraph:

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

Anyone regularly involved in poll analysis would notice two red flags in this paragraph:

The actual results of the poll were 34%-14%, with 27% undecided and 22% falling into some strange category of not supporting anyone nor being undecided. To instead report the results as "more than a 2 to 1 margin" is to use a rhetorical trick that creates more similarity between the final result and the poll than the numbers actually suggest.
The poll was conducted from May 11-20, which is actually a range of 24-33 days before the election, not "three weeks." To call it three weeks instead of providing the actual dates make it sound as though the poll was taken closer to the election than it actually was.

Because of these two rhetorical slight of hands that were employed instead of simply listing the poll results and actual dates the poll was completed, my sense of the integrity of this poll drops immediately. It wouldn't even have taken any longer to just list the numbers, but for some reason the pollsters immediately employed rhetorical moves instead.

Undecideds break heavily for lesser known challengers within the context of American elections. It is difficult to imagine why that would be any different in other countries, given that the same phenomenon of the electorate making up its collective mind about an incumbent before the election season would still be in effect. Further, check out the following two paragraphs from the poll that they failed to mention entirely in their op-ed (hat-tip Juan Cole):

' A close examination of our survey results reveals that the race may actually be closer than a first look at the numbers would indicate. More than 60 percent of those who state they don't know who they will vote for in the Presidential elections reflect individuals who favor political reform and change in the current system.'(...)

The current mood indicates that none of the candidates will likely pass the 50 percent threshold needed to automatically win; meaning that a second round runoff between the two highest finishers, as things stand, Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Moussavi, is likely.

So, due to the large number of undecideds and the mood of the undecideds, in writing about their own poll, Ballen and Doherty actually predicted a second-round run-off with no one reaching 50%+1. However, when official results come out showing the incumbent winning with 63%, they publish an op-ed in the Washington Post suggesting that the election was clean, based on their own polling?

I don't know anything about these pollsters. However, it is pretty bizarre to argue, at different times, that a single poll both shows the incumbent likely to not reach 50%, and also that a 63% result for the incumbent was probably legitimate. I really can't wrap my head around that one. Even though I absolutely hate making implications like this, such a strange turnabout in analysis is enough to make one wonder if there is another agenda at play.

Anyway, this isn't going to be settled by statistical analysis. Right now, the real numbers to be asking about are how many people are protesting, and how long they will continue to do so. On that front, the number seems to be rising from thousands, to hundreds of thousands, to millions.

The Ahmadinejad Effect

Paul Goodman — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:27:48 GMT

What do you think the repressive regimes of the region are going to conclude about Obama's response to massacre, disappearances, and torture of pro-democracy movements after seeing his response to Ahmadinejad?

Conclusion: We can pull a Tiananmen and Obama will do nothing but congratulate us on a "robust debate".

"The Obama Effect" was a false dawn for Middle East democracy, now we wake up to the nightmare.

(if this is "not a diary" forgive me, but I see no open thread)

Iran & LSD--Liberal Social Democracy

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Juan Cole, Informed Comment:

observers who want to lay a guilt trip on us about falling for Mousavi's smooth upper middle class schtick are simply ignoring the last 12 years of Iranian history.

Today, the situation in Iran seems very much in flux, as street demonstrations continued for a second day. Before discussing Iran specifically, though, I want to address the the larger world historical background.

In yesterday's discussion of what's happening in Iran, there was a lot of back and forth that seemed to me to be of the "Blind Men and the Elephant" kind--the Elephant being liberal social democracy. The diary I wrote was about the events unfolding in Iran as part of a centuries-long struggle for liberal social democracy punctuated with several such crucial moments which I referred to, and since it seems the Elephant got lost a bit in that discussion, I thought it worthwhile to begin saying a few words about it.

First off, stealing elections is not democratic. That's more or less ground zero for me. Democracy that's not liberal does not protect individual rights. It would allow a democratic majority to arbitrarily put someone to death. And, of course, the right to vote--which of course includes the right to have it counted--os one of those rights. Democracy that's not social does not recognize protect social and economic rights. It would allow any number of people to starve to death.

That's why I see liberal social democracy as the minimal acceptable form of government. And I see the struggle to achieve LSD on a worldwide basis as the great struggle of the past 250 years--a struggle we are still very much in the midst of.

The post-WWII expansion of widespread prosperity, leading to the first truly mass middle class, first centered in Western Europe and North America, then spreading around the globe, has seen a reorientation toward what are called "post-materialist values". There is a great potential here, as this represents a great maturing in the potential for collective self-government, but there is a danger as well, to the extent that people born into conditions of basic material security may not appreciate what it has taken to achieve that state, or what it means that so many still live outside of it.

And now to Iran, specifically....
First, Juan Cole yesterday posted "Stealing the Iranian Election", which presented cogent evidence that the election results were not credible on their face. Here are just the last two:

5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.
6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

Now a longer excerpt from Juan Cole today, which explains quite well why this election should be seen as an outrage for the Iranian people, rather than an example of Western myopia (as if there weren't enough of those already):

Some comentators have suggested that the reason Western reporters were shocked when Ahmadinejad won was that they are based in opulent North Tehran, whereas the farmers and workers of Iran, the majority, are enthusiastic for Ahmadinejad. That is, we fell victim once again to upper middle class reporting and expectations in a working class country of the global south.
While such dynamics may have existed, this analysis is flawed in the case of Iran because it pays too much attention to class and material factors and not enough to Iranian culture wars. We have already seen, in 1997 and 2001, that Iranian women and youth swung behind an obscure former minister of culture named Mohammad Khatami and his 2nd of Khordad movement, capturing not only the presidency but also, in 2000, parliament.
Khatami received 70 percent of the vote in 1997. He then got 78% of the vote in 2001, despite a crowded field. In 2000, his reform movement captured 65% of the seats in parliament. He is a nice man, but you couldn't exactly categorize him as a union man or a special hit with farmers.
The evidence is that in the past little over a decade, Iran's voters had become especially interested in expanding personal liberties, in expanding women's rights, and in a wider field of legitimate expression for culture (not just high culture but even just things like Iranian rock music). The extreme puritanism of the hardliners grated on people.
The problem for the reformers of the late 1990s and early 2000s was that they did not actually control much, despite holding elected office. Important government policy and regulation was in the hands of the unelected, clerical side of the government. The hard line clerics just shut down reformist newspapers, struck down reformist legislation, and blocked social and economic reform. The Bush administration was determined to hang Khatami out to dry, ensuring that the reformers could never bring home any tangible success in foreign policy or foreign investment. Thus, in the 2004 parliamentary elections, literally thousands of reformers were simply struck off the ballot and not allowed to run. This application of a hard line litmus test in deciding who could run for office produced a hard line parliament, naturally enough....
Ahmadinejad's 2005 victory was made possible by the widespread boycott of the vote or just disillusionment in the reformist camp, meaning that fewer youth and women bothered to come out.
So to believe that the 20% hard line support of 2001 has become 63% in 2009, we would have to posit that Iran is less urban, less literate and less interested in cultural issues today than 8 years ago. We would have to posit that the reformist camp once again boycotted the election and stayed home in droves....
So observers who want to lay a guilt trip on us about falling for Mousavi's smooth upper middle class schtick are simply ignoring the last 12 years of Iranian history. It was about culture wars, not class. It is simply not true that the typical Iranian voter votes conservative and religious when he or she gets the chance. In fact, Mousavi is substantially more conservative than the typical winning politician in 2000. Given the enormous turnout of some 80 percent, and given the growth of Iran's urban sector, the spread of literacy, and the obvious yearning for ways around the puritanism of the hard liners, Mousavi should have won in the ongoing culture war.
And just because Ahmadinejad poses as a champion of the little people does not mean that his policies are actually good for workers or farmers or for working class women (they are not, and many people in that social class know that they are not).
So let that be an end to the guilt trip

Next, at Huffington Post, Nico Pitney is doing a bang-up job liveblogging the Iran election aftermath.

The most recent post:

10:02 AM ET -- Tossing away the notebook. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has a powerful report from Tehran:
She was in tears like many women on the streets of Iran's battered capital. "Throw away your pen and paper and come to our aid," she said, pointing to my notebook. "There is no freedom here." And she was gone, away through the milling crowds near the locked-down Interior Ministry spewing its pick-ups full of black-clad riot police. The "green wave" of Iran's pre-election euphoria had turned black. [...] Majir Mirpour grabbed me. A purple bruise disfigured his arm. He raised his shirt to show a red wound across his back. "They beat me like a pig," he said, breathless. "They beat me as I tried to help a woman in tears. I don't care about the physical pain. It's the pain in my heart that hurts." He looked at me and the rage in his eyes made me want to toss away my notebook.

And perhaps the most weighty post overnight, concern possible future developments in the next few days:

3:28 AM ET -- "There will be blood." I posted below on Trita Parsi's belief that Iran's reformists are "widely assumed" to be planning to challenge Ayatollah Khamenei.
Now Steve Clemons (of the New America Foundation and a HuffPost blogger) writes about a discussion he had in London with "a well-connected Iranian who knows many of the power figures in the Tehran political order."
[T]he scariest point he made to me that I had not heard anywhere else is that this "coup by the right wing" has created pressures that cannot be solved or patted down by the normal institutional arrangements Iran has constructed. The Guardian Council and other power nodes of government can't deal with the current crisis and can't deal with the fact that a civil war has now broken out among Iran's revolutionaries. My contact predicted serious violence at the highest levels. He said that Ahmadinejad is now genuinely scared of Iranian society and of Mousavi and Rafsanjani. The level of tension between them has gone beyond civil limits -- and my contact said that Ahmadinejad will try to have them imprisoned and killed. Likewise, he said, Rafsanjani, Khatami, and Mousavi know this -- and thus are using all of the instruments at their control within Iran's government apparatus to fight back -- but given Khamenei's embrace of Ahmadinejad's actions in the election and victory, there is no recourse but to try and remove Khamenei. Some suggest that Rafsanjani will count votes to see if there is a way to formally dislodge Khamenei -- but this source I met said that all of these political giants have resources at their disposal to "do away with" those that get in the way.

Finally, from Gary Sick. For those too young to remember, he was a rather prominent public figure during the Iran hostge crisis. Wikipedia notes:

Sick served on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, and was the principal White House aide for Persian Gulf affairs from 1976 to 1981, a period which included the Iranian revolution and the Hostage Crisis.

He has since worked in academia. Yesterday, Sick wrote:

Iran's political coup
If the reports coming out of Tehran about an electoral coup are sustained, then Iran has entered an entirely new phase of its post-revolution history. One characteristic that has always distinguished Iran from the crude dictators in much of the rest of the Middle East was its respect for the voice of the people, even when that voice was saying things that much of the leadership did not want to hear.
In 1997, Iran's hard line leadership was stunned by the landslide election of Mohammed Khatami, a reformer who promised to bring rule of law and a more human face to the harsh visage of the Iranian revolution. It took the authorities almost a year to recover their composure and to reassert their control through naked force and cynical manipulation of the constitution and legal system. The authorities did not, however, falsify the election results and even permitted a resounding reelection four years later. Instead, they preferred to prevent the president from implementing his reform program.
In 2005, when it appeared that no hard line conservative might survive the first round of the presidential election, there were credible reports of ballot manipulation to insure that Mr Ahmadinejad could run (and win) against former president Rafsanjani in the second round. The lesson seemed to be that the authorities might shift the results in a close election but they would not reverse a landslide vote.
The current election appears to repudiate both of those rules. The authorities were faced with a credible challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had the potential to challenge the existing power structure on certain key issues. He ran a surprisingly effective campaign, and his "green wave" began to be seen as more than a wave. In fact, many began calling it a Green Revolution. For a regime that has been terrified about the possibility of a "velvet revolution," this may have been too much.

Looking forward tentative, Sick writes:

It is still too early for anything like a comprehensive analysis of implications, but here are some initial thoughts:

The willingness of the regime simply to ignore reality and fabricate election results without the slightest effort to conceal the fraud represents a historic shift in Iran's Islamic revolution. All previous leaders at least paid lip service to the voice of the Iranian people. This suggests that Iran's leaders are aware of the fact that they have lost credibility in the eyes of many (most?) of their countrymen, so they are dispensing with even the pretense of popular legitimacy in favor of raw power.

The Iranian opposition, which includes some very powerful individuals and institutions, has an agonizing decision to make. If they are intimidated and silenced by the show of force (as they have been in the past), they will lose all credibility in the future with even their most devoted followers. But if they choose to confront their ruthless colleagues forcefully, not only is it likely to be messy but it could risk running out of control and potentially bring down the entire existing power structure, of which they are participants and beneficiaries.

With regard to the United States and the West, nothing would prevent them in principle from dealing with an illegitimate authoritarian government. We do it every day, and have done so for years (the Soviet Union comes to mind). But this election is an extraordinary gift to those who have been most skeptical about President Obama's plan to conduct negotiations with Iran. Former Bush official Elliott Abrams was quick off the mark, commenting that it is "likely that the engagement strategy has been dealt a very heavy blow." Two senior Israeli officials quickly urged the world not to engage in negotiations with Iran. Neoconservatives who had already expressed their support for an Ahmadinejad victory now have every reason to be satisfied. Opposition forces, previously on the defensive, now have a perfect opportunity to mount a political attack that will make it even more difficult for President Obama to proceed with his plan.

In their own paranoia and hunger for power, the leaders of Iran have insulted their own fellow revolutionaries who have come to have second thoughts about absolute rule and the costs of repression, and they may have alienated an entire generation of future Iranian leaders. At the same time, they have provided an invaluable gift to their worst enemies abroad.
However this turns out, it is a historic turning point in the 30-year history of Iran's Islamic revolution. Iranians have never forgotten the external political intervention that thwarted their democratic aspirations in 1953. How will they remember this day?

How indeed. What about you?

Here's my one thought to kick things off: America can do very little, even in the way of saying anything, given our atrocious history, most importantly, our role in overthrowing Mosadegh in 1953. I learned about this ten years later, as a young teen, when an Iranian foreign exchange student came to live with us. So this isn't merely a piece of academic history to me. I still feel the sense of outrage that this was done in our name that I felt when Said told me about it 46 years ago. We have never done anything to mitigate this terrible crime, we have only added to it. It would be an enormous benefit if Obama were to start owning up to our past in the Middle East. His continued covering up of Bush era crimes is not keeping our troops safe there, but is only limiting our capacity to have a beneficial influence. Were he courageous enough to speak candidly of how we have gone astray in the past, he would open an enormous space for honesty, repentance, and renewed trust. That could give us real influence that would be invaluable in a situation like that in Iran today. But instead, we have virtually nothing.

It's time for us to free ourselves from the mistakes of our past to the best of our abilities. It's time for truth. If we're willing to take our first step, others are eager to follow. They're tugging on us even now to follow our own best instincts.

What say you?

Scattered Thoughts About Iran's Stolen Election

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:20:00 GMT

Amidst the chaos of various reports from Iran, one thing seems clear: the election was stolen, and rather ham-fistedly at that.

I should hasten to say, it's possible that they stole an election they would have won anyway. I don't pretend to be an expert in Iranian politics, and with such a volatile situation--plus a class dimension pointed to by VLaszlo in quick hits that's never seriously discussed here--I doubt that many others outside Iran know much better either.

But I do know the tell-tale signs--at least some of them--when an election is being stolen. Manipulating and cutting off communications are right there at the top of the list.

Given that nothing could possibly de-legitimate the unelected government more than this, one has to wonder why they did it. Perhaps they didn't realize this. Perhaps they didn't care. Perhaps they even wanted it, to show how little they cared if they were seen as illegitimate. As I freely admit, I don't know enough about Iranian politics to even begin to say which is more likely. But given what little I do know, this moment seems clearly parallel to a number of other crucial moments in world history--none of them too happy in the short run.

Tianenman Square is an obvious parallel--a moment of potential transformation dashed, one that came at the end of a string of such moments that had swept through Eastern Europe. The CIA's coup in Iran in 1953 is another such moment, as is the multi-nation European uprising of 1848. These are all moments when it seemed that bonds of history might burst... but then they did not.

But what are those bonds of history? They are primarily the bonds of the masters, but they are also the bonds of necessity as well, which often means they are the bonds of what the poor need to survive. Those on the edge of starvation may eat like kings for a day if that's what it costs to rally enough of them to keep the Ancien Regime in place.
That's the bottom line of what I see happening in Iran just now. I'm not claiming it's the dominant framework we all should adopt in understanding events there--I don't claim there's any dominant framework at all.

I only claim that it's a valid one, that it gets at some significant piece of the truth--and that that piece is one that's widely shared around the world, not just now, but across a broad period of time, reaching back at least to the 19th Century, but forward we know not how long. For if we do not find a way past this point of impasse before too long, then global warming and other forms of environmental catastrophe will close off the possibility of further progress for at least a period of centuries.

We need to find a way forward that empowers individual autonomy while at the same time ensuring the essential dignity and security of the least among us--the basics of both political and civil rights on the one hand and cultural/socio-economic rights on the other.

This is not conceptually an impossible dream. It is entirely doable in terms of social dynamics. But there are tremendously powerful special interests opposed to it, and their are powerful myths we have come to believe that tell us it is not possible.

This is one reason why it matters a great deal what is happening in Iran today, where it's been reported that many supporters of Mousavi have gone out to protest without any hope of success, merely because they feel they must do it--one might say, out of a sense of "duty now for the future." And this sense of duty is not just important for them, but equally much for the poor masses who may have quite sincerely voted for Ahmadinejad as well.

Now, that's the kind of bi-partisan change I can believe in.

Zombie Lies: Iran Edition

Daniel De Groot — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Since McCain said it several times to batter Obama over his willingness to talk with adversaries before bombing their innocent citizens, it's worth noting that the President of Iran has not called for "wiping Israel off the map." Obama did at least mention that Ahmadinejad is not in charge of the Iranian military and would not be able to order such an attack even if he wanted to, but that he supposedly said this has become one of the right's favourite zombie lies that cannot die.

Inside, the dissection.
As you'd expect, the first challenger to this meme is Juan Cole:

the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem.

The Cole post goes on to detail his attempt to translate the remarks himself, and his reasons for disputing the translations that the wire services were going with.

See, Khomeini (not to be confused with Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader of Iran) is a kind of Reagan figure for Iran, and Iranian politicians like Ahmadinejad will tend to quote him. So the line in Farsi comes from an old Khomeini speech. Hell, McCain stole a line from Churchill tonight with his "end of the beginning" quip about the financial meltdown. Same idea (without, obviously any moral comparison between Churchill and Khomeini).

Cole later better expresses why the the "wiped off the map" phrasing simply cannot be accurate as a translation of Ahmadinejad's thoughts: "No such idiom exists in Persian." For anyone who speaks more than one language, you will have encountered phrases that simply do not mean anything in the other language. I hesitate to guess how poorly attempting to translate "lipstick on a pig" into farsi would go. Or "cut and run" or any one of dozens of aphorisms used in political discourse in english.

Naturally, no one who already believes Iran is itching to nuke Israel any chance it gets will be satisfied with the word of farsi speaker Juan Cole with his love of all things Iran-

I should again underline that I personally despise everything Ahmadinejad stands for, not to mention the odious Khomeini, who had personal friends of mine killed so thoroughly that we have never recovered their bodies.

But anyway, Cole is hardly alone. Aside from this excellent analysis published in the Guardian, we also have the raging leftists in MEMRI who translated it thusly:

"'Imam [Khomeini] said: 'This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.' [...]

Of course, if all this weren't enough, there is the little matter that Ahmadinejad has been asked to clarify this and has done so:

He also suggested that Iran would not launch any attack on Israel - America's ally in the Middle East.
"There is no need for any measures by the Iranian people" to bring about the end of the "Zionist regime" in Israel, Mr Ahmadinejad said.

And here's another (better) translation by AFP of some other Ahmadinejad remarks that same year:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has predicted that Britian, Israel and the United States would eventually disappear from the world like the Egyptian pharaonic kings.
[...]
Ahmadinejad's comments were the latest salvo by the deeply religious president against the West and Israel. He has repeatedly predicted that Israel is doomed to disappear.

The Point: McCain Lying or Just Clueless

I realize this kind of thing has been published a number of times. But McCain said it several times in the debate, and watching the post-debate analysis, no one is calling him on it. It is simply an accepted "fact" of the discourse of American politics. Much like Atrios noted today about Sarah Palin:

Her problem isn't so much that she speaks in gibberish, the problem is that she doesn't speak in Official Washington Gibberish. John McCain spouts gibberish all the time, as do all politicians, but it's often the kind of gibberish which is part of the Beltway dialect.

There is still a real chance John McCain will win this election, and knowing the truth about this remark could become very important in heading off another colossally stupid war. Further, who knows what the October surprise might be, for now it is all economy all the time, but if shit hits the fan in Iran over centrifuges or sanctions, we will be hearing a lot more of this canard.

McCain Says "We Were Greeted As Liberators"

grannyhelen — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:30:10 GMT

Not since the first utterance of Mission Accomplished has a politician proved himself to be so breathtakingly out of touch with reality.

This is John McCain on "This Week" with George Stephanopolous:

Steph: But there was a fundamental difference regarding the original reason to go to war [in Iraq]. He [Obama] said it would inflame the Muslim world and become a recruitment tool for Al Quaeda. You said and you wrote that it would lessen antipathy in the Muslim world and that we would be greeted as liberators. Wasn't Senator Obama right about that?
McCain: I don't believe so. We were greeted as liberators.

Link to the vid here: http://abcnews.go.com/video/pl...
McCain goes on to say the the execution of the war in Iraq was the problem, but not the decision to go.

So...

One wonders out loud how a McCain administration would differ from a Bush administration in terms of foreign policy (with the very recent exception of the last few weeks, when even George Bush has decided he can't just bomb every country into an enthusiastic support of his agenda). Would McCain "bomb, bomb, bomb...bomb, bomb Iran" as he has intimated (and put to a snazzy jingle)?

How about our building conflict with Russia - will he send US special forces in to foment a revolution? Will US troops be occupying the Kremlin, and if so, does this mean Bremer will come out of retirement as Transition Czar?

How many more Iraqs would John McCain get us involved with during his hypothetical administration, and when would we finally nation-build our way out of economic existance?

This is one of the most irresponsible, naive, dangerous and frankly tone-deaf statements of the general election to date, and proves why we can't have John McCain in charge of the most powerful nation in the world at this precarious time. It would make excellent macabre satire along the lines of Dr. Strangelove, if the implications of this mindset weren't so frightening.

McCain should explain himself, and quickly.