The University of Pennsylvania’s Iran Media Project and ASL 19, a Canadian non-profit working against censorship in Iran, explain how sanctions are increasing the Iranian government’s censorship capabilities:
It is increasingly difficult for independent publishers of books and print newspapers in Iran: The problem this time is not strict censorship, [...]]]>
The University of Pennsylvania’s Iran Media Project and ASL 19, a Canadian non-profit working against censorship in Iran, explain how sanctions are increasing the Iranian government’s censorship capabilities:
It is increasingly difficult for independent publishers of books and print newspapers in Iran: The problem this time is not strict censorship, but the skyrocketing price of paper. Iran has reduced subsidies for imported paper, placing a stranglehold on an industry that relies heavily on paper’s import. The devaluation of almost 50% of the Iranian Rial compared to the US dollar and other major currencies has further made the import of paper from abroad exorbitant.
Under such conditions, President Ahmadinejad’s administration has been selective in financially supporting publishers and newspapers close to the government. Independent publishers and any publication that is critical of the government have been left to deal with this crisis on their own. As a result, some publishers have closed down, while some have reduced their circulation and publication schedules. Those with access to alternative sources of funding have decided to import paper, regardless of high prices, to keep their publication going.
Regardless of the cuts on subsidies for importing paper, the government continues to provide these publishers with subsidized paper and the administration has allocated major funds to purchase books from these publishers. Finally, the government helps these publishers by purchasing government-sponsored advertisements in their magazines and newspapers, and given this generous support from the government, this third of group of publishers has hardly been affected at all by the increased price of paper.
]]>Sweeping economic sanctions exact a deep toll from cultural heritage and the arts. As the United States and its allies continue to exert economic pressure on Iran, those of us who care about and work in the arts should be aware of the negative effects such actions have on cultural production and cultural preservation. The severe sanctions imposed on Cuba and Iran go beyond the interest of any government in their impact on people and their culture.
In a new report for the Oxford Research Group (first excerpted at PBS’s Tehran Bureau) author Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi explains why sanctions without compromise won’t change Iran’s hardline leaders’ stance on the nuclear program:
The key dilemma which Western policymakers should consider is that, rightly or wrongly, the [...]]]>
In a new report for the Oxford Research Group (first excerpted at PBS’s Tehran Bureau) author Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi explains why sanctions without compromise won’t change Iran’s hardline leaders’ stance on the nuclear program:
]]>The key dilemma which Western policymakers should consider is that, rightly or wrongly, the Supreme Leader and much of the governing elite have staked their legitimacy on the nuclear programme. This is one reason why Oxford Research Group in consultation with former policymakers and diplomats with direct experience of the Iranian nuclear file emphasized that in order to reach a diplomatic solution, Iran should be offered a package with integrated “face-saving” measures. This briefing has also sought to make the case that sanctions and defiance are no replacement for serious diplomacy, which ultimately means that both sides must show their readiness to depart from their opening positions.
If Iran’s total submission and relinquishment of all right to uranium enrichment is the endgame, then sanctions are highly unlikely to succeed as long as the present governing elite remains in power. A compromise solution, however, remains feasible and not beyond the realm of possibility.
Another factor which should be considered is that Iran does not believe the U.S. is prepared to offer a deal that would be palatable to it prior to Obama’s re-election. Similarly, it is doubtful that Ayatollah Khamenei, and Ahmadinejad’s domestic critics, would favour conclusion of a comprehensive deal with the P5+1 if it meant Ahmadinejad could claim it as a victory and capitalise on it domestically. The Iranians thus want to keep negotiations going, so that diplomatic contact is maintained until the arrival of the most apposite time to strike a deal. Iran’s economic turbulence of course impacts its plans in this regard, but nonetheless the aforementioned should be borne in mind.
If the objective is to curb and limit Iranian uranium enrichment activities, and ensure they remain peaceful, then the sequencing of any deal needs to be carefully weighted to promote a “balance of advantage” for both sides of the dispute. As we had previously laid out in “Iran’s Nuclear Impasse: Breaking the Deadlock,” it may be possible to exchange the demands made on Iran’s nuclear ambitions with the progressive lifting of nuclear related sanctions. It is still possible for the West to use the leverage provided by sanctions constructively. As yet however, there are few signs that the U.S., France, Germany and Israel will agree to any such scheme.
“If it’s Sunday,” Columbia University scholar Gary [...]]]>
“If it’s Sunday,” Columbia University scholar Gary Sick wrote in an email to Gulf 2000, a listserv he moderates, “it must be time for major U.S. government ‘leaks’ (really planted stories) about Iran. Positioning and spinning is particularly important with negotiations possibly ready to start.”
He continued,
]]>The official feed to The New York Times is in the article by David E. Sanger and Steven Erlanger outlining U.S. demands in the opening round. They look very much like the proposed demands outlined by Israeli officials and Dennis Ross last week, viz. closing (and eventually dismantling) Fordow, and halting all production of and removing all 20 percent enriched uranium. The official going-in position seems to be a halt to all enrichment, but there is an ambiguous suggestion that a compromise outcome would be some level of enrichment with stringent monitoring and inspections.The leak to the Washington Post had a different theme. It suggests that U.S. intelligence — primarily drones and intercepts — is now so good that we can have considerable confidence that Iran is not now building a nuclear weapon and that we would know if and when Iran changed course and decided to race for a bomb. This complements the Times article by indicating that the United States is going into negotiations with a much better understanding of internal Iranian policy than we ever had on Iraq. “Trust us,” seems to to be the underlying message.What is missing from both stories is any indication of what Iran might expect to receive for its cooperation. The threat of crippling sanctions is mentioned in the event that Iran fails to toe the line, but there is no consideration of how sanctions might change if there was actual movement toward an agreement. The strategy is all threat and no concession. That is entirely consistent with U.S. strategy since at least the days of Bill Clinton.
Part of the negative tone in The New York Times may be the result of its good-cop-bad-cop approach to Iran reporting. Will we have a report from the alternative team on Monday giving a more nuanced and balanced interpretation of the same evidence? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Incidentally, neither The Times nor The Post, despite their varying degrees of focus on the intelligence picture, even hinted at assassinations or cyber warfare in Iran, let alone the Sy Hersh report about secret U.S. training of Iranian Mojahedin Khalgh operatives for operations inside Iran. Some things, it seems, are better off not said.
We write:
The film opens with a history lesson that begins in 1978 with the first signs of the widespread unrest that would eventually topple the Shah. Iran’s despotic dictator is presented [...]]]>
We write:
The film opens with a history lesson that begins in 1978 with the first signs of the widespread unrest that would eventually topple the Shah. Iran’s despotic dictator is presented as “a long-time ally of the United States,” as the film’s narrator, Iranian actor Shoreh Aghdashloo, explains.
Then comes the Islamic Revolution, and the film places the blame squarely on the fecklessness of President Jimmy Carter.
“The fact that Jimmy Carter did not support the Shah in his time of difficulties actually signaled to the Iranian people that the Shah’s rule was over,” says Harold Rhode, a disciple of Bernard Lewis (who also appears in the film) and a former Pentagon analyst involved in Douglas Feith and his Office of Special Plans’ activities building a public case for war with Iraq.
Rhode’s comment hints at themes that keep reemerging throughout the documentary: The belief that Middle Easterners respond only to shows of strength, and that, while Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama have been weak on Iran, Ronald Reagan’s supposed strength was respected in the region (with the exception, of course, of his withdrawal from Lebanon after the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks there were bombed in 1983).
The film pushes the neoconservative meme that Iranian leadership is irrational and can’t be trusted with nuclear technology.
“Americans and Europeans are really uncomfortable with the idea of holy war and mass murder for religious reasons,” Cliff May says in the film. “Because they can’t imagine that for themselves, they also can’t imagine that others behave that way. But this is a failure of imagination.” Bernard Lewis compares the inability to deter a nuclear Iran with Iran’s use of “martyrs” in the Iran-Iraq War, in which young Iranians were sent across Iraqi minefields.
But both these generalizations miss a key point: Iran’s leaders, despite a willingness to sacrifice citizens, have demonstrated that they are concerned primarily with themselves. Iran’s use of a nuclear weapon would almost certainly imperil the regime’s survival.
And the experts interviewed by the Clarion Fund make no secret about where they stand on the “military option.”
Tighter sanctions and increased support for the Green Movement are both endorsed in the section titled “Stopping the Regime,” but Clarion’s experts also favor keeping the “military option” on the table.
“If Israel feels compelled for reasons of self-preservation to mount an attack against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities, the United States will nevertheless be blamed for the Israeli attack and the United States will be drawn into the aftermath of such an attack no matter whether we were part of it at the beginning or not,” explains CSP’s Lopez.
While the film’s justification for military action appears to hinge on Israel’s willingness to launch a unilateral attack, recent comments from former Mossad chief Meir Dagan pushing back the Iranian nuclear clock may pose a challenge to the sense of urgency expressed by Clarion’s experts and the narrative of imminent conflict crafted by the film’s producers.
Iranium fits nicely into Clarion’s oeuvre. Like the producers’ previous movie, it portrays a clash of civilizations, suggests that Muslims value death over life, and portrays irrational hatred toward Israel and anti-Semitism as key to comprehending the anger and frustration voiced by Muslim countries against the United States. While Iranium does little to elaborate on these basic tropes about the Muslim world — in this case, mainly Iran — the formula for the Clarion Fund’s anti-Muslim propaganda is becoming more apparent with each new iteration.
The Clarion Fund appears to have (perhaps mistakenly) uploaded a copy of “Iranium” to the video sharing site Vimeo. The embedded video is below but we imagine that the producers might be taking the video down shortly.
It’s also worth watching the extended interview (hosted on the same account) with the film’s narrator, Shoreh Aghdashloo. Aghdashloo appears to share Frank Gaffney‘s interest in “creeping Shariah” but, despite the repeated (ad nauseum) use of the term, it’s a little unclear how much of a grip she actually has on the current political climate in Iran.
The article is a look into the possible reasons that Israel has pushed back the nuclear timeline for Iran. I quote Tony Karon at length (which appears at TB) and list my own thoughts (some via Jim):
That notion — [...]]]>
The article is a look into the possible reasons that Israel has pushed back the nuclear timeline for Iran. I quote Tony Karon at length (which appears at TB) and list my own thoughts (some via Jim):
That notion — that you can’t whip up your own population into a fearful frenzy, then not do anything — tracks with comments made in the past by top Israeli officials casting aside the “existential threat” meme. Along with Barak, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy sounded a confident note in late 2009: “It is not within the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel — at best it can cause Israel grievous damage. Israel is indestructible.”
But there are other possibilities to consider, most of them speculative. Perhaps Israel was merely gloating about its covert actions against Iran. Many mainstream commentators suggest Israel is behind the Stuxnet computer worm that damaged Iranian centrifuges as well as a campaign of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Maybe, as Jim Lobe suggested to me in a conversation, there was some kind of quid pro quo between the U.S. and Israel over the public extension of Israel’s nuclear clock.
There are certainly many pawns on the board to trade between Israel and the U.S. at the moment: an Israeli settlement freeze (whether including East Jerusalem or not), the fate of imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. offer of an Israeli wish list of military hardware (as discussed in earlier failed talks on a freeze), or maybe even some sort of agreement for Israel to drop mounting preconditions for yet another round of direct talks. All are possibilities, though some quite unlikely.
It’s worth noting, that as a source close to high-ranking Israelis put it to LobeLog, Israel has shifted its focus from the threat of Iran to the threat of “delegitimizers.” The latter is an amorphous and misleading catchall phrase that the Israeli right and their Stateside defenders use to indict the motives of anyone who even comes near the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
I also add that Paul Pillar, writing on the website of the National Interest, has an interesting post listing some possibilities:
One is that they are more or less straightforward reflections of careful, straightforward analysis by Israeli experts of the actual state of the Iranian program. Not every statement by a public official needs to be a disingenuous manipulation of the facts in pursuit of a policy objective. Sometimes we need to resist the tendency to overanalyze someone else’s motives.
Given Israel’s track record, I’m skeptical of this lack of skepticism. But some of Pillar’s other possibilities track with the ones I enumerated, and all are well worth reading.
Matt Duss at The Wonk Room, meanwhile, picks up on an interesting Der Spiegel interview with new IAEA chief Yukiya Amano. Duss notes that Amano told the German daily, “Despite all unanswered questions, we cannot say that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.”
You’ll recall, of course, that Amano told U.S. officials that “he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision” — including Iran — according to U.S. diplomatic cables. As Duss points out, this aligns perfectly with the view Amano espoused in his Der Spiegel interview — because the “U.S. court” on this particular “key strategic issue” corresponds with a public acknowledgment by the CIA (PDF) that the U.S. does “not know whether Tehran will eventually decide to produce nuclear weapons.”
On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal‘s neoconservative editorial board recently declared (falsely) that Iran had already “announced its intention to build a nuclear bomb.”
As I wrote on Tehran Bureau, none of the recent developments seem to have had much impact on U.S.-based Iran hawks, who are perfectly content to keep beating the war drums. No matter what Iran does or how its nuclear program advances (if at all), the hawks want to attack it. No matter how effective sanctions are, they will never be enough.
]]>At PBS/Frontline‘s Tehran Bureau, I laid out what I think is a pretty compelling case that the [...]]]>
At PBS/Frontline‘s Tehran Bureau, I laid out what I think is a pretty compelling case that the United States should put a confidence-building deal — specifically some new version of the long discussed fuel-swap arrangement — on the table.
From the Tehran Bureau piece:
If, in Istanbul next month, Iran balks at U.S. and P5+1 efforts to arrange a confidence-building fuel swap, the Islamic Republic’s intransigence will be put on full display. If, on the other hand, Iran agrees to such a deal, little harm will be done to the West’s longterm prospects of ending the nuclear standoff without drastic measures – and Iran will turn over a sizable chunk of its nuclear material. If the United States and the rest of the P5+1 make the Iranians an offer they can’t refuse, it could be a win-win situation.
John Limbert, a Naval Academy professor and distinguished former foreign service officer who was an Iranian hostage and later ran the Iran desk at Obama’s State Department, is fond of saying, “They always zig when we zag.” The inverse is also true and, at this moment, the United States seems to be the one doing the zigging. But a zigging line and a zagging line just might cross paths, and the Obama administration should take advantage if the opportunity arises in Istanbul. It may not work, but to do nothing, and to try nothing, is to passively slide down the path to confrontation.
Check out the whole thing here.
]]>You can stream it from AntiWar Radio website, or listen here:
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]]>You should read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
]]>With the sights of Washington’s hawks now focused squarely on Iran, many critics feel they’ve seen the movie before as the Islamic Republic’s alleged nefarious activities in Iraq are relentlessly trotted out. And many of them even have their roots in the same journalist, Michael Gordon, who played a central role in the Times’ catastrophic abdication of its responsibility to the public in 2002 and 2003. [...]
Gordon, rather than exercising caution with the information he was receiving, seemed to go beyond what he reported and what he was handed. Investigative journalist Gareth Porter documented for the American Prospect how it was not Gordon’s sources, but Gordon himself who “articulated the narrative of an Iranian-inspired attack on Americans” in a briefing reported for a mid-2007 New York Times story.
And you might also be forgiven for considering Gordon a reporter with a less than savory record on matters that might drive the nation to war. He was the reporting and writing partner of none other than Judith Miller, the former New York Times reporter whose cozy relationships with Iraqi defectors and administration officials were instrumental in rousing public opinion against Iraq. Miller has since been dispatched by the Times and has staked out a more overtly ideological position writing for outlets like Fox News, where her distortions and use of almost exclusively neoconservative-aligned sources don’t prompt questions.
In 2002, however, Miller and Gordon were working together on stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for theTimes. On Sunday, September 8, they had a front-page story on Iraq’s attempts to acquire aluminum tubes. Miller and Gordon wrote that the tubes were intended for centrifuges aimed at producing highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. [...]
That Judith Miller was dismissed at all is something of an aberration. Gordon’s treatment is more par for the course. [Glenn] Greenwald notes that even after his error-laced Iraq reporting, [Jeffrey] Goldberg was lured away from the New Yorker, presumably with “bags full of cash,” by the Atlantic. He and Michael Gordon have now moved on to reporting about Iran — Goldberg through the eyes of the hawkish Israelis, and Gordon from Iraq, through single-source raw intel and unnamed military and administration officials.
This is not looking forward nor looking back, but not looking at all — a collective aversion of the eyes — as those same journalists responsible for enabling an aggressive war on questionable premises do so once again from their perch atop the journalistic establishment.
Foreign Policy: Marc Lynch blogs that while the White House is considering “talk[ing] more openly about military options [against Iran],” according to The New York Times’ David Sanger, such rhetoric would be counterproductive and dangerous. Lynch warns that if the Iranians return [...]]]>
Foreign Policy: Marc Lynch blogs that while the White House is considering “talk[ing] more openly about military options [against Iran],” according to The New York Times’ David Sanger, such rhetoric would be counterproductive and dangerous. Lynch warns that if the Iranians return to the P5+1 nuclear talks, “Iran will quite reasonably refuse to bargain under the threat of military force, and will view American offers under such conditions as manifestly insincere,” and won’t find a military threat credible. More importantly, such threats would destroy any confidence building measures and widen existing divisions. “The greatest danger of introducing open war talk by the administration is that it would represent the next step in the ‘ratcheting’ of which I’ve been warning for months and pave the way either to the 1990s Iraq scenario or to an actual war,” says Lynch.
The Jerusalem Post: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (FDD) Benjamin Weinthal writes that new EU sanctions will have an impact on EU-Iranian gas deals but unlike the U.S. sanctions the new EU sanctions will not place sanctions on individual Iranian officials because of human rights violations. Weinthal interviews FDD’s Mark Dubowitz who tells him, “A fragile political consensus exists in favor of sanctions in Europe. If the Obama administration doesn’t provide determined leadership by either sanctioning foreign companies which are violating US law, or persuading these companies to terminate their Iranian ties, European governments will not enforce their own sanctions.” Weinthal repeats his Dubowitz’s calls for Swiss energy company Elektrizitätsgesellschaft Laufenburg (EGL) to cancel its €18 billion-€20 billion gas deal with Iran.
Tehran Bureau: Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the hawkish Washington Institute for Near east Policy (WINEP) writes that while the Treasury Department’s decision to sanction 37 German, Maltese and Cypriot companies for being controlled by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) but “the latest U.S. actions are not likely to put sufficient pressure on Tehran to change the regime’s calculus.” The Iranian shipping line is alleged to participate in arms smuggling and, according to Levitt is “one of the central players in Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons capabilities.”
]]>The allegations were first brought to light by New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins. Filkins later confirmed the exchanges of cash with Karzai himself, who [...]]]>
The allegations were first brought to light by New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins. Filkins later confirmed the exchanges of cash with Karzai himself, who called the allegation defamation even as he admitted it was true.
But what exactly does the exchange of cash mean?
Iran has long been involved in post-Taliban Afghanistan. As Amb. James Dobbins recounts in his section of the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Iran Primer, which was also published at Tehran Bureau, Iran’s relationship with the Northern Alliance allowed the December 2001 Bonn Conference to end successfully with the creation of an Afghani government. It was also Iran, says Dobbins, who represented the U.S. at the conference, and suggested adding language about elections to the interim Afghan constitution created in Bonn.
Most analysts seem to agree that the “bags of cash” pseudo-scandal only reinforces the notion that Iran and the U.S. share an interest in a stable Afghanistan, or at worst, that the cash handed over pales in comparison to what the U.S. throws around with Karzai unlikely to be beholden to Iranian demands.
“Worries about geopolitical bogeymen can overwhelm good sense,” writes Foreign Policy‘s Steve LeVine on his blog about oil geopolitics. “Just who is Tehran endangering by keeping Karzai lubricated with pocket change? For one, the fellows U.S. troops are fighting: the Taliban.”
“Today’s alarmism is partly over Karzai’s use of some of the Iran money to buy off Taliban leaders. To which one can rightly reply, So what? The strategic payoff is how power operates in Afghanistan,” he adds.
Michigan professor Juan Cole blogs that the revelation underscores several realities, among them “that the US and Iran are de facto allies in Afghanistan (in fact both of them are deeply opposed to the Taliban and their backers among hard line cells of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence).”
“US military spokesmen have sometimes attempted to make a case that Iran is helping the hyper-Sunni, Shiite-killing, anti-Karzai Taliban, which is not very likely to be true or at least not on a significant scale,” he continues. “The revelations of Tehran’s support for Karzai give credence to Iranian officials’ claims of having been helpful to NATO, since they both want Karzai to succeed.”
Even Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, doesn’t think the revelation is a big deal, despite underscoring the Karzai’s “venality”: “On the bright side, the Iranian money probably doesn’t influence Mr. Karzai’s policy or Afghan actions any more than, say, our money does,” she writes on a New York Times online symposium on the subject. “The Afghan president has always had a ‘strategy of tactics,’ playing one powerbroker off against another to make sure he stays afloat.”
Thought she concludes that the money might be intended to hasten a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Marlowe acknowledges the ‘bags of money’ don’t pose a great threat to the United States: “The bogyman of Iranian influence in Afghanistan is overhyped. The Iranians have every interest in a relatively stable neighbor.”
This is just about the same view as neoconservative Council on Foreign Relations scholar Max Boot, who writes in Commentary: “These cash payments hardly mean that Karzai is a dupe of Iran. He gets much more money and support from the U.S. than from the Iranians, and he knows that.”
“In a way, what the Iranians are doing, while undoubtedly cynical, is not that far removed from conventional foreign-aid programs run by the U.S., Britain, and other powers that also seek to curry influence with their donations,” Boot notes. He does, however, have concerns that the Iran-Karzai relationship is an indication of what is to come for Afghanistan should the U.S. “leave prematurely.”
So there you have it. Not much on the left, not much on the right. The “bags of cash” scandal has ended up being little more than the rare confirmation of business as usual.
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