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Atlantic Free Press OP/ED
Sat 04 Jul 2009 |
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The Coup in Iran must not stand |
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Written by Jalal Alavi
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Saturday, 04 July 2009 06:29 |
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by Jalal Alavi
 Much of what has transpired over the past couple of weeks in Iran was anticipated in my commentary published about a month in advance of the June 12 presidential election [1], which goes to show how predictable the Islamic Republic can be to those who are familiar with factional politics in Iran.
Accordingly, a chronology of major conspiratorial events in the history of the Islamic Republic and a review of some of the possible reasons behind the electoral coup that prevented reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi from being declared the winner of the June 12 presidential election may prove useful to those who have been following the events.
While a coup is seldom a feature of factional politics in most Middle Eastern countries, the conspiracy against Mousavi is only the latest in a series of plots historically directed against reformist elements in Iran.
Thus, it may be said that the hardliners’ consolidation of power in Iran began with the plot against the provisional government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, which led to his resignation in late 1979.
The next plot or rather coup was directed against the Islamic Republic’s first popularly elected president, Abolhassan Banisadr, which led to his tumultuous impeachment in 1981 and the execution of some of his close associates soon after.
The third of these plots brought about former President Mohammad Khatami’s failure to deliver on his promises of reform and rapprochement with the West, as well as the brutal silencing of some of Iran’s most fervent advocates of freedom and democracy [2].
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s failure to secure a third, though not consecutive, term in office in 2005 was the result of a fourth plot within the fragmented structure of the Islamic Republic [3], as a result of which hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first became president.
Of course, one must also add to the above the Guardian Council’s post-Khomeini vetting of presidential and parliamentary candidates as a way of further consolidating hardliner power in Iran.
Clearly, then, this latest plot against a moderate or reformist element in Iran cannot be considered as anything new, though the extent to which the hardliners have been willing to use deceit and force this time to secure their continuous hold on power is truly surprising.
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Sat 04 Jul 2009 |
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The Anti-Empire Report - Much ado about nothing? |
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Written by William Blum
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Saturday, 04 July 2009 06:16 |
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by William Blum
What is there about the Iranian election of June 12 that has led to it being one of the leading stories in media around the world every day since? Elections whose results are seriously challenged have taken place in most countries at one time or another in recent decades. Countless Americans believe that the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen by the Republicans, and not just inside the voting machines and in the counting process, but prior to the actual voting as well with numerous Republican Party dirty tricks designed to keep poor and black voters off voting lists or away from polling stations. The fact that large numbers of Americans did not take to the streets day after day in protest, as in Iran, is not something we can be proud of. Perhaps if the CIA, the Agency for International Development (AID), several US government-run radio stations, and various other organizations supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (which was created to serve as a front for the CIA, literally) had been active in the United States, as they have been for years in Iran, major street protests would have taken place in the United States.
The classic "outside agitators" can not only foment dissent through propaganda, adding to already existing dissent, but they can serve to mobilize the public to strongly demonstrate against the government. In 1953, when the CIA overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, they paid people to agitate in front of Mossadegh's residence and elsewhere and engage in acts of violence; some pretended to be supporters of Mossadegh while engaging in anti-religious actions. And it worked, remarkably well.1 Since the end of World War II, the United States has seriously intervened in some 30 elections around the world, adding a new twist this time, twittering. The State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown of its service to keep information flowing from inside Iran, helping to mobilize protesters.2 The New York Times reported: "An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so)." 3
In recent years, the United States has been patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with warships, halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas or for other illegal reasons, financing and "educating" Iranian dissidents, using Iranian groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran, kidnaping Iranian diplomats in Iraq, kidnaping Iranian military personnel in Iran and taking them to Iraq, continually spying and recruiting within Iran, manipulating Iran's currency and international financial transactions, and imposing various economic and political sanctions against the country.4
"I've made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran's affairs," said US President Barack Obama with a straight face on June 23. Some in the Iranian government [have been] accusing the United States and others outside of Iran of instigating protests over the elections. These accusations are patently false and absurd."5
"Never believe anything until it's officially denied," British writer Claud Cockburn famously said.
In his world-prominent speech to the Middle East on June 4, Obama mentioned that "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government." So we have the president of the United States admitting to a previous overthrow of the Iranian government while the United States is in the very midst of trying to overthrow the current Iranian government. This will serve as the best example of hypocrisy that's come along in quite a while.
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Sat 04 Jul 2009 |
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Beyond Independence: We are most free when we are most bound to others |
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Written by Robert Jensen
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Saturday, 04 July 2009 06:15 |
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by Robert Jensen
 Power is typically approached as a question of dominance and submission. Power is marked by the ability to impose or the ability to resist that imposition. This is what some have called “power-over,”[1] which assumes a zero-sum game in which individuals are always in competition for that power—someone dominates and someone submits. In such a world, one can use this kind of power with varying levels of responsibility to others, but in such a world it is inevitable that power routinely will be used unjustly. Because there is always the threat that some other person or group can grab the power, these kinds of systems will encourage people to seek always more power. This is readily evident, for example, in the emergence of the United States as the dominant power after World War II. Even though it was clear the United States could have lived relatively secure in the world with its considerable wealth and extensive resources, that status was instead a source of anxiety in a power-over world, as seen in this conclusion of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in 1947: “To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat. Preponderant power must be the object of U.S. policy.”[2]
That’s the logic of power-over: One either dominates or eventually is dominated. The potential of a challenge from below means that no amount of power is enough; more always must be accumulated to ward off threats. Along the way, people pursuing these goals tend to justify the concentration of power as in the best interests of all; the enlightened ones with the power tell us that they will use it benevolently in the interests not just of themselves but also those less fortunate. All of human history argues against having faith in this power-seeking, with its accompanying hubris and self-delusion. But history is conveniently ignored by the powerful as they congratulate themselves on their vision and fortitude, while at the same time they work feverishly to propagandize the powerless, lest those below see the shell game for what it is and rebel.
It’s tempting to say that this power-over exercised on earth is illusory, that real power rests with God or on some other plane of existence. The problem, of course, is that the suffering caused by the exercise of power-over is not illusory and does not exist at some other level. It is felt by people and other living things in the here-and-now. The need to challenge power-seeking, domination, and injustice is not otherworldly but of this world. Still, it is not merely rhetorical to mark that power-over is dead power. It is ultimately the power of death, and also is a power that comes only to those whose souls are dead. The poet Muriel Rukeyser expressed clearly the nature of this power and why we should reject it:
Dead power is everywhere among us—in the forest, chopping down the songs; at night in the industrial landscape, wasting and stiffening a new life; in the streets of the city, throwing away the day. We wanted something different for our people: not to find ourselves an old, reactionary republic, full of ghost-fears, the fears of death and the fears of birth. We want something else.[3]
We want something else, but our systems and institutions rarely provide it. Even the church itself, where we might assume we could find that “something else,” is mired in a domination/subordination dynamic. Much Christian theology is rooted in the idea that people are so inherently evil that we must subordinate ourselves to God, and then—convenient for church officials—to a calcified dogma and doctrine propagated by the church. It shouldn’t be surprising that this conception of Christianity coexists comfortably with the power-over exercised by the contemporary nation-state and corporation. These groups of elites—political, economic, religious—take for themselves the right to dominate in their arena, eyeing the other elites nervously, knowing they must collaborate with each other but always aware they also are in nervous competition in the struggle for primacy. Such is the nature of life, even for the ultra-privileged, in a power-over world.
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Sat 04 Jul 2009 |
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Ethnic Cleansing as a State Policy |
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Written by Nicola Nasser
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Saturday, 04 July 2009 06:11 |
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by Nicola Nasser
In his speech at Bar Ilan University on June 14, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a new Israeli “peace plan,” with preconditions that a Palestinian negotiator must first meet before he would “promptly” engage in “unconditional” bilateral talks to meet an international consensus demanding the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. His preconditions added to the fourteen conditions the former Israeli government of comatose Ariel Sharon attached to Israel’s adoption in grudge of the 2003 Road Map blueprint for peace with the Palestinian side, on the basis of which the U.S. administration of President Barak Obama and his presidential envoy George Mitchell are now urging an early resumption of “immediate” Israeli – Palestinian peace talks, which Mitchell on June 26 hoped “very much to conclude this phase of the discussions and to be able to move into meaningful and productive negotiations in the near future."
Sharon’s conditional approval of the Road Map has condemned the blueprint as a non-starter, led to the Israeli military reoccupation of the Palestinian autonomous areas, aborted former U.S. President George W. Bush’s promise to Palestinians to have their own state twice in 2005 and 2008, and doomed the twenty – year peace process since the Madrid conference in 1991 to its current impasse that Obama and Mitchell are trying to break through. It is a forgone conclusion that Netanyahu’s preconditions -- Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state,” “demilitarization” of the prospective Palestinian less-than-a-sovereign state and preserving Israel’s illegitimate “right” to expand its illegal colonial Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories -- will fare worse than Sharon’s conditions.
Netanyahu demanded that the “Palestinian population,” and not the Palestinian people -- who live “in Judea and Samaria,” and not in the Israeli – occupied Palestinian territory, where there is an “Israeli presence,” and not an Israeli military occupation -- should first agree to a “public, binding and unequivocal” recognition that Israel is “the nation state of the Jewish people” worldwide, and not the nation state of the Israelis. His demand was an arrogant precondition ridiculed by Gideon Levy in Haaretz on June 15 as an “excessive demand that Palestinians recognize the Jewish state by one who has failed to recognize the Palestinians as a people,” sarcastically welcomed the next day by Ma'ariv’s chief political columnist, Ben Caspit, who wrote: “Welcome, Mr. Prime Minister, to the 20th century. The problem is that we're already in the 21st.” Moreover, such a precondition “is almost humiliating and it is unlikely to be met,” by the Palestinian Authority (PA), according to Avi Issacharoff, writing in Haaretz on June 17.
Israeli analyst M.J. Rosenberg wrote on June 19: Acceptance of Israel as a “Jewish state” is a non-starter at this point. And Netanyahu knows it. If that is a precondition for negotiations, there will be no negotiations. But without any definition of borders and with Netanyahu committed to expanding settlements in the West Bank, how can anyone seriously expect Palestinians to recognize Israel as a “Jewish state?” Aaron David Miller, a former senior U.S. negotiator in the Mideast, said Netanyahu’s speech “was less about pursuing Arab-Israeli peace and much more about pursuing the U.S.-Israeli relationship.”
PA’s Prime Minister in Ramallah, Salam Fayyad, noted in a speech at Al-Quds (Jerusalem) University on June 22 that his Israeli counterpart’s speech missed all reference to the Road Map blueprint as well as to the thorny issue of expanding settlements and described the speech as "a new blow to efforts to salvage the peace process." Head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)’s department of negotiations affairs, Saeb Erakat, condemned Netanyahu’s speech as a “non-starter.” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged the international community to isolate him and his government. His Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, a close ally of Abbas and the U.S. and Israel’s 30-year unwavering peace partner, said Netanyahu’s precondition “aborts the chance for peace,” although he declined to heed Abbas’ call for the isolation of Netanyahu and received him and others of his cabinet. Al-Baath, the mouthpiece of Syria's ruling party, commented: “Netanyahu has confirmed that he rejects the Arab initiative for peace.” In an editorial on June 16, the Saudi Arabian English daily, “Arab News,” said his speech was “a challenge to the world community.” Walid Jumblat, a leading figure of the March 14 bloc, which recently won the Lebanese elections, lambasted the speech as dragging the region into a “dangerous stage” and one that “completely crippled” any possibility to reach a peace settlement, adding that, “any talk about Israel as a Jewish state means closing the file on the (Palestinian right of) return,” on which there is a consensus among rival Lebanese factions to reject the resettlement of half a million Palestinian refugees hosted by Lebanon since 1948.
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Sat 04 Jul 2009 |
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United Opposition Hezbollah After the Elections |
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Written by Franklin Lamb
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Saturday, 04 July 2009 06:01 |
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by Franklin Lamb in Dahiyeh.
While on the surface the pro-US team here did preserve its ‘majority’ the Hezbollah led opposition actually won the election by nearly ten percent of the popular vote. Of approximately 1,495,000 votes cast on June 7, 815,000 voted for the National Lebanese Resistance led by Hezbollah while 680,000 voted for the March 14 government parties.
As Lebanon’s new Prime Minister, Saad Hariri labors to put together a coalition Cabinet, Hezbollah is currently stronger politically in Lebanon than it has ever been. The Party can largely determine the construction of the next Lebanese government and insist on key cabinet posts going to its allies, as it prefers keep a low profile and influence policy through quiet consultation rather than threats and muscle flexing.
As one Hezbollah friend explained, “If Hezbollah has just one member sitting in Parliament, the Majority understands that the whole Resistance is there. We don’t need to be flashy, rather we need to collaborate and make this new government work. Our supporters are demanding this.”
Post election popular support for Hezbollah appears to have increased due to its post-election sportsmanlike acceptance of the results and its conduct ad efforts at accommodation with its political adversaries despite ongoing misgivings about the “US Team.”
This stance is illustrated by a Hezbollah joke that is currently bouncing around Dahiyeh, a major Resistance area where there is not massive support for the US March 14 team.
A Hezbollah member writes to Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Iran’s Supreme Leader or Jurisconsult (Wali al Fiqeh) who the party often consults on religious issues and political matters.
“Dear Leader Khameini,
I am a crack dealer in Beirut who has recently been diagnosed as a carrier of the HIV virus. My parents live in the suburb of al Dahiyeh and one of my sisters, who lives in Jounieh, is married to a transvestite. My father and mother have recently been arrested by Hezbollah security for growing and selling marijuana in their small garden and are currently dependent on my other two sisters who are prostitutes in Maameltein.
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