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Weekly Commentary
Enter
“the Shark”
On June 17,
Iran’s theocratic regime will hold a presidential election,
which, like all other such theatrics, carries no semblance of
the democratic process. Hundreds may nominate themselves, but as
one election official said, the few whose absolute loyalty to
the system is rock solid will be allowed to run. Among them is
the former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, nicknamed “the
shark” by Iranians.
After eight
years of shameless capitulation to the rival faction the
so-called reformist faction of President Mohammad Khatami is now
turned into a hapless bunch despised by the Iranians and ejected
from circles of power.
If there were
any doubt that Khatami’s faction indeed has been serving the
interest of fundamentalist regime,
Iran’s
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, removed all doubt on
Monday, saying that both factions were “the components of the
Islamic Republic” and loyal to the Constitution. The two camps
were "two wings for flying upward to progress," he added.
Translation: Both factions are bent on preserving the clerical
system and its theocratic Constitution.
What about
the candidates? Increasingly vulnerable in the face of the
rising popular unrest and under international pressure to
dismantle its nuclear program, the ruling clerical establishment
has opened the door to a notorious member of the old guard,
Rafsanjani, who has announced his intentions to run in what is
expected to be a rehash of a disastrous eight-year tenure
immediately after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989.
With a
Mafia-type stranglehold on many important businesses and
industries in Iran, Rafsanjani was utterly disgraced when he
failed to win a seat from Tehran during the sham parliamentary
elections in February 2000.
As Khomeini’s
chief advisor, he ran the devastating Iran-Iraq war that left
millions of casualties, hundreds of billions of dollars of
material losses and millions of displaced persons. Rafsanjani
also oversaw the mass killings of political opponents in the
1980s and the serial assassinations of dissidents abroad, for
which he was implicated by a Berlin court in 1997.
The Khobar
Tower bombing of 1996 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in which 19
American servicemen lost their lives, was planned and carried
out under his watch. And, last, but not least, he has been the
architect of Iran’s secret drive for nuclear weapons since early
1990s.
His PR
campaign has already begun and familiar foreign journalists have
been traveling to Tehran to interview him. Again the misnomers
such as “moderate” or “pragmatic” are heaped on this cunning
mullah by an array of Iranian analysts whose political umbilical
cords with the establishment remain intact. One can also feel
the hype in certain Washington media and policy circles, which
promised a
Tehran
spring the last time Rafsanjani became President.
So, the
artificial drama to heat up an otherwise boring pre-election
soap opera continues with Rafsanjani doing his version of
playing hard to get. “I had no choice but to swallow the bitter
pill of becoming a candidate,” he said when announcing his
intention to run.
Meanwhile,
his unofficial campaign stumps have been disastrous. His
appearance on a May Day gathering in a sport stadium in Tehran
was canceled due to intense anti-Rafsanjani protests in advance
of his speech.
If the
February 2004 parliamentary election is any indication, even
fewer voters will cast their ballots. Those prospects, however,
are not going to stop the ruling clique from their usual spin
and fraud game. With the vote more than a month away,
Intelligence Minister Ali Younessi has already boasted that
fifty-percent of the population will go the polls come June 17.
The obvious
message of the June election, however, is that the clerical
regime has arrived at a dead-end and the best it can field is a
terror-monger, despicable tyrant named Rafsanjani. Washington is
wise to keep that in mind when formulating a sound policy toward
Tehran.
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The Washington Times
May 06, 2005
Nuclear Diplomacy with Iran
You may have
missed it, but sometime this spring, the Bush administration
decided to subcontract its Iran strategy to Europe. In late
February, in a dramatic reversal of its long-standing assertion
that the United States will not negotiate with Iran over its
nuclear ambitions, the White House unexpectedly announced that
it was siding with the "EU 3" — France, Germany and Great
Britain — in their efforts to diplomatically stall Tehran's
atomic advances. Among the diplomatic and economic carrots now
being proffered to Iran's ayatollahs by the Bush administration
are a lifting of American opposition to Iran's accession to the
World Trade Organization and the provision of aeronautical
components for Iran's aging fleet of airliners.
What lies
behind this new engagement? It is certainly not that the White
House has gone soft on
Iran.
Administration officials continue to maintain that Iran is
covertly pursuing an atomic capability, and have flatly rejected
Iranian proposals to retain the means for limited uranium
enrichment. Yet, in the absence of a coherent policy designed to
thwart
Iran's
atomic ambitions, American officials have steadily drifted
toward Europe's brand of diplomacy.
There are at
least three reasons why such an approach is fraught with peril.
The first
relates to timing. By signing on to the European diplomatic
track, the Bush administration has implicitly embraced France,
Germany and Great Britain's schedule for dealing with Iran. Such
a step is highly problematic…
Another
timetable is also in play. With Iran's current "reformist"
president, Mohammed Khatami, constitutionally barred from
seeking re-election once his term in office expires,
international pressure is mounting to delay any sort of decisive
diplomatic or military response until after Iranians go to the
polls in June — even if
Iran
demonstrates bad faith in its negotiations with
Europe in the interim. Moreover, under this rationale, Iran's new president
will need time to craft a cabinet, assume control of the
country's sprawling bureaucracy and formulate his own stance on
Iran's nuclear program — a process that could take additional
weeks, if not months.
All of this
means that a concerted trans-Atlantic policy toward the Islamic
Republic will not materialize until substantially later in 2005,
at the earliest. In the meantime, the Iranian regime acquires
valuable breathing room to forge ahead with its nuclear
development.
The second
reason has to do with style. Despite earnest European denials,
the current EU-3 negotiating track is not a new effort. It bears
a remarkable resemblance to an earlier European attempt to
cajole Iran into giving up its WMD programs and support for
terrorism through economic inducements. That initiative, dubbed
"critical dialogue," fizzled in 1997, but not before providing
Iran with much-needed economic assistance and the political
cover necessary to continue its rogue behavior. The current
European approach is likely to meet the same fate, irrespective
of revived hopes in
London,
Paris and Berlin for a more constructive sort of engagement with
Iran's
ayatollahs.
The third
relates to objectives. The Bush administration has previously
declared that it "will not tolerate" a nuclear Iran. Yet just
such a development now appears to be under serious consideration
by American allies in Europe. In recent days, Britain, France
and Germany, stymied by Iranian intransigence, have reportedly
begun contemplating a compromise deal that would enable the
Islamic Republic to retain nuclear technology that could be used
in the development of an offensive nuclear arsenal. Such a move
is anathema to American objectives, and if implemented would
decisively dash hopes for any sort of consensus between the
United States and Europe.
Sooner or
later, though,
Washington
is likely to grasp that such reasoning increasingly constitutes
the triumph of hope over experience. And when the White House
does get serious, it will discover that there is no substitute
for an independent American strategy toward the Islamic Republic
— one that is designed to deter, contain and ultimately
transform the regime in Tehran.
Excerpts from a commentary by Ilan Berman, vice president for
policy of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington and
author of the forthcoming Tehran Rising: Iran's Challenge to the
United States.
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The New York Sun
May 10, 2005
Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program
Suspected
WASHINGTON
-- A secret, parallel military program to produce nuclear
weapons may be behind Iran's announcement yesterday that it will
break its agreement to suspend uranium enrichment. Western
intelligence agencies, including the CIA, suspect the Islamic
republic has been hiding the program from the International
Atomic Energy Agency's inspectors during the last two years of
negotiations.
A Western
diplomat with access to sensitive real-time intelligence told
The New York Sun yesterday that America, Israel, and some
European intelligence services have concluded recently that a
pattern of procurement and technical training arrangements
strongly suggests the existence of a second nuclear program in
Iran...
The
executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education
Center, Henry Sokolski, told the Sun yesterday that there is a
growing consensus that the Iranians have a secret parallel
program. "Other allied governments have raised this specter
based on their assessment of their intelligence. This is not
just the Israelis, the United States, and Italy," he said…
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Agence France Presse
May 9, 2005
Suicide Bombers Mingle at Teheran Book
Fair
TEHRAN -- Scooby Doo, where are
you? If you're at Tehran's book fair and looking for something
for the kids, you'll find the stand right next to Islamic
Jihad's and around the corner from those other surprising
pillars of the publishing world, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Iran's massive annual literary
fest, it seems, has pretty much something for everyone: Thomas
the Tank Engine, interior decorating, Microsoft Windows
programming, "How to Kill an Israeli" and Jean-Paul Sartre.
"We have a stand here every year,"
explained a young man at the Hamas booth, which featured
T-shirts blazened with the portrait of their late spiritual
leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, replica suicide bomber headbands
and posters featuring mug shots of Palestinians who "blew
themselves to bits".
The literary message, explained
the young Hamas rep, was that "they blow themselves up so others
can have a better life".
Hamas, he said, also has an office
in the Islamic republic, "and a bank account number for
donations".
The man at the Islamic Jihad booth
appeared to a bit bore, perhaps slightly frustrated given that
most visitors seemed to prefer books about Big Bird next door.
He is offering a history of Palestine pamphlet and a rather
bloody CD-Rom on "Martyrdom-Seeking Operators".
Publishers from the United States
were also represented at the packed book fair at Tehran's
sprawling international exhibition centre, albeit by their
Iranian import agents, and drawing large crowds…
One stand had a real assault rifle
on display. That was the Hezbollah booth -- more of a multimedia
experience, which was quite unique.
"Captured from the Zionists in
Southern Lebanon," explained the Lebanese Shiite movement's rep
as he showed off the rusty rifle. "We've had a lot of people
coming by, and nearly all our books have sold out after just two
days."
They may have a hard time
competing with the more entertaining books in the foreign
publisher section -- especially with Britain's Mr. Tickle and
the other much-loved Mr. Men stories.
But Hezbollah even had something
for kids: "Resistance Boy: The Boy from Quds (Jerusalem)" is the
name of the PC CD-ROM.
"It's a game for children. They
have to shoot down Israeli aircraft and shoot at other things,"
explained the Hezbollah salesman.
For adults he recommended 'Special
Force', a 3D shoot-em-up in which nifty programmers have managed
to turn aliens into Israelis, and where the object of the game
is to die.
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