Tehran in Flames

[GreNME]

Marg Bar Dictator

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The Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Khamenei has shown what a traitor to the Iranian People he is by allowing a sham election. He is now using his Basij forces (explanation (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/jon-lee-anderson-understanding-the-basij.html)) to try to clamp down on protests of the rigged elections, and as a result more voices from Iran than ever before have been getting out to the internet in a demonstration that these people demand freedom, crave civil rights, and want their own voice. People are dying as a result of the attacks by the Iranian government's 'secret police' (this article (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1906049,00.html?xid=rss-topstories) is an example), and it's only causing the protesters to get more angry.

My hope for this is that the Iranian people win out over Grand Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. They deserve a voice, and they deserve the same self-determination as a country as anyone else does.

I also hope that the United States government has the good sense to keep out of this fight, because getting involved will only rally everyone in Iran against the US (right now only Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are against the US). The fight for these rights needs to be fought by the Iranian people, and while I support their fight for rights I do not want to jeopardize their self-determination-- I hope the US government understands this concept as well.

Marg Bar Dictator
زنده باد ايران

[HereticHulk]

I think the CIA is all over this. America is backing Mir-Hossein Mousavi to be the 'reform candidate' because he will play ball with corporate America to get that Oil.


The youth continue to gain a voice under the theocratic regime in Iran. However, history dictates that Mir Hussein Mousavi, the reformist candidate leading the protests, has a questionable track record that Neo-cons seem to be overlooking.

In 1983, acting prime minister Mousavi reportedly had a hand in the Beirut barracks bombing that left an estimated 300 U.S. Marines dead. Mousavi was also a lead contact Imad Mughniyah, the alleged brain child behind the barracks bombing. The track record behind Mousavi also includes running operatives through Kuwait and Iraq, along with a 1988 truck bombing that left five Americans dead in Naples, Italy.

It should also be noted that retired Navy Admiral James “Ace” Lyons sought to kill Mousavi’s operatives in the 80’s, but was met with roadblocks after Reagan secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger ‘sabotaged’ the plan.

more...

.Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.

...“The Finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” Preparing the Battlefield, The New Yorker, July 7, 2008

...The Ukrainian Orange phenomenon was modeled quite explicitly on the example of the Rose Revolution, which featured a disputed election, massive youth-oriented street protests, and plenty of subsidies from U.S. government agencies. The 'Color' Revolutions: Fade to Black, Antiwar, September 29, 2006.

...The Pentagon and US intelligence have refined the art of such soft coups to a fine level. RAND planners call it ‘swarming,’ referring to the swarms of youth, typically linked by SMS and web blogs, who can be mobilized on command to destabilize a target regime. Color Revolutions, Geopolitics and the Baku Pipeline", Engdahl, (no date)

...Even before the count began, Mousavi declared himself “definitely the winner” based on “all indications from all over Iran.” He accused the government of “manipulating the people’s vote” to keep Ahmadinejad in power and suggested the reformist camp would stand up to challenge the results.

...“It is our duty to defend people’s votes. There is no turning back,” Mousavi said, alleging widespread irregularities. Iran declares win for Ahmadinejad in disputed vote, Associated Press, June 13, 2009

There is a full effort of the "western" media and some expatriate Iranian organizations to de-legitimize the Iranian election despite the absence of any real evidence of voting fraud. These events show all characteristics of an engineered "color evolution".

As said before I find the reelection of Ahmadinejad quite plausible. He has done a lot for the poor and the elections were for a decent part class based. As Robert Fisk relates from someone not-regime-friendly in Tehran:

But I must repeat what he said. "The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad."

My guest and I drank dookh, the cool Iranian drinking yoghurt so popular here. The streets of Tehran were a thousand miles away. "You know why so many poorer women voted for Ahmadinejad? There are three million of them who make carpets in their homes. They had no insurance. When Ahmadinejad realised this, he immediately brought in a law to give them full insurance. Ahmadinejad's supporters were very shrewd. They got the people out in huge numbers to vote – and then presented this into their vote for Ahmadinejad."

The myth in the "western" media is that Ahmadinejad is a "right-wing hardliner". While he asserts nationalism and sovereignty as any president should do, in interior politics and economics, dominant in elections everywhere, his position is more to the left of the typical "western" right-left scale.

The argument favored by Juan Cole and others that high inflation and high unemployment numbers should have favored Mousavi and the 'reformers' backed by Iran's richest man Rafsanjani. But those numbers, as asserted in the "west", are not what they are said to be.

Unfortunately the myth that is currently created, will likely be used to favor the agenda of the war mongers. We will all be in trouble if their argument wins. This whole issue will do wonders for oil speculators and thereby snuff up any "green shots".

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_56031.shtml

[John L]

I think the CIA is all over this. America is backing Mir-Hossein Mousavi to be the 'reform candidate' because he will play ball with corporate America to get that Oil.

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_56031.shtml

The author there sounds like a kook. The first two sentences of his disclaimer-- "Before you start connecting the dots, consider this: The attempt to discredit the elections and cause instability in Iran look very much like a scheme we've seen before - directly out of the CIA playbook."-- pretty much set the stage for conspiracy-theorizing from the get-go.

HH, all I can say is that for the past two and a half weeks, I've been not only keeping up with briefs from people who are over there, but have also been listening to as many sources as possible that have not been mainstream media outlets (who have really dropped the ball on coverage) and checking in with individuals who are directly connected to people in the thick of things over there. This is not some fake game being played in Iran by outside forces, of this I can assure you. However, to give you some idea of why I'm sure of this without making public any names that can be affected, I'll try to give you an idea of what's going on over there.

Basically, the Iranian people have, for at least a decade and a half, been keen on normalizing relations with the West, but only under one condition-- they are able to do so on their own terms. What this means is that while there are millions upon millions of people in Iran who would like to set up relations again, the last thing they ever want is something like the Shah happening and the memory of what a failure this was runs very deep (even in the young). To wit:
For those who think Mousavi is a US-connected figure, they really don't know who Mousavi really is. This is one of the guys who championed the Iranian nuclear program and still argues that Iran has just as much a right to a nuclear program as any other country in the world. For someone who is allegedly a CIA plant, he holds one of the most opposing positions to anyone in the US government. He maintains that he would support brokering a relationship with the West, but removing the nuclear program is out of the question. He also is not on friendly terms with Israel, which would be another sticking point with the US, since he would not likely be recognizing Israel as a legitimate state were he to get into office. On just those two positions alone, Mousavi is very much the opposite of a supporter of the United States as an ally, and is instead concerned primarily and vehemently with the prosperity and strength of the Iranian people and Iran as a nation. Suffice to say, while having Mousavi in office may be somewhat preferable to Ahmadinejad in terms of international rhetoric, since the office of the president of Iran has next to no influence on international policy and must still pass all policies through the Supreme Leader, any arguments that Mousavi being in office will somehow benefit the United States are beyond mistaken and well into the realm of ridiculous-- this man is concerned with Iran and the Iranian people, not the health and welfare of the United States. He's not even as democratically-motivated as many of the protests and protesters who are supporting him, and is instead willing to submit to the Iranian popular vote than to try and dictate some other agenda.
Rafsanjani, who is another big player in what's been happening in Iran, is actually someone who was part of the original 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. This man isn't a former Revolutionary, he's still operating on the tenets he did back in 1979 when the Shah was ousted. He's strongly interested in a government that is for the Iranian people and that follows the Iranian Constitution that was drafted from the 1979 Revolution, and is instead trying to oppose what is being seen by many as a military coup by the forces of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran. This is a man of the Revolution for the Iranian government, not Western secular democracy or any pre-1979 form of government. As such, Rafsanjani has already issued a statement that he supports Khamenei's move to extend the period of checking disputes of the election results, and has approved of Khamenei's re-counting 10% of the votes. Considering Rafsanjani is the head of the Assembly of Experts-- the only council in Iran who is capable of unseating Khamenei and replacing him with anyone else-- ignoring the practical and middle-ground stance that Rafsanjani has been taking throughout these last couple of weeks is going to result in an extreme lack of understanding about what's going on.
One of Mousavi's most notable supporters is the grandson of the first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. This was the figurehead of the Iranian Revolutionary government and one of the faces of the power that ousted the Shah in 1979. His views and Mousavi's views are very similar, and conspiracy theories trying to connect Khomeini to US political or intelligence forces would be laughable considering this man still strongly dislikes the installed government that was the Shah, and as an Islamic scholar his view of the position of the Supreme Leader is one of support. The difference between him and the current Supreme Leader is that he feels the office of Supreme Leader should not be so mired in political battles, that it's a position of religious authority that should not be abused by political posturing and bias. He views Khamenei's behavior as reeking of bias and lacking the ecumenical impartiality that the position requires, and his view is primarily that this is due to Khamenei's entwining the office of Supreme Leader with political duties instead of remaining a position that is supposed to be the religious and political 'conscience' of the nation.
Interestingly, directly relating to the link you gave, that "someone not-regime-friendly in Tehran" that was quoted just happened to be parroting the Ahmadinejad campaign arguments nearly word-for-word, most of it untrue. University enrollments for non-Basij and non-IRG citizens-- all of which require a promissory acceptance by the regime-- had gone down since 2005 in Iran. Unemployment in cities large and small had gone up throughout the country, leaving people young and old out of work.
As for the claim that Ahmadinejad's politics are somehow "more left" than even the left of the US, all that speaks of is an incredibly naive and uneducated writer-- the concept of medical coverage and care by the state is not dictated by political left-right politics, but is instead dictated by Islamic law that places the religious and political authority as the "parent" to the people. It's a concept that is authoritarian and autocratic, not politically left or right-- those trying to turn it into a political assignment display a shallow understanding of the difference between the inherent church-state interweaving behind Iranian (and, incidentally, Islamic) political structure.


Sorry, HH, but the author of that article (and the general conspiracy theory about the US being behind these events) is naive, seemingly wantonly ignorant, and shallowly attempting to define Iranian politics through an American framework, which isn't even close to the same zip code of the ballpark that is what has really been going on in Iran. Politics in Iran are as different as a (Christian) church and a (Muslim) mosque-- sure, they're both places people may go to observe their religion, but the purpose, structure, and layout are very different.