In Tehran these days, the heat is on. It has become something of a customary summer spectacle that with the rise in temperature and the onset of summer regime thugs begin to more rigorously enforce compulsory laws on women’s cover. In the words of one of the regime’s most powerful and reactionary clerics, blood must be shed to force women to wear their Islamic head covers. A shocking hike in the number of violent rapes against women in Iran, with a few cases of gang rape, is slowly turning into an embarrassing national issue. Members of the Majlis have begun an investigation. While some clerics blame the women, claiming that the victims’ “loose” demeanor and “open” dress brought this violence upon them, Iranian women’s groups increasingly try to bring international attention to their plight. When, in the future, the history of the rise and fall of Iran’s clerical regime is written, the women’s fight for their rights will emerge as one of the most critical components of the democratic movement. It will be recognized that women were at the vanguard as the most persistent advocates of individual freedom. Though to a casual outside observer, a woman’s fight for the right to show an inch or two of her hair might seem frivolous, it is a fact of history that sartorial freedom is invariably organically linked to the political liberties of a society.

So summer heat has increased pressure on women. But the heat on Ahmadinejad, at fever pitch till a month ago, has subsided, at least for now. An uneasy peace seems to have emerged in the recently tempestuous face-off between the once-bombastic president and the increasingly authoritarian Khamenei. When threatened with impeachment by the Supreme Leader’s allies in parliament, the press and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), Ahmadinejad, to the surprise of his detractors, did not go quietly into the night—he decided to fight fire with fire. He threatened to tell the truth about what is happening in the country; He talked of the tens of millions of dollars made each year from the illicit trade in American cigarettes, and how “the brothers”—an unmistakable reference to the IRGC—have not been able to forgo the temptation to avail themselves of this source of income; He talked of these brothers operating many illegal ports of entry where, using the guise of national security, they bring in all manner of commodities at great profit. He even threatened to close down these entry points. The IRGC responded by angrily denying any involvement in illegal trade of any kind. Khamenei, though determined to trim Ahmadinajad’s wings, was also worried that open factional feuds will embolden the opposition. He therefore encouraged everyone to fight out their differences behind closed doors. And as for the matter of the recalcitrant president, Khamenei, in the words of one of his cohorts, decided to “fix (taamir) but keep Ahmadinejad.”

Though in English “fix” has a wide range of meanings (many of them surprisingly relevant to this case), and though the Persian word used to describe what Ahmadienejad has to undergo is bereft of these colorful connotations and is merely mechanical in connotation—“taamir” is what you do to your car—it was clear that only a neutered Ahmadinejad would be allowed to finish the two years left in his term of office.

And Khamenei has been also “fixing” other problems and political adversaries. On the one hand, he has been faced, more clearly than ever before, with the power of the IRGC juggernaut he has created. Though Khomeini, in his last political testament (considered by the Iranian regime to be sacrosanct) clearly warned against any interference of the armed forces—and specifically of the IRGC—in politics, and though the constitution clearly bans such interference, commanders of the IRGC have in recent weeks brazenly defied these laws and admonishments. Not only have they declared who can and cannot not participate in the coming election, they have also unabashedly attacked anyone who dared question the legality of their participation in the political process. Mohammad Reza Khatami, a British-trained physician and the brother of the reformist ex-president, wrote an open letter to the commander of the IRGC saying that his comments about the elections can only be described by two words: “military coup.”

Suddenly the regime sites, of which there are hundreds, each with a long litany of hired guns willing to scurrilously attack anyone at any time, began an orchestrated attack on Khatami. This was in a true sense Khamenei’s Truman/McCarthy moment. He should have fired (or at least publicly reprimanded) the IRGC commander for entering into realms beyond his duties. Yet he has yet to say a word, or even show displeasure by having one of his minions question the wisdom of such political utterances by members of the armed forces. He knows, probably better than anyone, how he and his regime are now utterly beholden to the IRGC and its militia arm, the Basiji. They are the ones who continue to maintain an atmosphere of terror in the country, meant to ensure events in Syria and Egypt don’t encourage the people of Iran to return to the streets and demand their democratic rights.

Khamenei has also been trimming the power of Rafsanjani—a man who had been for more than fifty years his close friend and played a critical role in making him the Supreme Leader. Taking a page or two from Stalin’s treatment of Bukharin in the latter’s last days, when Stalin is reported to have played with the beleaguered Bukharin like a cat playing with a cornered mouse before making a meal of him—a story captured brilliantly in Stephen Cohen’s biography of Bukharin—Khamenei has in recent weeks allowed increased attacks on Rafsanjani in some of the websites close to his camp. In one, called Amariyoun, there is an almost two-hundred page document chronicling Rafsanjani’s past “sins”—everything from working in cahoots with members of the Shah’s regime to “flirting” with the United States, even participating in terrorist acts. Along with these attacks, Khamenei moved to strip Rafsanjani of his last perch of power as the head of the Expediency Council. The Council was set up by Khomeini to adjudicate differences between the three branches of government. Instead of dismissing Rafsanjani, something that would have clearly shown yet another facet of tensions within the regime, Khamanei instead used a nebulous article of the constitution to set up a new committee charged with adjudicating differences between the three branches. In other words, he created a new bureaucracy that renders Rafsanjani’s job moot. He put Ayatollah Shahrudi, an Iraqi-born cleric and for many years Khomeini’s top conduit to the Shiite Iraqi opposition, in charge of this new committee.

Finally, the assassination of a young scientist who worked in the field of nuclear physics in Iran—as well as Russia’s renewed effort to broker a deal between Iran and the international community—has once again put Tehran’s nuclear program under the spotlight. There is no indication that the Bushehr reactor, scheduled to start operation at least a year ago, will be operational anytime soon. The viruses introduced into the computer system controlling the centrifuges did, by all indications, considerable damage to the regime’s nuclear infrastructure. Of these viruses (all reportedly designed by the United States and Israel) only the first, Stuxnet, attracted much attention in the West. Almost in passing, the Iranian regime referred to a second virus and, of course, claimed that much as they had with Stuxtnet the “soldiers of God” immediately beat back this new “Zionist-American” attack.

The Russian effort has so far come to naught. Tehran has once again reiterated its position that it will not heed UN resolutions demanding that Iran temporarily stop its enrichment activities. But with the economic situation worsening inside the country, with new sanctions in the works in Washington and possibly even in the UN, and with the Syria despot—the regime’s sole ally in the region—on the ropes, it looks like it is going to be a long, hot summer in Tehran.
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This article first appeared in THE NATIONAL INTEREST

By: Amir Taheri

For over a week now global media have focused on Egypt, calling the events there a “revolution”, and this is something that they feel rather happy about.
But is this a revolution?
And, if yes, should we be happy about it?
Revolutions are always identified as such after they have taken place.
When a mob attacked the Bastille prison in Paris to release the nine inmates, no one knew this would start a revolution.
Nor did people think that the Bolsheviks’ attack on the Russian Duma (parliament) would be the trigger for a revolution.
And what about the burning of newspapers kiosks in Qom? Again, no one thought that a revolution was afoot in Iran.
In every case, the governments of the day could have nipped the revolution in the bud. They didn’t because they did not think there was going to be a revolution!
Those revolutions happened because the powers in place retreated in the hope of appeasing the crowds.
Revolutions remind me of a story by Chekhov in which a man is riding his sled in a snowstorm in Siberia while wolves pursue him. To appease the wolves he keeps throwing whatever food he has to them. This gives them strength to continue their pursuit. He does not know that their ultimate aim is to devour him.
Anyway, in Egypt’s case, let us wait until a revolution has actually happened before we apply this label.
For the time being, there is no revolution in Egypt.
What we have are protest marches, the sacking of some shops and private homes, and the usual cliché of tanks in the streets.
This could become a revolution, but it hasn’t yet.
Supposing this is a revolution, should we be happy?
This is hard to answer because revolution is a catchword that describes many different events.
For example, we talk of the Industrial Revolution or, more recently, the information technology revolution.
Sometimes the term is used for mundane purposes. Supermarkets boast of a price “revolution”, and Lady Gaga speaks of her, or perhaps it is his, musical “revolution”.
Dictators, from Hosni al-Zaim to Muammar Kaddhafi to Saddam Hussein have described their coups as “revolution”. Only Hafiz al-Assad was modest enough to label his coup a “correcting move” (Al-harakat al-tashihiyah).
The French love the word “revolution” so much that they use it to describe almost any event involving crowds and changes of government. Thus we have the 1830, the 1848, the 1871 and the 1968 “revolutions” in France.

In 1848 more than a dozen events in Europe were labelled “revolution”.
More recently we have had “revolutions” designated with flowers and/or colour schemes, for example the “carnation revolution” in Portugal and the ”orange revolution” in Ukraine.
Most historians assert that only two deserve the label of revolution: the downfall of the Bourbons in France in 1789 and the Romanovs in Russia in 1917. Their argument is that those events not only changed the lives of the French and Russian peoples but also led to wars, both hot and cold, that affected other countries.
I would add the 1979 revolution in Iran, although it does not meets all the conditions of the historians’ model.
However, in this analysis, I leave it aside because the regime it created has not yet been overthrown.
But, what about the French and Russian revolutions?

We know that both claimed millions of lives, caused much devastation and grief, and ultimately ended in failure.

France is today smaller than before its “Great Revolution”. The country is still suffering from the over-centralised system created by the revolution.

The belief that only violence produces reform has entered the French political DNA. This is why France suffered from terrorist activities of all kind for decades and is still the European nation most affected by industrial disputes and violent strikes. The belligerence woven into the French political vocabulary is part of the revolutionary heritage.
The disaster that was the Russian revolution need not be re-told here. Russia is smaller than under the last Tsar and is still trying to emerge from the ditch it was plunged into in 1917. Every year new mass graves of victims of Bolshevism are discovered in a corner of that vast country. Vladimir Putin’s attempt at imposing a new version of autocracy is a sign of the confusion that Russia must still dissipate.
However, the French and Russian revolutions failed to uproot cultures that had grown over centuries. Today, the weird and cruel cultures promoted by Robespierre or Lenin are laughed at if not spat upon.
Revolution is a new concept in Muslim countries.
Until the last decades of the 19th century, Islamic languages, including Arabic, Persian and Turkish, did not even have a word for revolution. Opposing the government in place was “fitnah” (sedition).
In the case of Egypt, it is supposed to have had its “revolution” in 1952 when The Free Officers seized power.
Thus, what is happening in Egypt may not be the start of a revolution but the beginnings of getting out of the one that took place in 1952.
The 1952 coup d’etat put the Egyptian society on a different trajectory. Before it, Egypt was a proto-capitalist society slowly emulating the Western model. Given time, it might have shed its feudalistic features in favour of modern ones developed in Europe across the water.
The 1952 coup created a police state with centralised decision-making. Half a century later it still needs to keep the country under a state of emergency and now even a curfew.
A man of personal integrity, Nasser was an autocrat nonetheless. Anwar Sadat tried to be both the Napoleon and Charles X of Egypt, failing on both accounts. Hosni Mubarak started getting Egypt out of the 1952 straitjacket in the economic field but forgot the need to also get out of it politically.
Entering a revolution is easy, even exciting. Getting out is difficult and painful. In 1979, many of my friends in Tehran were high on revolutionary fervour. By 1983, almost all were dead, executed by the mullahs’ regime.
However, I think Egypt will re-emerge by shutting the book on the 1952 “revolution” without embarking on a new one. In other words, Egyptians should try to get out of the frying-pan without jumping in the fire. Let’s hope that Egypt is neither a political desert nor the house of lunatics that Iran was in 1979.

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Source:
http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=2&id=24023

Submitted by James Besser on Tue, 01/25/2011

Catching up on the Iran issue, my attention was snagged by a Ha’aretz report today that the new head of Israel’s Military Intelligence says Iran could have nuclear weapons “within one or two years.”

Well, maybe. Not for an instant will I dismiss the danger posed by a nuclear Iran or the accuracy of Brigadier-General Aviv Kochavi’s predications. As WikiLeaks demonstrated, even regional governments that have no use whatever for the Jewish state are also wishing somebody – anybody – would take care of an Iran they regard as a mortal threat.

But honestly, don’t Israeli leaders see that they have a credibility problem?

I mean, these predictions of when Iran will have usable nukes are enough to make your head explode.

The online publication Salon recently ran a compendium of wrong predictions, concluding that “According to various Israeli government predictions over the years, Iran was going to have a bomb by the mid-90s — or 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, and finally 2010. More recent Israeli predictions have put that date at 2011 or 2014.”

Recently Meir Dagan, the outgoing Mossad chief, said it wouldn’t be until 2015, at the earliest, apparently because sanctions – and maybe the Stuxnet computer virus – set them back. That reportedly infuriated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who seems to believe Iran will have the bomb in maybe 5 minutes. (Later Dagan, under fire from Netanyahu, changed his mind).

Look, the idea of the fanatic nut jobs in Tehran getting their hands on nuclear weapons is appalling. It’s a danger to Israel, a danger to the other regional countries Iran would like to put under its thumb and it’s a danger to U.S. interests.

The problem is, the credibility of those issuing the direst warnings about Iran is shaky, to say the least. The frequently missed, overwrought predictions of when Iran will join the nuclear club lead to the suspicion that for all the real threat implicit in Iran’s weapons program, some of these warnings are meant more as distractions from other issues – like the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

This endless stream of dire predictions doesn’t contribute to the creation of clear-headed, pragmatic policy, and they reinforce the impression the goal here is to start yet another war.

Yes, a nuclear Iran is a big problem, but so  a nuclear Pakistan and a nuclear North Korea, both of which already have bombs and governments crazy enough to use them. (And an unstable, anarchic Pakistan represents possibly the greatest danger that nukes could end up in the hands of Islamic fanatics bent on destroying Israel).

Nobody’s talking about going to war against those countries, are they? Our efforts to curb their nuclear programs range from ineffective to nonexistent.  Yet the Iran threat is often depicted as far more dangerous and even more immediate than the threat posed by these countries that already have nukes, suggesting that military action is the only answer.

Yes, worry about Iran, and figure out strategies for curbing its nuclear ambitions. But the conflicting predictions and the overwrought warnings don’t convince the world the problem is real; on the contrary, they just fuel doubts about those raising the alarms. So doe the apparent indifference of the Jewish community to proliferation crises in other parts of the world – including proliferation that could have a direct and dire impact on the Jewish state, starting with the reckless Pakistanis.

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This article was first published in “The Jewish Week.”

Ted Koppel
Sunday, January 23, 2011

Veteran broadcaster

on how a crisis ended, but a war began

——————————

On Jan. 20, 1981, 52 American diplomats, intelligence officers and Marines were finally released after being held hostage for nearly 15 months at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Americans saw it as the end of a long national nightmare. Iranians saw it as a successful phase in what the Pentagon would come to call the Long War.

We were wrong; they were right.

On the face of it, the Iranians achieved what they wanted. President Jimmy Carter had labored with key advisers through the last night of his presidency, desperately trying to bring about the hostages’ release before Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 40th president. The Iranians, though, were determined to humiliate our 39th president and were not about to free the captives on Carter’s watch.

As the television networks began their Inauguration Day coverage, the expected moment of release became the theme. TV screens were split to accommodate parallel images from Washington and Tehran. Just outside the Iranian capital, camera crews were taken to Mehrabad International Airport, where the soon-to-be-former hostages would board their flight to freedom.

At ABC News, where I worked at the time, one of our camera crews had been granted access to the Oval Office the previous night. We had video of Carter, looking grim and exhausted, in a cardigan, consulting with his aides until, quite literally, it was time to dress for the inauguration of his successor. Those images and live shots of desperate diplomacy, followed by the stately run-up to the transfer of power in Washington, played on one side of the screen. The preparations for departure from Mehrabad played on the other.

The Iranians stage-managed the drama down to the last second. Precisely at noon, just as Reagan began to recite the oath of office, the planeload of Americans was permitted to take off. The Iranians’ message was blunt and unambiguous: Carter and his administration had been punished for America’s sins against Iran, and Reagan was being offered a conciliatory gesture in anticipation of improved behavior by Washington.

That was hardly the interpretation that the Reagan administration put on the event. The new president portrayed the hostage release as a long-overdue act by which the Iranians acknowledged the obvious: There was a new sheriff in town. The feckless days of the Carter administration were over, and the Iranian mullahs had bowed to the inevitable. Indeed, the administration seemed to be saying that Iran’s greatest concern was now the possibility of U.S. retaliation for the humiliation of the preceding 444 days.

That last point probably was a part of Iran’s strategic calculus. Iran was not then, and is not now, any military match for the United States. Without the American hostages in Tehran, Iran was plainly vulnerable to U.S. power.

Further complicating its position, since September 1980, Iran had been fighting a massive invasion by the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein, the beginnings of a bloody war that would last most of the decade. The United States officially proclaimed neutrality – Henry Kissinger famously observed that it was a shame both nations couldn’t lose – but Washington considered Iran the greater threat and covertly assisted Hussein.

Once the hostages were released, however, no reprisal came, and the Iranian leadership offered no evidence of wanting to reconcile.

In their approach to the United States in the decade that followed, the mullahs provided chilling evidence of how closely they had studied the influence of the media and public opinion on U.S. foreign policy. During the hostage crisis, they learned how obsessively engaged our news media becomes when U.S. prisoners are taken. What Americans consider one of our greatest national virtues – concern for the individual – the Iranians recognized as a vulnerability.

We in the American news media have a tendency to obsess over one crisis at a time, often to the exclusion of other important issues. Indeed, I can hardly overlook my own role in this. The title that ABC News gave to its nightly coverage seemed hyperbolic at first, but it proved frighteningly prescient: “America Held Hostage.” The story held America’s interest so tightly and for so long that our specials on ABC eventually morphed into a regular program – “Nightline.”

Iran watched and learned. They realized that the fixations of the American media could lead to shifts in U.S. national policy. They observed how the hostage crisis cost Carter a second term, and they would soon learn that what influenced one administration could be applied to another.

On Oct. 23, 1983, a truck loaded with explosives was driven into a barracks building in Beirut housing U.S. Marines, who were there as part of an international peacekeeping force. The driver died in the suicide attack, as did 241 American military personnel. Eventually, the bomber was identified as a member of an organization called Hezbollah, which was believed to have been funded and trained by members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

By the time even that much was established, Reagan had ordered all U.S. military personnel in Lebanon evacuated to ships of the 6th Fleet, off the coast. A brief time later, those ships received fresh orders and sailed off. There had been no great public support for engagement in Lebanon in the first place, so there was little reaction to the abrupt departure. (The U.S. invasion of Grenada, occurring at the same time, consumed much of the public’s attention.)

Iran saw how a devastating attack could force America out of Lebanon, with little outcry back home and no retaliation for the bombing. And just as hostages had proved useful to Iran during the Carter administration, they would be used again to manipulate the Reagan White House. Dozens of Americans and Europeans were kidnapped in Lebanon and held hostage during the early and mid-1980s. Again, Hezbollah was believed responsible, and Iranian patronage was more firmly established.

In relatively short order, these tactics would draw the Reagan administration into one of the more bizarre covert negotiations in recent history. Among those kidnapped in Beirut was the CIA’s station chief, William Francis Buckley. He was held and tortured for 15 months, and at one point he was reportedly taken to Iran. He died in captivity. Reagan’s distress over Buckley’s ordeal in particular, and over the fate of other American captives, was a factor behind the Iran-contra affair.

Far from punishing the Iranians, Washington arranged for Israel to sell weapons to Iran. The Israeli stockpiles would be secretly replenished by the United States, which was legally prohibited from selling directly to Iran. In return, Iran would free some hostages. Finally, Iran’s payment for the weapons would be used to buy arms for anti-communist forces in Nicaragua, thereby circumventing a congressional ban on sales to the contras there. That was the icing on the cake.

It was a fiasco. Reagan, whose staunch opposition to communism around the world would lead to the collapse of the Soviet empire, found his administration embroiled in negotiations with the sponsors of Hezbollah. The scheme clearly circumvented U.S. law, and had others in the administration not taken the fall, it could have led to Reagan’s impeachment.

What Iran learned in those years – and we’re still absorbing the consequences of those lessons today – is that kidnapping and terrorism are useful weapons against the United States. Ultimately, Reagan’s broad-shouldered bravado was no more effective in dealing with Tehran than Carter’s mild-mannered diplomacy.

We’ve still not found our way. Instead of taking military action against Iran, the United States has twice invaded Iran’s bitterest enemy, Iraq. And what Iran couldn’t do for itself, George W. Bush did for it: Saddam Hussein is gone, and Tehran’s influence in the Persian Gulf is greatly enhanced.

There was every reason to celebrate the release of those 52 Americans on Jan. 20, 1981. But what Iran learned then and has applied in the decades since has been costly for the United States. Here we are, 30 years after what we thought was the conclusion of a crisis, still wondering if the end will ever be in sight.

Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC’s “Nightline” from 1980 to 2005, is an NPR commentator and a contributing analyst for “BBC World News America.”

———————–

Source:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/23/AR2011012300253.html

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BY ABBAS MILANI | DECEMBER 29, 2010

Of the many inaccuracies and obfuscations of the Iranian nuclear negotiations, one of the most persistent has been the claim that, in questioning the ultimate goals of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, the West is seeking to enforce a duplicitous double standard. According to this line of rhetoric, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran, was a Western ally — or, in the language of the regime, a “lackey” — and thus America and Europe were willing and eager to help him get not one, but many, reactors. But since the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, these critics allege, Iran is being singled out and persecuted. In 2006, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Der Spiegel, “It’s interesting to note that European nations wanted to allow the shah’s dictatorship the use of nuclear technology.… Yet those nations were willing to supply it with nuclear technology. Ever since the Islamic Republic has existed, however, these powers have been opposed to it.”

Even some progressive intellectuals in the West have bought into this story, either supporting the regime’s program or at least criticizing the U.S. stance on Ahmadinejad’s current program as hypocritical given its past lenience toward the shah. The U.S. government itself, in what must be considered an inexplicable failure of public diplomacy, has never challenged this narrative — although it has access to hundreds of pages of documents that disprove the regime’s allegations.

In fact, Washington was involved in a long-standing and frequently behind-the-scenes diplomatic tussle with the shah over the purpose of his nuclear program. Recently declassified documents from the Carter and Ford presidential libraries; the departments of defense, energy, and state; and the National Security Council (NSC) show that every element of today’s impasse between the U.S. government and the Islamic Republic was also present in the negotiations with the shah. These range from Iran’s insistence on its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) right to a “full fuel cycle,” its complaint that the United States was singling it out for guarantees no other country was required to give, and finally the U.S. offer to make Iran part of an international consortium to enrich uranium outside Iran, the so-called “Russian solution.” The shah repeatedly insisted that at least he did not want a nuclear bomb — yet he was adamant that Iran not be treated as a second-class citizen. These negotiations, details of which have not been published before now, don’t just expose the regime’s lies about the alleged U.S. double standard, they also offer a useful guide for Western negotiators in navigating the waters of Iranian nationalism, both real and feigned.

Iran’s nuclear program began in 1959 with a small reactor given by the United States to Tehran University as part of the “Atoms for Peace” program announced by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in December 1953. But that only whetted the Iranian monarch’s appetite: With his increased oil revenues, and with his new vision of Iran as the hegemonic force in the region, a nuclear program became for Shah Pahlavi the symbol of progress and power. He summoned Akbar Etemad, a trained nuclear physicist, to the royal court in 1973, told him of his desire to launch a nuclear program, and asked Etemad to develop a master plan.

Two weeks later, the shah met with Etemad again. He quickly read the 13-page draft document Etemad had prepared, then turned to the prime minister and ordered him to fund what turned out be one of the most expensive projects undertaken by his regime. There was no prior discussion in the Majlis, where the constitutional power of the purse lay, or in any other governmental body or council. Like every major policy decision in those days, it was a one-man act. Thus was launched Iran’s nuclear program.

The shah’s plans called for a “full-fledged nuclear power industry” with the capacity to produce 23,000 megawatts of electricity. By 1977, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) had more than 1,500 employees (who were, on the shah’s orders, allowed to become the highest-paid government employees). Pahlavi had arranged for the training of Iranian nuclear experts around the world (including a $20 million endowment at MIT), engaged in an intensive search for uranium mines in Iran and all over the planet, and launched several nuclear research centers across the country. AEOI was in those days one of the most heavily funded programs in the country. In 1976, its budget was $1.3 billion, making it, after the country’s oil company, the single biggest public economic institution in the country.

While Germany and France showed immediate eagerness to sell Iran its desired reactors, the United States was initially reluctant to sell any, “without conditions limiting [the shah's] freedom of action,” according to the text of a U.S. governmental memo. The German company Kraftwerk signed the first agreement to build the now-famous Bushehr reactor with an initial completion date of 1981 and an estimated cost of $3 billion. As Bushehr was located in a dangerous zone that was prone to frequent and strong seismic activity, extra funds were set aside to protect the site against the dangers of an earthquake. It was said at the time that the German government was so eager to find a foothold in the Iranian market that it guaranteed Kraftwerk’s investment against any loss. U.S. companies, on the other hand, were barred from these contracts until Washington’s concerns about the shah’s intentions were addressed.

The shah was adamant that Iran should enjoy its “full rights,” as he put it at the time, within the NPT — an agreement Iran had immediately signed upon its formulation and that calls for non-nuclear states to forfeit the search for a nuclear bomb in return for easy access to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. But Iran not only insisted on the right to have the full fuel cycle, it also was interested in processing plutonium — a faster way to a nuclear bomb than enriched uranium.

In remarks that echo Ahmadinejad’s provocative boasts today, in February 1974, following a Franco-Iranian agreement to cooperate on uranium enrichment, the shah told Le Monde that one day “sooner than is believed,” Iran would be “in possession of a nuclear bomb.” The shah’s surprising comment was at least partially in response to the 1974 Indian test of a nuclear weapon.

Realizing the repercussions of his comment, the shah ordered the Iranian Embassy in France to issue a statement declaring that stories about his plan to develop a bomb were “totally invented and without any basis whatsoever.” The U.S. Embassy in Tehran, conveying the shah’s message, reassured the State Department that he was “certainly not yet” thinking about leaving the NPT or joining the nuclear club.

But even as he was trying to reassure Washington of his intentions, the shah did indicate that, should any country in the region develop the nuclear bomb, then “perhaps the national interests of any country at all would demand that it would do the same,” according to the text of discussions with the U.S. ambassador. Assadollah Alam, the shah’s court minister, claimed more than once in the journals he kept from the early 1970s until his death that, in his view, the shah “wanted the bomb” but found it expedient to adamantly deny any such intent at the moment.

According to Defense and Energy department memos from the time, the United States was particularly worried that “the annual plutonium production from the planned 23,000 MW Iranian nuclear power program will be equivalent to 600-700 warheads.” Nonetheless, by June 1974, the United States was finally willing to sell Iran nuclear reactors but only after, as another U.S. memo put it, “incorporating special bilateral controls in addition to the usual” international safeguards. These safeguards were, in the mind of U.S. officials, necessary not just because of concerns about the shah’s intentions but because “in a situation of instability, domestic dissidents or foreign terrorists might easily be able to seize any special nuclear materials stored in Iran for use in a bomb.”

While the shah was willing to consider some of these safeguards, he was insistent that Iran not be treated differently from any other country. By then, Iran had already signed letters of intent with German and French companies for four nuclear power plants, and the shah had signaled his plan to procure eight more from the United States. The State Department not only favored the sale of these reactors but even encouraged the Bechtel Corporation to convince the shah to invest up to $300 million in a jointly owned uranium enrichment facility in the United States. These proposals were all predicated on the shah’s willingness to accept more rigorous controls over plutonium processing — something that was of particular concern to the United States. Although eager to offer such assurances, the shah flatly rejected the idea of affording the Americans a veto on reprocessing of U.S.-supplied fuel.

As negotiations on these issues lingered, seeming to reach an impasse, and the shah held firm to his rejection of any U.S. veto right, the Defense Department recommended that the United States reconsider its hard-line approach and accept the shah’s demands. Pentagon officials wrote about their concern that the shah’s unhappiness over this issue carried the threat “of poisoning other aspects of U.S.-Iran relations.” The fact that France and Germany were more than happy to sell to the shah what the United States was withholding, and the fact that the shah had made clear gestures of possible cooperation with India on Iran’s nuclear program, made the case for a U.S. reconsideration of its position more urgent. President Gerald Ford, and later his successor Jimmy Carter, agreed to accommodate the shah, but still only to the extent that U.S. proliferation concerns were met. Under Carter, finally, the shah was willing to make the kinds of concessions that proved he wasn’t seeking a bomb — such as forgoing plans for plutonium processing plants — and the president permitted U.S. companies to sell reactors to Iran in 1978.

But by this point, the first hints of internal political trouble had already appeared on the horizon in Tehran. Within months of this crucial agreement, the shah was too preoccupied with the evolving domestic crisis to pay much attention to the nuclear negotiations. The shah’s vacillations, as much the result of his indecisive character as of the medications he was taking to fight the onset of cancer, combined with the Carter administration’s failure to develop a cogent policy on Iran, helped enable the rise of the revolutionary clerics and the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

No sooner had Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini come to power than he ordered all work on Iran’s nuclear program stopped, criticizing the shah for ever pursuing such a program. Within a few years, Khomeini changed his mind, but by then the West was much more distrustful of Iran’s intentions. The real break came when the West learned in 2002 that the Iranians had built at Natanz an enrichment facility with the capacity to house a cascade of 50,000 centrifuges and that the hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was increasingly in charge of the country’s nuclear program (as well as its economy and politics).

Unfortunately, the U.S. response since then has enabled the kind of hysterical accusations lodged against it for supposed nuclear hypocrisy. Instead of making it clear to the people of Iran that a democratic, law-abiding government could have easily, and at much less cost, achieved the enrichment rights guaranteed under the NPT — and instead of encouraging Iranian democrats who have repeatedly declared their opposition to a nuclear bomb for Iran — the United States has offered unrealistic ultimatums and changed its course again and again, allowing the regime to mischaracterize America’s approach and create its own nuclear reality.

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Abbas Milani is director of Iranian studies at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Adapted from The Shah by Abbas Milani. Copyright © 2011
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This article was first published in the FOREIGN POLICY

An appellate court in Tehran upheld an award winning freelance journalist’s verdict.

Jila Baniyaghoub who is also an activist in the Iranian Women’s movement, is now facing a mandatory sentence of one year in jail and a 30 year ban from journalism.

Throughout the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, only one other journalist, Ahmad Zeidabadi, has been so severely punished.

Baniyaghoub and her husband were arrested at their residence exactly a week after Iran’s controversial and contested presidential election last year.

After two months, she was able to get out of jail by setting bail. Her husband, however, is currently serving a 5 year sentence at the notorious Evin Prison’s Ward 350.

Bewildered by the severity of her client’s sentence, the defense attorney Farideh Gheyrat called such a harsh verdict against this independent journalist as unjust.

Pointing out that Baniyaghoub had been acquitted of similar charges twice before and that her professional mannerism and journalistic practices had not changed, Gheyrat denied that her client had done anything besides her job of journalism.

Ms. Baniyaghoup is the recipient of several international awards in journalism, with the last ones being for Courage in Journalism for reporting on the condition of women in war torn countries and the battle fields, the International Award for Freedom of Speech, and the Best Weblog Writer form Reporters without Borders. However, now that she is banned from her main source of income it is unclear how she will manage her livelihood.

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This report was adopted from its Farsi source at:

http://www.kaleme.com/1389/08/03/klm-36329

With the supreme religious leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, conducting a rare but much advertised visit to the religiously significant city of Qom, the most important hub of Shiite religious affairs in Iran, a group of political prisoners’ families have asked the religious leaders of that city in an open letter to intercede on their behalf and question the supreme leader on the status of the country and the treatment of political prisoners.

The once named “Godfather of Persian Blogging,” may now be facing execution on a number of charges, stemming mainly from his once unconventional rhetoric towards the Islamic Republic of Iran’s system and its leaders, and also a trip he made to Israel.

With Hossein Derakhshan (AKA “Hoder”) being incarcerated in detention for close to two years, a Tehran prosecutor has now asked for capital punishment, further calling it a lesson to others.

The judge overseeing the case, Mr. Salavati, has yet to make a ruling.

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, arguing that an orchestrated series of global sanctions has brought more economic pain than Iran’s government anticipated, are making a renewed appeal to Iranian leaders to reopen negotiations on the country’s nuclear program.

The administration’s opening to Iran comes as evidence mounts that gasoline shipments to the country have slowed; that at least some banks, from Europe to Pakistan, have cut off dealings with the country for fear that they will lose access to the United States financial system; and that Iranian officials have been unable to get foreign investment for several multibillion-dollar oil and gas projects.

Much of that evidence has been reported by the local news media in the Persian Gulf region and is difficult to confirm, but officials with the United States Treasury Department say they also believe that Iran is having trouble attracting investment for oil and gas projects.

Mrs. Clinton argued that “the scope and reach” of sanctions adopted over the past two months in the United States, Europe and parts of Asia “have had real bite,” and have given the West new leverage.

Still, both Mrs. Clinton, in a 20-minute telephone conversation on Friday, and Mr. Obama, in an unusual assessment to editorial writers and columnists at the White House last week, acknowledged that Iranian leaders might be unwilling to give up the nuclear program — a huge source of national pride — despite the escalating cost.

“It may be that their ideological commitment to nuclear weapons is such that they’re not making a simple cost-benefit analysis on this issue,” Mr. Obama told the journalists.

In a sense, the administration’s latest overtures are testing the theory behind its decision to push for ever tightening sanctions: that the financial punishment would bring Iran to the negotiating table. Critics have questioned the approach from the beginning, and even one of Mr. Obama’s advisers said that while Iran had indicated a willingness to start some kind of talks in September, there was always the chance that the sanctions would backfire, leading the country to “speed up the nuclear program.”

There is also the chance that Iran, which says its nuclear program is for peaceful uses, will figure out ways around the international crackdown, as it has done with past sets of sanctions.

Mr. Obama’s and Mrs. Clinton’s back-to-back public statements appeared to be part of an effort to signal to the Iranian people that the country would continue to suffer if their government did not find what Mrs. Clinton called “a pathway” to negotiations. A senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that in coming days, the administration would stress its view that “the economic difficulties experienced by the public” in Iran are being caused by choices the Iranian government is making.

The White House appears to be hoping that continuing economic pressure could drive already disgruntled small business owners in Iran’s influential bazaars to join forces with Iranians who have been agitating for political change since last year’s disputed presidential election.

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have long talked about a “two track” system of economic pressure on Iran and continued diplomatic openings, but for a time the focus had been squarely on sanctions. The statements last week, however, indicated a move to re-emphasize opening diplomatic channels, and Mrs. Clinton said that the United States had sent “very clear messages” to the Iranian leadership through European officials in recent weeks.

Mr. Obama said, however, that there had been no direct communications with either President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton defined with any precision what steps Iran’s leaders would need to take to build confidence that they were willing to negotiate. Other administration officials, who declined to speak on the record, cited several major demands made by the United Nations Security Council, all of which Iran has rejected for more than four years.

They include a full suspension of all uranium enrichment and providing complete access for international inspectors.

These days, American officials appear to be spending almost as much time trying to assess the impact of economic sanctions as they are to trying to measure Iran’s nuclear progress. So far the reports of the financial effects are largely anecdotal, but taken together they suggest the country is feeling some pain.

The United Nations resolution, for instance, named a company controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Khatam al-Anbiya, which has been seeking investors for a key part of the South Pars oil and gas fields.

Iran recently announced that the company was withdrawing from the project, presumably because its involvement was blocking foreign investors.

Another firm, which American officials also suspect of having links to the Revolutionary Guards, appears to have taken over, but so far Treasury Department officials believe there have been no investors.

And while the United Nations resolutions did nothing to block the shipment of refined gasoline into Iran — a step China strongly opposed — the series of sanctions issued by a number of countries in recent weeks appeared to have halted some of those shipments.

According to the White House, eight major companies, including Lukoil, Royal Dutch Shell and Total, have issued public statements that they have halted supplies of gasoline.

The effects of the cutoffs, however, remain unclear since Iran, which imports about 40 percent of its refined petroleum, had stockpiled gasoline in anticipation of the sanctions. It also remains unclear whether the cutoffs could eventually result in shortages, especially if China “backfills” to make up for lost gasoline and investment in Iran’s energy industry as some administration officials fear.

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This article was first published in The NY Times.