| Al Jazeera, June 16, 2009 | |||||||
An Iranian state radio channel has reported that seven people were killed after an attack on a military post close to a rally disputing the results of a presidential election. The violence occurred on Monday in the capital, Tehran, amid protests against the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Radio Payam reported on Tuesday. “Several thugs wanted to attack a military post and vandalise public property in the vicinity of Azadi Square,” the radio said, referring to the site of the rally.
“Unfortunately, seven people were killed and several others wounded.” Also on Tuesday, the Iranian authorities arrested two prominent reformists, Saeed Hajjarian and Mohammad Ali Abtahi, their aides said. The arrests came amid mounting unrest in the capital as Mousavi supporters pledged to continue their demonstrations. Ahmadinejad supporters said they too planned a demonstration on Tuesday at the same location, raising the possibility of further clashes between the rival camps. State television reported that Iran’s highest legislative body, the Guardian Council, was willing to recount the votes and that the recount may lead to changes in cadidates’ tallies. Ahmadinejad in Russia The news of the deaths came as Iran’s president arrived in Russia for a security conference, despite the popular protests at home against a vote in which the authorities declared him the winner. Ahmadinejad landed in Yakaterinburg for the Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation (SCO), in which Iran has observer status. “We welcome the fact that elections took place, we welcome the new president on Russian soil and see it as symbolic that he made his first visit to Russia,” Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, told reporters after Ahmadinejad’s arrival. “This allows hope for progress in bilateral relations,” he said. Ahmadinejad’s trip had been scheduled for Monday but he postponed it in the wake of the protests. Violent clashes Initial reports suggested that armed men loyal to Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard opened fire during the protest rally in Azadi Square which was attended by tens of thousands of people.
An Associated Press photographer in the square said one person had been shot dead and several others appeared to be seriously wounded.The incident occurred in front of a local base of the Basij, Iran’s volunteer paramilitary force, which had been set ablaze. Many at the rally were supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the election candidate defeated in Friday’s poll. Mousavi addressed the rally, his first public appearance since his defeat. Clashes were reported hours after the demonstration, which was held in defiance of a ban imposed by the interior ministry, began. Police fired tear gas as dozens of protesters set several motorbikes on fire. “There has been sporadic shooting out there … I can see people running,” said a reporter of Iran’s English-language Press TV who was at the demonstration. Peaceful protest The demonstration had been largely peaceful until the shooting. Robert Fisk, a writer and journalist who was observing the rally, told Al Jazeera that he had heard shots being fired and saw demonstrators break into a run, but that things had continued to be largely peaceful. “It’s extraordinary to me that anyone would start shooting at such a huge crowd of people,” he said. “Especially people who have been continuously non-violent all the way from the start of this march, which has of course been prohibited so I suppose that will be the excuse.” Fisk said that not all the protesters were supporting Mousavi and that many were simply making a statement about the vote. “I don’t think they [the demonstrators] are all supporting Mir Hossein Mousavi, they are objecting to the presence of Ahmadinejad as the president. They don’t believe he won those votes,” he said. The official results of the election gave Ahmadinejad 63 per cent of the vote and Mousavi 34 per cent, figures Mousavi has dismissed as a “dangerous charade”. Alireza Ronaghi, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Tehran, said several different police units were at the rally. “There were several kinds of police there; riot police were easily distinguishable from the rest of them with their gear and vests and helmet,” he said. “There were normal police, with their green outfits. There were also plainclothes police who you could only recognise because they were carrying wireless communicators. And there were also others, who were just walking but looked like they didn’t belong to the rally.” Poll backlash Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, on Monday ordered officials to look into the complaints against the veracity of the election. The 12-man Guardian Council said it would rule within 10 days on the two official complaints it had received from Mousavi and Mohsen Rezaie, another losing candidate.
The council, headed by Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who endorsed Ahmadinejad before the vote, vets election candidates and must formally approve the results for the outcome to stand.Earlier in the day, about 400 pro-reform students, many wearing green face masks to conceal their identity, gathered at a mosque in Tehran University and demanded Ahmadinejad’s resignation. Iran has faced a growing international backlash over the validity of the polls. Barack Obama, the US president, said on Monday that he was deeply troubled by the post-election violence. Saying the world was inspired by Iranian demonstrators, he added that free speech and the democratic process must be respected. France and Germany summoned the respective Iranian ambassadors to account for events. |
Posts Tagged ‘Iran’
Several killed at Iran rally
June 16, 2009
Neocons Using Iran Election To Push For War
June 14, 2009
It helps that the neocons in both the United States and Israel made emphatically clear how much they wanted Ahmedinejad re-elected. If they had kept their mouths shut — and pretended that they preferred the moderate Moussavi — they would have a bit more credibility now as they shout that Ahmadinejad’s election justifies an end to diplomacy.
But they didn’t prefer Moussavi; they preferred the thug and said so. The internal contradiction in their argument can be seen in these words from Israel’s very neocon deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon today.
“We had no illusions about these elections in Israel,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, “because on the nuclear issue there was no fundamental difference between the candidates.” Nevertheless, he added, Ahmadinejad’s election removes “any glimmer of hope for change in Iran.”
Got that? Even though there was no difference between the candidates, Ahmadinejad’s “victory” removes “any glimmer of hope….”
Here is Elliot Abrams: “Both the apparent victory and the apparent fraud greatly complicate the Obama strategy. My advice is that they had better be thinking about more sanctions….Sanctions that bite might be a powerful tool and might push the regime into a serious negotiation. But it is more likely that the engagement strategy has been dealt a very heavy blow.
So what do these guys want?
They want confrontation with Iran, no matter who runs the government. Above all, they want President Obama to stop thinking about diplomacy and give Israel the green light to attack Iran that George W. Bush refused to give.
It’s not going to happen that way because the argument for diplomacy, and against war, is as strong after the stolen election as it was before.
America’s interests are the same regardless of the state of democracy in Iran. And those interests (the safety of American troops in Iraq, the survival of Israel and our other allies in the region, the supply of oil, eradicating Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and preventing Pakistan’s collapse, etc) all require us to prevent the neocons from leading us into another debacle — a twin pillar of failure to erect next to the Iraq war.
I’ll leave it to the experts to explain exactly why and how to pursue diplomacy. But for now, here’s my rule of thumb. The neocons are always wrong. They were wrong when they led the American cheering for Ahmadinejad and they are wrong when they lead the moaning over his “victory.” In fact, they have not been right any issue in the 30 years or so since Norman Podhoretz invented neoconservativism.
Neocons are a great and true weathervane. They always point in the wrong direction, the very opposite of a moral compass.
Hillary Clinton Threatens to Attack Iran ‘The Way That We Did’ Iraq
June 8, 2009Citing the disastrous 2003 US invasion of Iraq as an example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today warned that by continuing to refuse to abandon its civilian nuclear program, Iran was risking the possibility of an invasion by the US or “some other enemy that would do that to them.”
The comments came during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” program, and when asked by interviewer and former Clinton-era official George Stephanopoulus, Secretary Clinton reiterated “that’s right, as a first strike.”
The bulk of the interview emphasized US opposition to the Iranian program, along with unquestioned claims that the nation was pursuing nuclear weapons. Secretary Clinton also extended the American nuclear umbrella over Israel in the event that Iran attacked them.
Considering it was no more than 72 hours ago that President Obama made his historic call for a “new beginning” to US relations with the Muslim world, it seems incredible that his administration is already raising the prospect of an Iraq-style invasion of Iran.
Already six years in, the Iraq occupation has killed thousands of US soldiers, sucked trillions from the American economy, and is stretching the military to its limits. It is unfathomable that with this war still far from over, the Obama Administration is considering an Iraq redux in its larger neighbor to the east.
Israel Demands IAEA Action on Iran, Syria, Not Itself
June 8, 2009Addressing Friday’s reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Israeli Foreign Ministry today demanded that the group take “immediate and determined” action against Iran and Syria, two states over which certain questions remain unanswered.
Israel has accused both nations of pursuing covert nuclear weapons programs that the IAEA has not uncovered. The incredible thing is that Israel is not itself a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has developed its own massive nuclear weapons program, which it has refused to subject to international scrutiny.
In Syria in particular, the IAEA reported finding trace amounts of enriched uranium inside a nuclear reactor that runs on enriched uranium, but said the traces were absent from previous declarations. Israel has demanded that the IAEA publicly condemn Syria for the lapse.
In Iran, the IAEA confirmed that Iran’s uranium enrichment program continued to grow. Though perfectly legal and designed for use in tandem with a soon to be finished nuclear energy reactor at Bushehr, Israel has condemned the program. The IAEA once again affirmed that none of the low-enriched uranium had been diverted to any other use.
Last month, a US official suggested that every nation, even Israel, should join the NPT, and Israel reacted with shock and outrage. Yet with no real proof of wrong-doing, Israel would subject Syria (whom it illegally attacked in 2007, destroying the evidence it claims once existed of their covert program) and Iran to further international censure for falling somewhat short of perfection in answering questions Israel would’ve never allowed to be asked to begin with.
ANALYSIS / Netanyahu bringing Israel closer to war with Iran
May 26, 2009
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| By Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent | Haaretz/Israel, May 26, 2009 | |||||
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| Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu considers the lifting of the Iranian nuclear threat his life’s mission. Before coming to power, he had mentioned that such an operation might cost thousands of lives, but the price was justified in view of the threat’s severity. His comments yesterday at the meeting of Likud’s Knesset faction put to rest Ariel Sharon’s doctrine that Iran is not just Israel’s problem but the entire world’s problem, and Israel must not be at the forefront of the struggle. Israel is now at the forefront.
The leaders of Iran and Israel escalated the verbal confrontation yesterday. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said discussions on the nuclear issue are over, which means Iran does not intend to give up enriching uranium. Netanyahu said that if Israel does not lead the defense against the Iranian threat and bring in the United States and other countries, no one else will. In both cases, in Tehran and Jerusalem, it’s possible to justify the leaders’ comments by citing domestic political needs. But even if the immediate motive is domestic politics, the strategic implications cannot be ignored.
A senior source close to the Obama administration has said that the dialogue Obama has offered Iran will come to nothing and that the U.S. will not strike Iran unless something unusual and unexpected happens. If this turns out to be the case, the Netanyahu government may have to decide whether to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Three arguments are normally made to reject the likelihood of an Israeli military option: the complexity of the mission, the U.S. veto and opposition in the government. It is usually assumed that Israel will seek to repeat the 1981 bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq. This is only one scenario and not a likely one. There are other possibilities to consider: a war in the north that drags Iran in, or a strike against a valuable target for the Iranian regime, which leads Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to take action against “the Zionist regime.” If Iran attacks Israel first, the element of surprise will be lost, but then Israel’s strike against the nuclear installations will be considered self-defense. The second argument, regarding American opposition to a strike, depends on the circumstances. It’s hard to imagine that Obama will order the interception of Israeli aircraft on the way to Natanz if all other ways of stopping the centrifuges have failed. Clearly the administration will have to chastise Israel, and let’s not forget the statements by CIA chief Leon Panetta, who warned against any operation not coordinated with the United States. But no one knows how Obama will behave in the moment of truth. He told Newsweek that he will not tell Israelis what their defense requirements are. Netanyahu liked this very much. The third claim, about political opposition at home, is entirely mistaken. In talks on going to war, the ministers and officers compete over who is more patriotic, not who is wiser or more rational. At decision time, no one will dare go down in history as having reservations and risk being portrayed as a coward. If the Second Lebanon War is anything to go by, all the “heroes” who criticized the war in retrospect had voted to go to war. This will be the case if Netanyahu brings to the cabinet a plan to attack Iran, and the Israel Defense Forces will say that it can. A war with Iran is not inevitable. But the prime minister took another step yesterday toward preparing the general public for the possibility that it might break out. |
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Obama Orders Update to Iran Attack Plan
May 23, 2009On NBC’s Today Show this morning, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that President Obama has ordered him to update the plans for a US attack on Iran, plans which were last updating during the Bush Administration. Gates says the plans are “refreshed” and insists that “all options are on the table” with respect to the potential attack.
It was only a month ago that Secretary Gates was warning vigorously against the potential attack, saying that it would create a “disastrous backlash” against the United States to hit Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities. The Obama Administration has insisted it is intending to pursue the matter diplomatically with Iran, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said the administration doesn’t expect diplomacy to work, and the effort seems to be primarily to rally international support for more measures against Iran.
The US has also been sending secret missions to Israel in recent days, reportedly to caution them against launching any surprise military attacks against Iran of their own. It was unclear how successful the warnings were: Prime Minister Netanyahu said he remained confident that the US would respect Israel’s right to attack Iran.
It is unclear whether Gates’ revelation portends a serious potential for an imminent US attack on Iran, or whether the move is more international posturing. Still, it seems unlikely the news will be greeted warmly in Iran, which is in the middle of an election campaign in which potential US talks are a major issue.
Related Stories
Western Media Propagandize Iran’s Missile Test
May 22, 2009Iran announced on Wednesday that it had successfully tested its Sejil 2 surface-to-surface missile, and Western media sources took the opportunity to portray the Middle Eastern nation as a threat to world peace and, specifically, as a threat to Israel.
The Seijl 2 missile has a range of about 1,200 miles, and thus would be capable of hitting Israel, but Iran’s President Ahmadinejad announced in a speech following what he deemed a successful test that the missile’s purpose was to protect Iran from the threat of aggression.
Still, media accounts in the U.S. and other Western nations portrayed Iran’s test as a threatening provocation and linked it to an Iranian nuclear weapons program there is no evidence actually exists.
The London Times’ headline alarmingly read, “Ahmadinejad claims Iran’s new missile is capable of hitting Israel”.
But the paper failed to produce a quote of the Iranian president actually specifying Israel as being within range of the missile. Instead, the text of the article only states that Ahmadinejad merely announced that a missile with a range of 1,200 miles had been successfully tested.
Israel holds massive exercise simulating all-out war
May 22, 2009An IAF fighter jet.
Photo: IDF [file]
Fighter jets, cargo planes and missile defense systems of the corps took part in the drill where defense from a simultaneous attack against Israel from the south and the north was simulated.
Unlike previous drills, the air force did not train on long-range sorties, such as those that would be carried out during an offensive targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities; the drill this past week focused on defending the country.
During the exercise, the scenario included war against Hamas in the South and war against both Hizbullah and Syria in the North.
In early June, the Israeli home front will be practiced in the most far-reaching rehearsal for an emergency rocket attack ever carried out. All Israelis will be instructed to enter secure spaces and sirens will sound out throughout the country.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who received a briefing on the results of the past week’s exercise, was positively impressed and said “we have a strong air force and this gives us a sense of security.”
Referring to the Iranian test-launch of a long-range ballistic missile on Wednesday, Barak said it was “more proof that we must develop means to confront” the Iranian threat.
AIPAC’s Hidden Persuaders
May 18, 2009Despite the ballyhoo of the recent Aipac national policy conference in Washington, when Israel-US bonds were feted, relations between the two countries are currently more strained than at any time since 1991. That was when the elder George Bush, as US president, fiercely lobbied Yitzchak Shamir to join in the Madrid peace conference. Relations then reached their nadir when James Baker uttered his infamous remark about Israel’s American-Jewish supporters: “Fuck the Jews, they don’t even vote for us.”
If relations continue to deteriorate in coming months, we might have to go back in time to the Suez crisis of 1956 to find a time when relations were this fraught.
A case in point is Iran. That bogey-nation was everywhere at the Aipac conference. Every keynote speech – if they weren’t directly written by that group’s staff – seemed unmistakably scripted and “on message”, dedicated to the existential threat that Iran poses not just to Israel, but the entire world.
A glossy brochure distributed at the Aipac meeting showed a map (pictured below) centred on Iran and beyond, with a dark ominous ring around Iran’s neighbours and as far away as India, Russia, Africa and eastern Europe. The message: these are the countries under imminent threat of Iranian ballistic missiles.
A map contained in a brochure distributed at an Aipac meeting
The brochure copy even intimates that the next step for Iran is “building a missile with range to reach US territory”. (Never mind that Iran doesn’t yet have any ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear weapon, nor will it have the bomb itself for anywhere from a year to five years depending on which you source you choose to believe.)
Israel is in the midst of a massive diplomatic, political and intelligence campaign, both public and covert, that could lead – if those officials behind it have their way – towards a military strike on Iran. It is a war for the hearts and minds of Americans. Or you might call it the war before the war. In intelligence circles, this Israeli project is known as perception management and defined by the department of defence as:
Actions to convey and/or deny information … to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders … ultimately resulting in foreign behaviours and official actions favourable to [US] objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception and psychological operations.
The Israelis are following the template of the Bush administration’s run-up to the Iraq war. First, the US government advocated half-hearted efforts at diplomatic engagement. Then it ratcheted up pressure through sanctions and UN resolutions. That is where the Israeli campaign stands now.
Aipac’s members carried a unified message to Capitol Hill during their lobbying of US senators and members of Congress. They demanded that Congress pass the most draconian sanctions ever proposed against Iran. They demanded that Iran be offered a limited time in which to respond to an ultimatum insisting it drop its nuclear programme.
What then? If you review Aipac’s literature and the various commentaries published either by Israeli diplomats or their supporters in the US media, they don’t specify what comes next. But any sensible person can guess that the final step will be war: “Israeli leaders have … hinted at pre-emptive military strikes if they decide that diplomacy has failed.”
The Israelis surely know that the Obama administration will never go to war against Iran. In fact, they know that Obama would not approve of Israel doing so. But I’ve become convinced, in doing the research and speaking to knowledgeable sources, that Israel is prepared at some date in the near future to attack Iran itself, even against the wishes of the US.
This of course will put Obama in an untenable position: do US forces attack the Israelis (in effect defending the Iranians) and risk the fallout that would occur in relations between the Democratic administration and American Jews? Or does he allow the Israelis to carry on to their targets and bomb Iran, accepting the bloodletting and mayhem that will inevitably result? If Israel wishes for the latter outcome, they must lay the groundwork here in the US for tacit acceptance by the American people of a third-party attack on Iran.
Indeed, they are already a good deal of the way toward this goal, as the latest polling from Rasmussen Report reveals. According to it, 49% of Americans believe that if Israel attacks Iran then the US should help Israel.
Some readers may say this is alarmist. Before I learned some of the information I gathered from sources both public and not, I also would have labelled this as overly dramatic. But Israel hasn’t shrunk, for example, from drafting opinion columns for US newspapers on the menace posed by Iran, and telling the editor that a local Jewish community leader would be attaching his name to it.
Within the US Israel exploits a willing circle of Likudist advocacy groups and thinktanks – such as the Washington Institute for Near East Peace, the Israel Project, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs as well as Aipac itself – that are closely scripted and co-ordinate their political message with Israeli diplomats. While some of these groups deny such a close affiliation, there is proof of scripting and amplification of the Israeli government’s agenda. And of course there may be cases in which the organisations know the needs of their patron so well that they need no prompting.
In another example, Israeli diplomats monitored and encouraged a member of Congress to host an anti-Iranian conference that would advocate Israel’s message of sanctions (and more).
Israel, along with enablers like Aipac, has not shrunk from hounding its critics. One peace activist in the US so angered Israeli authorities that he was driven from a job through a whispering campaign in the community, which also included a disparaging article leaked to a willing reporter.
The level of hubris necessary to pull this off is astonishing. Fresh off the dismissal of the Rosen-Weissman spy charges involving its own employees, Aipac is flexing its political muscle and reminding the world of its resurgence. It does this through a combination of manipulation, public lobbying and punishment of its enemies.
We in the US must be prepared to resist. We must protect ourselves from Israel’s propaganda offensive ginning up war with Iran. We must encourage President Obama to stay strong in his commitment to Israeli-Arab peace, whether or not Israel is a willing partner. Keeping our eyes on the prize of peace is going to be the hardest challenge of all, because the Netanyahu government is doing everything it can to divert the world’s attention.
Iran protesters to keep up pressure
June 17, 2009Anti-government protesters appear set to keep up the pressure on the Iranian leadership, with a fifth day of rallies planned.
The plan by the demonstrators to hold more protests on Wednesday comes a day after the Guardian Council, Iran’s highest legislative body, said that it was prepared for a partial recount of last week’s vote.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incumbent president, was officially declared winner of Friday’s poll by a margin of two-to-one over his nearest rival Mir Hossein Mousavi.
Continued >>
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