For your enjoyment since I know you are such a big fan of the Supreme Leader.

http://www.shiatv.net/view_video.php?viewkey=f7a16fc57fb253e6255c

Even your friend Mousavi was at this conference.

You cannot win. End of story. Deal with it.

Mossad did it? Why don’t you walk down the hall to Operations, ask them if they fronted this and inform us all?

Thanks.

I doubt the majority of protestors would have a problem with the Islamic Republic if all the rights guaranteed in the constitution hadn’t been eliminated to the point of becoming meaningless, if even elections had come to mean nothing because they are rigged. if the state and the economy hadn’t become a TOTAL monopoly of ultraconservative clerics (a la Mezba Yadzi and Ahmed Khatami) and if the regime and the Supreme Leader hadn’t become totally immoral in the sort of crimes against the people they approve, including mass beatings, rape and murder.

That you approve such tactics is apparent by your reference to 1988. That you function as a agent for coup leaders is apparent by your fake name.

That all these charges are true is apparent by the fact that the regime finds it necessary to close up all opposition newspapers and arrest journalists back home and drive out all foreign journalists. Other governments don’t NEED to do that. Nevertheless it hasn’t work.

As for 1988, that stuff won’t work now because:

1. in 1988 you were dealing with a tiny group not a much wider public opposition and disillusionment. The kind of people you have targeted are much more sympathetic and the trials have backfired by actually shaming and convicting the regime. Are you claiming those confessions were “real” and not derived by horrible tortures and threats against family members?

2. In 1988 the regime had more credibility and its lies were believed, so that many of the crimes could be hidden. None of this is true now while people have even begun to look into those past crimes.

3. Iran’s economy is much worse.

4. Iran is far more isolated when it most needs more contact with the world.

Thank you for your concern.

By the way your friends in Anbar Province are having second thoughts about their collaboration with the Americans. The poor whiners feel “abandoned”. See the excellent and entertaining recent article from the Washington Post.

Money quote: “The Americans left without even saying goodbye. Not one of them,” Sabah said in his villa in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, once the cradle of Iraq’s insurgency. “Even when we called them, we got a message that the line had been disconnected.”

Somewhere in Anbar he knows there is a sharp knife with his name on it. Could not happen to a better guy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/02/AR2009100205346_pf.html

In Anbar, U.S.-Allied Tribal Chiefs Feel Deep Sense of Abandonment

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 3, 2009

RAMADI, Iraq — There was once a swagger to the scotch-swilling, insurgent-fighting Raed Sabah. He was known as Sheik Raed to his sycophants. Tribesmen who relied on his largess called him the same. So did his fighters, who joined the Americans and helped crush the insurgency in Anbar province.

Sabah still likes his scotch — Johnnie Walker Black, with Red Bull on the rocks — but these days, as the Americans withdraw from western Iraq, he has lost his swagger. His neighbors now deride him as an American stooge; they have nicknamed his alley “The Street of the Lackeys.”

“The Americans left without even saying goodbye. Not one of them,” Sabah said in his villa in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, once the cradle of Iraq’s insurgency. “Even when we called them, we got a message that the line had been disconnected.”

Nowhere is the U.S. departure from Iraq more visible than in Anbar, where the 27 bases and outposts less than a year ago have dwindled to three today. Far less money is being spent. Since November, more than two-thirds of combat troops have departed. In their wake is a blend of cynicism and bitterness, frustration and fear among many of the tribal leaders who fought with the troops against the insurgents, a tableau of emotion that may color the American legacy in a region that has stood as the U.S. military’s single greatest success in the war. Pragmatism, the Americans call their departure. Desertion, their erstwhile allies answer.

As the United States leaves the province, acknowledged Col. Matthew Lopez, the Marine commander here, “you’re going to have individuals who are unhappy.”

Sabah freely admits he is one of them.

“We stood by them, we carried out their requests, we let no one hurt them,” he said in a rushed clump of words, near certificates of appreciation from the Marines and the U.S. Army that gather dust in a mother-of-pearl cabinet. “They weren’t supposed to abandon us.”

As he sat with other tribal leaders who joined the American-led fight in 2006 and 2007, his reticence seemed to rival his fatalism, the sense that foes outnumber friends. “I expect I’ll die at any time,” he worried. “Today, tomorrow, maybe the day after.”

‘The British Had Foresight’

Steeped in desert traditions of pride, dignity and honor, no one in Anbar, perhaps the most Arab of Iraq’s Arab regions, would contend that any foreign occupation was good, and the Americans remain deeply unpopular in some quarters here. But true or not, there is a prevailing sense in this vast, arid region bisected by the Euphrates that, as far as occupations go, the British were better at it than the Americans.

There are bridges still nicknamed “British bridges,” built after the British defeated the Ottoman Empire and occupied Iraq at the end of World War I. One spans the Euphrates in Ramadi. The descendants of some sheiks jealously guard pictures of their forefathers posing with British potentates. One of them bragged that Gertrude Bell, the British diplomat and adventurer, wrote about his ancestor, the powerful sheik Ali Sulaiman.

“One of the most remarkable men in Iraq,” she declared in a letter to her father.

“The British had foresight and, we can’t say credibility, but they had more patience than the Americans. They understood how to take time to win someone to their side,” said his great-grandson, Ali Hatem Sulaiman. “The Americans, no. With them, it’s either shoot you or give you money, it’s either hire you or beat you up.”

The Americans, he said, used a jackhammer to shape a diamond.

Deliberate Disengagement

To be fair, Lopez, the colonel in Ramadi, is no jackhammer.

His tenure in Iraq started in 2003 in Karbala, part of the Shiite Muslim heartland. He ends his latest tour, this one in Iraq’s Sunni hub, next month. He dismissed the idea that allies were somehow abandoned or friends shown any disrespect.

The day after he took command, Lopez ordered the construction of a diwan, a kind of reception hall requisite in any sheik’s house. Forty-eight hours later, it was done, complete with eight Persian carpets, overstuffed furniture, ample ashtrays and even pink plastic flowers in the corner. On the wall is a clock with the 99 names of Allah in Arabic.

“All the nuances,” Lopez described it, “all the cultural sensitivities.”

His Marines train their Army successors in the etiquette of brewing Turkish coffee, or as one soldier put it, “espresso times 10.” Well-sugared tea should be served as soon as the sheiks sit down in Lopez’s diwan. “You want to be Johnny on the spot every time,” Cpl. Jared Jones insisted. In serving meals, put lamb in the middle, he said, chicken to the side. Take plastic silverware out of the wrapper; doing otherwise is considered tacky.

“We can’t stress how much this matters,” Jones lectured the impromptu class of a half-dozen soldiers. “We mess it up, we pay the price. Now, are there any questions about chow?”

But even Lopez’s efforts can’t rewrite the arithmetic of postwar Iraq. He acknowledged that “the sheer mathematics” of the withdrawal mean U.S. officers are simply less engaged with some of the sheiks who joined them in the fight against insurgents, a battle widely viewed as one of the crucial pivots in the American experience in Iraq. As he describes it, the military has also disciplined itself to better target which sheiks it wants to court — the 20 or so whom they have deemed most prominent here.

“I think that’s one of our institutional lessons learned,” Lopez said.

The goal of what he called a responsible drawdown was “a return to normalcy.”

“It’s not normal for a coalition presence to be injected into the Iraqi cultural system and the sheiks’ system,” Lopez said, sitting in his office at Camp Ramadi. “Without extricating ourselves from the equation,” he added, “it can’t return to normal.”

A Sheik Speaks His Mind

Postwar Anbar is anything but normal, whatever normal might mean here. By virtue of its money, arms and prestige, the U.S. military — like its British predecessors — has indelibly remade the province’s landscape. One ally, Ahmed Abu Risha, whose clan was little known before the occupation, is on a trajectory to become Anbar’s most powerful man. Other allies have gathered fabulous wealth. Yet others deem themselves dead men walking, having courted too few friends while they occupied the U.S. limelight.

The one constant is the degree to which the sheiks dislike one another. Any pledge not to speak ill about one’s peers is almost always a preamble to a string of expletives. In one rant that ended only when the sheik ran out of breath, a rival was called a pimp, a prostitute, the son of a dog and, finally, “a circumciser.”

Perhaps another constant is the suspicion that many of America’s allies direct at their patron.

“They did the same thing in Vietnam,” said the pragmatic Affan al-Issawi, a U.S.-allied militia leader near Fallujah whom Lopez called “a very dear friend of mine.”

“I know their history. Just in one night, they left. They left all their agents and friends behind. I knew they would leave one day,” Issawi said.

Issawi has decorated his villa with portraits of himself with then-President George W. Bush, former American military commanders and President Obama. He acknowledges the help the U.S. military gave him in the counterinsurgency, including rifles, heavy machine guns and ammunition it seized from “bad people,” as well as $1.5 million in contracts to build schools and a water station. On one $450,000 school contract, he boasted, flashing a $25,000, diamond-encrusted Rolex watch, he managed to clear $300,000.

Indeed, Issawi may come out on top. He is an ally of Abu Risha, who some speculate might become the president of Iraq after next year’s elections. Issawi has a seat on the provincial council, guaranteeing police protection. He carries his wealth naturally, like a rich Persian Gulf Arab, at ease with privilege to which he has grown accustomed.

“I didn’t build my life with American bricks,” said Issawi, who will turn 35 in November. “I knew one day they would leave, and that they would leave quickly.”

A Bitter Aftertaste

In 1922, Ali Sulaiman, the sheik praised by Gertrude Bell in her letter, worried what would happen to his reputation if it looked like the British had abandoned him.

Nearly a century later, Raed Sabah and a coterie of other sheiks are the modern equivalent. At the peak of the fight against the insurgency, the United States supplied Sabah with 50 AK-47 rifles. Jassem Swaidawi, another ally, ran up a $30,000 bill one month on a U.S.-supplied phone he used to contact the military; he was reimbursed. Hamid al-Hais shows off a partial right finger and two wounds in his right leg, suffered in a fight with insurgents in 2007. They all met Obama when he was still a presidential candidate.

Some of them said they expected American citizenship. Fearful for their lives amid charges of treason, others hoped for help finding residency in neighboring Jordan or Syria. Some are clearly motivated by money, which was once abundant: They want funds to keep flowing in a region that, more than any other part of Iraq, appears wedded to kleptocracy. “The simplest thing they could have done was to keep in touch,” said Sabah, who last saw representatives of the U.S. military before the provincial elections in January.

“The Americans never understood Iraqi society,” added Hais, sitting in his diwan with a plaque from the U.S. military that reads, “Allies in battle, friends in peace.”

“All they did was write down in their notebooks what they were supposed to have learned,” he said.

The American project here was always infused with contradictions. Iraq was never as sovereign as U.S. officials insisted, never as secure as the military proclaimed. The United States called itself a partner, even as it presided over the destruction of the country’s fabric. In Anbar, it proclaims a return to normalcy, amid a withdrawal it deems responsible, in a land that will long bear its mark.

Sabah and other U.S.-allied sheiks joke darkly about the accusations leveled against them: that they have served as spies and stooges for the Americans. Some call them “the sheiks of dolma,” a reference to the stuffed grape leaves the allies would serve U.S. military officers for lunch. You served the Americans, some tell the sheiks, and they never served you.

“The Americans took what they wanted from them and left them behind. You can’t do that in Iraq,” said Col. Mahmoud al-Issawi, Fallujah’s police chief. “It’s shameful to the worst degree. It’s not just shameful, it’s actually a huge scandal.”

“An easy target to be killed,” he termed the sheiks.

In the interview, Lopez, the Marine commander, said he was sure that the United States would still boast of friends in Anbar in five years. Sabah, not called a sheik as often these days, was doubtful.

“They may have to come back one day, and their friends won’t be here anymore,” he said. “Who would stand with them again? After this? No one would accept it.”

A section of the population has become radicalized. That was true before June 12 and it is true now. That sector does not want the Islamic Revolution, they do not want Guardianship of the Jurisprudent (Velayat-e faqih), they do not want to be involved in the affairs of Lebanon or Palestine, in short they want to be secular westerners.

This sector does not want “reforms” and they will not be mollified or pacified by anything short of the overthrow of the Revolutionary system and the abandonment of the Imam Khomeini legacy. Oh sure they’ll go along with the Greenie leaders and their hypcritical appeals to the example of “Khomeini the liberal reformer” a Khomeini that never existed in the real world. Even now you hear the grumbling from the street that Mousavi is too moderate, too willing to compromise etc.

I understand the opposition perfectly, they really do want “death to Khamenei” and “death to AN” and to Jafari etc., etc., There is nothing to compromise and there wasn’t on June 14th either.

The truth is that this is a struggle to the death between the Islamic Revolution and those that want “death to the Islamic Revolution” and it will be resolved the way all such conflicts have been resolved. In the past with the sword, today with the Kalashnikov. I referenced the “Battle of the Camel” in another post and the fact is that we are heading for another such event in Shiite history.

The choice is simple for those who can’t stand the Islamic Revolution: Emigrate, Submit or Fight. I despise the MOK but I respect them for fighting for what they believe in. As opposed to the Greenies they did not try to overthrow the Revolution while pretending that they were simply implementing the “true” doctrine of Imam Khomeini.

Cyrus didn’t argue for using the attacks to crack down on the Greenies, I did. There is a reason why Islam forbids the consumption of alcohol. :-)

I did it because I believe that a decisive crackdown is necessary now just like it was necessary in 1988. China and Iran are different cases, what a brilliant piece of analysis! I only brought China up because it is a bizarre argument on your part to use China as an example when China had its own harsh crackdown.

Closer to home one can cite the Syrian crackdown on the city of Hama in 1982 which effectively put an end to Sunni Fundamentalist activity in that country. I prefer the example of Imam Khomeini in 1988 as an example of an effective crackdown, an example by the way which was never condemned by your leading Green reformers of the present day.

“Note how well I blew that argument apart earlier:” I notice that you are very, very good at complimenting yourself, I like that.
You seem to like the definition of words, here’s one: Narcissism, the trait of excessive self-love, based on self-image or ego.

Re: Blaming Israel
The Israelis are well known to push minority sects and separatist movements to weaken Arab and Islamic states and I cited two specific cases, the Maronites and the Kurds. I can also cite the Druze as well as other Middle East Christian communities (other than the Maronites). As befits a colonial settler state the Zionists believe in “divide and conquer” and Iran is the most important threat they’ve faced in a generation.

That seems to be an illusion common to regime hardliners and their supporters like Samuel (Why the fake English/American name?). The illusion may explain some of the regime’s stubborness.

Note how well I blew that argument apart earlier:

http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-current-events/38461-why-irans-hardliners-think-people-will-get-over-regime-crimes.html

By the way, who but a regime propagandist would blame Israel for recent attacks clearly linked to Al Queda (see your above post). Let’s face it: the regime itself alienated the public. What’s to like about a brutally oppressive government that clearly rules for a few, hands them the whole economy as well and brutally mismanages the rest–all this why endlessly persecuted religious and ethnic minorities and anyone who dares think for themself or question any crime (an offense known as “slander” or even I “crime against God” by the regime).

From such charges I gather Khamenei and God (Allah) are identical. What arrogance this regime has as well as brutality and mendaciousness!

Why would you want the regime to use the attack as an excuse to crackdown on its critics?

Is it because you support the regime or because you expect a crackdown will backfire? If the latter, you contradict your own argument further on that regime blunders don’t lead to backfires.

You say the rigged elections, subsequent torture and rapes, show trials, etc.
haven’t backfired but your rebuttal points solely to things the IRCG indisputably did to strengthen itself PRIOR to those blunders. That was already a done deal. Can’t you see that my post deals with the consequences of those blunders–not what the regime achieved pre-coup in terms of strengthening itself but what it did post coup to weaken itself.

Definition of “backfire”: When a regime policy not only fails to achieve what was intended but tends to produce the opposite.

I say say the regime never expected such a strong public reaction to its rigged election, expecting it could pull the wool over people’s eyes. The regime thought it could–as in the past–get away with so many crimes against the protestors afterward without exposure. Did it prove wrong on both assumptions or not? Has torture intimidated critics or merely forced it to change tactics? Who is more likely to be viewed as a Satan and who as Satan: Khamenei or Kourrabi? Was that so before June 12th?

Who has more credibility today: the state media or Saint Kourrabi and others? Like its homosexual and heterosexual rapes and its show trials (who believes thos confessions?) lies such as “Nedia was killed by her fellow protestors” simply arouse revulsion and teach folks how shameless immoral the regime and all its supporters truely are. This regime is so self-tainted in the public eyes it can never regain the public’s trust.

You also seem to assume success consists of achieving SHORT-TERM tactical successes that anyone already in full control of state organs and having all the guns could hardly fail to achieve–cheating on election day, stopping large-scale protests with numbers of 3 million or more. Winning the battles where the deck is loaded means nothing is you lose the war.

BACKFIRES EXEMPLIFIED

Backfire: the regime has alienated a growing number of people permanently and irreconcilably.

Backfire: An increasingly radicalized public has moved on to much greater demands than those the regime might easily have managed just after elections.

Backfire: What once still retained considerable respect prior to June 12 and subsequent events (the Supreme Leader, the Islamic Republic) now enjoys much more widespread contempt.

Backfire: Even the means of achieving temporary tactical successes become corrupted and weakened as time passes. The more people are bused from small towns into the city to control demonstrators and the more basilj have contact with demonstrators, the more word travels to every point in the land of what is really happening. At the same time, the more demoralized Basilj become, a process clearly well underway.

re: Ramadi and Anbar Province.

Al Sadr’s militia has no presence there and hence no impact. In fact, in many places in southern Iran (Basra especially) people became fed up with the Al Mahdi army and other Islamist milita for the same reason Arabs in Anbar Province became fed up with Al Queda and Iranians with Khamenei’s crowds. Islamist rule is intolerable and, for Iranians, democracy far more preferable. In Anbar province Arabs saw the USA, seen as the lesser of two evils.

re: lot of China’s progress was after it, correctly in my opinion, cracked down HARD on China’s “Green Movement” AT Tiananmen Square.

True and I know this is exactly what hardliners are hoping will happen in Iraq. However, historical analogies only work to the degree the two situations are identical. The less this is so, the more worthless the comparison. For example, note how the Munich analogy was constantly misapplied to Vietnam.

I wrote a long post describing all the many reasons why the regime cannot expect that they could pull off what the Chinese did with Tianneman–too many variables are different. Nevertheless the regime proceded from precisely the kind of mistaken assumptions from which you seem to proceed.