The Iran-Turkey-Israel Triangle: Erdogan in Tehran

The Latest from Iran (28 October): No Lull

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On Tuesday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad signed economic agreements and discussed regional politics.

Ahmadinejad praised Erdogan's stance against Israel, describing the country as a "threat to all nations":

When an illicit regime possesses nuclear arms, one cannot talk about depriving other nations of a peaceful nuclear program. Your clear stance toward the Zionist regime had a positive effect in the world, especially the Islamic world, and I am sure that everyone was satisfied.

The more regional countries expand their ties and get closer to each other, the more they can remove their problems and limit the ill-wishers that have plots against them.

Iran-Turkey cooperation would benefit both countries, the region and the whole Islamic world.

Ahmadinejad also praised Erdogan's stance on Tehran's nuclear programme, after the Turkish Prime Minister told The Guardian that "Iranians are working on nuclear power for the purposes of energy only".

Under the Iran-Turkey economic agreement, both countries commit themselves to trade through their own currencies instead of the dollar or euro. Turkey has signed similar accords with Russia and China.

The Latest from Iran (27 October): Domestic and Foreign Collide

NEW Latest Iran Video: University Protests (27 October)
NEW Iran: More on Kian Tajbakhsh and Tehran’s “Velvet Revolution”
Latest Iran Video/Translation: Karroubi on Events in the Iran Media Fair
Iran’s Political Confusion: Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and the Nuclear Agreement
Latest from Iran (26 October): After the Fair

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2015 GMT: 13 Aban Does Not Exist. Homy Lafayette offers more detail on the Government's order to state media to "refrain from disseminating any news, photo, or topic which can lead to tension in the society or breach public order" during the demonstrations on 13 Aban (4 November).

The article includes an English translation of the document, issued by Deputy Culture and Islamic Guidance Minister Alireza Malekian.

1810 GMT: Iran's Nuclear Manoeuvre. If this story from Press TV is accurate, then Tehran is haggling over the details of third-party enrichment, rather than walking away from the deal.

The article re-quotes the source who spoke to Al Alam TV (see 1015 GMT), "Iran will announce its response to the proposal put forward by [International Atomic Energy Agency] Director-General [Mohamed] ElBaradei on Friday, October 30." The official added that Iran did not want to send 80 percent of its uranium stock in a single shipment to Russia, as set out in the deal from the Vienna talks: "Iran as a uranium buyer knows best how much uranium, enriched to a level of 19.75 percent, it needs [for its medical research reactor]; based on this argument, it will raise certain issues with this proposal."

In other words, Tehran will insist on a lower amount of uranium --- currently, the deal is for 1.2 million out of 1.5 million tonnes --- being sent to Russia in the first shipment. More would be delivered for enrichment as the medical reactor required new supplies.

The report is seconded by the head of Parliament's Foreign Policy and National Security Commission, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, "Iran can send the scheduled amount in separate shipments so that its fuel supply [provided by foreigners] is guaranteed....Iran can send only a part of its stockpile … and then as it receives its 20 percent enriched fuel it will send the next portion."

A word of caution on this interpretation: Boroujerdi is close to President Ahmadinejad and is putting the pro-deal view. It is unclear whether the dissenting voices such as Ali Larijani (and possibly, behind Larijani, the Supreme Leader) have come around to this position.

1750 GMT: Back from a teaching break to find that Rooz Online, following up a story prominent on the Internet this morning, has published details of an alleged Government order to censor and possibly shut out any news of mass demonstrations on 13 Aban (4 November).

1230 GMT: As reports continue to come in, with claims of 1500 students protesting at Azad University in Tehran, we've posted the first video footage.

1020 GMT: Reports that students gathered to demonstrate at Tehran University but are being forced to move by security forces.

1015 GMT: Reuters is reporting, from Iran's Al-Alam television, that Iran will accept the uranium enrichment agreement but will demand changes. The source is an "unnamed official" who indicates Iran's reply will be made within 48 hours.

0810 GMT: Detentions, Concerns, and Hunger Strikes. Human Rights Activists in Iran has posted a summary of latest developments regarding post-election detainees. Included is the information that journalist Henganeh Shahidi and student Payman Aref have started hunger strikes.

0800 GMT: Myth, Imprisonment, and "Velvet Revolution". We've just posted more on the jailed Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh and the regime's accusations and tactics with the claim of foreign-directed regime change in

0715 GMT: A reader has pointed us to a report posted by CNN on a prison riot in Karaj, west of Tehran, on Sunday. Interestingly, the story comes from the National Council of Resistance in Iran, the opposition movement headed by Maryam Rajavi and linked to Mujahedin-e-Khalq.

0635 GMT: Meanwhile CNN International (broadcast, not website) is focusing on a peripheral story. Pakistan detained and has now released 11 Iranians who crossed the border yesterday. The original line was that the detainees were Revolutionary Guard members, possibly pursuing or looking for leads on those linked to last week's bombings. Pakistan, probably after discreet talks with Tehran, is now calling the wanderers "security guards"; Press TV portrays them as "border police" pursuing smugglers.

0630 GMT: Now The Washington Post has picked up on the effect of the internal debate on the enrichment agreement (and vice-versa) with an overview by Thomas Erdbrink, "Iran officials appear split on nuclear plan".

0600 GMT: One of the standing rules for analysis, when students and I consider US foreign policy, is that what happens overseas cannot be separated from what happens at home.

So it is proving --- and may prove in a significant way in the next 72 hours --- in Iran.

Tensions over the decision on the uranium enrichment deal are now beyond simmering and openly bubbling. Even this weekend, all the signals from the Iranian Government were that it would work out any issues and sign the proposal, with a significant portion of Iran's uranium stock going to Russia for enrichment, by Wednesday or Thursday. Now, all bets are off.

Readers took yesterday's analysis of the possible conflict between the Supreme Leader and President Ahmadinejad to a new level with their comments, but this morning I still find myself with questions rather than answers. The straightforward explanation would be that the Supreme Leader, working through the statements of Parliamentary leaders like Ali Larijani and Mohammad Reza Bahonar, is now blocking agreement. But, if so, why did he apparently endorse "engagement" to the point where the deal was almost struck? What could be the calculation in approaching the International Atomic Energy Agency, and thus Washington, in the summer and now walking out on the deal at the 11th hour?

Other theories from our readers include an Iranian "good cop, bad cop" act which would allow Ahmadinejad to portray himself as the guy who wanted to work with Obama but had to give way to Ayatollah Khamenei and the Iranians walking out of the arrangement because their ploy --- getting uranium for the medical reactor enriched for free while retaining enough of their stock to pursue other programmes --- hasn't yielded enough of a result.

Fortunately for my confusion, if not the general situation, there should be some clarification by Friday. Iran can't spin out the post-Vienna deliberations beyond the weekend, given that the US has already let last Friday's deadline slide in expectation of a Tehran decision within a few days. So it's accept, reject, or try to bring the "5+1" powers back to the table for talks.

And that declaration from Iran will in turn give the US Government, as well as the European powers, Russia, and China, a somewhat paradoxical choice. If Tehran does not sign the enrichment agreement, does the Obama Administration continue engagement, possibly strengthening the Iranian President against his own Supreme Leader? Or does it walk away (or is forced away by Congressional and public hostility to any more talks), now watching an internal Iranian situation in which Washington is no more than a bystander?

Iran: More on Kian Tajbakhsh and Tehran's "Velvet Revolution"

Iran’s American Prisoner: The Case of Kian Tajbakhsh (Continued with 15 Years in Jail)
Iran: How the Regime Constructed the “Velvet Revolution”
The Latest from Iran (27 October): Domestic and Foreign Collide

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Despite (or possibly because of) the muted public response by the US Government to the 15-year sentence handed down to Iranian-American academic Kian Tajbakhsh, the campaign for his release has picked up steam in the last week. On Sunday we featured an article by Karim Sadjadpour, and fellow scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who was detained for months with Tajbakhsh in 2007, has blogged for The New York Review of Books.

Gary Sick, a former US Government official who has been named in the regime's indictments as a "foreign operative" working with Tajbakhsh, has also offered his thoughts. Without forgetting that hundreds of others remain in post-election detention, we post this to link Tajbakhsh's case to a wider analysis of the Iranian Government's accusations and tactics in its portrayal of "velvet revolution".

Last week, an Iranian-American colleague of mine, Kian Tajbaksh, was sentenced in Tehran to 15 years in prison. The indictment included the charges that (1) he was in contact with me; (2) that he was part of the Gulf/2000 network that I manage; and (3) that I am an agent of the CIA.

Normally, I simply ignore silly accusations such as this. They are nothing new. On one hand, it has been intimated that I must be under the influence of Iranian intelligence (by prominent neoconservatives who believe that my views on Iran’s political development and especially its nuclear program are not sufficiently alarmist). I have also been accused (by such worthies as Hossein Shariatmadari, the ultra-radical editor of Iran’s Kayhan newspaper, who is also a representative of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei) of being a CIA agent. I regard these insinuations as badges of honor, since they merely confirm that I do not subscribe to the ideological extremes of either of these groups. I have always felt that my reputation could speak for itself and required no public defense.

However, this time the accusations are really not about me but about a friend and colleague. Moreover, they are not just newspaper hyperbole by people who have an ax to grind and whose desire to make a political point exceeds their respect for the truth. These assertions are a matter of law—an official indictment by the judicial authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is often said that it is impossible to prove a negative. How do I prove that I am NOT an agent of the CIA? How do I prove that the Gulf/2000 Internet project is NOT engaged in overthrowing governments? How do I prove that Kian—a friend and a colleague—was NOT trying to lead a “velvet revolution” against the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Let me simply reverse the questions. I spent 24 years in the U.S. Navy—my only connection with the U.S. government. The Navy sponsored my education at the University of Kansas. It took me to the Persian Gulf for my first exposure to the region that has become my professional specialization. It sponsored my graduate work for a Ph.D. degree at Columbia University. And it paid my salary while I was on the National Security Council staff at the time of the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. I never received a paycheck from any other agency of the U.S. government. Do the prosecutors in Iran have evidence to the contrary? If so, please let me know.

There are a number of commentators on Iran, such as Reuel Gerecht, Graham Fuller, and Bruce Riedel, who indeed worked for the CIA. Although their political views disagree sharply, they always identify themselves as former CIA employees. I do not identify myself that way for the very simple reason that I never worked for the CIA.

The prosecutors charge that Kian was in touch with me. Right. We were both academics in New York, and we saw each other from time to time. However, I have gone back over the past 20 years with that in mind, and I am struck by something quite different. Over that period of time, I have known every Iranian ambassador to the United Nations and many members of the staff of the Iranian U.N. mission. I have spent much more time with them than with Kian.

More important, I have been in meetings with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on four different occasions over the past three years. I have spent at least nine hours with him, much more than I ever spent with Kian. In my last meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad, I told him that if he were simply a lowly academic, instead of the president of Iran, he would be subject to arrest upon his return to Iran for meeting with the roomful of U.S. academics and think tank representatives that he had assembled at his hotel. He scoffed at the idea. Now one of my colleagues, a lowly Iranian-American professor who was about to take up a position at my university, is being condemned to 15 years in prison because, among other things, he had contact with me.

Iranian security officials are notably lacking in any sense of irony or humor. But I do wonder whether President Ahmadinejad is being considered for indictment because of his extensive contacts with me over the past four years.

The Gulf/2000 network is an Internet project that began 16 years ago to facilitate communication and information sharing among individuals who have a professional association with issues involving the Persian Gulf. It includes individuals of widely differing backgrounds and opinions, including both private citizens and government officials from countries around the world, including Iran. If any Iranian government official wishes to know about G2K, as we call it, he need only consult his colleagues who are members.

G2K is routinely cited in international conferences in Tehran and elsewhere as a reliable source of informed commentary and factual information about issues involving the Persian Gulf. It is limited to specialists, but it is not a secret. It includes individuals of every possible political persuasion. And it is not engaged in overthrowing governments.

The indictment against Kian is in fact an indictment of the legal and security structure of the Iranian government. The charges are false, deliberately false. They consist of a series of political fabrications devoid of even the flimsiest effort to verify the truth.

These accusations cast shame on any institution that professes respect for justice and law. They substantiate the words of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, one the founders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that this government is no longer either Islamic or a republic but merely the latest in the shabby succession of Middle Eastern military regimes. These charges remind us of the excesses of the Stalinist show trials and the abominations of the Chinese Red Guards—examples of revolutions that betrayed their own ideals.

This is not about Kian, and it is certainly not about me. It is about the abject failure of a ruling clique that has lost the confidence and support of its own people and must contrive scapegoats to excuse its own deficiencies.

Iran's American Prisoner: The Case of Kian Tajbakhsh (Continued with 15 Years in Jail)

Iran’s American Detainee: The Case of Kian Tajbakhsh
Iran: How the Regime Constructed the “Velvet Revolution”

In early August, we featured the case of Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, arrested at his home in Tehran a few weeks earlier. Within days of the report, Tajbakhsh was amongst the defendants in the first Tehran trial, held up as a prime agent in the "velvet revolution".

Last week Tajbakhsh was sentenced to 15 years in prison. In contrast to the attention given to previous US citizens held by Iran, such as journalist Roxana Saberi, but in parallel to the case of the three American "hikers" detained this summer and still held, Tajbakhsh's fate has received little attention. There was a perfunctory State Department declaration of concern, but the US Government apparently is making its efforts for Tajbakhsh's release behind the scenes and very quietly.

Karim Sadjadpour provides further information and thoughts in this article from Foreign Policy:

My friend, the Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, was recently  sentenced to 15 years in Tehran's Evin prison. For those familiar with the ways of authoritarian regimes, the charges against him will ring familiar: espionage, cooperating with an enemy government, and endangering national security.

Since his arrest last July -- he was accused of helping to plan the post-election uprisings -- Kian's family and friends have made countless appeals for clemency to the Iranian government, written letters to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pleading his innocence, and signed dozens of petitions. All to no avail.

I've come now to realize that the regime probably thinks we're obtuse. Indeed, they know better than anyone that Kian is an innocent man. As the expression goes in Persian, "da'va sar-e een neest," i.e. that's not what this fight is about.

Allow me to explain.

Kian was first arrested in 2007. His crime was having previously worked as a consultant for the Open Society Institute (OSI), a U.S.-based NGO. Though his work was nonpolitical, focused on educational and developmental projects, and had received the explicit consent of the Iranian government, he was accused of trying to foment a "velvet revolution" on behalf of U.S.
intelligence agencies.

While in solitary confinement in Evin, he was subjected to countless hours of interrogation. Had the authorities found any evidence for the above charges during all this, Kian certainly would not have been freed after four months.

He was permitted to leave the country after his release, but chose to remain in Tehran with his wife and newborn daughter. He reassured his worried family and friends that he was now an open book to the Iranian government and there could be no further rationale or pretext to detain him.

Over the last two years, he regularly met with his minder from the Ministry of Intelligence. Aware of the fact that the government was monitoring all of his activities and communications -- including e-mail and telephone conversations -- he kept a very low profile and exhibited
great caution.

During this period, Kian and I regularly exchanged e-mails. He urged me to read his favorite book, Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz's brilliant novel, The Captive Mind, which examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right.

On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Shah we debated the successes and failures of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and he told me he believed that the former outweigh the latter. Hardly the worldview of a subversive counterrevolutionary.

Even amid the massive popular uprisings following the tainted June 2009 presidential elections, Kian remained cautious and unmoved, steering way clear of any political activity and continuing to meet with his minder.

On June 14, two days after the election, he wrote me an email saying, "I'm keeping my head down ... I have nothing to add to all the reports that are here." In the same e-mail, Kian even expressed skepticism about the opposition's accusations of electoral fraud, saying he had seen "little hard evidence."

A few weeks later he was arrested, bafflingly, on charges of helping to
plan the post-election unrest.

Read rest of article....

Iran: The Karroubi Effect

The Latest from Iran (24 October): Resurgence
Video: Karroubi & Crowd at Iran Media Fair (23 October)
The Latest from Iran (23 October): Karroubi Appears

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On 17 July Mehdi Karroubi, a cleric who had finished a distant fourth in the Presidential vote, allocated a measly percentage point of the toll, joined the crowds marching to the Friday Prayer ceremony being led by Hashemi Rafsanjani. He was jostled by security forces, with his clerical turban knocked from his head.

Far from removing Karroubi from the political scene, however, the incident symbolically propelled him to the centre of it. The former Speaker of Parliament, was well-known inside Iran, of course, but Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had finished a disputed second to President Ahmadinejad in the vote was the most prominent leader of the Green Wave. By late July, that was no longer the case. After Karroubi published a letter he had sent to Rafsanjani, asking for full investigation of the regime's abuses of detainees, he too became a representative of the demands for reforms that millions of people had sought from the first marches after the election.

Yesterday the turban was knocked from Karroubi's head again. He arrived at the Iran Media Fair, which has been running all week. One look at the videos, however, will show the impact of the appearance. The electric effect on the crowd, as they were spurred into both positive chants for Karroubi and, allegedly, anti-regime outbursts ("Death to the Dictator"), overturns weeks of speculation that the Green movement is spent.

The jostling of Karroubi, forcing his withdrawal from the Fair, may have been the result of a surge in the crowd. It may have been a clash between pro-Ahmadinejad supporters and their opponents. Security forces may have been trying to protect Karroubi, rather than joining in an attack upon him.

None of that matters. Once someone swiped an arm at Karroubi's head, they donated an injection of spirit to the Green wave. Details of plans to change the system are difficult to develop, let alone implement. So movements can drag, drift, wander as the messiness of politics overtakes the initial rush of protest. But when the turban again came off Karroubi yesterday, it overtook all those details --- indeed it overcame the Government surveillances, detentions, and "information" which have tried to sap the strength from opposition. Karroubi had made it, he had defied the authorities, and so could "we".

As we count the days to the 13 Aban (4 November) demonstrations, we have wondered if the Green Wave could maintain its strength, rather than ebbing out into a half-mobilised, less than half-hearted demonstration. I think we just got our answer.