1955 GMT: The lawyer for 21-year-old Amir Reza Arefi says his client has been sentenced to death for “mohareb” (war against God). Arefi was arrested in April 2009, before the June election.
1945 GMT: Keeping Rafsanjani in His Box. An EA correspondent puts together an important story: with the 7th general assembly of the Assembly of Experts due next week, probably on Tuesday and Wednesday, new attacks have been launched upon Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the Assembly.
A statement from a number of clerics at Qom declares that, due to the performance of Hashemi Rafsanjani in the past few months, he is not suitable to continue in his post. And Fars News, criticising Rafsanjani’s son Mehdi Hashemi for not returning to Iran after five months abroad, asserts that his settling in London is “strange and suspicious”.
1715 GMT: The Karroubi Wave. It appears that the Karroubi family — not just Mehdi Karroubi, but the family — are ready to propel the next wave of opposition to the Government and regime. In addition to Fatemeh Karroubi’s interview (1600 GMT), Mehdi Karroubi’s son Hossein has spoken out to Radio Zamaneh.
Tom Englehardt, writing at TomDispatch, goes beyond the headline “30,000 extra troops” of President Obama’s recent announcement to detail the extent of the US escalation and long-term commitment — despite Obama’s initial declaration of a “beginning to the end” of the military presence in July 2011 — to the intervention in Afghanistan (N.B.: All links in original article):
In his Afghan “surge” speech at West Point last week, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new “way forward in Afghanistan.” He spoke of the “additional 30,000 U.S. troops” he was sending into that country over the next six months. He brought up the “roughly $30 billion” it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.
Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and how expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the surge of November 2009 is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the U.S. war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media’s focus on the president’s speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those 30,000 new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what’s actually underway. Read the rest of this entry »
2000 GMT: What War Game is The Economist Playing Out? The British journal has an “analysis” which, given the publication’s usual journalistic standards, is shocking: “An Iranian nuclear bomb, or the bombing of Iran?”
The piece starts with a series of false steps and distortions to get from premise — the second enrichment plant at Fordoo near Qom — to conclusion: “brazen”, “belligerent” Iran is “on the threshold of becoming a nuclear (military) power”. That’s pnly a prelude, however, to “news” posing as advocacy of Bomb, Bomb Iran.
The journal gives unwarranted prominence to a road show by two former US Senators and a former Air Force General who are talking up a strike and then intones, “Israel’s threats of military action might be more credible than America’s”. That allows The Economist to play big boys with big toys, sketching out how a military attack might unfold, before offering a most sensible “compromise”:
So which will it be: a war with Iran, or a nuclear-armed Iran? Short of a revolution that sweeps away the Iranian regime—ushering in one that agrees, like post-apartheid South Africa, to give up its nuclear technology—sanctions may offer the only hope of avoiding the awful choice.
1940 GMT: Strike. A statement from the “Lawyers of the Green Movement of Iranian People” calls for strikes as “a civil action for acquiring one’s rights” and adds this summary of the movement: “The Green Movement doesn’t belong to anybody. Its leaders are different shades of people that are gathered around democracy. It is the people that are leading the movement.”
Any information about this initiative would be appreciated, as the group is new to us.
1920 GMT: Preventing 16 Azar. An article in Deutsche Welle summarises that more than 90 students have been arrested in the last three weeks. The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran outlines some of the cases of the “stepped up persecution and prosecution of student activists throughout the country”.
1910 GMT: A Signal from the Leader? An EA reader tips us off that Ayatollah Khomeini’s office has distributed copies, not published before, of a Supreme Leader speech from this summer reminding members of Parliament of their proper role and responsibilities.
Now, this would have no connection whatsoever with the troublesome rebellion of more than a few legislators against the Ahmadinejad Government, right?
1810 GMT: Any Connection Here? On the same day that a Government minister threatened his son with arrest and trial, Hashemi Rafsanjani put forth another general criticism of that Government: “Today there is no room to hide the matter. The difficulties presented by the political disputes are grave.” Read the rest of this entry »
CNN, which is desperate to ensure that Christiane Amanpour is The Most Important Broadcaster in the History of the World, has not released the video of Monday’s roundtable at George Washington University with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. They have released the transcript, however.
The significance of the discussion is diluted because the first 2/3 of it is one of the worst interviews I have ever read. Forget Amanpour’s fawning and gushing about “the annals of recent history”, the first few minutes devoted to Clinton and Gates saying We are the Best of Friends, the opening substantive question, “Do you think you can win in Afghanistan?”, and the close in which Amanpour says that we have to fight in Afghanistan for “the young people”.
Almost nothing of importance is said about Afghanistan, even though the Obama Administration is on the cusp of a decision about another military escalation. There is no critique of what another 40,000 troops would mean, only scare words about Al Qa’eda and the Taliban. The conversation is slanted with the further question, “By scaling back over the next 12 to 18 months, you can win in Afghanistan?”, so Clinton and Gates can say, “No”, and avoid any specific consideration of the difficulties of escalation.
The only passage of interest is Frank Sesno’s challenge that the “non-military” dimension of US efforts is “only a drop in the bucket”. Clinton does not refute that point, instead she tellingly shifts the conversation, “In order to operate in many of the places in Afghanistan, you have to have a level of security.So there has to be a commitment to make an area as secure as possible.”
Yet, instead of pressing the point that there are issues beyond security, Amanpour and Sesno walked away. There is no reference in the interview to alleged corruption affecting the development efforts. Indeed, the Afghan Presidential election, which took place two months ago and still has not been resolved amidst allegations of fraud, is never mentioned.
The conversation on Iran is far more interesting. Indeed, Clinton dropped in an important revelation when she said that the Geneva talks on Iran’s nuclear programme had produced an aggreement for “third-party enrichment” in principle. That shift from earlier reports of an agreement in practice matches Tehran’s account. And beyond the specifics, Clinton offered perhaps the best summary of the US engagement with Iran: “[The talks] buy time.”
Clinton was far more close-mouthed on Iran’s internal situation, offering only, “We’ve been very clear in supporting the legitimate aspirations of the Iranian people and in speaking out forcefully against the irregularities of their electoral process.” However, note further down her confirmation that the State Department did make a significant intervention early in the post-election crisis: “We were told that Twitter just was going to have to shut down for 48 hours to do some upgrades to the software. So we called and said, “Please don’t shut down, because this is a major communications loop for people on the streets.”
AMANPOUR: Welcome. Welcome to you both.
We’ve been sort of searching back in the annals of recent history, and we can’t really find an example such as this, where two sitting secretaries, in charge of some of the most important briefs at the moment, are sitting on stage in an interview such as this.
So we just wanted to start by asking you, how often do you speak together? What is it like working together? Do you pick up the phone and call each other whenever you like? How does it work? Read the rest of this entry »
Have a good viewing of the video or read of the transcript of the interview of General James Jones, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, on CBS’s Face the Nation and you’ll get the big story. The fight between Obama advisors who want to limit US involvement in Afghanistan and the military commanders who want escalation just went public, big-time. The decision of General Stanley McChrystal, in a speech in London, to trash Vice President Joe Biden’s preference for a tightly-defined American effort against Al Qa’eda was a Take That to the Administration. That’s why he got hauled aboard Air Force One, as President Obama made a special stopover en route to Copenhangen, for “consultations”.
Jones, with his military background, has been Obama’s chosen tough guy to face down the commanders (thus his comment this summer to the commanders in Afghanistan that, faced with a request for more troops, the President would react, “WTF?”). So, watching and reading this, how firm a line will Obama hold against the persistent demands and public pressures of his Generals?
(Below the CBS interview we’ve added the transcript of Jones’ appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, which goes over similar ground.)
BOB SCHIEFFER, CBS NEWS ANCHOR: General, thank you for coming. More bad news from Afghanistan this morning. Eight American troops killed in this latest attack. This as the White House is debating whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. I want to begin by asking you about this meeting that the president had with General McChrystal, our top general in Afghanistan. He met with him in Copenhagen after the general basally shot down the idea of changing strategy in Afghanistan. Two questions. First, did the president feel that the general was trying to bring pressure on him in public and did he tell him not to do that?
GEN. JIM JONES, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Well, Bob, first, thank you very much for having me on. It’s good to be back. Secondly to answer your question, I wasn’t at that meeting. And this is a one- on-one meeting between the two of them. And I haven’t really talked to the president about that. So I couldn’t answer this question except to say that the two had a good meeting and it was a good opportunity for them to get to know each other a little bit better. I’m sure they exchanged very direct views. Read the rest of this entry »
UPDATE 1000 GMT: The Independent of London offers the “exclusive” that the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, will ask for 20,000 more troops in his long-awaited report to President Obama.
Regular EA readers won’t be surprised, as only last Sunday we featured the public-relations offensive by two Administration officials pointing towards an increase of 25,000 soldiers. The question: will the US press for some of the increase to come from NATO allies or will it provide all of the additional forces?
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The post-election situation drags on in Afghanistan, with the result of the Presidential vote descending into a protracted delay amidst allegations of fraud. The electoral commission has now suspended daily briefings, and stories have emerged of a heated row between President Hamid Karzai and President Obama’s envoy Richard Holbrooke, apparently over the attempt of the Karzai camp to alter the vote so the President would be re-elected in the first round.
Our suspicion has been that, for many in Washington, this political quagmire would merely be the backdrop (and indeed the pretext) for an intensified military campaign. Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation shares our fears. Particuarly notable in his account below is the large presence of Bruce Riedel, who helped design the Obama strategy of intervention in Afghanistan at the start of 2009.
Afghanistan Apocalypse
Yesterday afternoon at the Brookings Institution, four analysts portrayed a bleak and terrifying vision of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan in the wake of the presidential election. All four were hawkish, reflecting a growing consensus in the Washington establishment that the Afghanistan war is only just beginning.
Their conclusions: (1) A significant escalation of the war will be necessary to avoid utter defeat. (2) Even if tens of thousands of troops are added to the US occupation, it won’t be possible to determine if the US/NATO effort is succeeding until eighteen months later. (3) Even if the United States turns the tide in Afghanistan, no significant drawdown of US forces will take place until five years have passed. Read the rest of this entry »
National Security Advisor James Jones is doing overtime today as the Obama Administration’s foreign policy salesman. He’s been interviewed on three of the top Sunday morning politics chat shows: Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday (transcript in a separate entry), and Face the Nation (transcript in a separate entry). The topics covered are the same: this week’s release of two American journalists from North Korea, the possible assassination of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, and engagement with Iran.
And it’s a triple dose of nothingness, with little of significance being said. To be fair to Jones, that’s because of the appalling simplistic media narrative. On North Korea, it’s sentimental “Yay, We Got Americans Out of an Evil Place” vs. “Oh, No, We Cut a Deal to Get Americans Out of an Evil Place”. The Mehsud case becomes a Boy’s Own story of daring American operations (even though no American would have been physically present, even in the air above, when the unmanned drone fired its missile), obscuring the problems in Pakistan that will last beyond — and possibly be magnified — by the killing. And Iran? Both the media and Obama Administration are in the side alley of the nuclear programme issue.
DAVID GREGORY: General James Jones, welcome back to MEET THE PRESS.
GEN. JAMES JONES (RET.): Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.
MR. GREGORY: Big news; North Korea, the two American journalists back home. This was the scene as it played out in Los Angeles on Wednesday, former President Bill Clinton accompanying the two journalists back home. He has since come back east and you have been able to fully debrief him. What can you say you have now learned about North Korea and specifically Kim Jong Il? Read the rest of this entry »
CHRIS WALLACE: General, welcome to “FOX News Sunday.”
JONES: Thank you, Chris. Good to be here.
WALLACE: Is Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban inside Pakistan, dead?
JONES: Well, we think so. The Pakistani government has believed — believes that he is, and all evidence that we have suggests that. But there are reports from the Mehsud organization that he’s not. But we think — we think that it looks like he is. Read the rest of this entry »
1955 GMT: The lawyer for 21-year-old Amir Reza Arefi says his client has been sentenced to death for “mohareb” (war against God). Arefi was arrested in April 2009, before the June election.
Tom Englehardt, 
2000 GMT: What War Game is The Economist Playing Out? The British journal has 
CNN, which is desperate to ensure that Christiane Amanpour is The Most Important Broadcaster in the History of the World, has not released the video of Monday’s roundtable at George Washington University with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. They have released the transcript, however.
UPDATE 1000 GMT: The Independent of London offers the “exclusive” that the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, 
CHRIS WALLACE: General, welcome to “FOX News Sunday.”
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