The most interesting spin out of the US in recent days is in a Saturday article in The Wall Street Journal by Jay Solomon, “U.S. Shifts Iran Focus to Support Opposition”.
The headline is a bit misleading, since the core issue is whether (in fact, how rather than whether) the Obama Administration will be pursuing and presenting additional sanctions against Iran: “The White House is crafting new financial sanctions specifically designed to punish the Iranian entities and individuals most directly involved in the crackdown on Iran’s dissident forces, said…U.S. officials, rather than just those involved in Iran’s nuclear program.”
The presentation, however, is telling. For weeks, the set-up for sanctions — for example, in the articles of David Sanger and William Broad in The New York Times — has been that they were essential to punish Iran for breakdown of enrichment talks and Tehran’s move toward a military nuclear capability. Now, for the first time, the message is not just that “rights” should take priority but that there may be a change of power in Iran: “The Obama administration is increasingly questioning the long-term stability of Tehran’s government and moving to find ways to support Iran’s opposition ‘Green Movement’.”
Read it: the authority of President Ahmadinejad is no longer assumed, even bolstered, by the US approach. An Administration source declares, “The Green Movement has demonstrated more staying power than perhaps some have anticipated. The regime is internally losing its legitimacy, which is of its own doing.” Read the rest of this entry »
1345 GMT: No Thanks on Nukes. Looks like Tehran will maintain a tough posture on talks on uranium enrichment. On Monday, President Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed the continuing Turkish effort to broker a third-party enrichment deal, but today the Iranian Foreignj Ministry spokesman said No, Thank You: “Turkey wants to play a role in solving the nuclear issue … But we don’t think our transparent views needed to be interpreted by other countries.”
1330 GMT: Peykeiran is reporting that several hundred students are protesting at Tehran University. The demonstration is occurring despite a warning from universities’ authorities that any protesters would be “dealt with”.
1200 GMT: The Tehran prosecutor’s office says 86 of the 204 arrested on 16 Azar have been released.
1015 GMT: Complementing our own discussion of the significance of 16 Azar, Nazenin Ansari writes on OpenDemocracy about “Iran’s Pre-Revolutionary Rupture”: “The continuing, defiant protest-wave in Iran accentuates the ferocious crisis of legitimacy at the regime’s heart. The epic events of 2009 are at a historic turning-point.” (hat-tip to an EA reader for bringing this to our attention)
0920 GMT: Students, Don’t Even Think About It. Fars News reports that Tehran University authorities have declared that any student gathering today is “illegal” and “will be dealt with”.
0915 GMT: Rumour of Day – Khamenei Disappears to “Secret Place”. Israel National News thinks it has an exclusive from “an activist in the global Iranian pro-democracy movement”:
I am told that Khamenei was taken to a secret place to monitor the situation and perhaps for his safety, and a helicopter was ready with a pilot in it to perhaps fly him out to Russia if the situation got out of hand. I am also told that prominent clergy went to meet with him hoping to force him to show leniency
0910 GMT: Karroubi on Students and Government Violence. Mehdi Karroubi’s Tagheer website carries an interview with the cleric in which he describes university students as the “thermometer“ of society and advises security forces to “refrain from getting entangled with the people, the students, and the valuable forces of society”. and get caught up in undesirable movements.” He emphasised that the political disputes within the country are “grave” and there is a “serious solution” for them.
Karroubi also criticized President Ahmadinejad’s reported remarks that there was that the US is trying to block the return of the 12th Imam of Shi’a Islam. This has tainted the “reputation of the system and the clergy”; the world should not regard Ahmadinejad as a representative of the Iranian nation but as “merely the head of the government”. Read the rest of this entry »
With all the developments of and beyond 16 Azar, we have had to put our analysis of US-Iranian relations on the back burner (especially given that the US Government seems to have taken no official notice of this week’s demonstrations). So we thank an EA reader who has brought this dimension back to the forefront by sending us Karim Sadjadpour’s analysis, in an interview with Middle East Progress, of the current state of “engagement”. Points from the interview that I think merit further discussion:
1) Sadjadpour’s portrayal is of a regime that, primarily because the Supreme Leader remains beyond challenge, has successfully ostracised “opposition within” such as Hashemi Rafsanjani, despite the hostility that he notes to President Ahmadinejad.
My own view is that the regime is more fragmented than he portrays. As we have highlighted today, there are moves from within the Establishment against President Ahmadinejad in the name of “national unity”, but this is not just a case of removing one political figurehead. Simply placing an unchallenged Supreme Leader on top of this system — apart from the fact that the Supreme Leader has himself been challenged on occasion “from within” since June — obscures this fragmentation.
2) So Sadjadpour is on the mark that the prospect of a resolution between the US and Iran on uranium enrichment is receding, albeit not because the Iranian regime is unified under Ayatollah Khamenei but because it is riven with divisions. Indeed, if you put the nuclear issue in a wider context, those divisions come out in Sadjadpour’s answer on the issue of subsidies and Ahmadinejad’s economic plans.
3) Sadjadpour is right that the Obama Administration will now be “bumped”, especially by Congress, into putting forth sanctions proposals. However, I think he is too optimistic about international acceptance, especially from Russia and China. The more pragmatic Obama officials recognise this, I suspect, and will try to limit the sanctions package as well as taking it outside the United Nations Security Council.
4) The most interesting part of the interview, perhaps ironically given the initial attention to “engagement”, is Sadjadpour’s return to the internal politics beyond the influence (and possibly cognizance) of the US Government. Thus the observation without immediate answers, as this is a marathon, not a sprint:
Both the government and the opposition are in precarious positions….I think the regime’s legitimacy will continue to decay, and they will be forced to rely on repressive measures to keep order….At the same time, the opposition leadership, partly by design, has not defined a clear game plan or end game, a clear alternative vision for Iran.
5) Speaking personally, while I may have differences in interpretation from Sadjadpour, I am alongside him on this sentiment (with the provision that one has to be very careful in explaining what it means to “facilitate…political change”):
This is an incredibly important time in Iran’s history and we want to be able to look back years from now and say we were on the right side of history. I sometimes fear that we may look back years from now and see that there was a tremendous opportunity to help champion and facilitate the cause of political change in Iran, but rather than taking it seriously we focused all of our attention on the nuclear issue.
Middle East Progress: The Iranian government has yet to agree to the IAEA proposal for enrichment of Iran’s low enriched uranium in a third country. What do you think are the aims of the government with regards to the proposal?
Karim Sadjadpour: Over the last several years—and especially since last June’s tainted presidential elections—any remaining moderates or pragmatists that were once part of the Iranian government’s decision-making structure have essentially been purged from the system. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently I had sharp words for an article by Borzou Daragahi of The Los Angeles Times because it was “so partial, so distorting, so wrong that it verged on sabotage of the demands, aspirations, and ideas of the Green movement”. Daragahi cited a few “analysts” who, more from their personal interests than from knowledge of the opposition, denounced Mir Hossein Mousavi and called on the US Government to recognise the outcome of June’s Presidential election.
Fortunately, in my opinion, Daragahi quickly walked away from that piece, recognising that the 13 Aban protests would be “significant”. However, he has now posted an interview with Karim Sadjadpour, one of the most prominent US-based analysts of Iran, which revives my concerns: “Is Obama administration dissing the ‘green’ opposition movement?” Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
0825 GMT: Norooz has published the names of 19 reformist activists and family members, out of 71 arrested on Thursday night at the home of detainee Shahabeddin Tabatabei, transferred to Evin Prison.
0753 GMT: Nuclear Deal Still On? Your latest clue, courtesy of Press TV, that the Iranians want an agreement on enrichment: a high-profile splash on the US and Russian positions, “Medvedev, Obama find talks with Iran ‘positive’”.
Your latest clue, courtesy of Press TV and Iran’s Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, that Tehran will spin out the process a bit longer, manoeuvring for best possible terms on “third-party enrichment” and assuring the Iranian people that it is negotiating from strength: “Iran asserts that its offer to buy nuclear fuel from the West is purely a confidence-building measure, as it has the technology to enrich uranium up to 20 percent.”
0750 GMT: We’ve updated the story of Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, now sentenced to 15 years in prison, with an article by Karim Sadjadpour.
0615 GMT: A morning where the significant movement is on the Iranian nuclear question. The inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency should begin their work at Iran’s second uranium enrichment facility, at Fardoo near Qom, today — Al Jazeera has video. That story will dominate “Western” coverage of Iran, possibly matched by speculation and worry over Tehran’s deliberations on the Vienna agreement on enrichment. Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani stirred up confusion yesterday, as we noted, with his criticism of the proposal — still no clue, in the dramatic US-UK coverage, whether Larijani speaks for anyone (say the Supreme Leader) other than himself.
Inside Iran, however, the hot-button question yesterday was whether Mir Hossein Mousavi and/or Mohammad Khatami had showed up at the Tehran Media Fair, a day after Mehdi Karroubi appeared.
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.
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.
The most interesting spin out of the US in recent days is in a Saturday article in The Wall Street Journal by Jay Solomon, “U.S. Shifts Iran Focus to Support Opposition”.
With all the developments of and beyond 16 Azar, we have had to put our analysis of US-Iranian relations on the back burner (especially given that the US Government seems to have taken no official notice of this week’s demonstrations). So we thank an EA reader who has brought this dimension back to the forefront by sending us Karim Sadjadpour’s analysis, in 
Recently 
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, 
0825 GMT: Norooz has published the names of 19 reformist activists and family members, out of 71 arrested on Thursday night at the home of detainee Shahabeddin Tabatabei, 
In early August, we featured
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