So you want to know where the “velvet revolution” is being planned? Look no farther than the secret plots being openly discussed at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
That’s the headline “exclusive” in Iranian state media this morning, as the Islamic Republic News Agency declares that various academics, activists, Jews, and troublemakers assembled this week for a conference on “Baha’i Unity”.
Our colleague Seyed Mohammad Marandi, of the University of Tehran’s Institute of North American and European Studies, has been quite busy lately, appearing on Al Jazeera English on Arab concerns about Iranian power (featured on Juan Cole’s website and available below). He then appeared on the same channel to discuss the launch of Iran’s first satellite, and Iran’s political position in the region and with respect to the US, with Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Hadi Amr of the Brookings Institute of Doha (Parts 1 and 2 on the full-page version of this entry).
Marandi’s interchange with Patrick Clawson is especially interesting, given Clawson’s hard-line projection of Iran as an imminent military threat and his assocation with possible Obama envoy Dennis Ross at WINEP.
Unnoticed by many, a complicated dance over talks with Syria — on a settlement with Israel, on its position vis-a-vis Lebanon, and on its relations with Iran and Hezbollah — is beginning. For a mix of reasons, some good (finally defusing some of the tension between Tel Aviv and Damascus), some not so good (the mistaken belief that this will mean the isolation of Tehran in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf), serious talks for the first time in almost a decade appear imminent.
Still, Washington firebrands who dreamed of Syrian regime change during the Dubya Years aren’t going down without a fight.
So you want to know where the “velvet revolution” is being planned? Look no farther than the secret plots being openly discussed at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
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