2120 GMT: Mahmoud Goes to the Country? OK, it’s not just Internet chatter. EA readers bring me up to speed: in a televised statement on Friday night, President Ahmadinejad set out the possibility of a referendum on his proposal to control $40 billion from subsidy reductions (the Parliament only gave him $20 billion).

And Ahmadinejad wasn’t pulling punches: he said that his “conservative” opponents in Parliament were verging on “treason” with exaggerated statements of the inflationary potential of his plan. Fortunately, he reassured, their economic estimates were not correct.

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2110 GMT: Containing the Poet. Another story to pick up — National Public Radio has a profile of 82-year-old Simin Behbahani, the poet who is so dangerous that Iranian authorities seized her passport as she was about to board a flight for an awards ceremony in Paris.

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Tags: Association of Teachers and Researchers of Qom, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, Ayatollah Nouri-Hamedani, Balatarin, Christian Science Monitor, Committee on Human Rights Reporters, Elham Ahsani, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, Evin Prison, Financial Times, Flynt Leverett, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Mann Leverett, Hossein Mar'ashi, Human Rights Activists in Iran, Iran, Iran Elections 2009, Isa Saharkhiz, Islamic Republic News Agency, Jahangir Amuzegar, Khabar Online, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Hashemi, Mehdi Yahyanejad, Mothers of Mourning, Najmeh Bozorgmehr, National Public Radio, New York Times, Persian2English, Russia, Scott Peterson, Simin Behbahani

The Latest from Iran (13 July): Challenge Renewed

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Over the last two years, we paid a good deal of attention to the story of five Iranian officials seized in March 2007 by US forces in Erbil in northern Iraq. It is a measure of how far the world has moved away from the Iraq story, and indeed of how much internal developments in Iran have come to the fore, that the release of the five by the Americans last week received so little attention (apart from Iranian state media, which eagerly featured the return of the men, pictured at left, this weekend).

That’s a mistake because this complex tale leaves two long-lasting lessons. The first is that, despite the tensions of Iran’s post-election crisis, there are officials in the Obama Administration who want to remove obstacles to long-term negotiations. The second is even more important: as Gareth Porter outlines below in a story for Inter Press Service, the release of the five Iranians points to the emergence of an Iraqi Government that is no longer subject to the demands of the US military:

Behind Detainee Release, a US-Iraqi Conflict on Iran

WASHINGTON – The release Friday of five Iranians held by the U.S. military in Iraq for two and a half years highlights the long-simmering conflict between the U.S. and Iraqi views of Iranian policy in Iraq and of the role of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) there.
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Tags: David Petraeus, David Satterfield, Gareth Porter, Hoshyar Zebari, Ian Kelly, Inter Press Service, Iran, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Jalal Talebani, Mahdi Army, Mahmoud Farhadi, Moqtada al-Sadr, Nouri al-Maliki, Obama Administration, Qassem Suleimani, Quds Force, Scott Peterson