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USADI
Commentary
The Message in Iran Slogans
Commentary by the US Alliance for Democratic
Iran
January 5, 2010
For years, despite all the tell-tale signs of a
growing opposition in Iran, many pundits
depicted the ruling government as
well-entrenched and enjoying significant popular
legitimacy. This served as a seemingly solid,
albeit unfounded, rational for them to advocate
the status-quo.
Then came the tsunami of popular dissent
resulting from thirty some years of ayatollahs’
plunder and murder, unleashed by the appearance
of massive fissures at the top of the ruling
establishment following the last June’s sham
elections.
Still, these pundits, although astonished by the
size and ferocity of the nation-wide uprisings,
ominously heralded the quick demise of the
movement at the first sight of the state
crackdown. They kept on insisting that
comprehensive diplomatic engagement with Tehran
should be pressed on.
Six months later, the relentless Iranian
protesters, in millions and with their awesome
tenacity and bravery, have again proved these
“Iran experts” and their interlocutors among
Western policymakers wrong. Not only the
dissidents have survived a viscous suppression
of the rulers’ multi-layered security apparatus,
they have, with chants of “Down with Khamenei,
Down with the dictator,” and with their
bludgeoned heads and bloodied bodies, shown that
they desire nothing less than the end of the
entire regime of a fascist dictatorship.
They want their country back, they envisions a
democratic Iran. They are not anti-Islam, but
they strive for a secular government where
popular will, and not that of a demagogue
clergy, claiming to be the regent of God on
earth, drives their nation.
With each uprising, they have also shown that
they have a great awareness of the world around
them and of those capitals that still, for a
variety of political and economical benefits,
shamelessly hang their hats on the murderous
regime in Tehran or seek negotiations with them.
They chant “No Ghaza, No Lebanon, my life for
Iran, “Down with Russia,” and “Obama, Obama,
either you are with us (people) or them (the
ruling establishment).”
They are surely monitoring the European Union
where a Parliamentary delegation was due to
travel to Tehran this week despite strong
criticism from lawmakers in the United States,
the United Kingdom, and several other European
countries. They are also watching Senator John
Kerry who intended to go to Tehran for an
official visit.
Both plans were reportedly rejected by the
Tehran regime, which is in a definitive fight
for its survival. Evidently the
Khamenei-Ahmadinejad gang and their
paid-with-the-oil-money thugs are too busy with
cracking heads and murdering and raping arrested
protesters to have time for diplomatic
breakthroughs, even for long-distance friends
such as Sen. Kerry and a handful of European
MPs.
Meanwhile, as President Obama’s year-end nuclear
deadline for Iran falls flat, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton has given a new meaning to the
term “deadline." On Monday, she said that there
is no hard-and-fast deadline for Iran to respond
and that the US wants to “keep the door open to
dialogue.”
With the speed and ferocity things are moving
toward a regime change in Iran, there is a good
chance that, unlike the US policy flap over Mossadeq’s
nationalist government, the current
administration will find itself apologizing to
the Iranians long before its term is over.
(USADI)
Commentary
In
protesters' fight for justice in Iran,
U.S. stands on the sidelines
By William Kristol
The Washington Post
Friday, January 1, 2010
"Along with all free nations, the United
States stands with those who seek their
universal rights."
That was President Obama on Monday, expressing
solidarity with the people of Iran -- and also
acknowledging that the world is crucially
divided into free nations and unfree ones.
The free nations tend to acknowledge the
existence of universal rights. Those rights
include the right of the governed to consent to
their government. And from this it follows "that
whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the right of
the people to alter or to abolish it, and to
institute new government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their safety and happiness."
As Obama said Monday, the Iranian regime is
engaged in "the violent and unjust suppression
of innocent Iranian citizens," using the "iron
fist of brutality, even on solemn occasions and
holy days" when "the Iranian people have sought
nothing more than to exercise their universal
rights." It governs "through fear and tyranny."
It follows, then, that the government of the
Islamic Republic of Iran has become destructive
of the just ends of government...
Doesn't the history of the 20th century, with
its wars and genocides and terrorism, teach that
"the side of those who seek justice" doesn't
easily prevail? That justice needs all the
energetic support it can get? That the help of
the United States is crucial?
The United States has not even begun to do what
it could -- rhetorically and concretely,
diplomatically and economically, publicly and
covertly, multilaterally and unilaterally -- to
try to help the Iranian people change the regime
of fear and tyranny that denies them justice.
Regime change in Iran in 2010 -- now that would
be change to believe in...
Read More
Commentary
Iran in turmoil
The beginning of the end?
Dec 30th 2009
The Economist
A floundering regime may have weakened
itself with its latest bloody crackdown. Let’s
hope so.
NO ONE knows whether the Iranian regime’s latest
bout of violent repression marks an ill-judged
step towards its own much-merited demise or if
it will cow the dissenters into sullen but
long-lasting acquiescence. But the violence
marks a change in the nature of the struggle
that has been fought out since last June’s
tainted presidential election. The regime may
catch its breath before it embarks on another
round of shooting and clubbing. But the prospect
that it is losing its grip, perhaps even
terminally, has now become a lot more credible.
For one thing, the government has become readier
to kill its opponents. By its own initial count,
15 people were killed in demonstrations on
December 28th, the day of Ashura, one of the
holiest in the Shia Muslim calendar; one of the
dead was a nephew of Mir Hosein Mousavi, the
main victim of the stolen election in June (see
article). For another thing, divisions within
the clerical establishment have become deeper.
Influential clergymen no longer want their
religion to be tarred by a regime that would,
among other things, punish mourners at services
for Grand Ayatollah Hosein Ali Montazeri, in
religious terms the most distinguished of the
foes of the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and
of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei.
It is understandable why so many clerics are
nervous. The opposition remains largely
spontaneous and without a clear leader, but its
animus is now directed as much against the
hitherto untouchable Mr Khamenei as against his
buffoonish presidential protégé. The regime’s
assorted opponents are becoming a lot readier to
question the legitimacy of the entire system of
clerical rule that the thwarted candidates for
the presidency in June had wanted merely to
improve.
The fate of Iran will be decided inside the
country. Iranians remain quick to resent
foreigners’ meddling, real or imagined, and the
regime has eagerly sought to exploit such
deep-seated feelings. So Barack Obama was right,
after the June election when the protests were
still young, to step cautiously into Iran’s
argument, in the hope—forlorn, as it turned
out—that his conciliatory hand might soften the
regime towards both its own people and its
supposed adversaries abroad.
Last weekend, however, the protests came of age.
It is hard to gauge opinion in Iran, but one of
the protesters’ wishes seems to be better
relations with the outside world. So Mr Obama is
right again—along with other Western leaders—to
speak out forcefully in defence of the
opposition. He cannot keep his hand of
friendship outstretched while Iran’s rulers,
with their own fists, are bashing so many
innocent heads.
The nuclear conundrum is a separate matter.
Iran’s turmoil is making it a lot harder, if not
impossible, for the country’s negotiators to
strike a deal, even if they wanted to. With the
regime divided, any conciliatory gesture is too
easily painted as weakness by one faction or
another. The West has proposed a deal whereby
Iran would send uranium abroad for further
enrichment to feed some reactors for medical
purposes in the country, but the government is
nigh-certain to miss the end-of-year deadline
for progress. With Mr Khamenei’s very being
seeming to depend on hating and mistrusting
America, that has led to renewed murmurings
about American military action against Iran.
That would be a mistake. Not only would a strike
be of uncertain military value, but it would
also inflame the entire region; even those
Iranians who detest the regime might then rally
to Mr Khamenei.
Why sanctions might help
So tougher economic sanctions seem sure to
follow, with perhaps even Russia and China
giving the nod at the UN Security Council. Some
of Iran’s admirable dissidents, such as the
exiled winner of the Nobel peace prize, Shirin
Ebadi, argue that such sanctions would be
mistaken, since they hurt the poor hardest and
might help consolidate the regime. Sanctions are
indeed a blunt and sometimes weak tool. But as
Iran’s economy flags, one of the starkest
changes wrought by its increasingly ugly regime
is that Iranians are beginning to blame their
leaders more than foreigners for their woes. The
tide may indeed be turning against the supreme
leader, his dreadful president and even the
cracking carapace of clerical tyranny...
Read More
Commentary
Iran's turning point
The Washington Post
Editorial
December 29, 2009
ONE WAY or
another, Sunday's Ashura holiday in Iran
probably will be a turning point in the struggle
between an extremist regime and an increasingly
radical opposition. At least eight people were
killed when hundreds of thousands of Iranians
turned out in cities across the country to face
police and militia forces, who fired into some
crowds and in turn were attacked and in some
cases overwhelmed by the protesters. These were
the largest demonstrations in six months, and
they provoked another escalation of repression:
The nephew of one opposition leader, Mir Hossein
Mousavi, was murdered Sunday, and 10 more senior
opposition figures were arrested Monday.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei clearly is
betting he can defeat the opposition Green
Movement with brute force. In the past week,
security forces have attacked peaceful mourners
at the funeral of dissident Ayatollah Ali
Montazeri and violated the tradition of
restraint associated with the Ashura holiday.
The predominant chant in the streets, meanwhile,
has shifted to "death to Khamenei" or "death to
the dictator." More street protests can be
expected when the movement's new martyr, Ali
Habibi Mousavi Khamene, is commemorated.
In short, Iran's political crisis now looks like
a battle to the death between the regime and its
opposition. No one on either side in Tehran is
talking about compromise. Nor does it seem
likely that there will be a sustained respite
from domestic turmoil until one side triumphs.
That in turn means that, more than ever, the
Obama administration and other Western
governments must tailor their policies toward
Iran to reflect the centrality of the Green
Movement's fight for freedom. While diplomatic
contact with the regime need not be broken off
entirely, by now it should be obvious that it
cannot produce significant results -- and might
serve to shore up a tottering dictatorship...
Full Story
Commentary
Iran slayings point to increasingly desperate
regime
The Los Angeles Times
December 29, 2009
Editorial
The shooting death of Ali Habibi-Mousavi in
Tehran has all the earmarks of a political
assassination. The nephew of opposition leader
and recent presidential candidate Mir-Hossein
Mousavi reportedly had received death threats
before he was shot in the heart by men believed
to be security forces or pro-government militia.
On Monday, Habibi-Mousavi's family said his body
was seized from the hospital, apparently to
prevent them from holding a funeral that could
ignite more protests -- a cycle that served
Islamic revolutionaries when they toppled the
shah 30 years ago.
The Iranian government denies killing
demonstrators and claims that "foreign
terrorists" murdered Habibi-Mousavi. Certainly
the last thing it wanted was to create another
opposition martyr alongside Neda Agha-Soltan,
the student whose fatal shooting was captured on
video last summer when the protest movement
began as an outcry against election fraud. And
yet that is quite possibly what happened on the
holiest Shiite Muslim holiday, Ashura, honoring
the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the
prophet Muhammad who was killed fighting
injustice.
Throughout the past six months, the Islamic
government has used seemingly measured force and
surgical arrests to try to put down the protests
without fueling more opposition. But the
protests are not dying out. On the contrary,
photographs posted on websites and printed on
front pages reveal emboldened demonstrators
beating back government security forces,
throwing rocks, attacking a police station and
setting fires. The opposition appears to have
grown into a politically and geographically
diverse grass-roots uprising. Its challenge of
the election results has expanded into a
challenge to the very legitimacy of the Islamic
government....
Full Story
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