Today’s US-Iran Crisis Is Rooted in the Decision to Invade Iraq

The ramifications of the illegal, unnecessary and predictably tragic U.S. decision to invade Iraq are still with us. This includes the ongoing crisis with Iran, which brought us perilously close to all-out war in early January, resulted in the tragic downing of a civilian airliner and remains in a hair-trigger situation.

INTERVIEW: Proof that Soleimani killed hundreds of Americans is “groundless” says Middle East expert

According to our next guest– the claim that Soleimani and the Iranian government are somehow responsible for the deaths of “hundreds of Americans” in Iraq—which has been repeated by Republicans, some Democrats and the mainstream media—appears to be groundless.

Our guest today is STEPHEN ZUNES, a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.

He’s written a new piece for The Progressive Magazine saying there is zero evidence that Soleimani killed hundreds of Americans….

Trump’s Threats towards Iran Aren’t Working. Here’s Why.

The Trump Administration has imposed sanctions against more than 1,000 Iranian entities, including Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, targeting almost every significant sector of that nation’s economy. But recently it reversed course, backing off its threat to sanction a top Iranian diplomat, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in response to concerns that it would foreclose any diplomatic recourse… [Full Article]

The Threat of War with Iran

The White House has ordered an aircraft carrier strike group off the coast of Iran and a fleet of bombers have flown to U.S. air bases near that country, while preliminary plans are apparently underway to send 120,000 U.S. troops to the region… [Full Article]

Pompeo’s Iran Speech a Prelude to War?

The United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech this past Monday targeting Iran may have created a new benchmark for hypocritical, arrogant, and entitled demands by the United States on foreign governments.

Trump’s Dangerous Abrogation of the Iran Deal

The Trump Administration’s decision to pull the United States out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the landmark nuclear agreement between Iran and the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the United States—strikes a dangerous blow against arms control and international security and even more firmly establishes the United States as a rogue nation.

Republicans, Democrats alike still level threats at Iran

The 2015 Iran nuclear deal should have curbed the longstanding bellicose rhetoric coming from Republican and Democratic political leaders toward the Muslim country. Signed by Iran and six other nations (including the United States) and ratified by the United Nations Security Council, the comprehensive agreement contains strict provisions limiting Iran’s nuclear capabilities to well below the threshold necessary to develop atomic weapons and subjects Iran to the most rigorous inspection regime in history. The result has been dramatically reduced regional tensions and the elimination of any potential threat to U.S. national security.

Despite this, the Republican and Democratic platforms adopted at their respective conventions last month are both more belligerent toward Iran than they were four years ago.

The Republican platform claims that the U.N.-sponsored and -endorsed treaty was nothing more than “a personal agreement between the President and his negotiating partners and non-binding on the next president.” Despite making it technologically impossible to weaponize Iran’s fissionable material, the platform instead claims that the agreement has somehow enabled Iran to continue to “develop a nuclear weapon.”

It even blames the treaty for somehow allowing Iran to “sponsor terrorism across the region,” “abuse the basic human rights of its citizens” and other crimes that were not addressed in the agreement.

Insisting that, despite the agreement, Iran is somehow “close to having” nuclear weapons and therefore “gravely threatens our security, our interests, and the survival of our friends,” the platform insists that a Republican president “must retain all options” in dealing with Iran.
Unlike the Republicans, the Democratic platform does endorse the nuclear deal. However, it declares that a Democratic president “will not hesitate to take military action” if Iran violates the agreement.

The promise to “not hesitate” to launch what would inevitably be a major war with disastrous consequences is disturbing on a number of levels. Among these is the fact that in the unlikely event Iran decided to violate the agreement, it would take Iranians at least a few years to rebuild their nuclear program to the point where they could develop even a single nuclear weapon, thereby allowing plenty of time for the international community to apply nonmilitary pressures to force the regime to resume its compliance.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which codifies the agreement, was adopted under Article 41 of the U.N. Charter, which empowers the Security Council to “decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions.” This is distinct from Article 42, which allows for military force only if nonmilitary means “have proved to be inadequate” and only if the Security Council specifically authorized it.

Therefore, the Democrats’ insistence that the United States should “not hesitate to take military action if Iran violates the agreement,” like the Republicans’ promise to “retain all options” regarding Iran, is nothing short of rejection of U.S. obligations under the United Nations Charter.

Hillary Clinton’s insistence that the 2016 Democratic Party platform include the threat to unilaterally resort to military action against Iran in response to potential violations of limits on its nuclear program bears disturbing parallels to her insistence that the United States had the right to unilaterally resort to military action against Iraq due to its alleged violations of limits on its nuclear program.

Indeed, during the 2008 presidential campaign, she accused Barack Obama of being “naive” and “irresponsible” for wanting to engage with Iran diplomatically. According to a story in Time magazine on her tenure as secretary of state, Obama administration officials noted how she was “skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, and firmly opposed to talk of a ‘containment’ policy that would be an alternative to military action should negotiations with Tehran fail.”

While there are many legitimate criticisms of Iran’s reactionary theocratic regime, the two party platforms appear to go overboard with their accusations. For example, Iran is the only country mentioned by name in the Republican platform as being a “sponsor” of “Islamic terrorism,” despite the fact the majority of such groups are Salafist and strongly oppose the Iranian regime. Iran has been directly involved in fighting such groups in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

In a similar manner, the Democratic platform states that “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism,” though many analysts would argue that Saudi Arabia plays a more significant role in that regard. (Ironically, the Democratic platform calls for the United States to “maintain our robust security cooperation” with Persian Gulf countries, such as Saudi Arabia.)

The Democratic platform also blames Iran for its alleged “support for terrorist groups like Hamas” and pledges to “push back” against such actions. However, despite some limited aid to Hamas for a short period several years ago, the Iranians have since severed their ties due to some major policy differences, including Hamas’ support for Islamist rebels fighting the Iranian-backed regime in Syria. (In yet another irony for the Democratic platform, the Persian Gulf country of Qatar is currently the major foreign supporter for Hamas.)

There are also some other dubious charges, such as claiming the regime denies the Nazi genocide of the Jews, which — while alleged by a former Iranian president — has never been government policy, and insisting that Iran “has its fingerprints on almost every conflict in the Middle East.” (The platform fails to note that in the two regional conflicts of most critical importance to the United States — Iraq and Afghanistan — the Iranians have been on the same side as the United States.)

It is striking how such threats and hyperbolic language were largely absent from the 2012 Democratic platform, which emphasized the need for diplomacy, while the Republican platform was somewhat less belligerent as well.

Historically, successful arms control agreements have resulted in lessening rather than escalating such hostile rhetoric. That does not seem to be the case, however, during this election year.

Hardliners on All Sides Undermining Iran’s Nuclear Talks

Reaching an interim nuclear deal with Iran would have been difficult enough even without hardliners in both Iran and the United States seeking to undermine them.

Many U.S. critics of the draft treaty deny this, however, naively assuming Iran is as weak as it was several decades ago, when foreigner powers could impose policies and even replace governments at will. Not only have such imperialist intrigues become more difficult overall, the reality is that Iran has, for better or worse, reemerged as a major regional power—as it has been for much of the past two and half millennia.

If President Obama and other Western leaders could dictate terms of a nuclear agreement, they certainly would. They realize they cannot, however. Republican opponents of the talks naively want a return to Bush administration policy of threats and ultimatums, during which Iran’s nuclear program dramatically expanded. By contrast, thanks to the Obama administration’s insistence on negotiations, the expansion of Iran’s nuclear capabilities has been halted and even rolled back.

Anyone familiar with the process of negotiations is that, in order to get the other party to do what you want them to do, there must be incentives as well as punishment. Imposing harsh sanctions without the hope of partial relief short of total capitulation is simply unrealistic, especially against a country with a strong a sense of nationalism and a history of humiliation by the West. There must be ways for both sides to declare victory. It now appears that, despite Republican efforts to sabotage such an agreement, this has been achieved.

Though some analysts have stressed the role of the so-called “Israel Lobby” in encouraging Congressional hostility, there is little new in GOP opposition to the administration’s efforts. The Republican right has consistently opposed arms control treaties, including SALT II, the Nuclear Freeze, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Small Arms Treaty, and the ban on weapons outer space. There’s no reason they should act differently in this case.

Meanwhile, Iranian negotiators have been faced with pressure from their own hardliners, who have skillfully manipulated Iranians’ strong sense of nationalism in pointing at Western double standards in trying to limit their nuclear program.

Up until the 1970s, the U.S. government encouraged American companies to sell nuclear reactors to the Iranian government, then under the dictatorial rule of the Shah, despite fears that his megalomania would lead him to divert the technology for military purposes. Despite the subsequent rise of an anti-American regime in that country, the United States is still obligated under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to allow signatory states in good standing to have access to peaceful nuclear technology, including nuclear reprocessing, as long as there are sufficient safeguards to prevent weaponization.

The Obama administration justified strict sanctions on Iran on the grounds the country was violating a series of UN Security Council resolutions demanding special restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programs. The Iranians note, however, that not only has the United States blocked enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions targeting Israel, Pakistan, and India—which, unlike Iran, already have nuclear weapons—the United States provides all three countries with nuclear-capable jet fighters and has recently expanded its nuclear cooperation with India.

Iran has joined the vast majority of Middle Eastern countries in calling for the establishment of a nuclear weapons-free zone for the entire Middle East—similar to the NWFZs already established in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Antarctica, and the South Pacific—in which all nations of the region would be required to give up their nuclear weapons and weapons programs and open up to strict international inspections and forbid foreign countries from bringing nuclear weapons into the region. The Obama administration has failed to support such a proposal, however, instead singling out Iran.

Iranians also point out that the United States, Russia, Great Britain, China, and France, which—along with Germany—are leading the negotiations seeking to restrict its nuclear program are themselves in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, article VI of which obligates them “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

It is important to remember that the only country to actually use nuclear weapons in combat is the United States, in the 1945 bombings of two Japanese cities, a decision most American political leaders still defend to this day.

Ultimately, the most successful means of curbing the threat of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is to establish such a law-based region-wide program for disarmament, in which all countries – regardless of their relations with the United States – must be a part.

And, ultimately, the only way to make the world completely safe from the threat of nuclear weapons is for the establishment of a nuclear-free planet, for which the United States – as the largest nuclear power – must take the lead.

US policy weakens Iran’s pro-democracy movement

While the outcome of the Iranian elections scheduled for June 14 may be hard to predict, it will make little difference as long as power remains firmly in the hands of Ayatollah Khamenei and other hard-line clerics. Indeed, while there are contending factions vying for the country’s relatively weak presidency, the narrow ideological spectrum within which candidates are allowed to run for public office offers little hope for change — at least through the electoral system.

Following the 2009 election, in which the incumbent right-wing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner despite his apparent loss to the popular reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the people of Iran rose up in a popular civil insurrection, which was brutally crushed.

While it is hard to guess how soon democracy will come to Iran, the government’s theft of the election and subsequent crackdown — shattering the illusion many Iranians still held that they could work within a rigged political system — may have brought that day closer. The repression, corruption, economic injustice, imposition of ultraconservative social policies, and poor treatment of women and minorities has led to so much dissent that it has forced the regime to jail many of the Iranian Revolution’s own leadership, including former Prime Minister Mousavi, former parliamentary leader Mehdi Karroubi, and prominent clerics.

Iran today is like Eastern Europe in the 1970s. The people are not yet at a point where they can bring down the regime, but the ideological hegemony that kept the system intact is gone. Just as Eastern European workers recognized that the system under which they were suffering bore little resemblance to its professed socialist ideology, Iranian Muslims — even those who supported the Islamic Revolution in principle — are recognizing that the “Islamic Republic” is actually neither.

While overt protests are rare, many thousands of tiny acts of resistance occur every day by Iranians who no longer recognize the legitimacy of the regime. It is only a matter of time before the people will again rise up and demand their freedom.

Unfortunately, U.S. policy is making things difficult for democratic forces in Iran.

Following the 1980 Iraqi invasion and the subsequent nine-year war (during which the United States largely backed Saddam Hussein), the country entered its darkest totalitarian period. When the war ended and a less bellicose administration was in office in Washington during the 1990s, some significant reforms took place within the regime under the moderate president Mohammad Khatami and his allies. However, under the George W. Bush administration — which saw the U.S. invade two countries neighboring Iran, arm Kurdish and Baluchi rebels, reject significant offers of concessions on the nuclear issue and other U.S. concerns in return for normal relations, refuse negotiations, label the country part of the “axis of evil,” and overtly call for “regime change” — ultraconservative elements were able to reconsolidate their power.

Early in his administration, President Barack Obama rejected the bellicose neoconservative ideology of his predecessor and committed the United States to multilateralism and negotiations, and the Iranian people were emboldened to rise up for their freedom. Subsequently, however, as U.S. policy has hardened, clamor for change both within and outside the system has largely been silent.

The pattern is clear: A reduction in outside pressure increases the prospects for change, while an increase in foreign threats strengthens autocratic elements.

The big mistake by the United States in Vietnam was failing to recognize that the power of the Vietnamese revolutionaries came through their ability to rally the nationalist sentiments of their people. Like the communist leadership of Vietnam, the Islamist leaders of Iran have been quite successful in appealing to nationalism when they feel their country is unfairly targeted. Indeed, Iranians are among the most stridently nationalistic people in the world.

Even Mousavi, Karroubi and other leaders in the Green Revolution support the current Iranian regime in its defiance of Western pressure regarding the country’s nuclear program. Regardless of most Iranians’ feelings about the regime, nationalist passions are inevitably stirred up as their country is placed under crippling economic sanctions over a nuclear program that has thus far been entirely peaceful. Even government critics note how nearby regional powers Israel, Pakistan and India — which, like Iran, are in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions regarding their nuclear programs but have actually developed sizable arsenals of nuclear weapons — are not being sanctioned and maintain close military and economic relations with the United States.

Iranians also observe how the United States spends nearly $900 billion annually on its military and military-related programs compared with only around $12 billion by Iran. Indeed, Iran’s military budget is less than one-fifth that of the six pro-Western Arab monarchies on the other side of the Persian Gulf spend and substantially less than Israel or even the United Arab Emirates. Yet there is growing pressure on Obama to use military force to deal with the supposed Iranian “threat.”

Obama continues to push for a diplomatic solution to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but he has not ruled out the use of military force. A large bipartisan majority of Congress has called on the president to use military force to prevent Iran from even developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. Realizing that Obama probably won’t launch a first strike himself, Congress is now pushing the administration to pledge to enter into a war with Iran in the event that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decides to ignore the advice of his top military and intelligence officials and launch an attack on Iran. Indeed, 87 senators have cosponsored a resolution calling on the United States to “stand with Israel and provide … diplomatic, military, and economic support” in the event Israel initiates a war.

History has shown repeatedly that people — regardless of their ideological orientation — tend to rally around the flag if their country is under threat of attack. Current U.S. policy, then, only serves to strengthen the grip of Iran’s autocratic rulers and weakens the ability of the opposition to mobilize for democratic change.

Congress Pushes for War with Iran

In another resolution apparently designed to prepare for war against Iran, the U.S. House of Representatives, in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 401–11 vote, has passed a resolution (HR 568) urging the president to oppose any policy toward Iran “that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.”

With its earlier decision to pass a bill that effectively sought to ban any negotiations between the United States and Iran, a huge bipartisan majority of Congress has essentially told the president that nothing short of war or the threat of war is an acceptable policy. Indeed, the rush to pass this bill appears to have been designed to undermine the ongoing international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program. According to Iranian-American analyst Jamal Abdi, a prominent critic of both the Iranian regime and U.S. policy, the motivation for the resolution may be to “poison those talks by signaling to Iran that the President is weak, domestically isolated, and unable to deliver at the negotiating table because a hawkish Congress will overrule him.”

President Obama’s “red line” on Iran — the point at which his administration would consider taking military action against the country — has been the reactionary regime’s actual procurement of nuclear weapons. The language of this resolution, however, significantly lowers the bar by declaring it unacceptable for Iran simply to have “nuclear weapons capability” — not necessarily any actual weapons or an active nuclear weapons program. Some members of Congress have argued that since Iranians have the expertise and technological capacity to develop nuclear weapons, they already have “nuclear weapons capability.” The hawkish Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has argued that “everybody will determine for themselves what [capability] means.”

In case there was any doubt about the intent of Congress in using this language, when Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) offered a clarifying amendment to a similar clause in a recent Senate resolution — declaring that “nothing in the Act shall be construed as a declaration of war or an authorization of the use of force against Iran” — both its Republican and Democratic sponsors summarily rejected the amendment.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, noted how “this resolution reads like the same sheet of music that got us into the Iraq war, and could be the precursor for a war with Iran. It’s effectively a thinly-disguised effort to bless war.”

As the liberal Zionist group Americans for Peace Now observed, the legislation suggests that “unless sanctions imminently result in Iran voluntarily shutting down its entire nuclear program (and somehow deleting the nuclear know-how from the brains of its scientists), military force will be the only option available to the Obama Administration and will be inevitable in the near term.”

Though it is not legally binding, the resolution does limit the president’s options politically. As pundit and former Capitol Hill staffer M.J. Rosenberg has noted, the bill was “designed to tie the president’s hands on Iran policy.” And, as with the case of Iraq, the language of such non-binding resolutions can easily be incorporated into binding legislation, citing the precedent of what had been passed previously.

The End of Containment

There is enormous significance to the resolution’s insistence that containment, which has been the basis of U.S. defense policy for decades, should no longer be U.S. policy in dealing with potential threats. Although deterrence may have been an acceptable policy in response to the thousands of powerful Soviet nuclear weapons mounted on intercontinental ballistic missile systems aimed at the United States, the view today is that deterrence is somehow inadequate for dealing with a developing country capable of developing small and crude nuclear devices but lacking long-range delivery systems.

Indeed, this broad bipartisan consensus against deterrence marks the triumph of the neoconservative first-strike policy, once considered on the extreme fringes when first articulated in the 1980s.

This dangerous embrace of neoconservative military policy is now so widely accepted by both parties in Congress that the vote on the resolution was taken under a procedure known as “suspension of the rules,” which is designed for non-controversial bills passed quickly with little debate. Indeed, given the serious implications of this legislation, it is striking that there was not a single congressional hearing prior to the vote.

The resolution also demonstrates that the vast majority of Democrats, like Republicans, have embraced the concept of “full-spectrum dominance,” the Bush-era doctrine that not only should the United States prevent the emergence of another rival global superpower such as China, but it should also resist the emergence of even a regional power, such as Iran, that could potentially deter unilateral U.S. military actions or other projections of American domination.

Limiting the President

It is unprecedented for Congress to so vigorously seek to limit a president’s non-military options in foreign policy. For example, in 1962, even the most right-wing Republicans in Congress did not push for legislation insisting that President Kennedy rule out options other than attacking Cuba or the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis. What might be motivating Congress is the fact that, in electing Barack Obama in 2008, the American people brought into the White House an outspoken opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq who not only withdrew U.S. combat forces from that country but promised to “change the mindset” – the idea that the United States could unilaterally make war against oil-rich Middle Eastern countries that did not accept U.S. domination – that made the Iraq war possible. Both Democratic and Republican hawks, therefore, appear determined to force this moderate president to accept their neoconservative agenda.

Deterrence, when dealing with a nuclear-armed party, is indeed a risky strategy. The international community does have an interest in preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, as well as in forcing India, Pakistan, and Israel to disarm their already-existing arsenals. All reasonable diplomatic means should be pursued to create and maintain a nuclear-free zone in that volatile region.

However, the idea that deterrence against Iran would not work because the country’s clerical leadership, which controls the armed forces, would decide to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack against Israel or the United States — and therefore invite massive nuclear retaliation that would cause the physical destruction of their entire country — is utterly ridiculous. The far more realistic risk to worry about is the enormous devastation that would result from a U.S. war on Iran.

The real “threat” from Iran is if that country achieves nuclear capability, it would then have a deterrent to a U.S. attack that was unavailable to its immediate neighbors to the east (Afghanistan) and west (Iraq), both of which were invaded by U.S.-led forces. Both Democrats and Republicans appear to be united in their belief that no country should stand in the way of the unilateral projection of military force by the United States or its allies.

Indeed, this resolution is not about the national security of the United States, nor is it about the security of Israel. It is about continuing U.S. hegemony over the world’s most oil-rich region.

Iran Threat Reduction Act Actually Enhances Threat of War

Congress is taking up dangerous legislation which appears to be designed to pave the way for war by taking the unprecedented step of effectively preventing any kind of U.S. diplomatic contact with Iran. The Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 (H.R. 1905), sponsored by the right-wing chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, contains a provision (Section 601, subsection (c)) which would put into law a restriction whereby

“No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that. . . is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran;”

Never in the history of this country has Congress ever restricted the right of the White House or State Department to meet with representatives of a foreign state, even in wartime. If this measure passes, it will establish a dangerous precedent whereby Congress would likely follow with similar legislation effectively forbidding any contact with Palestinians, Cubans and others.

Despite not having formal diplomatic ties since 1979, there has been frequent low-level contact between the two governments on such issues as combatting drug smuggling and Salafi terrorists. Recent examples include talks which facilitated cooperation in suppressing the Taliban and freeing three American hikers held in an Iranian prison. Such contacts would no longer be possible under this bill.

More seriously, the legislation appears to be designed to push the country toward a military conflict with Iran. History has shown that governments that refuse to even talk with each other are far more likely to go to war.

The bill passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week and, with 349 co-sponsors from both parties, is almost certain to pass the House of Representatives as a whole.
As is often the case with legislation dealing with foreign affairs that puts limits on executive behavior, there is clause allowing for a presidential waiver. It is very limited, however, allowing the White House to waive the requirement only

“. . . if the president determines and so reports to the appropriate congressional committees 15 days prior to the exercise of waiver authority that failure to exercise such waiver authority would pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States.”

The problem is that diplomatic encounters — particularly with countries with which the United States has tense relations — often need to be arranged in less than a 15-day period. The entire Cuban missile crisis lasted only 13 days, for example. In the event of a crisis that threatens a military confrontation between the United States and Iran, the Obama administration would have to wait more than two weeks before having any contact with any Iranian officials, which by then could be too late.

Another problem is that meetings with governments with which the United States has no diplomatic relations are usually arranged secretly through back channels. Unfortunately, the odds that none of the 26 Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee would leak news of such a meeting to Fox News or some other media outlet are rather slim. The relatively moderate elements within Iran’s factious regime would presumably not want to risk any meetings with Americans becoming known to hard-liners. Indeed, their personal safety could be at risk if found out. Similarly, to avoid attacks from Republicans prior to elections, the Obama administration would presumably want to avoid making such meetings public as well.
Fortunately, senior diplomats and intelligence officials are speaking out against this push for war. As veteran CIA analyst and Georgetown University professor Paul Pillar put it, “This legislation is another illustration of the tendency to think of diplomacy as some kind of reward for the other guy, rather than what it really is: a tool for our side.”

Similarly, veteran diplomats Thomas Pickering and William Luers observed, “Besides raising serious constitutional issues over the separation of powers, this preposterous law would make it illegal for the U.S. to know its enemy,” a principle which has been understood by strategic planners since first articulated by Sun Tzu in The Art of War in the 6th century B.C.

Another problematic clause in the bill, contained in the same sub-section, states that
“No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that… presents a threat to the United States or is affiliated with terrorist organizations.”

Not only could what constitutes a “threat” to the United States or an “affiliate” with a “terrorist organization” be interpreted rather broadly, it could restrict investigation of possible terrorist attacks. It would have made illegal the recent sting operation that foiled the alleged assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador, for example.

The march to war with Iran appears to have the support a sizable number of liberal Democrats. Indeed, more than 40 members of the so-called “Progressive Caucus” have signed on as co-sponsors of the bill, including: Karen Bass, Robert Brady, Corrine Brown, Yvette Clark, William Clay, Emmanuel Cleaver, David Cicilline, Steve Cohen, Elijah Cummings, Peter DeFazio, Rosa DeLauro, Sam Farr, Chaka Fattah, Bob Filner, Barney Frank, Janice Hahn, Mazie Hirono, Michael Honda, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Hank Johnson, Marcy Kaptur, John Lewis, David Loebsack, Ben Ray Lujan, Carolyn Maloney, Ed Markey, Jerrold Nadler, Frank Pallone, Jared Polis, Charles Rangel, Laura Richardson, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Linda Sanchez, Jan Schakowsky, Louise Slaughter, Peter Welch, and Frederica Wilson.

It should be noted that these clauses were added to the bill by committee chairwoman Ros-Lehtinen at the end of October, subsequent to some of the co-sponsors signing on, yet so far no one has withdrawn their co-sponsorship. Unless the public mobilizes against this legislation, then, it will be passed and the risks of a disastrous war will be markedly increased

Hikers in Iran

It has now been more than a year since Iranian authorities seized three Americans — Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd, and Josh Fattal — in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan and falsely accused them of espionage on behalf of the U.S. government. No formal charges have been filed, and they have been denied their right to see an attorney. All three have suffered from maltreatment, and Sarah is experiencing severe health problems.

All three are progressive, anti-imperialist activists, which not only makes the charges against them particularly absurd, but also may also explain why the Obama administration has done so little to free them.

Portrait of Three Activists
Shane, Sarah, and Josh were graduates of the University of California at Berkeley and were well-known in the antiwar movement in the Bay Area. Josh’s major passions were sustainable agriculture, food justice, and permaculture, which he pursued at the Aprovecho Research Center in Oregon. Just prior to visiting Shane and Sarah, he had been serving as a teaching fellow with the International Honors Program’s Health and Community project, spending time in Switzerland, India, China, and South Africa. While a student at Berkeley, he was a leader in the movement to get military recruiters off campus.

With support from the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute and the Center for Investigative Reporting, Shane was working as a freelance journalist in various countries in the Middle East, exposing a number of aspects of U.S. policy in the region that Washington would rather keep quiet. Along with his friend Dahr Jamail, he was one of the few independent journalists in Baghdad. His 2009 article “Iraq’s New Death Squad ” in The Nation magazine revealed how Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF), the largest foreign Special Forces outfit ever developed by the United States, was engaged in widespread human rights abuses. An article he wrote for Mother Jones last year revealed how the U.S. government, in an effort to bring temporary stability in Iraq, had funneled billions of dollars to what he referred to as “the country’s next generation of strongmen.” At the time of his arrest, Shane was finishing a major investigative article on the illegal use by Israeli occupation forces of “non-lethal” weapons, such as the “long-range teargas canister” (which essentially acts as a missile), against nonviolent protesters. During the past year, such weapons killed Bassem al-Rahmeh, a leading Palestinian nonviolent activist, and have grievously injured scores of others, including Americans Tristan Anderson and Emily Henochowicz.

Sarah was teaching English as a volunteer with the Iraqi Student Project, set up to help refugees whose education had been interrupted by the U.S. invasion and occupation. Among her projects was helping some of the more promising young exiles to obtain scholarships at American universities. Before leaving the United States, Sarah was living in Oakland, where she was an organizer in support of immigrant rights, including the historic May Day marches of 2006. She also facilitated groups to the U.S.-Mexican border to challenge the Minutemen and other nativist vigilantes. Prior to moving to the Middle East, Sarah spent time in the Mexican state of Chiapas doing solidarity work with the Zapatistas. Her blogs on the ongoing repression by both the Mexican and Israeli governments were well-received by human rights activists.

While in Oakland, both Sarah and Shane were part of the Midnight Special Law Collective, which provides legal and other support for activists around the country. Along with Josh, they were actively involved with Direct Action to Stop the War in organizing nonviolent action campaigns against the U.S. occupation of Iraq. They also volunteered for the Common Ground Collective’s efforts to support rebuilding poor sections of New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina based upon the principle of “solidarity, not charity.”

On moving to Syria, Sarah and Shane chose to live in a Palestinian refugee camp and engage in Palestine solidarity work. When Israeli occupation forces shot their friend Tristan Anderson in the head during a nonviolent protest in the West Bank, they went to visit him in an Israeli hospital just three weeks before their kidnapping.

In Kurdistan
Iraqi Kurdistan is generally considered to be a safe place for Western tourists. The mountains there are among the most beautiful in the world, so it’s not surprising that young Americans familiar with the Middle East would want to explore the area. Unfortunately, the Bush administration had used these same mountains to arm PJAC, a militant separatist group of Iranian Kurds closely aligned with the PKK, the notorious Turkish Kurdish militia. Obama suspended the clandestine effort and appropriately declared PJAC a terrorist group.

The Bush administration may also have sent U.S. Special Forces to the region to infiltrate Iran in preparation of a major U.S. attack, as revealed in a series of articles by Seymour Hersh, a practice also apparently suspended by the Obama administration. Given this recent history, claims of infiltration by American agents in this border region can appear plausible to many Iranians. In many respects, then, the captivity of Shane, Sarah and Josh is yet another tragic legacy of the Bush administration.

The destination of the three hikers was the Ahmed Awa waterfall, an area popular among Iraqis and a growing number of Western tourists. The spot was highly recommended by locals, but none of the three Americans apparently knew that it was so close to the Iranian border. Though the Iranian regime claims they crossed into Iranian territory, eyewitnesses say they were seized inside Iraq by Iranian guards who illegally crossed the border and effectively kidnapped them. Indeed, the Revolutionary Guard officer who apparently ordered their abduction has since been arrested on suspicion of smuggling, kidnapping, and murder. In short, these were hardly “hapless hikers” who naively walked into Iran as some in the media have tried to depict them.

Disparity in Coverage
The fate of these three activists has not received the amount of attention the media gave to Iranian-American journalist Roxanna Suberi, who was detained for three months on espionage charges by the Iranian regime, or of journalists Lisa Ling and Euna Lee, who were freed after four months in captivity by the North Koreans following intervention by former president Bill Clinton. A number of right-wing bloggers have labeled the hikers as “anti-Israel” and “far-left,” arguing that the State Department should just “let ‘em rot.”

Perhaps as a testament to his own youthful idealism as a community organizer, President Barack Obama acknowledged their activism in a statement calling for their release, saying, “They are simply open-minded and adventurous young people who represent the best of America, and of the human spirit. They are teachers, artists, and advocates for social and environmental justice.” Overall, however, the Obama administration appears to place freeing them from Iranian captivity as a relatively low priority.

After months of working unsuccessfully through official channels, some of the friends and family members of the detainees have decided to publicize their plight — along with their history of activism — in the hopes that global civil society, particularly the progressive activist community, can take the kind of initiative not yet coming from Washington.

The fear-mongering and saber-rattling that U.S. hawks have directed at the Iranian regime make it difficult for some progressive activists in the United States to speak out against the repression of the right-wing theocratic regime in Tehran. Yet, while the military threat posed by Iran is often greatly exaggerated, the repressive nature of the regime is not. Indeed, the absurd notion that these three progressive anti-imperialist activists would be spying for the U.S. government is but one more demonstration of the moral and political bankruptcy of the Iranian regime. And, given that — despite all the extreme anti-Iranian rhetoric — Washington is not doing much in support of these American captives, it’s up the progressive community to organize on their behalf.

Leading progressives such as Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Angela Davis, Cindy Sheehan, Medea Benjamin, Alex Cockburn, Christian Parenti, and the late Howard Zinn have called for their release. As Chomsky put it, “These young people represent a segment of the U.S. population that is critical of [U.S.] policies, and often actively opposed to them. Hence their detention is particularly distressing to all of us who are dedicated to shifting U.S. policy to one of mutual respect rather than domination.”

For More Information
Please visit www.freethehikers.org , where you can sign the petition, send letters to the U.S. and Iranian officials, and learn how to help organize actions to protest their detention and demand their release. Another web site, which focuses primarily on their activism and includes links to their writings, can be found at: freeourfriends.eu/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/hikers-in-iran_b_680816.html

Iran’s Do-It-Yourself Revolution

Facing an unprecedented popular uprising against his autocratic rule and his apparently fraudulent re-election, Iran’s right-wing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has attempted to blame the United States. A surprising number of bloggers on the left have rushed to the defense of the right-wing fundamentalist leader. Citing presidential directives under the Bush administration, they argue that the uprising isn’t as much about a stolen election, the oppression of women, censorship, severe restrictions on political liberties, growing economic inequality, and other grievances, as it is about the result of U.S. interference.

Meanwhile, critics on the right — who have shown little concern about democracy in other countries in the region that are just as oppressive yet more willing to support U.S. military and economic objectives have rushed to attack Obama for not intervening enough in Iran. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), for instance, insisted that the president should “come out more strongly” in support of the protesters.

The sordid history of U.S. intervention in Iran has made it easy for that country’s hard-line theocratic leadership to blame the United States for the unrest. Indeed, the United States is guilty of many crimes against that country. It overthrew Iran’s last democratic government back in1953. Subsequently, the United States armed and trained the Shah’s dreaded SAVAK secret police. In the 1980s, Washington supported Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran and, in the “tanker war” of 1987-88, the United States bombed Iranian coastal facilities, targeted ships, and shot down a civilian airliner. There was the arming of Kurdish and Baluchi separatists as well as the threats of war over Iran’s civilian nuclear program (even as Washington continued to support neighboring states that have developed nuclear weapons arsenals). And in recent years, the United States allocated tens of millions of dollars to opposition groups for the express purpose of “regime change.”

Despite this record of intervention, the United States has had nothing to do with the massive unarmed insurrection against the Iranian regime.

Not 1953

The Iranian regime and some of its apologists have tried to connect the homegrown protests now occurring in Iran with the U.S.-sponsored coup of 1953. At that time, CIA operatives bribed local leaders in South Tehran to lead riots in an effort to destabilize the nationalist government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq.
This is a totally spurious analogy, however. First of all, the CIA operatives on the ground in Iran today are mostly likely involved in efforts to infiltrate the intelligence service and nuclear program, and engage in other kinds of espionage and intelligence gathering. The CIA is a poor vehicle for fomenting revolution from below. It has been notoriously poor at understanding developments on the ground in Iran. Just weeks ago, U.S. officials dismissed Mir Houssein Mousavi, whose suspicious loss in the recent elections prompted the uprising, as simply a less provocative face of the same old regime. Indeed, the degree of protests has clearly caught U.S. officials off guard. In any case, no foreign intelligence agency has ever demonstrated such an ability to provoke such a mass uprising.

The CIA-inspired mob actions in 1953 consisted of thousands of people, but was well short of the hundreds of thousands who have taken to the streets since the apparent stolen election. These recent large demonstrations have been overwhelmingly nonviolent, while the 1953 unrest largely consisted of rioting, with widespread vandalism, arson, and assaults against civilians. The riots of 56 years ago took place exclusively in Tehran, while the recent demonstrations have taken place in cities and towns across the country for well over a week, despite often-brutal oppression.

More critically, the 1953 coup itself did not result from massive protests, but because armed police and military units seized key buildings and the government radio station, and attacked Mossadeq’s home. There were heavy exchanges of gunfire and artillery throughout Tehran neighborhoods that housed government facilities; over 100 people died in the battle in front of the prime minister’s house. Mossadeq finally surrendered as tank columns moved into the city and General Zahedi installed himself as prime minister, calling for the return of the Shah.

In short, the circumstances surrounding the 1953 coup have little in common with the events of 2009.

Blaming the Other

When popular armed socialist revolutionary movements swept Central America in the 1980s, U.S. officials and their right-wing allies insisted that these uprisings were not about resisting oppressive military-dominated regimes, death squads, endemic poverty, or social injustice. Rather, they argued, the Soviet Union was pulling the strings of what they considered puppet movements to seize control of these countries, as part of their grand communist plot to take over the world. According to this theory — constantly repeated on the floor of Congress, on op-ed pages, and in reports from conservative think tanks — Moscow and their Cuban allies were “exporting revolution” by forcing otherwise content peasants, workers, and others to rebel against legitimate governments.
In a similar manner, since the end of the Cold War Washington has tried to blame Iran for a wide range of activities: attacks on U.S. occupation forces in Iraq, unrest in Bahrain against that island’s autocratic monarchy, the rise of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, growing support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Generally the left, through its understanding of broader structural causes for social and political problems, has recognized that popular uprisings against repressive governments grow out of certain objective social conditions rather than as a result of outsiders stirring up trouble. Unfortunately, a surprising number of leftists in the United States and other Western countries, aware of very real imperialist machinations by the U.S. government elsewhere, have argued that popular civil insurrections against autocratic regimes are part of some grand U.S. conspiracy.

Anticipating a similar challenge to their increasingly unpopular rule, Iranian leaders began insisting a couple years ago that the popular pro-democracy uprisings in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine earlier this decade were an American plot to advance U.S. imperialism. In a broadcast on state television in July 2007, for instance, the Iranian regime claimed that Serbian student activist Ivan Marovic, one of the leaders of the successful nonviolent uprising against Milosevic in 2000, had met with President George W. Bush in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava in 2005 to plot the overthrow of the Iranian government. In reality, their “meeting” — which was photographed and widely circulated in Iran — consisted of a three-minute conversation in the midst of a group reception and didn’t include any mention of Iran. Marovic, an outspoken left-wing critic of U.S. imperialism, later described how he found Bush to be profoundly ignorant of and apparently disinterested in nonviolent resistance of the kind he and his Serbian colleagues successfully utilized in their pro-democracy movement.

In another bizarre episode, in February last year, Iranian government television informed viewers that Gene Sharp, the elderly theorist of strategic nonviolent action who works out of his tiny home office in a working-class neighborhood in Boston, was “one of the CIA agents in charge of America’s infiltration into other countries.” It included a computer-animated sequence of Sharp with John McCain and other officials in a White House conference room plotting the overthrow of the Iranian regime. In reality, Sharp has never worked with the CIA, has never met McCain, and has never even been to the White House.

U.S. Funding for Opposition Movements

The U.S. government has provided financial support for opposition groups in a number of countries, including Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. It has also provided seminars and other training for opposition leaders in campaign strategies. However, in none of these cases did the U.S. government provide any training, advice, or strategic support that resulted in overturning these regimes. Nor did the U.S. government or any U.S. government-funded entity ever provide operational funding or subsidies for any nonviolent action campaign. In any case, this limited amount of outside financial support cannot cause nonviolent liberal democratic revolutions to take place any more than the limited Soviet financial and material support for leftist movements in previous decades caused armed socialist revolutions to take place. No amount of money could force hundreds of thousands of people to leave their jobs, homes, schools, and families to face down heavily armed police and tanks, unless they had a sincere motivation to do so.

The Bush administration certainly did attempt to subvert and destabilize Iran through funding opposition groups. While continuing to back repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other countries, Congress approved the administration’s request for $75 million in funding to support “regime change” in Iran. However, few serious dissident organizations within the country accepted such support money from the U.S. government.

Indeed, more than two dozen Iranian-American and human rights groups formally protested the program, arguing that “Iranian reformers believe democracy cannot be imported and must be based on indigenous institutions and values. Intended beneficiaries of the funding — human rights advocates, civil society activists and others — uniformly denounce the program.” As president of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi noted, “While the Iranian government has not needed a pretext to harass its own population, it would behoove Congress not to provide it with one.”

Virtually the only ones to accept such funding were exiles who had very few followers within Iran and no experience with the kinds of grassroots mobilization necessary to build a popular movement that could threaten the regime’s survival.

In an even more counterproductive venture, the Bush administration began arming and supporting Kurdish and Baluchi separatists. The Obama administration ceased its support for these groups within days of taking office, formally labeling them terrorist groups. Ironically, Republicans are now attacking the administration for thus abandoning Iran’s pro-democracy struggle at the same time that Ahmadinejad and his supporters are citing these now-discarded efforts as proof of U.S. complicity in the current uprising.

Learning from History, Nor Foreigners

Uprisings like the one witnessed in recent weeks have occurred with some regularity in Iran since the late 1800s. Indeed, the idea of Americans having to teach Iranians about massive nonviolent resistance is like Americans teaching Iranians to cook the Persian stew fesenjan.

Iranians successfully rose up against economic concessions to the British in 1890. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905 against the corrupt rule of the Shah and regional nobles led to the emergence of an elected parliament and financial reforms. The uprising against the U.S.-backed Shah in the late 1970s brought down that autocratic monarchy. In each of these cases, the tactics were remarkably similar to those used in the weeks following the contested elections: strikes, boycotts, mass protests, and other forms of nonviolent action. The Iranians are learning from their history, not from Americans.

Though the subsequent Islamist regime has proven to be at least as repressive, the legacy of the largely nonviolent overthrow of the Shah remains an inspiration for Iranians still struggling for their freedom. Indeed, the current movement has consciously adopted many of the symbols and tactics of the 1978-79 period. There is the use of green (the color of Islam) as the movement’s identifying color. Demonstrators in Tehran, Tabriz, Mashhad, Isfahan, Shiraz, and other cities have gathered at the same locations of anti-Shah rallies. Protesters chant “Death to the Dictatorship” during demonstrations and shout “Allah Akbar” (God is Great!) from the rooftops. Demonstrators place their palms in the blood spilled by a killed or injured comrade and pressing the red palm print on a nearby wall as a sign of martyrdom.

Yet scores of leftist bloggers are trying to convince people that all this was something planned and organized by Americans over the past few months. There is something profoundly ethnocentric in refusing to recognize that civil insurrections and other pro-democracy campaigns have to be launched from Washington and that Iranians (like Eastern Europeans) are incapable of organizing a popular movement on their own. This argument simply adds weight to the neocons’ insistence that democracy can only take hold in Middle Eastern countries through U.S. intervention.

The future of Iran belongs in the hands of the Iranians. The best thing the United States can do to support a more open and pluralistic society in that country is to stay out of the way. It does a gross disservice to those putting their lives on the line in towns and cities across Iran to fail to recognize the genuine indigenous origins of this popular movement.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/irans-do-it-yourself-revo_b_222589.html