13 November 2011: Iran, etc

Is it just me, hearing Fareed Zakaria's pain at restraining himself, wanting to say he recognizes part of his job is placating war loving oligarchs nutballs? We could feel bad for him, but one imagines he's well compensated to talk out both sides of his mouth, to hint that war with Iran would be crazy, that they are complying with regular inspections, but "who can say" what their intentions are?

Who, who?

Maybe this is as close as a talking head on TV can get to saying that US foreign policy is deliberately counterproductive and stupid, which is to say not very close. And another thing you can't say on television is that Saddam and Qadaffi were both allied with the US at one time, then US policy changed, so see what it got them. Or to put it another way: the Iranians must by now conclude that it would be insane to not get nuclear warheads.


Two from the Christian Science Monitor:
1.Iran nuclear report: Why it may not be a game-changer after all The Iran nuclear report released yesterday by the UN nuclear watchdog agency sought to corroborate details provided by US intelligence in 2005. But some nuclear experts are unconvinced.

In a 14-page annex to its quarterly report on Iran released yesterday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said new intelligence and other data gave it "serious concern" about the allegedly peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program. But the casus belli for military strikes that anti-Iran hawks in the US and Israel expected to gain from the IAEA report is far from clear-cut.

Imminent Iran nuclear threat? A timeline of warnings since 1979

The report is based on more than 1,000 pages of information shared with the agency by US intelligence in 2005, one year after they were apparently spirited out of Iran on a laptop computer. But deep skepticism about the credibility of the documents remains – Iran has long insisted they are forgeries by hostile intelligence agencies – despite a concerted attempt by the IAEA to verify the data and dispel such doubt.

"It's very thin, I thought there would be a lot more there," says Robert Kelley, an American nuclear engineer and former IAEA inspector who was among the first to review the original data in 2005. "It's certainly old news; it's really quite stunning how little new information is in there."

and 2.Mystery surrounds deadly blast at Iran ammunition depot

Lew Rockwell,"12 Facts About Money and Congress That Are So Outrageous That It Is Hard To Believe That They Are Actually True" [via Mimi]

Brayden Goyette, Truthdig, "Flat Taxes Are Big in the Former USSR. Have They Worked?"

Arthur Silber re OWS

Scott Olsen, the vet who was injured at the Oakland OWS protests last month, discusses his progress since surgery at his Google Plus page in a public posting, here.[via Gary Farber]

Olbermann, etcetera

The fuss over Keith Olbermann "donating without approval" seems to be over, now that MSNBC has announced that he'll be back on the air(well, cable) on Tuesday. I generally don't pay much attention to these things, but I was interested in following it because I suspect that lots of "on air talent" fly under the radar in terms of disclosing their political contributions. (Alex Pareene discussed this recently in Salon.) I imagine MSNBC just wanted to make an example of Olbermann because it would help them burnish their conservo cred.

However I was struck by the irony that, writ large, the question of to whom million dollar talking heads might make political contributions is a much more serious question than whether or not NPR was just in firing Juan Williams recently, or whether or not they "handled it correctly." And yet the Williams firing, ostensibly cutting the other way politically, seemed to receive a lot more attention. (I say ostensibly because ultimately they both belong to the same corporatist political class, although that was probably why it generated more attention.)

One thing I didn't see discussed with respect to Juan Williams is the likelihood that, if you monetized the value that his association with NPR amounted to, in terms of conferring the imprimatur of seriousness and legitimacy that his presence on Fox News had, then arguably

a. Williams owed his ability to score a hefty Fox Corp paycheck to NPR, and
b. Fox News, especially in their early days, also benefited from the conferral of legitimacy on their "fair and balanced" shtick that their indirect association with NPR represented.

Just sayin'. (As they say.)




From the annals of loathesomeness: David Broder's op-ed from yesterday, calling for "seeming" to call for another needless war.

And, from polling report's twitter feed(groan if you must):

Democratic Party should: Renominate Obama 73% / Nominate a different candidate 22% (CNN/ORC Poll -- asked of Democrats)

7 October 2010 Mearsheimer interview etc

John Mearsheimer on the State of the Israel Lobby [Fall, 2010]

Cléa Thouin, assistant editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies[yt link], interviews John Mearsheimer [via Mondoweiss]


Helena Cobban , "When is an act of war not an act of war?"

Cobban suggests that the difference between "war" and "air strikes" in polling re military action against Iran makes an enormous difference, which reminds me of my suspicion of establishment polling in general and also makes me wonder if large numbers of Americans are stupider than a can of paint.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh and Karla Hansen, Asia Times, Why the US doesn't talk to Iran:

The repeated refusal of Iranian offers of dialogue by successive United States administrations suggests that US foreign policy in the Middle East has been driven not by national interest but by the military-industrial complex's need for a constant, external threat to justify its huge share of the treasury. Whether it is the perceived pursuit of nuclear weapons or support for terrorism, there has always been a convenient reason to target a nation.

BDR:

"Republicans are shitty, and no amount of Democratic shittiness changes that essential truth."

Maria Bustillos,The Awl, "How the For-Profit College Can Destroy Your Life"
via Susie Madrak


by Nancy Solomon, NPR:"Schools Urged To Teach Youth Digital Citizenship"

Freshman Tyler Clementi jumped off a bridge a few days after his sexual encounter with another man was broadcast online. Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, and Ravi's friend Molly Wei were arrested on invasion of privacy charges. They haven't said why they allegedly broadcast the video, but by all accounts, they were good students who had no history of cruel behavior.

"I think it's a case where good kids can do terrible things," says John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives.

But what if they were from a trailer park, instead of the kind of kids whose parents fit nicely into public radio's demographics? I hardly ever visit NPR's website, but here in one of the first things I come across, is just the sort of thing for which their detractors take them to task. But I guess it also dovetails nicely with the case of a good government that can do terrible things, so it's all good.


Louisville Courier-Journal, Yoga can be dangerous to Christians' faith, says Louisville's Southern Baptist Seminary President

Actually, Albert Mohler has said scores of crazy things over the years, including a backhanded endorsement of torture.

21 September 2010

Raw Story, "Poll: Vast majority opposes attack on Iran"
via

Two from the Christian Science Monitor:

Who’s picking up the tab for the tea party?

The tea party movement may have genuine grassroots. But just beneath the surface are professional fund-raisers, foundations, and political action committees – some of which have been around for years – pushing a conservative-libertarian agenda.

Scott Horton, "Reality check: Iran is not a nuclear threat"



Radley Balko, Slate: Blight Fight: Why is the city of Montgomery condemning the property of African-Americans along a civil rights trail?

Mark Weisbrot, Counterpunch:

"Net Neutrality, Free Speech and the Net: The Future of the Internet"

Two Tribes

Another video from Russia Today- this time with nice crispy sound that syncs properly, but the video is somewhat washed out. C'est la vie, as Russians no doubt say.

Earlier today CNN posted a poll in which they stated that a majority(71 %) of respondents believe that Iran presently has nuclear weapons.(the poll also says that while a majority of the respondents are presently against military action, it also suggests great malleability in that opinion should the rhetoric heat up, and very little concern about adverse repercussions-- something I partly blame on a childishly jingoistic press. I wonder how many people put 2 and 2 together regarding the US de facto policy of destabilizing Pakistan, the one Islamic country that definitely does possess nuclear weapons and how people feel about that, or if they even give much thought to it.

Repercussions-- like what? Like another massive oil embargo, or the real unification of the Islamic world against the US, or a crumbling of America's capacity for international influence, when Russia and China AND even the EU finally decide that we're a nation of depraved nutballs who can't be trusted. And many thousands killed. Oh yeah, that.

Actually,I don't have a hard time accepting that a majority of Americans do in fact believe this regarding the supposed existence of Iranian nukes, even though the CIA itself apparently doesn't believe this. What I have a harder time understanding, and the poll doesn't address this, is why Americans tend to trust American elites so easily regarding the outside world. So that when a foreign country does something(or appears to do something) that American elites don't approve of and the usual American TV talking heads tell us that country X is defying us because they're irrational or crazy, they just accept this uncritically. And they just accept that country X cannot possibly have sane, legitimate reasons for those contrary policies that don't conform to US government wishes , whether said policies are hypothetical or real.

The thing is, people generally have no problem believing that our elites lie to us and screw us over in virtually all other areas, but apparently regarding foreign policy they just accept that these people who so frequently mislead and even just plain lie to us, nevertheless also know what's best and sincerely mean to protect us. I guess these are two separate questions. Exceptionalism again, at least for part of it. God gave Adam the right to give names to the animals, and to America to determine whether or not foreigners are crazy.

Michel Chossudovsky, above, says that the US has nuclear warheads in Turkey and in Europe that are aimed at Iran. Additionally, most experts agree that Israel has nuclear weapons, even if this is a mostly forbidden topic for discussion in the popular US media. My point is, although I don't think any country that doesn't presently have nukes should decide to get them, it's hardly insane or unreasonable for Iran's elites to want to have nuclear weapons. Given how actively belligerent both the US and Israel have been to various middle eastern and other Islamic countries, it strikes me as pretty understandable that the Iranians should want nukes.

I also question whether the US would in fact be threatened by the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons arsenal, assuming we left them alone. Israel might possibly be threatened-- but even that I'm skeptical of. If anything, the likely net effect of a secure Iranian nuclear weapons arsenal might well be a better behaved Israel, one that doesn't threaten her neighbors so readily and is more likely to want to make legitimate concessions towards a real peace with the Palistinians, or-- at the very least-- stops launching so many "you kill one, we kill 500" military operations against her neighbors.

The problem of course, is that it be a secure nuclear arsenal. But who is likely to subvert Iranian nuclear security, besides Israel and the US?

Again, I'm not suggesting that for Iran to acquire nukes is a preferred outcome. As I've said before in comments here and elsewhere, I have often puzzled about why Ahmedinejad has never publicly suggested a linkage between greater co-operation in allowing IAEA oversight, and negotiating to account for and reduce(or even eliminate*) Israel's nukes. Also to clarify, when I say "nukes" I am specifically referring to nuclear weapons, and not simply powerplants, which after all they, along with the Israelis, are allowed by international law.


(*The "eliminate" is probably dreaming, hence in parentheses. Still there's no question to me that for neither Israel nor Iran to have nuclear weapons would be the ideal situation, and I don't see how a US military operation against Iran can do anything but kill more people and make that contingency even less likely to ever happen.)

The Man Who Changed The World, parts 1 & 2

Part one (of six): The Man Who Changed The World: Iran & The West

via www.alisanaei.com

and, part two:

"The Man Who Changed the World" Parts 3,4,5 and 6

Parts one and two are here. Directly above is part 3 of "The Man Who Changed the World". Below are parts 4, 5 and 6, which are mainly about the American Embassy hostage crisis of '79-'81.

pt 4:



pt 5:



and finally, pt 6:

An Unanswerable Question

Obama has endorsed Iran’s proposal to export uranium for third-party enrichment and said that "We support Iran's right to peaceful nuclear power,”. So I have to correct myself here where in an earlier post I wrote that Obama didn’t support any Iran nuclear program. Still, Obama is putting the onus on Iran to prove they are only using the enrichment plants for peaceful use. And how does Iran accomplish this? That’s the rub for there is very little Iran can say or do to prove such a thing. I’m reminded of how a question can be asked in such a way that there is no good way of answering it. For example if we use that old saw “Is it true you stopped beating your wife?” there is no good way of answering that question that damns you even before you answer for if you never beat your wife you cannot say it is true or not without inadvertently admitting you beat your wife. If you say it is not true then you are still beating her and if you say it is true than you are saying you had beaten her in the past. In a similar manner this is the conundrum faced by Iran in the face of U.S. belligerence. Actually it seems to me that the onus is on Obama to prove that Iran is making nuclear weapons but of course with the imbalance of power it isn’t about to go down that way.

Something to keep in mind is that politicians are good at jerking the public around. All the noise regarding Iran is taking attention off of more immediate disasters like the one in Iraq and the one in Afghanistan and the fact that any hope of health care reform happening just got flushed down the toilet as if there was ever a chance in hell that there was going to be any meaningful reform. That is not to say there will be no military action against Iran but this recent blowup certainly has taken center stage from what must be far more pressing issues for Obama.

Obama remains somewhat of an enigma for me. On one hand he isn’t as hawkish as Hillary Clinton of the steely glare. He has kept his promise to escalate Afghanistan but that is about it as far as I can tell and it is not the promise that I would have chosen as one I would like to see kept. Is Obama just an overly authoritarian creature who is completely indoctrinated in American Exceptionalism or is he a very smooth con artist? I believe he is mainly the latter with a little of the former mixed in. In the end it matters little what he is for it is his actions that matter and that is how he should be judged.

an invisible coup, pt 2

Since my post from the other day I notice that Xymphora has also posted about the presumptive coup, citing the same PressTV item, and "Xenophile" left a telling comment:

Xenophile 08/04/2009 08:47 AM
That sounds like PressTV's revenge for Western coverage/promotion of the astroturf revolution in Teheran.

Lemme see if I get it: a Saudi dissident quoted from the Arabic-language Iranian channel by the Iranian official press is the source. À consommer avec moderation

.

I also came across this: (September 2008)
from Stratfor.com,

Iranian media reported a failed coup attempt in Saudi Arabia on Sept. 3, citing an Arab publication. The details of the reports suggest, however, that they are unfounded. Tehran’s move to pick up the story is likely Iranian psyops against Saudi Arabia, designed to undermine global confidence in the stability of the world’s largest oil producer.

not a twitter revolution

from the Real News.

Iran, continued

This recent al Jazeera video (via Juan Cole) seems to partially confirm what I wrote earlier this week about Ahmedinejad's support among rural voters.

Painted green

Green may be the current cool color in Western pop culture, but it seems the Mousavi-ites dubbed their movement the green revolution because green is the color is of Islam(!). Or maybe that's just an explanation for global public consumption, so that we don't get too suspicious of all those Iranian young people holding up signs in English. Members of the Anglo press are always flattered when people in foreign countries wave signs in English that speak of freedom, even those TV-types who until very recently had been advocating bombing the crap out of Iran, as Glenn Greenwald has recently pointed out.

(Perhaps especially the ones who had been calling for bombing you.) We don't care about you, just what you stand for, so be a dear and stand for something we understand...

To be honest, I find it awfully difficult to evaluate the current goings-on in Iran. Was the election stolen? I no longer assume that the talking heads on TV care about telling me the unvarnished truth, and given how many decades US elites have invested in meddling in the middle east, it's hard not to be skeptical. On one hand we're told that opposition candidate Mousavi held a narrow lead in Iranian election polling just before the vote. On the other hand, it's hard to know how reliable polling methods are in Iran, and the gap in access to technology between country and rural folk may be substantial. Remember the famous story of how the Literary Digest predicted that FDR would lose reelection in '36 because they relied on polls of persons with telephones, which skewed their results to the republicans? On the other, other hand, as it were, just because a phenomenon plays out the way foreign elites(with a history of meddling in Iran's internal affairs) might have desired, doesn't mean it's bogus.

I note that Xymphora is suspicious that Israel and the US have interfered with the events in Iran, spurring the protests on. Even though Xymphora is prone to see a Zionist conspiracy behind every bush, this strikes me as plausible.

We're getting lots of images of rioting, but in a country of 70 plus million, about 20 million of whom live in the Tehran metro area, the only images we're getting are from the capitol, as opposed to from where the other 50 million live. Pepe Escobar has recently noted [video link]that Ahmedinejad's strongest constituency has always been among the rural poor, i.e., people who are less likely to have internet access. Call them, pace Nixon, Ahmedinejad's "silent majority."

Obviously we don't really know if their election was stolen, and we don't know if it wasn't. Apparently the Iranian government will do a recount of some disputed votes, but one assumes this is more about preserving order and shoring up its legitimacy than intrinsic concern.

I'll admit I wonder, as Xymphora and others do, if outside forces are egging on the disorder. But I also wonder if Americans could be moved to stand up for their rights in a similarly bold way without it being borne out of manipulation by elites.(I suppose I'm over-using that word at this point.)

Maybe, in our post McLuhan, insufferably postmodern, SMS/RSS/Social networking age, it's both easier for authentic grassroots phenomena to catch fire-- and easier than ever to manufacture them. Good luck Iran, even when the West has lost interest in your green revolution, so-called or otherwise, and moved on.

cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

Some recent things

artist: Fay Valentine


Seems there is a


Tell "The Progressive" to drop George McGovern from 100th Anniversary Event
Facebook page. The people signing on are angered that McGovern spoke out against the Employee Free Choice Act. The Progressive magazine is holding its 100th Anniversary Conference in Madison, Wisconsin on May 1st and 2nd.(Not too surprisingly, the magazine also has a Facebook group, which has a discussion board.)

NATO commemorated their 60th anniversary this past Saturday, April 4th. I'm not clear what purpose they serve in the post-Soviet era, let alone why they are fighting in Afghanistan, which isn't exactly a particularly North or particularly Atlantic part of the world. Ironically or not, April 4th is also the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination.


Al Jazeera, from February 2008, "Asia's hidden arms race"

and more recently,

How to survive a Gaza refugee camp

and

Why can't Iran have nuclear weapons?
a recent comment forum, also at Al Jazeera, from last month.


a new (to me) web site:

U.S. Media and Israel: Sharing the Balanced Truth about Israel Media Coverage in the U.S.

Al jazeera on rural Iran and the revolution

see also John Caruso's "Entire world menaced by better Iranian phone reception."