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THE BURNT GENERATION, OR THE DREAMS OF A YOUNG IRANIAN

By Koorosh Afshar*

TEHRAN

I’m a young Iranian. Like many of my friends, I am also a student. Shortly after the 11 September terrorist attacks, I read an article that has stuck in my mind ever since. Its message was simple: "Nowhere in today's world can we live happy lives while at the same time, in another part of it, reactionary, militant despots plot and plan against humanity and civility from their dens".

When my peers and I gather for our regular underground meetings, we often discuss that article. It helps to remember it as we plan our next moves against the 24-year-long plague that has hit our homeland, the land of the Persians.

The article did not strike me because I suddenly lost my own security after 9/11. We had no security to lose. My generation in Iran has never known security or, for that matter, real happiness. Many of my peers have been lost to the Islamic Republic's dens of torture or solitary confinement. But, as cruel as 9/11 had been for the world, it gave me hope that the tragedy in New York and Washington would mark the beginning of many changes.

I sensed that the world would finally seek to cure the illness, rather than merely treating the symptoms of a disease we, in Iran, know all too well: clerical fundamentalism and militancy.

But even as we Iranians push against our regime, we wish to share with you our story, in the hope of arousing in you an urge to lend moral support to our desire to end the mullahs' regime.

Clerical militancy has not only brought upon us the wrath of the Western world, but has also led to desperation for the many Iranians suffering under the Islamic Republic. My generation of Iranians, and there are some 32 million of us born just before or shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

I have heard that in America, our peers are known as "Generation X". But in Iran, we are called the "burnt generation". We started our political lives early. As children in kindergarten, we learned to march and beat our fists, shouting: "Down with America!" "Down with Israel!" (or from time to time, depending on the politics of the day, Britain or Russia). No one ever bothered telling us anything about why we were supposed to harbour such ill will towards the "Satan-of-the-day".

Years before the world cared about Saddam, we got to know him all too well. As children we sought refuge in our mothers' arms as his artillery and missiles rained down on our homes, day and night, for months on end. My peers all have stories about that eight-year nightmare. We lost fathers, brothers, arms and legs, cities, villages. And above all, my generation lost its innocence, to what, at the end, became the mullahs' war of political convenience.

After the New York tragedy, I remember helplessly crying when I read one day, on the Internet, about how careful Americans were to protect their children from emotional scars. Your government experts and teachers recommended that parents reinforce their love for children and keep their little ones from watching television.

When we had our tragedies, our leaders, whether "reformer" or "hardliner", sought to fill our streets with hysterical mobs carrying coffins on their shoulders and chanting war slogans. This we saw live every day, in our streets and on television, for eight long years. Can you imagine the "emotional scars" on a 6-year-old seeing the burnt skeleton of his father, his weeping mother by its side? I can. I am that child.

My family's "sacrifice" on behalf of the mullahs' "holy war" is supposed to bring me and many thousands like me certain entitlements such as food coupons, guaranteed university admittance, and employment. At first, we did receive special pensions. But today, there is little left for those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their homeland.

The "Foundation of the Oppressed" charged with protecting our interests has become a multibillion-dollar fiefdom for Tehran's Islamist thieves. Only the well-fed children and siblings of the clerical elite benefit now. They retain absolute control over every imaginable moneymaking venture in Iran. From pistachios and satellite dishes to opium and oil, anything that makes money is divvied up among the mullahs. Mr. Rafsanjani and his children can tell you. They lead the list of our Islamist thieves.

Today, however, despite our despair, we have found hope. Hope among ourselves. Hope in our numbers. Hope in the fact that the world seems to finally be caring. Hope in the fact that we may at last have a chance against the mullahs' rule.

Yet, we are nervous. Nervous of the endless debate among your opinion-makers: Shall we, or shall we not listen to the Iranian people? Is their discontent real or is it not? Should we engage moderate Islamists or should we not? Axis or no Axis?

Listen to our story. It is the story of life. It is the story of liberty. It is the story of the unalienable right to pursue happiness. It is the dream that made America, America. We have been deprived of the very basic rights that you take for granted every day in your free world. We, too, want and deserve the freedom to dress, to speak and to assemble. The freedom to love and the freedom to dream.

We do not need military intervention in Iran. We do not need clandestine operations either. We need nothing but your resolve. Lend us a hand and we will take care of the rest. How, you ask? Simple: Do not deal with our mullahs. It isn't only America's children that deserve to dream.

ENDS STUDENT MEMOS 20104

Editor’s note: Koorosh Afshar is a pseudonym for a student in Tehran. His name has been changed for his protection.

http://www.iran-press-service.com/articles_2004/Jan_04/student_memos_20104.htm

The Qaddafi Precedent

January 21, 2004
Weekly Standard
Henry Sokolski

Now that Libya's disarming, who's next?

Without Actually meaning to do so, the Bush administration has pulled off one of the most remarkable nonproliferation victories since the advent of the nuclear age: Libya, a hostile, isolated dictatorship, pledged to give up its support of terrorism and its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. This nonproliferation "walk-in"--a direct result of Bush's invasion of Iraq and U.S.-allied efforts to interdict illicit strategic weapons-related goods--breaks the mold of nonproliferation history and suggests not only what's possible, but what should be done next.

Muammar Qaddafi's nuclear renunciation is unprecedented. The handful of nations that previously relinquished their nuclear weapons capabilities--South Africa, Brazil, Ukraine, and Argentina--did so less out of fear than from confidence, which each of these nations experienced when they moved toward more democratic self-rule. Until Qaddafi's submission, there seemed little reason to believe that authoritarian proliferators would relent without liberalization (or overthrow). The hardest cases--Iran and North Korea--suggest this is still true.

Libya's example, though, provides hope for the cases in between. Neither Libyan backsliding nor a repeat of America's 1986 bombing run on Qaddafi's home now seems probable. If we are willing to enforce the nonproliferation rules we have--as we did with Iraq and are now doing against illicit nuclear trade--blocking the further spread of nuclear weapons may be possible, in brief, without bombing every proliferating prospect.

The question now is how to exploit Libya's nuclear exit to accomplish this.

Many nonproliferation experts-- including those that rushed off earlier this month to visit North Korea's known nuclear sites and those who still object to America's invasion of Iraq--insist that Libya's announcement means we should now cut nuclear deals with Pyongyang and Tehran. Shooting at these goals now, though, is a surefire loser.

To begin with, Pyongyang and Tehran are hardly contrite about violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). When uranium enrichment equipment bound for Libya was interdicted this fall, Qaddafi showed penitence; he immediately signed a sweeping missile, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons renunciation pledge (penned with British and American officials); and invited international nuclear inspectors in.

After U.S. officials confronted Pyongyang with evidence of nuclear cheating, it countered defiantly, threatening everything from nuclear testing to plutonium exports. Now North Korea refuses even to freeze its known nuclear facilities (much less its undisclosed uranium production plants) unless it is paid handsomely in advance with energy aid and security guarantees. Dismantlement is something Pyongyang claims it will consider doing only after two U.S.-promised plutonium-producing power reactors are completed (i.e., pretty much never).

Iran is no less shameless. Over the last four weeks, its leadership announced that President Bush deserved the same fate as Saddam, insisted Iran would resume enriching uranium (and admitted to expanding its enrichment capacity despite its pledge last October to freeze such work), demanded Bush apologize for accusing Iran of having a nuclear weapons program, blew off an American aid delegation headed by Senator Elizabeth Dole, and met with Russian officials to accelerate completion of a prodigious plutonium-producing power reactor at Busheir. Tehran is expanding its reactor and uranium enrichment efforts (both critical to making bombs) even though the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is still not yet able to find Iran in full compliance with the NPT.

Cutting a quick deal with Iran or North Korea, then, hardly guarantees another Libya. More likely, it will jeopardize the gains we have made. As a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman noted last week, the idea that Pyongyang might follow Libya's example by unconditionally renouncing its nuclear weapons capabilities is a delusion. "Expecting a change in our position," he explained, "is like expecting rain from a clear sky." Tehran's leaders, who insist on Iran's right to all forms of "peaceful" nuclear energy, are no less obdurate. If we make even partial concessions to their current demands, Qaddafi's worthy nonproliferation standard will be the first to suffer.

Focusing on Iran and North Korea as the next Libya is therefore, at best, a distraction. Meanwhile, adjacent to Libya, a clear nonproliferation opportunity has gone begging for attention. At Ain Oussera, in the middle of the Sahara, Algeria continues to expand a large nuclear "research" facility. This nuclear park, whose centerpiece is a large Chinese reactor covertly built during the 1980s, is capable of making approximately a bomb's worth of plutonium a year. Unlike Algeria's smaller research reactor operating in Algiers, the Ain Oussera facility is encircled with SA-5 air-defense missiles.

If this second reactor were clearly needed to make medical isotopes (as Algeria claims it is), it would still be plenty worrisome. Spanish intelligence as well as disarmament experts, though, fear it is simply a bomb factory. Worse, Algeria has only grudgingly revealed the bare minimum about it to IAEA inspectors and did so only after U.S. intelligence discovered the project by accident months before it was to go critical. With Qaddafi's nuclear renunciation, U.S., Libyan, French, and Spanish officials should approach Algeria to close down Ain Oussera.

Then there's Egypt, which has chemical weapons and long-range missile programs (an overt, active SCUD program and a dormant Vector solid-rocket effort dating back to the 1980s). Egyptian officials claim they are planning to acquire a nuclear-desalinization plant, which, again, would make nuclear weapons-usable plutonium. Would Egypt be willing to renounce the plant if Israel shut down its own plutonium-production reactor, now well over 30 years old and in need of a billion-dollar-plus refurbishment? Finally, there is Syria, a state that has rockets and chemical weapons and recently tried to acquire a nuclear desalinization plant from Russia. Wouldn't our diplomatic hand be strengthened against Iran if we could get other Middle Eastern nations to swear off nuclear-power reactors, uranium centrifuges, desalinization plants, and large, unnecessary nuclear research facilities?

If the United States and its allies were to take this approach, it could succeed, but only if they insist that the NPT be read in a more sensible way--i.e., in a fashion that deprives members of the right to acquire all they need to break out and build a large arsenal of nuclear weapons within a matter of weeks. A good start here would be to demand that all countries, including the United States, terminate any large nuclear effort that isn't profitable enough to be fully financed by private capital. This rule would put a crimp on Iran's nuclear plans and those of many other would-be bombmakers. It's one principle Washington and its friends should insist upon at the upcoming NPT review conference in 2005.

Finally, to give meaning to the NPT, the United States and its allies will have to act against violators well before they have photographic proof they have a bomb. The IAEA didn't suspect Libya was covertly working to enrich uranium. Even U.S. intelligence was incomplete until this fall's interdiction. And so it has been historically with every other nuclear proliferator, from the Soviet Union to Iran: By the time it's clear we have a problem, the best options for dealing with it have evaporated.

What this suggests--contrary to the post-Iraq war rants for more intelligence and greater caution--is that we be prepared to act more quickly on less information. Of course, it would be helpful if we did not wait until the only option for action was regime overthrow. This, among other things, recommends Bush's international Proliferation Security Initiative to interdict illicit nuclear weapons-related trade: It gives meaning to the rules and offers nonproliferation officials an action plan other than wringing their hands or devising new ways to cave in to proliferators.

We've certainly tried the latter over the last half-century and produced abysmal results. After Libya, we have clear cause to stop.

Henry Sokolski directs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and is editor with Patrick Clawson of "Checking Iran's Nuclear Ambitions" (U.S. Army War College, 2004).

The weekly Standard - 01/26/2004, Volume 009, Issue 19

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/616dqerg.asp

"Nuclear Pledge Broken"

January 21, 2004
Telegraph
Anton La Guardia

Senior western diplomats accused Iran yesterday of breaking a promise to halt uranium enrichment, a key process in making a nuclear weapon.

The Iranian undertaking, given three months ago, was hailed at the time as marking a new approach to the disarmament of rogue states through diplomacy rather than war but western officials said Teheran was still buying and assembling machines to enrich uranium. "The Iranians are definitely still out procuring equipment," said one senior western source.

"This is clearly a breach. The goal is cessation of enrichment and we are moving in the opposite direction."

Iran says it has only "temporarily" suspended operation of the gas centrifuges to enrich uranium and insists it has a right to make fuel for nuclear reactors to generate electricity.

However its behaviour will deepen suspicion in America and Europe that Teheran's civil nuclear programme is being used to mask a secret project to build an atomic bomb.

The latest disclosure could undermine the fragile agreement negotiated in October by Britain, France and Germany to avert a new crisis over weapons of mass destruction.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, met his German and French counterparts on Monday to discuss Iran and other issues.

Diplomats said the United States was certain to raise the enrichment issue when the governing board of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog meets in March.

This carries the implied threat to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.

"If the Iranians want to go to the Security Council, they are going about it the right way," said one diplomat. "We are in the middle of a negotiation. Like all negotiations with Iran, it's hard work. You have to do a lot to get a little."

Under concerted pressure from America and Europe, Teheran admitted in November to lying about its nuclear programme for 18 years, confirmed it had made small quantities of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium and agreed to a new system of intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran also promised to suspend "all uranium enrichment-related activities" as part of the deal that saved Iran from being referred to the Security Council and being treated as an international pariah.

However, the issue is now mired in a legalistic argument over what constitutes "enrichment activities". Diplomats said the Iranians had adopted a very narrow definition: halting the operation of gas centrifuges while continuing to build up their facilities.

However the Americans and Europeans believe Iran should stop building the machines or even importing the components. The Europeans' aim is to convince Iran to abandon uranium enrichment in exchange for guaranteed supplies of nuclear fuel from Russia or western Europe.

Iran's move in November was seen as a major diplomatic breakthrough, and a tangible success for the war in neighbouring Iraq.

But Iran's co-operation now looks half-hearted after Libya's dramatic announcement last month that it was ridding itself of all weapons of mass destruction.

American and British weapons experts, overseen by the CIA and MI6, arrived in Tripoli at the weekend to dismantle the weapons programmes and aim to complete the job "in weeks or months". Much now depends on Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the international atomic agency.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/21/wiran21.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/01/21/ixportal.html