Iranian Alert -- May 13, 2004 [EST]-- IRAN LIVE THREAD -- "Americans for Regime Change in Iran"

The US media almost entirely ignores news regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Tony Snow of the Fox News Network has put it, “this is probably the most under-reported news story of the year.” Most American’s are unaware that the Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT supported by the masses of Iranians today. Modern Iranians are among the most pro-American in the Middle East.

There is a popular revolt against the Iranian regime brewing in Iran today. I began these daily threads June 10th 2003. On that date Iranians once again began taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Today in Iran, most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy.

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movement in Iran from being reported. Unfortunately, the regime has successfully prohibited western news reporters from covering the demonstrations. The voices of discontent within Iran are sometime murdered, more often imprisoned. Still the people continue to take to the streets to demonstrate against the regime.

In support of this revolt, Iranians in America have been broadcasting news stories by satellite into Iran. This 21st century news link has greatly encouraged these protests. The regime has been attempting to jam the signals, and locate the satellite dishes. Still the people violate the law and listen to these broadcasts. Iranians also use the Internet and the regime attempts to block their access to news against the regime. In spite of this, many Iranians inside of Iran read these posts daily to keep informed of the events in their own country.

This daily thread contains nearly all of the English news reports on Iran. It is thorough. If you follow this thread you will witness, I believe, the transformation of a nation. This daily thread provides a central place where those interested in the events in Iran can find the best news and commentary. The news stories and commentary will from time to time include material from the regime itself. But if you read the post you will discover for yourself, the real story of what is occurring in Iran and its effects on the war on terror.

I am not of Iranian heritage. I am an American committed to supporting the efforts of those in Iran seeking to replace their government with a secular democracy. I am in contact with leaders of the Iranian community here in the United States and in Iran itself.

If you read the daily posts you will gain a better understanding of the US war on terrorism, the Middle East and why we need to support a change of regime in Iran. Feel free to ask your questions and post news stories you discover in the weeks to come.

If all goes well Iran will be free soon and I am convinced become a major ally in the war on terrorism. The regime will fall. Iran will be free. It is just a matter of time.

13 May 2004 16:54

Iran to make nuclear report this week-Russian agency
Iran will this week give the U.N. nuclear watchdog answers to "all questions" on its nuclear programme, an Iranian nuclear source was quoted as saying on Thursday. "A report answering all questions asked by the (International Atomic Energy Agency) is ready, and we will hand it over to the IAEA over the next two days," a source in Iran's nuclear delegation visiting Moscow told Russia's Ria-Novosti news agency.

Iran, accused by the United States of seeking to acquire an atom bomb, says its nuclear programme is for peaceful power generation and has pledged to give a full account of its activities ahead of a June IAEA board meeting in Vienna. The source said the document could be dispatched as soon as Thursday with a group of IAEA officials who had been inspecting Iranian nuclear sites and are now due to return to Vienna.

Iranian officials want the IAEA to drop Iran from its agenda altogether after the board meeting, but Washington says Iran is still secretly trying to build atomic weapons. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei warned Tehran a week ago that the world would not wait forever for it to divulge the full extent and nature of its nuclear programme. Russia, which is helping Iran build a nuclear reactor near the city of Bushehr, has also been under fire from Washington – the United States believes Iranian scientists can extract weapons-grade plutonium from the 1,000-megawatt plant and use Russian nuclear know-how to build a nuclear bomb.

Both Russia and Iran have staunchly denied that was possible, but Russia's reluctance to jeopardise its ties with Washington has stalled the plant's construction. The Iranian delegation was in Moscow this week to discuss how to take the $800 million project further, but little has come out of their visit so far. "It's a very sensitive period. Extensive talks with the Iranians didn't yield anything," a source in the Russian Atomic Energy Agency told Reuters.

http://www.gateway2russia.com/st/art_234974.php

Blix Says Iran Could Develop Nuclear Weapons

May 13, 2004
The Associated Press

STOCKHOLM -- Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said Thursday that it wasn't unreasonable to think that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon within two years.

The former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made the assessment in an interview Thursday with Swedish public radio, which had cited an anonymous official in Iran as saying that secret experiments were being conducted in underground laboratories in the country.

The man, interviewed by phone from Iran, suggested the experiments were linked to advanced centrifuges Iran had developed to enrich uranium - the process that can be used either to develop nuclear fuel or warheads.

Blix said if that is the case, he wasn't surprised.

"It does not sound completely unreasonable," said the former Swedish foreign minister, and ex-chief U.N. weapons inspector who is now head of a newly created Stockholm-based independent commission on weapons of mass destruction. "It depends how far they've come in developing the centrifuges that are needed."

Blix did'nt immediately return messages left by The Associated Press.

Iran said it suspended uranium enrichment last year under international pressure, but continued to make uranium-enriching centrifuge components. In April, the country said it stopped all construction of those centrifuges.

Iran's nuclear program came under international scrutiny last year after the IAEA discovered a covert centrifuge facility at Natanz. First word of the existence of the centrifuges came nearly two years ago.

Since those discoveries, traces of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium and new more advanced centrifuge prototypes and experiments have raised the international community's concerns about Tehran's development of a nuclear weapons program.

"Any information that any country is building a plant for enriching uranium raises questions about the intention," Blix said. "You need uranium enriched up to about 4% for use in a peaceful nuclear power plant."

Blix said it's widely known that Iran has sought to increase its enrichment capabilities.

"At the same time, they say that the intention is not to enrich uranium up to the high percentages needed for making bombs, but that they want to be self-sufficient with fuel for their nuclear plants," he said.

Blix said it would be better if Iran gave up any enrichment program altogether.

http://iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news.pl?l=en&y=2004&m=05&d=13&a=6

U.S.: Libya to Halt Trade With 3 Nations

May 13, 2004
The Associated Press
Barry Schweid

WASHINGTON - Libya has agreed to halt military trade with North Korea, Syria and Iran. The move, announced Thursday by Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, follows a decision by Tripoli to stop its programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. It was hailed as welcome news by Bolton, who said North Korea had provided Libya with its Scud missiles.

A parallel announcement was expected in the Libyan capital, where President Moammar Gadhafi has steered the country toward the good graces of the United States.

Last month President Bush took steps to restore normal trade and investment ties with Libya, moving to allow resumption of oil imports and most commercial and financial activities as a reward to Gadhafi for eliminating his most destructive weapons.

Libya's actions "have made our country and the world safer," the White House said. But significant sanctions remain on the books as an inducement to Libya to resolve issues that are still pending.

In an extraordinary move, Gadhafi agreed last December to dismantle Libya's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.

In response, the administration two months ago lifted a ban on use of American passports to travel to Libya.

"Through its actions, Libya has set a standard that we hope other nations will emulate in rejecting weapons of mass destruction and in working constructively with international organizations to halt the proliferation of the world's most dangerous systems," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

Last year, Libya removed a major obstacle to more normal relations with the United States by meeting U.S. demands stemming from the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988. Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing and promised to pay $10 million in compensation to each family of the 270 victims.

In addition to the economic steps the White House announced, fledgling diplomatic ties will be upgraded to permit the opening of liaison offices in Washington and Tripoli. This would be a prelude to the eventual establishment of normal diplomatic relations.

The easing of sanctions imposed in 1986 and those called for under a 1996 Libya sanctions law will allow a resumption of oil imports from Libya and permit most commercial activities, financial transactions and investments.

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/8658202.htm

Behead Obscurantism!

May 13, 2004
Iran Institute for Democracy
Ramin Parham

“You are the Red flower of the garden of Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini!”

”You are the most revolutionary man in the world, Ayatollah Khomeini!”

Chanted by organized groups of male demonstrators, in gangs of 40 to 50 led by a ring leader, highly mobile, going up and down the streets of my neighborhood, the alienating cry would contaminate everything, from the once serene atmosphere to the walls. All of a sudden, faces would appear estranged; eyes would glow with fear and apprehension. Something was about to happen, friendliness was about to disaffect our town. Anxiety would grow more tangible at night when a chilling “Allah-o Akbar” would fill the sky, spreading like an air-born disease from afar to our neighborhood. They spread the lies that “blood was running down the gutter”; that “Israeli commandos were shooting the people in the city”...Kids were no longer playing street soccer during the day; families were no longer going to sleep at night after an evening chat on the stories of the day. But, not so long before, God used to be Love. At noon, there was this man, on the national radio, with an enchanting voice, singing the “Azaan-e Zohr”, the noon call for prayer, a time of ecstatic beauty. Often, one could not tell of his incantation or the wind, which one would make the trees dance so graciously. Days and streets had become kidless; Nights had become sleepless; Trees would no longer dance. All things, above and below, were filled with the same insanity, the same fear, the same estrangement. Remedy had become poison. Love had become hatred, vomited by thugs. God had become a monster. I was 15 year old. The Islamic Revolution was coming. Khomeini, the Supreme Head, was on his way...

An American friend, coming back from Iraq, told me that they are now distributing all over Najaf and elsewhere, posters of Imam Hussein depicting Him beheaded. He knows well the region. He knows that at no time in the past, Hossein had been shown beheaded. He knows that this is insanity, for Hossein, the righteous, needs not to be shown beheaded. On his final days, Udai, the son of the fallen dictator, called Iraq the “strategic depth” of the Islamic theocracy in Iran. I know, and my American friend knows as well that Udai-the-sick was right. Iranian theocrats are using the same field-proven techniques on the streets of Sadr City and elsewhere. Those who today, are travestying the iconography and the rituals of faith in Iraq, have been rehearsing there macabre mise-en-scène for the past 25 years in Iran and in southern Lebanon. They are the disease of the faith, the cancerous tumor metastasizing healthy tissues. The infection must be defeated. Obscurantism must be beheaded.

The people of Iran stand in fraternity with their Iraqi brothers. Together, they will remember, for generations to come, the heroes who have come from afar, leaving behind their land and their family, to fall in Iraq. So that Freedom can Endure...

http://www.iraninstitutefordemocracy.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=104

The Shah & She

National Review - By Reza Baygan
May 13, 2004

An old ruler and a new Iran

Farah Pahlavi's An Enduring Love was an immediate bestseller in Europe and has received plenty of attention in the United States. The book's release has presented a fresh opportunity for those interested in modern Iranian history to revaluate the record of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the challenges he faced during his reign. While on the one hand he was pushing incessantly for the advancement of Iran, on the other, he had to recreate his own role as a modern king of an ancient monarchy. The roots of his tragic fate are to be found in the relentless tension between these two competing exigencies. Farah Pahlavi's memoirs provide the reader with the opportunity to grasp the immensity of this challenge.

In a poverty-stricken country beset by ignorance, insecurity, and disease, the shah mobilized all the resources at his disposal to address the most urgent issues of health care, education, and territorial security. Ironically, it was the brilliant success of his objectives that prepared the ground for his violent downfall. The unremitting speed of development led to higher standards of living and, inevitably, heightened political expectations to unsustainable levels.

Although the 1979 revolution eventually fell into the hands of the most fanatical and retrograde forces in society, one cannot forget that it was initially fuelled by a desire for greater political freedom. Political reform that would mirror the rise in the standard of living was energetically demanded by an ambitious, restless, and educated young population that had no memory of the rampant disease, poverty, and illiteracy that had gripped the country just few decades previously.

Farah Pahlavi herself belonged to a generation that still had vivid memories of the humiliating backwardness of the country. When the reins of power were delivered into the hands of the young Mohammad Reza, Iranians lived under the constant threat of foreign intervention, disease, and insecurity. In her book, Empress Farah recounts the dire conditions of the country at a time when even the capital was deprived of the most basic necessities, like clean water:

Every district had its day for receiving this muddy running water. Directed by small dams, it flowed for a few hours into a tank under the house or a reservoir usually dug in the courtyard or the garden. We had both tank and reservoir, and I remember watching with great curiosity as all the water with rubbish collected further up the channel flowed into them: watermelon peel, dead leaves, cigarette butts, bits of wood. The water settled after a day or two and could be pumped up into a tank in the attic, which supplied the kitchen and the bathrooms. In spite of the quicklime added to the water in the tank, little worms proliferated there; our parents were forever telling us never to drink water from the faucet.

The shah, as a head of state who had sworn to preserve his country's sovereignty, walked a thin line in staying within his remit as a constitutional monarch while protecting his homeland from the likes of the revolutionaries, the Communists, and the terrorists organizations. Reading Farah Pahlavi's memoirs we are reminded again of how the king "could forgive those who had designs on his life, but not those who threatened the security and unity of the country." There is bitter irony in the fact that the king forgave a man called Parviz Nickhah — the brain behind a Leftist group that sent a hit man to assassinate the shah — and provided him with an important position in Iranian television. This same person was later executed by the Islamic revolutionaries for his sin of being forgiven by the man they hated so much.

As was proven after the revolution, when the Iraqis took advantage of Iranian military weakness and internal chaos by attacking the border province of Khuzestan, the foreign military threat was not a figment of the shah's imagination. He had learned from painful lessons of history that the weakness of the central government had always whetted the appetite of Iran's neighbors to invade the country. In Iran, Islamic terrorism and Communism, or as the shah used to call them, "the accursed alliance of the red and the black," have time and again done duty as the fifth column of the enemy.

Those critics today who, after the end of the Cold War, sit in their ivory towers and complacently criticize the shah's human-rights record according to the most up-to-date democratic standards, should remember that the geopolitical landmarks of the shah's era were Gulag prison camps in the north, and the headquarters of the Baath party in the south. Surrounded on both sides by those infernal waters, the shah was battling against all odds to navigate his country towards modernization and progress.

If the shah's removal from power was the magic formula many people claimed it would be, today, a quarter of a century after his death, Iran should not be experiencing one of the darkest and most oppressive times in its history. What held the country back from political development in the time of the shah was rooted in those backward forces that have gained considerable ground since the victory of 1979 revolution. Those forces raised formidable obstacles in the path of the shah's reform program every step of the way. Some powerful segments of the Shiite clergy fought tooth and nail against the granting of voting rights to women and agrarian reform.

Elaine Sciolino, the New York Times Paris bureau chief who in 1979 accompanied Ayatollah Khomeini on that fateful journey from Paris to Tehran, and Abbas Milani the author of several books on Iran, accuse Farah Pahlavi of attempting in her memoirs to gloss over her husband's authoritarianism and rehabilitate his place in history. If looking at modern Iranian politics unencumbered by sectarian animus leads to the rehabilitation of the shah, Farah Pahlavi can by no means be accused of being the only person who has made such an attempt. The following quote from Desafíos a la libertad by Mario Vargas Llosa, the celebrated Peruvian writer, more than corroborates Empress Farah's account of the great achievements and the tragic fall of the Iranian monarch:

When the Shah was overthrown and the Ayatollahs took over, the world heaved a sigh of satisfaction: a tyrant had fallen and a popular government was born. Very few were then aware of the awful truth, that the real reason for the uprising of the Iranian people against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was not his megalomania and his wild spending, neither corruption, nor the crimes of the SAVAK his sinister secret police, but the agrarian reform destined to put an end to feudalism and transfer land belonging to the clergy to the mass of new landowners, as well as his efforts to westernize Iran by emancipating women and secularization of the government. It was these measures that aggravated the imams who then converted all mosques into centers of rebellion against 'sacrilege' and 'impiety.' The Shah did not fall because of the many evils he caused his people, but for the good things he tried to do.
In her book review (May 2, 2004), Sciolino states: "Farah Diba is so full of anger and bitterness that her memoir distorts more than it enlightens." Nothing can be further from the truth. Her memoirs abound with affection and sympathy for her countrymen. Even a prime minister like Mohammad Mossadeq, who nearly caused the shah's overthrow in 1953, is treated with fairness and praised for his "courage" and "firmness." The book takes pains to convey the message that today, more than ever, Iranians must stop dwelling on the past. They should move beyond the stage of bitter recriminations in order to make a joint effort in reconstructing their country. Concerning the divisive interpretations of events that led to Mossadeq's ouster — and which still morbidly occupy the thoughts of many Iranians — she writes: "My wish today is that all Iranians put an end to this fifty-year-old quarrel. It has no place in the Iran of tomorrow, which all of us should build together."

Remembering the best they have been able to achieve, and relying on the excellence and humanity of their culture, is essential for Iranians to pull the country out of its present quagmire. An Enduring Love is a forward-looking document and a valuable lesson in generosity, forgiveness, and reconciliation. It helps Iranians to recognize the true sources of their strength and to opt for a future worthy of their great heritage.

— Reza Bayegan is an Iranian-born commentator currently living in France.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/bayegan200405130855.asp

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.