Iranian Alert -- May 23, 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.

Iran gives IAEA initial report on atomic program

May. 22, 2004 17:13
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
VIENNA, Austria

Iran has delivered its initial declaration of its nuclear program to the U.N. atomic watchdog, a key step ahead of an agency meeting next month to assess suspicions that it is covertly trying to make weapons, the agency said Saturday.

The Tehran regime handed over the dossier on Friday to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the documents "should provide broader information about Iran's nuclear activities," IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said.

The Vienna-based agency will work to assess the "correctness and completeness" of the declaration, and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei will deliver a report to the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors when it meets on June 14, Gwozdecky said.

Iran was obligated to provide the declaration under a so-called additional protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which allows international inspectors to conduct intrusive unannounced checks of its nuclear facilities.

ElBaradei has said his inspectors are getting the access they want in Iran but need additional information.

The United States has long maintained that Iran _ part of U.S. President George W. Bush's "axis of evil" along with Iraq and North Korea _ is not telling the truth when it says its nuclear programs are geared only toward generating energy. Washington insists that Iran's real goal is to make arms.

The U.S. House of Representatives this month accused Iran of "continuing deceptions and falsehoods" involving development of nuclear weapons, alleging in a resolution that "it is abundantly clear that Iran remains committed to a nuclear weapons program."

Last month, U.S. officials said Iran may be running a covert military nuclear program parallel to the peaceful one it has opened to international scrutiny in efforts to dispel suspicions it has weapons ambitions.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said new intelligence on Iran's nuclear activities was strengthening suspicions of two programs _ one that IAEA inspectors have access to and another, run by the military and geared toward making nuclear weapons.

Iran has dismissed the allegations as "baseless" and has insisted it has offered the complete story on its nuclear program.

Iran said it suspended uranium enrichment last year under international pressure but continued manufacture of uranium-enriching centrifuge components. In April, it said it had also stopped building centrifuges.

Iran's nuclear aims first came under international scrutiny after the IAEA discovered a covert centrifuge facility in the central city of Natanz.

Since the initial discovery of the centrifuges, traces of weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium; new, more advanced centrifuge prototypes; and suspicious covert experiments that can also have military applications have increased suspicions.

Last year, IAEA inspectors found radioactive particles that had been enriched to weapons-grade level _ higher than what Iran requires for fuel for a nuclear reactor. Iran said the particles came from imported equipment.

Although the U.N. agency has no proof that Iran has enriched uranium to weapons levels or has attempted to build a bomb, it suspects the Iranians have the expertise to do so, ElBaradei said earlier this month.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1085208930525

Iran - A theocracy at the tipping point

Ottawa Citizen - By Michael Petrou
May 22, 2004

Conservative religious beliefs still command much loyalty in Iran. But more and more, Iranians openly disparage the ruling clerics, drink smuggled alcohol , watch MTV and, if they are women, wear their headscarves perched precariously on the back of their heads. It is a nation ready for change.

ESFAHAN, Iran - In a trendy coffee shop in Esfahan's Christian Armenian quarter, four Muslim men sit at a low table near the bar, smoking cigarettes and drinking espresso.

The coffee shop's stereo is playing Green Day's Time of Your Life. Several of the young men and women in the cafe and on the sidewalk outside have bandages on their noses, the result of recent plastic surgery -- a popular trend among young Iranians who can afford it.

Nasser Behruz, a heavyset man with thinning black hair, uses a piece of chocolate to scoop foam from his small cup of espresso and talks about change. Unlike most of the cafe patrons, he's old enough to remember the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and has watched the country transform since.

"Look at this," he says, waving his hand at the young men and women sitting in the cafe with their foreheads centimetres apart. "Ten years ago, this would not be possible ... Things are getting better, but slowly, very slowly. I don't know what will happen in the future, but I hope the changes continue."

I order a malt beverage that contains no alcohol, which prompts Mr. Behruz to talk about his favourite alcoholic drinks and the occasional house parties he throws for his friends.

"Sometimes if I have a party and there is a lot of music and dancing and my neighbour calls, then the police will come. But it's not a problem," he says, and rubs his thumb and forefinger together to indicate a bribe.

"I give them something and they go away."

Mr. Behruz invites me to his apartment for a few drinks.

"The government doesn't like Iranians talking to foreigners," his friend says. "If they see us talking to a tourist, we get questioned. But it's OK. We thought you were Iranian, and the police will, too. Let's go."

On the outside wall of Mr. Behruz's apartment building someone has spray-painted "Down with women who don't wear the hijab."

"Must have been some Islamic person who did this," he says.

We spend the evening drinking a clear and potent moonshine that has been smuggled into the country from the Kurdish areas of Iraq in two-litre pop bottles. In Mr. Behruz's kitchen, we mix the alcohol with Mecca Cola and fruit juice.

Mr. Behruz tells me he is an atheist, and we have a long, spirited conversation about whether God exists.

After a couple of hours, Mr. Behruz puts on a video of the Iranian singer Googoosh performing at Maple Leaf Gardens. The singer had been banned from performing by Iran's fundamentalist clerics after the Islamic Revolution and was only permitted to leave the country a few years ago. She promptly launched a triumphant world tour to capacity audiences.

As we work our way through the bottle, Mr. Behruz becomes a little more animated. Like every other Iranian I speak with, he says he doesn't want the United States to overthrow Iran's government. (The only person I meet in Iran who thinks this would be a good idea is a visiting businessman from Afghanistan.)

But Mr. Behruz is desperate for regime change.

"If the Americans come here I will shoot them," he says.

"But they must go, the mullahs. They must go. I don't know how. Maybe we will have another people's revolution. I think our spirit is like France, and French democracy is best for us."

Late that night, Mr. Behruz and I walk across the lower level of the exquisite Khaju Bridge spanning Esfahan's Zayandeh River. A group of middle-aged men has gathered beneath the bridge's vaulted archways to take advantage of the structure's shower-like acoustics and sing. One man plays a flute and another earnestly belts out a Googoosh song: "Of all the men in the world, you're the one for me ..."

- - -

I leave Esfahan and travel northwest, across the Iranian plateau toward the mountainous borders of Iraq and Turkey.

It is a rugged and seductive part of the country, frequented by nomads and smugglers. Most of the people who live here are Kurds, Turkic Azaris, and Armenian and Assyrian Christians.

Kurds in Iran have their own distinct language and culture. And, unlike the majority of Iranians who are Shiite Muslims, Iranian Kurds practise Sunni Islam. However, even though heavy fighting raged in 1979 between Kurdish separatists and the country's new Islamic regime, few Iranian Kurds today want outright independence from Iran.

Most would prefer greater autonomy, more democracy and the freedom to practise Islam as they see fit.

Kurdish friends invite me to a wedding in a village near the city of Mahabad.

Women wearing beautiful, brightly coloured dresses and no headscarves dance hand-in-hand with men while energized musicians sing and play horns and stringed instruments.

Guests hand the singer wads of cash with their names written on the bills. The singer reads the names and sings their praises without missing a beat. The dancers hold hands in a line and move in a counter-clockwise circle.

The man leading the dance twirls a handkerchief above his head, knocking blossom petals from an overhanging tree, adding to the riot of colour.

"The Persians dance with the men and women separate," one guest says. "We Kurds dance together. It causes some problems with the Islamic people, but I don't care.

"We Kurds are Muslims, too. But Islam isn't telling women to cover their faces. We don't do that."

- - -

Christianity has existed in Iran since before the advent of Islam.

An Assyrian church in the northwestern city of Tabriz is built on the ruins of a much older church, believed to have been founded by one of the three Magi, or wise men, who returned to Persia after visiting the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem.

Today, about 300,000 Iranians are Christians, mostly ethnic Armenians.

"We don't feel isolated here," says Violet, a young Armenian woman in Esfahan, where the Persian shah settled a large community of Armenian Christians during the early 17th century.

"We have been here for 400 years and it is our home. Maybe our motherland is elsewhere, but this is our birth land. We have deep roots here and the attachment in our hearts is strong."

Privately some Armenians will admit to "misunderstandings" between their communities and Iran's government since the Islamic Revolution.

"Obviously sharia law isn't natural to Christians," one man says.

"But our religious rights are respected. We celebrate all our holy days, even national days commemorating battles between Armenians and Persians ... And we have our representatives in parliament. They represent us and help us reclaim our rights."

But if the older Armenian and Assyrian churches in Iran are at least officially protected, the regime does not tolerate evangelism. Muslims who convert are considered apostates and are subject to harsh punishment. Most evangelical churches in the country have gone underground.

"Me, personally, I must evangelize privately, in people's homes," says Sharif, 26, an Assyrian man from Tabriz who joined a local Protestant church as an adult.

"If the government found out, there would be a lot of problems for me."

Iran is also home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East outside of Israel.

Their history here began 2,500 years ago when the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great captured Babylon and freed the Jewish slaves. Some elected to stay in Persia rather than return to Palestine, and subsequent generations of Jews immigrated here to escape the persecution of Greeks and Romans.

Today, Muslims in the Iranian city of Shiraz speak casually about the numerous Jewish merchants in the city they do friendly business with.

"They're Iranian, just like the rest of us," one man says.

But the attitude of the clerics in the Iranian government is less benign.

In 2000, a revolutionary court convicted 10 Shiraz Jews of spying for Israel, in a trial widely regarded outside Iran as unfair. All the convicted men were released within three years, but the incident exposed the theocracy's continued intolerance.

Officially, foreigners visiting a synagogue in Iran need permission, and a guide, from the Ministry of Information and Islamic Guidance. But I simply ask my taxi driver to take me to the "Jewish church," and he does.

The synagogue is located behind unmarked walls about a block away from a Christian church. Inside, two dozen worshippers are preparing themselves for prayer. Several men who speak with me are clearly uneasy about my presence and continually look over my shoulder to where my driver is parked outside.

One man seems to suggest in broken English that I come back later when I am alone. But the entire atmosphere is uncomfortable. I leave quickly and do not return.

- - -

It would be misleading, however, to imply that all Iranians are opposed to the ruling clerics, or that support for the religious fundamentalists running Iran is limited to an old guard of aging revolutionaries.

In Shiraz, I visit several madrassas, or Islamic schools, and other centres of Islamic study that are crowded with young scholars and new students.

I am guided through the city by Rezvan, a 42-year-old man with a quiet voice and thick black beard. In one of his eyes, the pupil appears to have somehow burst and the inky blackness has leaked into the lower half of his iris.

I assume he supports the religious clerics because of his beard, a rarity among most Iranians, but we have barely started walking toward the first madrassa when he says: "Iran today is like Europe of the Renaissance."

"We want to become secular," he continues. "Religion and government should not go together. Most of us feel this way. But the government does not want what the people want."

At the madrassa, we visit with Hussein, a young scholar of 20 who invites us to his whitewashed room, where he sleeps and studies. The walls are lined with religious books and decorated with a photograph of him when he was about 12 years old.

We sit on the floor, looking out over the madrassa's courtyard and drink tea that Hussein boils on a gas burner in his room. Below us in the courtyard, a young student sits cross-legged on the floor opposite a cleric with an open copy of the Koran between them, discussing passages from the holy book.

Hussein wants to be sure that I know Muslims respect Jesus, and asks why Easter is important to Christians. He says he will study Islam for 12 more years, likely much longer.

"I want to spend my life helping to advertise Islam," he says. "It doesn't matter if it is in a mosque or a school. It is all part of the same life."

On our way to a neighbouring Islamic study centre, Rezvan warns me not to refer to the clerics there as "mullahs."

"They don't like to be called mullahs, because they think it makes them sound like Osama bin Laden," Rezvan says. He pauses before adding: "But there really isn't that much difference."

All the clerics we talk to at the centre are gracious and polite. One insists on personally driving us across town to our next appointment, clutching his robes around his tall frame before folding himself into his tiny car and plunging into the city's chaotic traffic.

Another tries to explain the role of religion in Iran's government.

"The Koran gives guidance for all parts of our lives: culture, family, science," he says.

"And so it is natural for our religion to be part of government as well. The two are connected."

The cleric is a small man with a scraggly goatee and sideburns, and a face smooth except for a few wrinkles around his eyes. He is 30 years old but almost looks like a teenager.

I mention this to Rezvan after we leave the study centre and sit down to a glass of tea and a pot of lamb stew at a bazaar teahouse. Rezvan sticks a small piece of sugar under his lip and strains his tea through the sugar as we talk.

"Of course, he looks young," Rezvan scoffs. "The mullahs never do any work."

- - -

Iran is approaching a tipping point.

Religious conservatives still command the loyalty of some. But the gulf between the Iranian people and their government is deep and widespread.

Many Iranians openly disparage the ruling clerics, drink smuggled alcohol in their homes and at parties, watch MTV on their satellite televisions and, if they are women, wear their headscarves perched precariously on the back of their heads.

State-censored newspapers are full of propaganda against Israel and the United States. But a private bookstores near Tehran University prominently displays copies of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

For a while it seemed possible that President Mohammed Khatami and parliamentary reformers might change the system from within. But the conservative clerics cynically crippled the reform movement before the last election by banning reformist candidates, and many Iranians who seek democracy have now turned their backs on Mr. Khatami and his contemporaries.

"We have had the so-called reformers for six years with nothing to show for it," one student says. "They think saving the system is more important than the needs of the people. They are a dead end."

The clerics will defend their power. And indeed, the death of Zahra Kazemi, the Canadian photojournalist who was murdered while a prisoner at Iran's notorious Evin prison, and the coverup of her killing betray both the determination and desperate depravity of Iran's religious dictatorship. But a confrontation with Iran's people is inevitable.

Before coming to Iran, I had thought the country would be divided between young and old, between those who supported the Islamic Revolution and those who can't remember it. And many of the most active dissidents are young people and students.

But one of the most impressive people I met in Iran is Farouk Kahn, an elderly scholar who lives in a southern Iranian city. Mr. Kahn has written more than 10 books on philosophy and poetry, all of which sit unpublished on the shelves of his apartment.

He was once imprisoned along with his daughters because of his secular and leftist beliefs, and there is little chance the clerics would allow his ideas to be published today, even a decade after his release.

During our evenings together, Mr. Kahn loved to drink brandy when it was available, and Kurdish moonshine when brandy was not, and talk about religion, women and poetry.

He would sing Iranian folksongs and recite long verses from the Persian poet Hafez, a hero to many Iranians and something of a kindred spirit to Mr. Kahn, who shares the poet's love of wine and sex.

Around midnight, we'd usually retire to Mr. Kahn's living room to drink tea and watch his illegal satellite television, which beamed music videos, softcore pornography and programming from Iranian exile communities into his home.

When I left Mr. Kahn's home on my last night, he unwired a painting from his bedroom wall and pressed it into my arms, refusing all my attempts to give him something in return.

"I am 71 years old, 42 years older than you," Mr. Khan said. "And all my life I have been lucky to continue learning as if I were a young man. If you don't learn, if you don't continue to learn, you are frozen. The mullahs in Iran are frozen. They are trapped 1,400 years ago."

http://www.daneshjoo.org/generalnews/article/publish/article_6305.shtml

Michael Ledeen: Let Sadr be and go after Chalabi?

Lying into the Mirror
Misunderstaning the war on terror.

We have adopted our enemies' view of the world

May 21, 2004, 4:43 p.m.
National Review Online

Shortly after moving to Washington from Rome — we're talking late Seventies — I did a long interview with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan about the Carter administration's foreign policy. At a certain point, Moynihan elegantly summarized what had happened to us: "being unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies," he said, "Carter has adopted our enemies' view of the world." So, it seems have many of our policymakers in their panicky and incoherent decisions regarding Iraq.

First, the matter of the "abuses" of the prisoners. Maybe the temperature of the rhetoric has cooled enough for us to address the most important aspect of the debacle: Torture and abuse are not only wrong and disgusting. They are stupid and counterproductive. A person under torture will provide whatever statements he believes will end the pain. Therefore, the "information" he provides is fundamentally unreliable. He is not responding to questions; 99 percent of the time, he's just trying to figure out what he has to say in order to end his suffering. All those who approved these methods should be fired, above all because they are incompetent to collect intelligence.

Torture, and the belief in its efficacy, are the way our enemies think. And remember that our enemies, the tyrants of the 20th century, and the jihadis we are fighting now, are the representatives of failed cultures. Our greatness derives from the superiority of our culture, and we should, as the sports metaphor goes, stick with what got us here.

Second, our defeat in Fallujah. I had hoped that the tactic of enlisting Sunni leaders to assist in the defeat of the jihadis would accelerate the terrorists' defeat and enable us to round them up and clean out the city. But it turns out that it wasn't a tactic at all; it was a strategic retreat. Today, throughout the region, everybody knows that the bad guys outlasted us. We were forced out. The Sunni generals (the first of which, unforgivably, was one of Saddam's henchmen) just told everyone to cool it for a while, and the bad guys are now reorganizing for the next assault. Instead of smashing the terrorists, we set ourselves up for more casualties.

Worse yet, some of the crackpot realists in our military and their exhausted civilian commanders in State and Defense, have convinced themselves that this is the way to go, and they are now whispering to one another that we should adopt "the Fallujah model" in future engagements.

If that holds, then we have lost. Because it means that we have surrendered the initiative to the terrorists and will not destroy them in future engagements. That adds up to actively encouraging the enemy to attack us.

Third, is the decision to launch a preemptive strike against Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. Our enemies — religious fanatics and other advocates of tyranny — have long dreaded the emergence of an Iraqi leader with unquestioned democratic convictions, someone at once deeply religious and yet committed to the separation of mosque and state. Yet the State Department's and the CIA's Middle East gangs have hated him and fought him for more than a decade, because he is independent and while he is happy to work with them, he will not work for them. Moreover, he has often proved more knowledgeable, as when, in the mid-Nineties, he informed CIA that one of their fatuous little coup plots had been infiltrated by Saddam's agents. They laughed at him, but not for long. Soon thereafter an Iraqi intelligence officer called the CIA man in charge of the operation on his "secret" cell-phone number to say "listen carefully and you'll hear the final screams of your coup leader."

I am not sure if CPA — including State and CIA officials — has spent more man hours fighting Chalabi than fighting Moqtada al Sadr, but it's probably pretty close, and in any event somebody should ask Viceroy Bremer why he massed so much firepower to break into Chalabi's house and Kanan Makiya's house, and the offices of the INC, instead of doing the same to Moqtada, who at last account was still free to mobilize the masses of his faithful to kill us. Is this not proof positive of the total inversion of sound judgment of which Moynihan spoke so elegantly a quarter-century ago?

Now the usual unnamed intelligence sources are whispering to their favorite journalists that they have a "rock-solid case" showing that Chalabi was in cahoots with the Iranians. This, coming the same crowd that told President Bush they had a "slam-dunk case" on Iraqi WMDs, should arouse skepticism from any experienced journalist, but it doesn't (another grim sign that confusion reigns supreme in Washington these days). It's a truly paradoxically accusation, since the refusal of the American government to provide Chalabi with support and protection for the past decade is what drove him to find a modus vivendi with Tehran in the first place. And Chalabi is not alone in dealing with the Iranians and their representatives in Iraq; it is hard to find any serious organization or any serious leader of any stripe — Kurdish, Shiite or Sunni, imam, mullah, or Ayatollah — who doesn't work with the Iranians. How could it be otherwise? We have shown no capacity to defend them against Iranian-supported terrorists. And terror works. Finally, it's hilarious to see this crowd of diplomats and intelligence officers attacking an Iraqi for talking too much to Iranians, when Powell's State Department and Tenet's CIA has been meeting with Iranians for years.

As I once wrote, the war against Saddam is nothing compared to the war against Ahmed Chalabi.

All of this is the inevitable result of the fundamental misunderstanding of the war against the terror masters. It is a regional war, not a war limited to a single country. Since we refuse to admit this, we are unable to design an effective strategy to win. Deceiving ourselves, we lie to the mirror, saying that defeats are really victories, that Baathists are our friends and independent minded Shiites are our enemies, and that appeasement of the mullahs will end their long war against the United States.

Has anyone told the president?

http://nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200405211643.asp

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