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Earlier this week, I wrote about the dirty tricks campaign against journalist Amir Taheri following his revelation that, in a private meeting in Iraq last July with Iraqi leaders, Barack Obama tried to persuade them to delay the agreement being hammered out with the US government on a draw-down of the American military presence. According to this account, which quoted Iraq’s foreign minister Hoshya Zebari (pictured), Obama had thus privately sought to undermine an American government foreign policy initiative – an explosive revelation. Taheri subsequently dismissed as tendentious Camp Obama’s response which he said deliberately confused two separate agreements under...

The way Barack Obama talks of Iraq, you'd think the whole county is a sea of fire and blood, created by the United States. So he might be surprised to learn that tour operators in Europe and the Middle East are touting this "sea of fire and blood" as a new holiday destination. One program just put on the market by Terre Entiere, a leading French tour operator, offers a "Christmas Pilgrimage" in December to Iraq's biblical sites, some of which date back more than 2,000 years. Another program starts in January. Called "Forgotten History," it includes visits to some...

Yet more disturbing evidence of Barack Obama’s patent unsuitability for high office has dropped like a stone having briefly surfaced in the mainstream media. Last Monday, Amir Taheri reported in the New York Post that, while campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Obama tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence. This meant a number of things. First, the delay would keep US troops in Iraq until after the 2010 deadline for withdrawal proposed by Obama himself – thus showing, said Taheri, that...

On Monday, in an opinion piece published in the New York Post, I suggested that Senator Barack Obama had urged Iraqi leaders to postpone making an agreement with the United States until there was a new administration in Washington. I said this because Obama himself had said it. By trying to second-guess the present administration in its negotiations with Iraq, Obama ignored a golden rule of American politics. I first learned about that rule from Senator Edward Kennedy more than 30 years ago. During a visit to Tehran, Kennedy received a few Iranian reporters for a poolside chat. The big...

Story growing legs? I'm surprised it's being folowed up on.

http://www.againstobama.com/2008/09/obama-tried-

AHMADINEJAD'S NEW ENEMY: WOMEN By AMIR TAHERI September 6, 2008 -- IN one of his last sermons before his death, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini warned of "three threats" to his vision of Islam: the US, the Jews and women. Two decades later, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks he has the United States and the Jews in hand - and is moving on the third "enemy." Women were the first to demonstrate against Khomeini's regime with a mass rally in Tehran on March 8, 1979 - less than a month after the mullahs had seized power. Over the next decade, the authorities...

BACK TO JIMMY - What Biden Pick Really Signals BY choosing Sen. Joseph Biden as his vice-presiden tial running mate, Barack Obama sent three messages. The first two are implicit admissions that Hillary Clinton had a point in the primaries. The third tells us more of what Obama means by "change." Biden is supposed to make up for Obama's lack of the knowledge and experience needed to leader on national security and international affairs. And the Delaware senator, with his humble working-class origins, is also meant to reassure the "simple folk" that Obama seems to be losing. But the third...

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

Missiles of Illusion Remember al-Qaher and al-Zafer? You don't? Well, what about al-Hussein and al-Abbas? No, again? The first two were the names of missiles that the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser relied upon as "secret weapons" in his promised "Battle of Destiny" in 1967. The other two were names of Saddam Hussein's missiles that were supposed to secure him victory in his "Mother of Battles" in 1991. We now have to learn the names of two other missiles, Shahab and Zelzeleh presented by Iran's Khomeinist rulers as in what they regard as an inevitable war against the United States...

Tehran's Tricks: Plays Rope-A-Dope On Nukes August 1, 2008 TOMORROW is the deadline for Iran to respond to the latest offer on its nuclear program. The package, shaped by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany and offered in Geneva two weeks ago, offers a way out of the impasse. But don't expect Tehran to call the lead negotiator, European Union foreign-policy czar Javier Solana, to say it's accepted the deal. Iran has made it clear it doesn't intend to show any flexibility. "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad set the tone Wednesday in...

Spiderman in Tehran 25/07/2008 By Amir Taheri "A picture is worth a thousand words!" This is the proverb invented by an American photographer in the 1920s but ascribed to the Chinese for good effect. While not always true, like all other proverbs, it is surprisingly accurate on some occasions. No picture could replace a thousand words by Neffari or Roumi. But no number of words could replace the 1990 photo of an Afghan teenage girl with terror in her green eyes, reflecting two decades of war and famine. Sometimes, however, words are needed to reveal the hidden meanings of a...

Iran's Brutal Labor Crackdown New York Post Amir Taheri A year ago last Saturday, Ali Khamenei ordered the abduction of trade-union leader Mansour Osanloo. In so doing, Iran's top ruling mullah hoped to kill in infancy the independent trade-union movement that Osanloo had launched in '05 with the help of colleagues among bus drivers and conductors in Tehran. A year later, Osanloo is still in prison, sentenced to five years on a charge of "undermining the security of the Islamic Republic." Yet the free-union movement that he inspired has spread like wildfire. Transport workers in Tehran and its suburbs have...

Sufism, Sophistry and Politics 27/06/2008 By Amir Taheri Bombing the Islamic Republic's nuclear installations would turn the Middle East into a "ball of fire". The warning comes from Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Muhammad El-Baradaei. The "ball of fire" is a poetic expression, and I wondered where it came from. I thought of Johnny Cash's famous song, The Ring of Fire. However, a friend suggested that the image came from a qasida by the great Egyptian Sufi Ibn al-Farid. That Egyptians, besides being masters of jokes (nokats), have a poetic bend of mind is to their credit....

The Offer He Will Refuse May 09, 2008 Asharq Alawsat Amir Taheri Will you take an offer if you knew that by refusing it you would get a better one? The answer from Tehran is an emphatic no, and concerns the latest "generous package" that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany put together in London last week. The “package” shaped after days of hard bargaining between the United States and the European Union on one side, and Russia and China on the other, is designed to persuade the Islamic Republic to break the diplomatic logjam...

Why Does Ahmadinejad Want Russian Troops in Iran? 25/04/2008 By Amir Taheri Why is the leadership in Tehran anxious to give Russia the right to land troops in Iran? The question is not fanciful. The Islamic Republic is conducting a devious campaign to prepare public opinion for that eventuality. The message is relayed through deliberately vague terms that diplomats understand immediately while the general public does not. The device is to revive two treaties that most students of Iranian history thought were dead and buried long ago. The first is the 1921 Treaty that the government of Sayyed Ziauddin Tabatabai,...

Murder's Mess for Muqtada April 16, 2008 New York Post Amir Taheri Riad al-Noori liked to boast that a "host of angels" protected him, along with his 250 heavily armed bodyguards. Yet, he has just been gunned down in his home in Najaf, Iraq's principal "holy" city, by a three-man hit team that managed to get away without any of the angels or bodyguards making a move. Noori was a bad man but an important player in the dirtiest corner of Iraqi Shiite politics. He headed the special bureau of Muqtada al-Sadr, the maverick mullah sponsored by Tehran. Himself a...

April 10, 2008 -- A GAMBLE that proved too costly. That's how analysts in Tehran describe events last month in Basra. Iran's state-run media have de facto confirmed that this was no spontaneous "uprising." Rather, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) tried to seize control of Iraq's second-largest city using local Shiite militias as a Trojan horse. Tehran's decision to make the gamble was based on three assumptions: * Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wouldn't have the courage to defend Basra at the risk of burning his bridges with the Islamic Republic in Iran. * The international force would be...

Unconditional Talks with Iran Could Lead to War Mar. 21, 2008 Talk to almost anybody in Washington about foreign policy these days and you are likely to hear that Iran is the number one "international problem" for the United States. Pundits and politicians are unanimous that dealing with the Islamic Republic will be one of the key issues of the presidential election campaign. The question is: what to do about Iran? It is clear that the leadership in Tehran, boosted by last week's parliamentary elections, is in no mood to offer concessions. The choice facing policymakers is between standing up...

Judging by the way much of the Western media is dealing with the Iraq War's fifth anniversary, we're still fighting the acrimonious debates of 2002 and early 2003. Focusing on the past, however, may prevent us from understanding what's happening in Iraq today and its effect on the broader region. The war had three objectives: * To dismantle the regime of terror created by Saddam Hussein and his Tikriti clan. * To restore to the Iraqi people the power that the Tikritis had usurped. * To help Iraqis build a new system that might, in time, become a model for...

...Most Americans judge a candidate based on his politics rather than his parents' religious background. In a country where everyone has a rich ethnic and religious background, Obama's family story wouldn't have sounded that exotic. Some Americans may have even regarded the Islamic part of Obama's family story as a plus for the candidate, if only because the biggest challenge to US global leadership todayscomes from forces speaking in Islam's name. Obama's efforts to distance himself from Islam contrasts with his innovative approach to US relations with its Islamist challengers. President Bush has chosen the "iron fist" - invading Afghanistan...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrives in Bagh dad tomorrow for what both sides call an "historic visit."... As the possibility of al Qaeda and its allies winning recedes, Iran is starting to focus on the prospect that a Shiite-dominated but pro-American Iraq might offer Iranians a rival model. So the Islamic Republic has determined not to let the Americans and their Iraqi allies succeed beyond defeating al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgency. As Ahmadinejad has put it several times, Tehran won't allow Iraq to have an "American future." In Tehran's eyes, America's historic mission was to remove the Khomeinist regime's...

Islam at the Ballot Box AMIR TAHERI February 21, 2008 Pakistan's election has been portrayed by the Western media as a defeat for President Pervez Musharraf. The real losers were the Islamist parties. The latest analysis of the results shows that the parties linked, or at least sympathetic, to the Taliban and al Qaeda saw their share of the votes slashed to about 3% from almost 11% in the last general election a few years ago. The largest coalition of the Islamist parties, the United Assembly for Action (MMA), lost control of the Northwest Frontier Province -- the only one...

The Conference of Arab Interior Ministers held its 25th annual session in Tunis last week - and singled out terrorism as "the principal threat" to the national security of the 22 countries of the Arab League. What took the ministers so long to understand what terrorism is doing to their nations? In fact, their predecessors discussed terrorism at the inaugural session a quarter-century ago; it has been a key item on every year's agenda. The problem was, the Arab states couldn't agree on what constituted terrorism. They shied away from a clear definition for fear that it might apply to...

The 'Manchurian Mullah' February 01, 2008 New York Post Amir Taheri AS the "student" arrives in a bulletproof limousine with heavily armed guards, his teachers, ignoring that he's two hours late, greet him deferentially. The scene takes place at the Shiite seminary in Qom, Iran's holy city. The 35-year-old "student": Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army, a militia often deemed one of Iran's chief assets in Iraq. Sadr has spent much of the last 10 months in Iran, living in a 14-bedroom villa in Tehran's posh Farmanieh neighborhood. From there, he travels 90 minutes to Qom twice a week,...

IRAN'S NEW PURGE - Slapping the 'Moderates' January 26, 2008 -- OPPONENTS of taking a tough line on Iran have always claimed that imposing sanctions (not to mention threatening military action) would strengthen the Islamic Republic's most radical elements. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice looks to have bought that argument. Last week, she agreed to water down the new sanctions that her advisers had devised against the Islamic Republic. -excerpt- Events inside Iran, however, provide a different picture. The Council of the Guardians of the Constitution, a 12-man committee of mullahs and their legal advisers, this week rejected applications from...

The Duel in Islam, Turkey's New Model VS. Iran's New York Post January 04, 2008 Amir Taheri For centuries, Iran and the Ottoman Empire, of which modern Turkey and Egypt were parts, fought for influence in the Muslim world. That changed when Turkish westernizers under Kemal Ataturk and their Iranian counterparts under Reza Shah Pahlavi decided that religion was the cause of their nations' decline. -excerpt- Turkey and Iran have reverted to their traditional roles by offering rival models of political Islam. -excerpt- The Iranian model began to emerge after the mullahs seized power in 1979 and proceeded to invent...

Lebanon Between Democracy and Civil War December 29, 2007 Ashrq Alawsat Amir Taheri As 2007 draws to a close it seems as if Lebanon is likely to replace Iraq in Middle East headlines. Still without a president and limping along under a caretaker government, Lebanon is manifesting the early signs of a failed state. At first glance, the crisis appears to have been prompted by the failure of the parliament to elect a new president. In reality, however, the problem goes beyond the mere election of a president. After all, the Lebanese political system is centred on the parliament with...

That figure is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who became mayor of Tehran less than two years ago. He won the presidency in a landslide, crushing the mullah-cum business tycoon Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the pillars of the regime since its inception in 1979. Ahmadinejad's victory means that Khamenehi, who has established himself as head of the most radical faction within the Khomeinist establishment, now controls all levers of power for the first time. He will now be able to put his own men in charge of all key government departments. Any idea of Western-style reforms to please the restive middle classes...

Iran: Hope is No Substitute for Policy 23/11/2007 Amir Taheri With all attention focused on the conflict between the Islamic Republic and the United Nations over the nuclear issue, little notice is taken of the power struggle within the Khomeinist ruling elite in Tehran. What impact will that struggle have on the broader conflict between Tehran and the UN? Would the outcome of that struggle determine whether Iran would provoke a new war in the region? These questions are currently debated within policymaking circles in both Europe and the United States. While the predominant American view is that any effect...

Who Are Iran's Revolutionary Guards? November 15, 2007 Amir Taheri The scene is a board meeting of Bank Sepah, Iran's second-largest financial institution, in Tehran. The directors are waiting for the sardar (literally "head-owner") to arrive. But the sardar is in a changing room, shedding his uniform for a civilian suit. The man in question is Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the new commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which owns and controls the bank. Most Americans already know more about the IRGC than they'd like to. In September the Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of a nonbinding resolution...

<p>'EDUCATIONAL": That's how President Vladimir Putin's entourage described the Russian's recent whirlwind trip to Tehran.</p> <p>Islamic Republic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hyped the 36-hour visit as a "historic event." Some Western commentators even suggested that Putin and Ahmadinejad planned to create an axis to counter Western influence in the Middle East.</p>

'Che Like Chamran' is a Paradox October 17, 2007 Gulf News Amir Taheri In his latest video-taped message, Al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden tried to lay the foundations for an alliance between radical Islamism and Western leftist "progressisim". He quoted with admiration a number of American and European leftists, including Noam Chomsky, the polemicist-cum-linguist who believes that the United States is a "rogue state" and the source of all evil on earth. The dream of an Islamist-Marxist alliance, however, is not confined to Bin Laden and Al Qaida. It also plays a part in the overall strategy of Iran....

New French Foreign Policy Takes Shape September 22, 2007 Asharq alAwsat Amir Taheri Earlier this week, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner set the cat among the pigeons by announcing that the Western democracies had to prepare for war to stop the Islamic Republic in Tehran from developing a nuclear arsenal. To be sure, Kouchner, always a man of peace, did not present war as the only option. In fact, he went out of his way to insist that every effort should be made to resolve the crisis through peaceful means. What was refreshing in Kouchner's comment was the fact that...

Tehran's Campus Crackdown New York Post Amir Taheri As millions of Iranians prepare for the new school year, the scene is being set for what could be a long hot autumn on university campuses across the nation. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has promised to "cleanse" the Iranian educational system of what he calls "the corrupt influence of the infidel" and has mobilized a special militia to crush the expected student revolts. The radical president refers to his "academic cleansing" plan as "The Second Great Islamic Cultural Revolution." The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini closed the universities and launched the first "Great Islamic...

Defeat Made in Washington September 14, 2007 Asharq Alawsat Amir Taheri While some US politicians claim that the war is lost, a broader analysis of the existential struggle between two visions of the world may provide a different picture. The trick that the party of defeat uses is simple: reduce the larger struggle to the war in Iraq, then further reduce it to the success or failure of the so-called "surge"; then proceed to show that, despite the presence of 22,000 additional US troops, the terrorists still manage suicide attacks. The conclusion: the war is lost; let's run away as...

Iran's War on the Kurds September 12, 2007 The New York Post Amir Taheri For the last year at least, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the back bone of the Islamic Republic in Iran, has been engaged in a bloody war against Kurdish rebels in four provinces bordering Iraq. Initially, the authorities in Tehran tried to keep the war a secret, referring to it only occasionally as "operations against evildoers." However, things changed last February when "evildoers" destroyed a Revolutionary Guard combat helicopter, killing nine officers - including the regional military commander, Gen. Saeed Qahhari. The incident took place in...

Iran: Muscle Power vs. Brain Power September 08, 2007 Asharq Alawsat Amir Taheri What are the duties of a true believer on the first night of his burial? How did Ayatollah Dast-Ghayb achieve martyrdom? What was the name of the lion who cried over Imam Hussein's martyred corpse in the desert of Karbala? These are some of the questions that young Iranians must answer before gaining admission to higher education. The new interview system is part of a project designed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to "cleanse" Iranian higher education from what he regards as "the polluting influence of the Infidel"....

When People Refuse to be Terrorized 27/07/2007 In every terrorist war there comes a time when even the deadliest operations begin to lose impact. Every human endeavor is subject to the law of diminishing returns. In the case of terrorism, whose aim is to cow the adversary into submission, this means a growing refusal by the adversary to be cowed. In time, terror also loses whatever initial support it might have enjoyed as more and people discover its ugly face. This maybe what is happening in the Muslim world now. The latest surveys show that support for suicide-murder operations is...

Iran's Revolutionary Guard: Monolith or Jigsaw? August 24, 2007 Asharq Alawsat Amir Taheri For a quarter of a century, the regime established by Khomeini has been labelled a “mullahrchy”, a theocracy dominated by the Shi’ite clergy. Now, however, those familiar with the Iranian situation know that a majority of Shi’ite clerics never converted to Khomeinism and did not endorse the Islamic Republic. In the past few years, especially since the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President in 2005, those mullahs who had converted to Khomeinism have lost some of their power privileges. Today, it is safe to say that the...

Iran has just carried out the largest wave of executions since 1984. It is early dawn as seven young men are led to the gallows amid shouts of "Allah Akbar" (Allah is the greatest) from a crowd of bearded men as a handful of women, all in hijab, ululate to a high pitch. A few minutes later, the seven are hanged as a mullah shouts: "Alhamd li-Allah" (Praise be to Allah). The scene was Wednesday in Mashad, Iran's second most populous city, where a crackdown against "anti-Islam hooligans" has been under way for weeks. The Mashad hangings, broadcast live on...

Saving the Iraqi Situation August 04, 2007 Arab News Amir Taheri When President George W. Bush launched his so-called “surge” policy in Iraq last year he based it on a key assumption: The US would improve the security situation in Baghdad and its environs while the Iraqi leadership takes the steps to translate military gains into political progress. With the “surge” in its third months of full gear, even the most critical observers agree that while violence is still raging on a daily basis, the security situation in Baghdad and the two most turbulent provinces of Diyala and Anbar has...

Iranian Workers Are On the March July 31, 2007 Gulf News Amir Taheri The way part of the Western left portrays Iran, one would believe that here we have a progressive regime opposed by small numbers of rich reactionaries beholden to the United States. Blinded by anti-Americanism, the so-called left in the US and the European Union fails to see the true nature of the current struggle in Iran. American intellectuals of the left such as Michael Moore, Sean Penn and Noam Chomsky have persuaded themselves that anyone who shouts "Death to America!" is fighting for "repressed humanity" and worthy...

What would you do when faced with a cash flow problem? You might try to curb expenditure, work harder to earn more, borrow money, or, when all else fails, put up the family jewels for sale. The latter is precisely what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration is trying to do as it faces a cash shortage. Signs that the government may be running out of money have multiplied in recent months. Tens of thousands of civil servants, including school teachers, have not been paid since January. Bills from private contractors working for the government are piling up, threatening the survival of...

How Supreme Is Iran's Supreme Leader? July 23, 2007 The Washington Institute for Near East Policy Patrick Clawson and Mehdi Khalaji Reports that Ayatollah Ali Meshkini has either died or is on the brink of death shed light on the nature of power in Iran. Meshkini is speaker of the Assembly of Experts -- a body that, despite its traditionally minor role in Iranian politics, is constitutionally empowered to not only elect a new Supreme Leader if the post becomes vacant, but also to dismiss a sitting leader. Current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei cannot be pleased that this body may...

Iran: The Conspiracy that Wasn't July 20, 2007 The New York Post Amir Taheri . . . THOUGH IT DOES SEEM A FINE IDEA Esfandiari: Hardly a "foreign plotter." EVER since its creation in 1979, the Islamic Republic in Iran has been obsessed with conspiracy theories, especially "foreign plots" to topple it. This paranoia was demonstrated again Wednesday with the televised confessions of two U.S. citizens of Iranian origin arrested in Tehran and accused of working for the "Great Satan." To most Iranians who watched the sordid show, the two "enemies of Islam" seemed unlikely heroes of an international conspiracy....

HAMAS gunmen celebrated their victory over Fatah yesterday by parading the bullet-ridden corpses of the rival faction's fighters in the streets of Gaza City.

IN Persian mythology, no warrior worth his salt would enter battle before indulging in a good dose of rajaz. Put simply, rajaz translates as boasting. The term, however, encompasses other meanings. The hero steps into the battlefield, draws his sword, swirls several times and then stops to address the adversary who has likewise taken up position. He might recite an ode recalling the martial deeds of his ancestors. Or he might declaim a satirical sonnet mocking the enemy. In the modern military lexicon, rajaz functions as psychological warfare. ....................................................... The Guard's commanders prefer a strategy of low-intensity operations and proxy...

Iran's Crackdown - Hostage Crisis a Distraction? April 05, 2007 New York Post Amir Taheri Was the crisis over the capture of the British host ages part of a smoke screen for a crackdown on dissidents in Iran? (excerpt) The crackdown is beginning to gather pace. Several publications critical of government have been shut down... (excerpt) And now the regime seems to be setting the stage for show trials that recall the worst days of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. Last month, a member of the Majlis, the regime's ersatz parliament, was sent to prison for six years on trumped-up...

April 6, 2007 Here’s a way to deal with the scorpion Iran needs a taste of its own mischievous medicine Amir Taheri While everyone should be happy that the 15 British servicemen are home from Tehran, it is, perhaps, too early to uncork the bubbly. For the undeclared war that the Islamic Republic has waged against Western democracies since 1979 is far from over. A reminder of this came just as the 15 captives boarded a plane for London, when gunmen linked to Moqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi cleric working for Tehran, killed four British soldiers in Basra in an ambush....