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U.S. Sizing Up Iran?

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Yassamine writes on the sort of campaign and solidarity with the Iranian People which needs to be built. Opposing war doesn't mean you have to support the mullahs.

Full text at link.

Our duty to Iran's working class

Speaking at a CPGB meeting in Manchester in support of Hands Off the People of Iran, Yassamine Mather makes the call for urgent and principled solidarity

It seems such a long time that there have been threats of military action against Iran without them being followed through that some people may have become a bit blasé. It is a bit like the boy who cried wolf too many times perhaps. However, the reality is that his time the threats are very serious.

The reasons why there are serious threats now have very little to do with the Iranian nuclear programme. Most people agree that the Iranian government exaggerates the stage it has reached and the west also exaggerates this - in regard to uranium enrichment, for example - both for their own reasons. I am not dismissing the nuclear issue altogether, but I do not think it is the reason why we are facing these serious threats.

There are other reasons. First and foremost there is the world economic crisis and the fact that the United States is in economic decline. It is feeling the pressure of both the crisis and the partial erosion of its hegemonic position - not to the extent that its hegemony is threatened by some competitor seeking to take over that role, of course. Because of that it cannot tolerate states like Iran - despite the fact that it follows every neoliberal instruction dictated by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and so on. The problem is that politically Iran is not playing the game that the hegemonic power wants it to play. For that reason it has to be taught a lesson.

Let me stress here - because within the Iranian left and opposition in general there is some confusion on this issue - I am not saying that the United States is threatened by China as a new emerging political power. China’s economic dependence on the US is well known, but, most importantly of all, China’s economic reserves are held in US dollars and in US banks: it would not be in the interest of the Chinese to wage an economic war against the United States; quite the reverse. And China too is very much affected by the economic crisis, just as many countries in the developing and emerging economies are facing its effects.

Leaving aside the effects of the economic crisis, the political reason the US needs to exert its power in the region arises from the fact that its position has been damaged by the two wars it has waged in Iraq and in Afghanistan. I am not using the word ‘defeat’ in this context, as it is more complicated than simply saying the US was defeated in Iraq: clearly it was not. But the outcome is certainly not what anyone in the US political establishment would have wanted: a political regime totally allied to the Iranian government. That must have been the worst-case scenario for American strategists. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq under the Ba’athist regime was a staunch opponent of the Iranians and its downfall has strengthened Iran. The same is also true of Afghanistan. Iran was no friend of the Taliban, but the Karzai regime has distanced itself at times from the US and has moved to find better relations with Iran - both with the supreme leader and with Ahmadinejad. The rapprochement between Iran and Afghanistan gives Iran influence in a very strategic part of the world. This strategic importance is not simply about oil (though there is the additional issue of the oil-rich Gulf region), but about its geopolitical significance.

As the Saudis keep telling the US, the two wars have produced Shia governments all the way from the borders of Iran to the Levant, and that is a serious matter. In the regional context I know that some people in the Stop the War Coalition have said that if Iran is attacked we will see demonstrations in every Arab country, not least Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood will be up in arms. The reality is that there is now another very forceful voice in addition to Israel telling the United States to go to war against Iran, and that voice is Saudi Arabia - and, by extension, some of the Sunni Islamic groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Anyone who has any understanding of the Gulf, who knows the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, will understand that would be their position as well - the MB has expressed this in various interviews. The opposition to Iran from the Saudis and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries is poisonous and vehement: you can hear it and you can feel it if you watch Al Arabiya television for 10 minutes. For them it is clear that Iran is the main enemy; they have forgotten about Israel. In fact Israel, Saudi Arabia and the GCC now have a common enemy: Iran.

Also we have now seen Hamas distancing itself from both Syria and Iran, contrary to what hopeful, and I assume uninformed, members of the STWC are telling us. Hamas has been issuing statements saying that if there is a war between Iran and Israel it will stay neutral. As someone who has never supported Hamas it frightens me that it would make such a statement. But that is the reality of the regional context and no manner of wishful thinking can change this. Iran has influence in the Middle East, but also many enemies, and the United States knows it.
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004757
 
Jerry_B said:
Maybe the CPGB can help restart the Tudeh...?

The Tudeh unfortunately closely collaborated with the mullahs at the start but its leaders and members ended up facing slaughter in prison. It wouldn't have a great amount of credibility within Iran.

Read other articles by Yassamine on this thread and on Iran: What Elections?

The Iranian Left is fractured, every time I open a cupboard another Left Party falls out. The Worker-communists are now in at at least four different organisations.

Yassamine is involved in Workers Left Unity Iran.

HOPI and indeed the CPGB can only offer support from the outside. Maybe the CPGB could support a particular Iranian Left party but it would be wrong for HOPI as a solidarity organisation to do so.

Whats needed though (imho) is a democatic socialist party which opposes imperialist intervention.
 
Barack Obama Prepares for War Footing

Last Friday, March 16, President Barack Obama may have quietly placed the United States on a war preparedness footing, perhaps in anticipation of an outbreak of war between Israel, the West, and Iran. A newly-propounded Executive Order, titled "National Defense Resources Preparedness," renews and updates the president's power to take control of all civil energy supplies, including oil and natural gas, control and restrict all civil transportation, which is almost 97 percent dependent upon oil; and even provides the option to re-enable a draft in order to achieve both the military and non-military demands of the country, according to a simple reading of the text. The Executive Order was published on the White House website.

The timing of the Order -- with little fanfare -- could not be explained. Opinions among the very first bloggers on the purpose of the unexpected Executive Order run the gamut from the confused to the absurd. None focus on the obvious sudden need for such a pronouncement: oil and its potential for imminent interruption.

continues

Article link
 
Maybe that's why Obama has suddenly become so pally with Cameron?
 
Hopi weekend conference: April 21-22, central London
http://hopoi.org/?p=1975

The danger of a new war in the Middle East is increasing every day. The war drums are beating ever louder, especially in Israel. Hands Off the People of Iran is hosting this weekend conference in order to highlight the dynamics behind the sable rattling. Sessions include:

1. War, imperialism and the capitalist crisis

2. Israel, Iran and the Middle East

3. The political economy of the Iranian regime

4. Solidarity with the people in Iran

Speakers confirmed so far include:

John McDonnell MP
Yassamine Mather (chair of Hopi)
Mohamad Reza Shalgouni (Rahe Kargar)
Moshe Machover, Israeli socialist
Anahita Hosseini (socialist student in exile)
Mike Macnair (CPGB).

Download a leaflet in English and in Farsi.

http://hopoi.org/wp-content/uploads/Hop ... 2-engl.pdf

http://hopoi.org/wp-content/uploads/Hop ... -farsi.pdf

Saturday and Sunday, April 21-22, University of London Union, Malet Street, London.

All welcome. More details to be confirmed asap
 
The Powers that be don't merely want to attack Iran. They want to invade Iran. This should have been obvious to everyone who can find Afghanistan and Iraq on a map since 2003.
The 'withdrawal' (not really true we have a 'private' army of contractors there who still answer to the CIA & still control the country and it's oil) is simply 'creating' the cover story. Next they'll stage a false flag attack and blame it on Iran and then masses of US troops will pour back into Iraq & Afghanistan in preparation for a 'retaliatory' invasion. When people like me point out an invasion was the plan all along,the 'withdrawal' will be pointed to as 'evidence' that it wasn't.
This,of course,also suggests that the bombings/attacks in Iraq are really being done by US contractors and or Islamic CIA assets (Al Qeada-which means they don't even have to lie as long as people don't know Al Qeada is controlled by the CIA.) These bombing will also further public support for a 're-occupation' of Iraq in preparation of an invasion of Iran.
 
I doubt that the USA would be in a hurry to re-occupy Iraq. But the new independant Iraq does not agree with their hostility towards Iran, and has become a thorn in their side. The coming war with Iran is probably one of the motives behind their attempts at destabilizing Syria, with the help of their Saudi and Qatari allies. And they would probably try to do the same to Iraq, and Lebanon along with it. Those countries have become collateral victims.

http://www.voltairenet.org/The-statemen ... e-Security

News analysis

Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the conspiracy against Lebanon and Iraq

The predicament endured by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the government of Qatar is major, considering that the defeat in Syria is placing the rulers of the Kingdom and the Qatari Emirate in an awkward position. It is consequently clear that Riyadh and Doha are planning to undermine the Lebanese and Iraqi situations to compensate for the great losses in the context of the conspiracy against Syria.

Firstly, the Saudi and Qatari officials are extremely concerned about the new Arab situation which will be generated by President Bashar al-Assad’s victory over the world war.
[......]

Secondly, all the political signs and facts on the field reveal that the Gulf rulers are trying to activate a wide-scale sabotage plan against Lebanon and Iraq to compensate for the losses and implement the American-Israeli inclination to prevent the bloc which includes Iran, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon from turning into a regional bloc opposed to America and Israel, while preventing any geographic, political or economic communication between those states –or at least obstructing it. This is due to the fact that the formation of this bloc would herald a strategic transformation in the region and constitute a nightmare to Israel and the Gulf governments, as its independence character could soon attract Jordan, Palestine and Egypt. Hence, work is ongoing to activate the presence of the gangs of takfir in Iraq and to escalate their operations, while trying to revive sectarian divisions and coordination between the extremist groups to break Iraq apart under the headline of federal states with enhanced prerogatives to prevent the establishment of an Iraqi central state. Indeed, such a central state following stability on the economic and the security levels in Iraq could turn the country into a worthy opponent, while its relations with Iran and Syria would cause a major setback for the colonial Israeli alliance.

Thirdly, in Lebanon the gathering of the terrorist gangs for which dens, camps and operations rooms were established, is motivated by the need to turn them into a combating force led by the Future Movement and the Lebanese Forces in parallel to the imminent and final settlement of the situation by Syrian state, in order to compensate for the failure in Syria by igniting the Lebanese situation. This step features a clear wager on the ability to deplete the Lebanese resistance through a sectarian strife being prepared in the North, the Bekaa and the camps, as an alternative option for the ability to strike the Syrian fort that is embracing the resistance.

Some experts are expecting the failure of the Gulf wager and believe that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is facing a difficult internal test which might shift its attention away from any other arenas. But clearly, the detonation of the situation in Lebanon is combining the security axis that is reviving the tools represented by the gangs of tafkir and the terrorist groups in Lebanon under the command of the Future Movement, and the Saudi attempts to bring Walid Jumblatt back to the March 14 alliance in order to remove the current parliamentary majority from power whenever Saudi Arabia chooses to do so.
 
Full text at link.

Time is fast running out
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004797

It is clear that the Obama administration is preparing US public opinion for war, writes Yassamine Mather

On Saturday April 14 Iran will attend talks with six world powers. The US has indicated this is Iran’s “last chance” to avoid military intervention and the Obama administration is taking very specific demands to the talks as preconditions for further negotiations: for example, Iran “must immediately close” a large nuclear facility allegedly built underneath a mountain if it wants to avoid a devastating strike.

Other “near term” concessions to avoid a potential military conflict include the suspension of high-level uranium enrichment and the surrender by Tehran of existing stockpiles of the fuel, according to senior US officials. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton made the usual noises about time “running out for diplomacy”, while expressing “doubts” about whether Iran has any real intention of negotiating a solution. In other words, preparing US public opinion for an attack that is possibly already scheduled.

The preconditions put Iran’s Islamic government in an impossible situation and, although Tehran might use the talks to buy more time, accepting such conditions would represent such a terrible humiliation that it would be tantamount to political suicide for a dictatorship whose unpopularity continues to rise. But, there again, the US is hardly aiming to make life easy of the theocracy. In Tehran, some senior clerics are hoping that the 12th Shia Imam will make his reappearance even sooner than they are apt to predict.

As for Washington, in an election year the Obama administration has decided it cannot afford to look “weak” on Iran, as the Republican right ups the pressure for military action. To add to the pressure, the US navy has announced the deployment of a second aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, to the Persian Gulf region, where it will join the USS Abraham Lincoln. This will increase its ability to launch a massive air war on Iran at short notice.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Centre for Research on Globalization quoted political analyst Ralph Schoenman to the effect that Nato and the US are arming Israel with missile capacity in relation to a “projected and planned attack upon Iran”, According to Schoenman, Italy’s sale of 30 M-346 training jets to Israel is part of these preparations. And the Israeli military has gained access to airbases in Azerbaijan, according to Mark Perry of the journal Foreign Policy:

“Obama administration officials now believe that the ‘submerged’ aspect of the Israeli-Azerbaijani alliance - the security cooperation between the two countries - is heightening the risks of an Israeli strike on Iran ... senior diplomats and military intelligence officers say that the United States has concluded that Israel has recently been granted access to airbases on Iran’s northern border.” One “senior administration official” is quoted as saying: “The Israelis have bought an airfield … and the airfield is called Azerbaijan.” [1]
 
Dear friends and supporters of Hands Off the People of Iran,

I am writing to you, as the threat of war against Iran further escalates. In response to this awful prospect, Hands Off the People of Iran has intensified its campaigning work and is seeking to draw new forces into the fight. For example, this month we are hosting an important conference to look at the political and economic dynamics behind the war drive (http://hopoi.org/?p=1975). Also, we are advertising Hopi’s message more widely with a full page advert in the New Statesman’s Iran special, available in late April. These two initiatives alone will set us back £4,000.

Hopi is run on a shoestring. We are totally reliant on the support of anti-war activists who recognise the unique value of our work for the cash to make it happen. That’s why I’m writing to you. We need donations big and small. If every comrade who thinks our campaign does a good job – that the anti-war movement needs a voice like Hopi’s – made a donation, then we could not simply fund the activities I describe above, but could look to expand our work and influence in the coming period.

You can donate via the Paypal button on our website (www.hopoi.org) or by sending a cheque to Hopi, PO Box 54631, London N16 8YE

I look forward to hearing from you - your help is much appreciated.

In solidarity,

Yassamine Mather
Chair, Hands Off the People of Iran

www.hopoi.org

[email protected]
__._,_.___
 
Mobilise against threat
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004808

We must mobilse against the threat of war with Iran says Yassamine Mather

On Saturday April 14, Iran attended talks on its nuclear programme with six world powers in Istanbul. In the end, this ‘summit’ was little more than talks about talks - to take place in May in Baghdad. The uneasy stand-off continues and the strong possibility remains of an attack on Iran within months. Indeed, the outcome of the meeting has provoked a degree of cynicism, with press outlets in the US, the UK and Israel pointing out that Syria now seems to have learned the ‘Iran method’ - that is, agree to talks simply to buy time and postpone intervention.

Israel’s so-called ‘frustration’ threatens to boil over - there is no guarantee that it will simply wait. A major Israeli TV station has reported that the country’s air force is psyched up for an attack on Iran. ­A reporter from Channel 10 spent several weeks interviewing pilots and other military personnel at an Israeli air base and remarked upon the palpable sense of excitement they displayed at the prospect of Israel’s first full-scale air campaign in 30 year. Many spoke openly about the “years of preparation” that are now almost over, as the momentum towards military action gathers pace. The reporter, Alon Ben-David, saw “dozens if not more planes” being readied to carry out an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, including F-15 fighter jets, escort planes and air tankers to refuel the squadron en route to its target.

An attack on Iran would be a disaster and threaten to unleash reactionary developments across the region. Hands Off the People of Iran has organised a school over the weekend on April 21-22 to arm comrades in the workers’ and progressive movement with a thorough understanding of the pressures that are now pushing towards another catastrophic war in the Middle East.
 
Full text at link.

Ideas to empower the anti-war movement
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/ideas-emp ... r-movement
Michael Copestake reports on HOPI's successful weekend school

Binyamin Netanyhu and Barack Obama: war threats
“The only thing that is certain is uncertainty,” said Labour MP John McDonnell in his talk at the April 21-22 weekend school organised by the Hands Off the People of Iran at the University of London Union.

Given the negotiations between the five members of the United Nations security council plus Germany and Iran that have just completed in Istanbul and are due to resume next month in May in Baghdad (of all the places to talk peace in the Middle East, could there be a more ironic one?) and the decline in the number of those mobilised on demonstrations and marches against war, the truth of this statement should be well noted by all. The continued threat of direct military action against Iran combined with factors such as the US electoral cycle constitute a heady and unpredictable brew.

The weekend school was part of the continued efforts of Hopi to reorientate the left against both the imperialist war drive and the sickening anti-working class regime of the Iranian state itself. Aiming to provide an analysis of the forces driving to war and the general condition of the Iranian state and society, Hopi brought together a range of speakers, including Iranian activists and exiles, National Union of Journalists president Donnacha DeLong, as well as comrade McDonnell himself. ...

Irrationality

The speaker for the first session on the Saturday was CPGB’s Mike Macnair, who sought to explain what he judged to be the increasingly irrational military adventures of the United States and its imperialist allies. These tend to end in social chaos, as in Iraq, rather than the imposition of some pax Americana, and comrade Macnair linked them to three distinctive cyclical tendencies within capitalism. ...

Iran working class

Iranian trade unionist and former political prisoner of the Iranian regime, Majid Tamjidi, gave an illuminating and hard-headed assessment of the plight of the Iranian working class, caught as it is in the vice of imperialist sanctions and neoliberal Islamic despotism.

What came through in comrade Tamjidi’s talk was the nightmarish coincidence of the needs of the US and Iranian states, which serves to push both further down the road towards military conflict. The bluster and bravado with which the Iranian regime responds to sanctions and threats of war feed US portrayals of Iran as intransigent and in need of a swift and harsh remedy. The missing element in the narratives of both the imperialist and Iranian governments is the masses themselves, yet they are being crushed under the weight of both sanctions and the neoliberal policies of the theocratic state, resulting in 60% of Iranians living below the poverty line, 12 million on insecure ‘instant dismissal’ temporary work contracts, and at least 30,000 deaths per annum in workplace accidents.

This focus on the desperate economic situation of Iran and the Iranian working class was picked up in a session on the second day on the political economy of Iran, addressed by Mohamed Shalgouni of the Organisation of Revolutionary Workers in Iran and Hopi chair Yassamine Mather.

The audience was straining to hear the words of comrade Shalgouni, not just because he was so quietly spoken, but because of the great interest in the things he had to say. He provided a compelling dissection of the role of the regime in the economy of Iran, of which 70% is directly or indirectly controlled by the state and its related bodies, increasingly under the auspices of utterly phoney privatisations that give ownership of companies to state and military officials technically at ‘arm’s length’ from the government in a kind of pocket-bursting, oligarchic give-away, last seen on a such a scale in the crash privatisations undertaken in the collapsing Soviet Union. That there can be such a bonanza for state bureaucrats and heavies is a legacy of the revolution, which resulted in the expropriation of the holdings of the royal family and a series of nationalisations. This self-interested gangsterism by the state, taken with three decades of increasingly severe sanctions, has led to the ruin of much of what remained of the Iranian economy and, with the possible closure of French car plants under the pressure of the United States, the situation grows more and more dire. ...

More focused on the immediate situation facing the wider world and its working class movement was the talk given by comrade Moshé Machover, co-founder of Israeli socialist party Matzpen. This was also the case with the panel discussion led by left-Labour stalwart John McDonnell MP, who humorously referred to himself and Jeremy Corbyn as the “parliamentary wing” of Hopi, Sarah McDonald, a runner in the previous weekend’s Vienna marathon in aid of Workers Fund Iran, and NUJ president Donnacha DeLong. ...

Edit to fix duplication.
 
Full text at link.

War threats and Iran's impoverished workers
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004823

The Iranian people are the main victims of the sanctions campaign, insists Majid Tamjidi

Iranian oilworker: white contracts
Over the last few years western governments have created an atmosphere of war against Iran and in the last few months severe sanctions have come into effect. In addition we face the threat of military attacks by Israel against Iran’s strategic centres, including nuclear facilities.

On the other hand, inside Iran the authorities - in particular supreme leader Ali Khamenei and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - have reacted to these threats with exaggerated bravado. The regime is trying to convince the population that these are just empty threats, that sanctions have had no effect and that Iran is capable of giving a fierce response to any military attack. On sanctions Ahmadinejad’s line is: ‘Even if we don’t sell any oil for two or three years we will have enough foreign currency to survive perfectly well.’ Of course, all this is taking place against the background of both secret and open negotiations with the west.

Both sides imbue their opponents with specific characteristics. The west portrays Iran as a dictatorship depriving its population of ‘human rights’, pursuing nuclear technology and thus threatening ‘world peace’, arguing that in order for a ‘democratic regime’ to be established in Iran, another Middle East war might be necessary. The Islamic regime states that it has no intention of producing nuclear arms and claims to be a state relying on the religious and moral beliefs of its population: beliefs that are superior to western ideologies about ‘human rights’.

It is not difficult to rebuff western excuses for creating this atmosphere of war and sanctions. The west is Israel’s main ally in the region and that country is a nuclear power. The US and its allies have never questioned Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, nor have they threatened it militarily. The imperialist powers’ main interactions in the region are with Saudi Arabia, which must hold the gold medal (or at least silver) for human rights abuses. The western media do not pay attention to the real victims of human rights abuses in Iran, such as Mahmoud Salehi, the labour activist who has spent the last few years in and out of Iranian jails for organising a May Day gathering. The soft war against Iran conducted by media like the BBC Persian service and Voice of America has not mentioned Salehi’s recent trip to France as a representative of the Iranian labour movement, while people like former Islamic guard Mohsen Sazegara and other ‘democracy campaigners’ are getting wall to wall coverage to such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish them from these stations’ presenters.

On the other hand, the Iranian people have shown time and again that they have no allegiance to the laws of their country and they have protested against them. The constant arrest, imprisonment and forced exile of many students, women, labour activists, writers and supporters of religious and national minorities is testimony to the fact that the Iranian people do not support Islamic legislation.
 
Full text at linlk.

Imperialism finds new pretext for threats

As Iranian workers went out in remarkable numbers for May Day, a new dispute over some small islands in the Gulf shows that despite apparent progress on the nuclear question a new source of tension has been found. Yassamine Mather reports.

A week can be a long time in politics, but in Iran it can seem more like a year.

Last week, as news agencies were reporting rumours of the regime’s possible retreat over its nuclear programme, the price of gold dropped on the Tehran exchange market - a clear sign of reduced tensions between western powers and Iran. The factional fighting of recent years also seemed to belong to the distant past, as figureheads of various factions of the regime, including those arch enemies, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the current incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attended the meetings of the National Expediency Council. They even managed to smile for the cameras in a pre-arranged photo-shoot.

However, then came news of another conflict in the Persian Gulf - this time between Iran on the one side and Saudi Arabia and Gulf Cooperation Council countries on the other. Arab and US media reported that the Peninsula Shield Force, the military coordinating army of the GCC, had been carrying out military manoeuvres to “test harmony and coordination among ground, air and naval forces and their readiness”.

The military exercise was seen as a response to Iran’s continued occupation of three islands in the Gulf - the tiny Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunb islets, near the mouth of the Straits of Hormuz, that was seized in 1971 by the shah after British forces left the region. Abu Musa, the only inhabited island of the three, was placed under joint administration in a deal with Sharjah, now part of the United Arab Emirates. They have since been a bone of contention with the UAE, which claims sovereignty over them.

While the dispute seemed to have been forgotten for most of the decades since, in the last two months the UAE has been mounting increasingly vocal demands for the return of their territory - with the backing of the GCC and the Arab League. This, of course, has brought an angry response from the Iranians, who vowed to “crush any act of aggression” and prompted a visit to Abu Musa by Ahmadinejad a few weeks ago. In Tehran the rumour is that even the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was not aware of the trip before it took place - on the eve of the international nuclear talks.
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/imperiali ... xt-threats
 
Full text at link.

Iran and Islamophobia
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004850

Is there something suspect about the opposition of Hands Off the People of Iran to the Iranian theocracy? Yassamine Mather answers some of the allegations

One of the arguments put forward against Hands Off the People of Iran is that our slogan, ‘No to the theocracy’ (which usually follows ‘No to imperialism’), is pandering to Islamophobia, especially at a time when there is a threat of war against Iran. In dismissing such accusations we have to point out one more time that it is not Islamophobic to support the call for separation of state and religion in a country where three decades of Shia governance has left religion’s reputation in tatters. There is a difference between being anti-Islamic and being against the rule of the clergy: the left cannot compromise on the basic democratic demand for separation of church and state.

In addition there are major differences between the propaganda used in the current escalation of imperialist threats against Iran and the anti-Islam arguments used in justifying ‘the war on terror’ and the subsequent Islamophobia. In the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, as the United States went on a mission to spread ‘liberal democracy’ through conflict, it was necessary to identify an enemy, albeit a largely invisible one, and to a certain extent a very specific form of anti-Islamic propaganda was used: Islam (of a certain type) was ‘the other’, whose terror had to be defeated. However, even then, the ‘war on terror’ was not presented as a war against Islam as such, but against a specific enemy.

At its height we did not see the demonisation of Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states who preach and finance Islamic fundamentalism. Although most of the perpetrators of 9/11 suicide attacks were from Saudi Arabia, the air raids and military invasion were directed against Afghanistan. The western ‘allies’ did not want to mention that the origins of the group claiming responsibility for 9/11, Al Qa’eda , could be traced to the deliberate politicisation of Islamic groups during the cold war by the United States and its allies. Recent history was brushed under the carpet, with media analysts and military experts failing to mention that since the 1950s western governments had encouraged, financed and even initiated Islamic groups in the Arab world and beyond in order to undermine and confront secular, nationalist and socialist forces. From Hamas in Palestine to the Taliban in Afghanistan, they were indeed creations of imperialism, with the deliberate aim of weakening revolutionary forces in the region.

So in many ways the ‘Islamic’ in this ‘war on Islamic terrorism’ was at best ambiguous and at worst misleading. Of course, in France, where the Arabs are the poor of the banlieues, the war was an excuse to attack the underclass, and to a certain extent in the rest of continental Europe, as well as the United Kingdom, a side benefit of the ‘war on terror’ was to isolate further a section of the immigrant population. In other words, its anti-Islamic character was only stressed when it suited the warmongers. At no time was their anti-Islam aimed at rich Saudis, Kuwaitis or Qataris - even though, for example, the Saudi royals continued to apply its constant state of internal terror in the name of Islamic fundamentalism. According to Alain Badiou, the predicate ‘Islamic’ in ‘Islamic terrorism’ has no function except to give content to the word ‘terrorism’.[1]

One could argue that, far from being a war against Islam, the ‘war on Islamic terrorism’ was used to incriminate, victimise and therefore control a certain section of dark-skinned migrants. Here I am not advocating indifference to the plight of Muslim migrants who bore the brunt of the attacks in response to 9/11. However, this fictitious war on Islam was not a war against a Muslim nation (such a thing does not exist) and in forming alliances to oppose it the left should have been honest about the reactionary nature of Al Qa’eda and the Taliban, and less eager to excuse Islamic fundamentalism.

Having said that, as far as the threat of war against Iran is concerned, the issue of ‘war against Islamic terrorism’ is not relevant. No-one in authority in the US or Europe has used the term for the last few years and military action against Iran is proposed not on the basis of the regime’s Islamic fundamentalism as such, but because of its alleged intention to acquire nuclear weapons. In fact vilification of the country’s civilian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is far more prevalent than that of senior clerics. The occasional attempts by US military officials to link the Iranian regime with Al Qa’eda and the Taliban backfired. It is now known that in fact Iran arrested bin Laden’s relatives in the early 2000s.[2]
 
Without reading all 45 pages, can someone tell me in simple terms why Iran is so bothered by Israel? Google doesn't seem to know.
 
Human_84 said:
Without reading all 45 pages, can someone tell me in simple terms why Iran is so bothered by Israel? Google doesn't seem to know.

I thought it was Israel that was bothered by Iran - so I can't help you there.
 
AngelAlice said:
Human_84 said:
Without reading all 45 pages, can someone tell me in simple terms why Iran is so bothered by Israel? Google doesn't seem to know.

I thought it was Israel that was bothered by Iran - so I can't help you there.

Same here! Its Israel who is threatening to bomb Irans nuclear facilities.

Iran have zero nuclear weapons, Israel have circa 300 nuclear weapons.

There was a time when I would have said that no Israeli Cabinet would authorise the casual use of nuclear weapons, but with the Russian Mafia Immigrants party in government along with ultra-orthodox parties anything is possible.

I support a nuclear weapon free Middle East and I want to see the Iranian Theocracy over thrown from within and from below.
 
Joining forces against war and expulsions

Milton Keynes Hands Off the People of Iran and the local Stop the War Coalition group joined forces for a meeting on the threat of war against Iran reports Dave Isaacson.

Comrades from the Hands of the People of Iran campaign in Milton Keynes have responded to the recently escalating sanctions and war threats against Iran by working closely with the local Stop the War group to build opposition to any imperialist intervention. We worked together to organise a joint Hopi/STW public meeting to discuss these issues on Monday May 28.

Over 20 people attended, which for a town such as Milton Keynes is reasonable. The meeting was addressed by Israeli socialist Moshé Machover, who is also a member of the Hopi steering committee. He gave an excellent opening, looking at the reasons why policymakers in the US and Israel want to see a change of regime in Iran and why some actively favour the methods of war to achieve such an aim. Moshé examined the long-term strategic interests of Zionism in Israel in particular. He argued that these interests flow from the fact that Israel is a certain type of colonial settler state, based upon the total exclusion of the indigenous population, to the extent that this can be achieved (unlike some other settler states such as South Africa and Algeria, where native peoples were needed for their labour-power).

With Israel’s determination to scupper any hopes that Palestinians have for an independent sovereign state on the one hand, and the Zionist nightmare of ‘demographic peril’ (the fear that the growing Palestinian population will increasingly outnumber Israelis) on the other, the very presence of the Palestinians is intolerable to Zionism. Comrade Machover explained that the solution that many Zionists have longed to put into practice is to simply expel the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza: ie, ethnic cleansing.

Indeed the current Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is on record telling students in a speech at Bar-Ilan University in November 1989 that “the government had failed to exploit politically favourable situations in order to carry out ‘large-scale’ expulsions at times when ‘the damage would have been relatively small. I still believe that there are opportunities to expel many people’.” Israeli provocations that lead to a regional conflagration involving Iran and the US could create just the “politically favourable situation” Netanyahu wishes for - a sideshow while they ethnically cleanse the Palestinians.

Moshé’s talk was well received and there were some very interesting questions which prompted further discussions on issues such as the current conflict in Syria, Israel’s own development of a nuclear arsenal, and an assessment of the Occupy movement. One speaker expressed scepticism about the scale of the ethnic cleansing Moshé argues Israeli politicians would like to carry out. He felt that such a thing would just not be acceptable in this day and age. Moshé responded that it is precisely our job to make sure that such acts are made unacceptable, and indeed made impossible, through our collective opposition. To achieve such aims we need political organisation and a programme.

Everybody I spoke to left feeling that the meeting had been a success. Everyone took home Hopi literature and many bought a copy of Moshé’s new book - Israelis and Palestinians: conflict and resolution. As well as Hopi and STW, the local Palestine Solidarity Campaign branch was also present with a stall. These are all good signs that people are taking the issues seriously and want to learn more.

As Moshé explained at the end of the meeting, this summer is a particularly dangerous one for the Middle East. We must keep a close eye on the situation and do all we can develop the ideas and organisation we need to pose an internationalist and socialist alternative to imperialism and Zionism. Hopi is very clear: we stand in solidarity with the Iranian people - not their regime - and oppose all sanctions and war threats. In Milton Keynes we will continue to work closely with the local STW group (which incidentally displays none of the sectarianism towards Hopi that we have experienced at a national level). It is also worth mentioning our gratitude to Milton Keynes trades council, an affiliate of Hopi, who financed the meeting with a £100 donation.

http://hopoi.org/
 
Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 1, 2012 344 Comments

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.

Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back.

The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible.

A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack.

continues
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world ... -iran.html
 
War against Iran has already begun, Sanctions and Malware are the opening acts of war against Iran. Yassamine Mather writes that those who condemn the crimes of the regime should also condemn the crimes of imperialism and its agents. Full text at link.

As the prospect of failure of the third round of talks between Iran and the 5+1 countries looms, the US-led soft war on Iran has been ratcheted up with the threat of further sanctions and the launching of a powerful computer virus targeting Iran’s nuclear research facilities. The virus has already spread to the commercial sectors, including the oil and banking industries. ...

Various ‘alternative governments’ and campaigns (for human rights, women’s rights and even workers’ rights) are being funded. Several websites, radio and TV stations have come up with proposals for workshops or a tribunal on the regime - fronted by a rainbow of the Iranian opposition, but backed by US/Canadian and EU regime change funds. A number of comrades at the Hands Off the People of Iran conference in April of this year raised the need to name and shame such groups. This article is an attempt to start a debate on the subject. ...

As we know from our experience in Hopi, political campaigns, publishing journals and bulletins, organising broadcasts, etc all cost money and clearly the weaker, more spineless sections of the Iranian left have been lured by the prospect of regime-change funding. In general the Iranian beneficiaries of regime change funds can be divided into two distinct categories:

1. Those who admit accepting foreign funds: mainly liberal and rightwing forces, such as monarchists, bourgeois republicans, former Revolutionary Guards like Sazegara and former Islamist greens (nowadays social democratic or liberal activists). These groups and individuals may publicise the source of their funding to ‘prove’ their importance, their relevance.

2. Those who receive such funds, but refuse to admit it, mainly because they still would like to masquerade as part of the left. These include sections of the Fedayeen Minority, Kurdish groups such as Komaleh, various splits from what was Iran’s Communist Party and a number of well-meaning, but dubious campaigns.

Those who supply the funds are often keen to unite this spineless ‘left’ into single campaigns alongside rightwing forces keen to brag about the source, and that is why even the most secret donations are eventually exposed. One such example is the International Tribunal for Iran,[3] which manages to unite sections of both the left and right, including those proud of their connections with organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (see below).

Hopi activists have been approached a number of times to lend their support to this campaign. In the past our response, in line with Hopi’s aims and objectives, has been: ‘We can only support campaigns against the Iran regime that have a clear policy in opposition to the US-led war drive. Can you give us the assurance we need - for example, by adding a clear statement against war and sanctions?’ This simple request has often been met with silence. In the meantime sections of the Iranian left - mainly comrades formerly associated with the Fedayeen Minority - have traced the funding for this tribunal and denounced its association with regime change from above. ...

http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/regime-ch ... come-below
 
Report: US and Israel Behind Flame Espionage Tool
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/0 ... ind-flame/
By Kim ZetterEmail Author June 19, 2012 | 4:29 pm | Categories: Flame, Stuxnet

The United States and Israel are responsible for developing the sophisticated espionage rootkit known as Flame, according to anonymous Western sources quoted in a news report.

The malware was designed to provide intelligence about Iran’s computer networks and spy on Iranian officials through their computers as part of an ongoing cyberwarfare campaign, according to the Washington Post.

The program was a joint effort of the National Security Agency, the CIA and Israel’s military, which also produced the Stuxnet worm that is believed to have sabotaged centrifuges used for Iran’s uranium enrichment program in 2009 and 2010.

“This is about preparing the battlefield for another type of covert action,” a former high-ranking US intelligence official told the Post. “Cyber collection against the Iranian program is way further down the road than this.”

Flame was discovered last month by Russia-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, following reports in Iran that malware aimed at computers belonging to that country’s oil industry had wiped data from the computers. In trying to investigate that issue, Kaspersky came across components of the Flame malware, which the researcher believed was not directly connected to the malware that wiped the Iranian computers clean but which they believed was created by the same nation states behind Stuxnet.

Kaspersky disclosed last week that Flame in fact contained some of the same code as Stuxnet, directly tying the two pieces of malware together.

According to the Post Flame was designed to infiltrate highly secure networks in order to siphon intelligence from them, including information that would help the attackers map a target network. Flame, as previously reported, can activate a computer’s internal microphone to record conversations conducted via Skype or in the vicinity of the computer. It also contains modules that log keyboard strokes, take screen shots of what’s occurring on a machine, extract geolocation data from images and turn an infected computer into a Bluetooth beacon to siphon information from Bluetooth-enabled phones that are near the computer.

Flame exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft’s terminal service system to allow the attackers to obtain a fraudulent Microsoft digital certificate to sign their code, so that it could masquerade as legitimate Microsoft code and be installed on a target machine via the Microsoft software update function.

Flame was developed at least five years ago as part of a classified program code-named Olympic Games, the same program that produced Stuxnet.

“It is far more difficult to penetrate a network, learn about it, reside on it forever and extract information from it without being detected than it is to go in and stomp around inside the network causing damage,” said Michael V. Hayden, a former NSA director and CIA director who left office in 2009, told the Post.

It’s still unclear whether the malware used to attack computers in Iran’s oil ministry is the same malware now known as Flame. According to the Post, the attack on the oil ministry computers was directed by Israel alone, a matter which apparently caught US officials off guard, according to anonymous sources who spoke with the newspaper.
 
Things take a bizarre turn.

Are Iranians banned from buying iPads?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18545003
By Sam Farzaneh
BBC Persian Service

Sahar Sabet, whose native language is English, spoke in Farsi to BBC Persian

Iran nuclear crisis

Far apart
Western 'sabotage'
Ongoing stand-off
UK mulls options

A salesman at US Apple store refused to sell an iPad to an Iranian-American woman after overhearing her speak Farsi, provoking a debate about the limits of Western sanctions against Tehran's rulers.

It all started with what many young people across the world want: an iPad.

Sahar Sabet, 19, was at an Apple store in Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, with her uncle. He had come from Iran to visit her family, who live in the state.

"I was telling him how much the product was, in Farsi," she told the BBC, referring to the language spoken in Iran and often by Iranian-American exiles.

The unfamiliar sounds caught the salesman's ear; he asked what language they were speaking.

She answered, then told him she was Iranian.

'Complete embargoes'
At that, the salesman told her he could not sell her the iPad, "because Iran and the US don't have good relations with each other", she said.

The store manager and other employees backed their colleague, Ms Sabet said, showing her a written policy that declared: "The US holds complete embargoes against Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria."

The policy states that Apple forbids the export of its products to those countries "without prior authorization by the US Government".

Ms Sabet was born in the US - and is therefore an American citizen - and her father has her speak Farsi at home so that she does not forget her mother tongue.

Continue reading the main story

Start Quote

This is part of an escalating pattern in which increasingly broad sanctions on Iran are hitting the wrong people”

Jamal Abdi
National Iranian American Council
"They didn't ask me whether I was an American citizen or not," she said.

She added: "The guy I spoke to... was at the check-out line. He didn't know anything about me or what I was buying it for. He just asked me 'what language are you speaking?' I just said I'm from Iran. He didn't know anything else."

Later, Ms Sabet called the company customer relations office, which apologised to her and advised her to buy the iPad online instead.

But Ms Sabet, a college student who hopes to attend law school, was not satisfied.

She called Atlanta's television news station WSB-TV, which reported the story.

Risk of liability?

The affair has provoked debate on exactly just how targeted America's "targeted" sanctions against Iran could be.

"Unfortunately, this is part of an escalating pattern in which increasingly broad sanctions on Iran are hitting the wrong people," said Jamal Abdi, a spokesman for the National Iranian American Council, an Iranian-American advocacy group.


The iPad is by far the most popular tablet computer on the market
The US sanctions do not restrict sales of products to Iranians living in the US, says John Sullivan, a spokesman for the US Treasury.

"There is absolutely no US policy or law that would prohibit Apple or any other company from selling its products in the US to anyone intending to use the product in the US, including Iranians and Persian speakers," he said.

But Apple could expose itself to legal liability if it sold consumer products in the US knowing they would be sent to Iran, said Farhad Alavi, a Washington lawyer who specialises in international trade.

"The mere fact that a potential customer speaks Persian or Korean is not and cannot in and of itself be sufficient to deduce that those customers will take the goods to Iran or North Korea," Mr Alavi said.

On Thursday, about a dozen activists went to an Apple store in New York and demanded the company stop "profiling" Iranian and Iranian-American consumers.

And in Georgia, other Iranians and Iranian-Americans planned to return to the Alpharetta store and speak ostentatiously in Farsi.

In response, Apple noted in a statement that its sales teams are multilingual and "diversity is an important part of our culture".

"Our retail stores are proud to serve customers from around the world, of every ethnicity," the company said.

"We don't discriminate against anyone."
 
Full text at link.

Accepting funds from the CIA

Supporters of the Iran Tribunal have desperately been trying to defend their abandonment of working class principle. Yassamine Mather reports on the contortions

The Iran Tribunal - convened to put the Tehran regime in the dock for its massacre of 5,000-10,000 political prisoners in 1988 - took place in London over June 18-22. While it largely went unnoticed by the public in Britain, it caused uproar amongst sections of the Iranian left.

The tribunal was not the first well-financed attempt to divert the genuine anger of the Iranian people, and their hatred of the Islamic regime (in its many factions), towards dubious ends. Similar stunts have taken place before under the auspices of so-called NGOs - which turn out to be little more than fronts for the United States and the European Union.

The National Endowment for Democracy - which organised and paidfor the Iran Tribunal - is a case in point. The NED is in fact a not very covert operation run by the CIA. This is from an Information Clearing House interview with a former CIA agent: “The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation from the US Congress. The money is channelled through four ‘core foundations’. These are the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (linked to the Democratic Party); the International Republican Institute (Republican Party); the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity; and the Centre for International Private Enterprise (US Chamber of Commerce).”1

The NED’s NGO status provides the fiction that recipients of its largesse are receiving ‘private’ rather than US government money. The LewRockwell.com website explains this further:

“Washington’s formula for regime change underwent a makeover in the 1980s. In a bid to ensure US political and economic interests were safeguarded, CIA-backed coup d’etats ousted democratically elected leaders from Iran to Chile. In their place were brutal dictatorships and governments that committed heinous crimes against their people ... The concept of democracy promotion is simple: finance, train, and politically back local opposition forces around the world that support the American agenda.

“On this very subject Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell said, ‘We do this through surrogates and non-governmental organisation and through people who are less suspecting of the evil that may lurk behind their actions than perhaps they were before. Have we learned some lessons in that regard? You bet! Do we do it better? You bet! Is it still just as heinous as it has always been? You bet!’ So, while the goal remains the same, it is no longer the CIA, but the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and its partners spearheading the effort.”2

The NED is also heavily involved in Egypt. According to the Los Angeles Times, “In Egypt, the four US organisations under attack for fomenting unrest with illegal foreign funding were all connected to the endowment [NED]. Two - the GOP’s International Republican Institute and the Democratic Party’s National Democratic Institute - are among the groups that make up the endowment’s core constituents. The two other indicted groups, Freedom House and the International Centre for Journalists, receive funds from the endowment.”3
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/accepting-funds-cia
 
Yassamine Mather examines the excuses used by ‘leftwing’ supporters of the Iran Tribunal and finds them wanting. Full text at link.

Iran: Sealed trains and class traitors
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/sealed-tr ... s-traitors

Debates about the Iran Tribunal - convened to put the Islamic regime in the dock for its massacre of 5,000-10,000 political prisoners in 1988 - continues to occupy a prominent place in the publications and websites of the Iranian left, both in exile and to a lesser extent inside Iran itself.

In a sense it is true that, given the current situation in Iran - not least the disastrous consequences of what the US calls “comprehensive sanctions” - this is a small, irrelevant issue. After all, this week alone another 400 workers lost their jobs in Iran’s main car manufacturer, Iran Khodro, as a direct consequence of sanctions: Malaysia, under pressure from the US, pulled out of a contract. It is also true that sanctions are not the same as cluster bombs, but their effect on the Iranian working class can be devastating nevertheless.

The first round of the tribunal, which took place last month in London, attracted very little publicity and was indeed an insignificant event. So why is Hands Off the People of Iran devoting so much attention to it? We exposed the fact that it was organised and paid for by the CIA-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy as another way of building up the momentum for a military attack on Iran. Yet some conspiracy theorists are saying that Hopi chose to do so because we are “supporters of the Islamic regime” - or alternatively we are part of a sectarian plot to discredit sections of the Iranian left. Well, to deal with the second accusation first, the leftwing cheerleaders of this tribunal have made a pretty good job of discrediting themselves. ..
 
Full text at link.

Iran: Stepping up the threats

http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-stepping-threats

The upcoming US Presidential elections are only ratcheting up the threat of military action against Iran reports Yassamine Mather

It is mid-summer in an election year, so we should not be surprised by the hawkish statements regarding Iran coming from the US - not just from the Republican contender, Mitt Romney, but also the current US president. However, even when we take into account the timing, some of the statements Romney has just made in Jerusalem are more than worrying - and they have been matched by Barack Obama’s promises to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on the despatch of bunker-buster bombs to the Gulf region.1

According to the Financial Times, in a keynote speech delivered in Jerusalem, Mitt Romney stated that the US has a “moral imperative” to stop Iran - the “most destabilising country in the world” - from developing nuclear weapons.2 Earlier in the day one of Romney’s advisors, Dan Senor, had said: “If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability, the governor would respect that decision”.3

In March 2012 Obama had criticised the “bluster and big talk” of Republicans candidates about a possible war with Iran: “This is not a game. There is nothing casual about it.”4 However, with the polls suggesting a tight presidential race,5 the US president has himself joined the “bluster and big talk” about Iran, the suggestion that the use of bunker-busters may now be on the agenda representing a real escalation. It is sad reflection of our time that the fate of 75 million Iranians and the possibility of military air raids against Iran’s nuclear facility might be decided by the rise and fall of Obama’s ratings in the polls. Added to this are reports that the United States is sharing with Israel full details of its possible military plans in relation to Iran.6

As far as Iranians are concerned, the war started on July 1, when a combination of new EU and US sanctions came into effect. The result has been large numbers of job losses, long queues for basic food, riots and demonstrations - no wonder Iranians are convinced that the confrontation with the west has entered a new phase. Sanctions cover not just nuclear, missile and military exports to Iran, but also oil, gas and petrochemicals, plus refined petroleum products; shipping in general; and banking and insurance, including transactions with the Central Bank of Iran - its director, Mahmoud Bahmani, commented that sanctions are “no less than a military war”.7

But it does not end there. On July 30, negotiators from the United States Congress and Senate reached an agreement regarding a new round of sanctions. The Senate Banking Committee’s Democratic chairman, Tim Johnson, promised to do all he could to make sure the legislation passed before the August recess: “… unless Iranians come clean on their nuclear programme, end the suppression of their people and stop supporting terrorist activities, they will face deepening international isolation and even greater economic and diplomatic pressure”.8 In addition, on July 31 Obama announced new measures to penalise foreign banks that help Iran sell its oil.9
 
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