U.S. Sizing Up Iran?

[ramonmercado]

Israelis and Iranians against war

No to imperialist war! No to sanctions!
No to the theocratic regime!
Support for socialism and democracy in Iran and therefore solidarity with all democratic, working class, socialist and secular movements in Iran.
Opposition to Israeli, British and American nuclear weapons. For a Middle East free of nuclear weapons as a step towards world-wide nuclear disarmament!

On the first Day of Communist University 20th August 2012, 4.45 pm
Glenthurston Apartments, 30 Bromley Rd. London, SE6 2TP
5 min walk from Catford railway station

http://hopoi.org/?p=2165

 

[Bigfoot73]

So it's all kicking off in a communist university in somebody's flat in Catford.
Absolutely classic.

 

[ramonmercado]

So it's all kicking off in a communist university in somebody's flat in Catford.
Absolutely classic.

Not quite!

The Communist University (Summer School), is usually held in Raymont Hall, Goldsmiths College. This year due to the Olympics (tourists hanging on I guess) it is being held at Glenthurston Apartments.

Caford is a purrfect venue.

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/action/comm ... rsity-2012

 

[ramonmercado]

So it's all kicking off in a communist university in somebody's flat in Catford.
Absolutely classic.

Only checked it out just now. Looks good.

http://www.londonselfcatering.co.uk/

 

[Yithian]

How and why is this document out?
Real? Fake? Bluff? Double-bluff? Impossible to judge from my perspective, but fascinating for all that:

Bibi’s Secret War Plan
by Richard Silverstein on August 15, 2012

In the past few days, I received an Israeli briefing document outlining Israel’s war plans against Iran. The document was passed to me by a high-level Israeli source who received it from an IDF officer. My source, in fact, wrote to me that normally he would not leak this sort of document, but:

“These are not normal times. I’m afraid Bibi and Barak are dead serious.”

The reason they leaked it is to expose the arguments and plans advanced by the Bibi-Barak two-headed warrior. Neither the IDF leaker, my source, nor virtually any senior military or intelligence officer wants this war. While whoever wrote this briefing paper had use of IDF and intelligence data, I don’t believe the IDF wrote it. It feels more likely it came from the shop of national security advisor Yaakov Amridor, a former general, settler true believer and Bibi confidant. It could also have been produced by Defense Minister Barak, another pro-war booster.

I’ve translated the document from Hebrew with the help of Dena Shunra.

Before laying out the document, I wanted to place it in context. If you’ve been reading this blog you’ll know that after Bibi’s IDF service he became the marketing director for a furniture company. Recent revelations have suggested that he may have also served in some capacity either formally or informally in the Mossad during that period.

This document is a more sophisticated version of selling bedroom sets and three-piece sectionals. The only difference is that this marketing effort could lead to the death of thousands.

This is Bibi’s sales pitch for war. Its purpose is to be used in meetings with members of the Shminiya , the eight-member security cabinet which currently finds a 4-3 majority opposed to an Iran strike. Bibi uses this sales pitch to persuade the recalcitrant ministers of the cool, clean, refreshing taste of war. My source informs me that it has also been shared in confidence with selected journalists who are in the trusted inner media circle (who, oh who, might they be?).

This is Shock and Awe, Israel-style. It is Bibi’s effort to persuade high-level Israeli officials that Israel can prosecute a pure technology war that involves relatively few human beings (Israeli, that is) who may be put in harm’s way, and will certainly cost few lives of IDF personnel.

Bibi’s sleight of hand here involves no mention whatsoever of an Iranian counter-attack against Israel. The presumption must be that the bells and whistles of all those marvelous new weapons systems will decapitate Iran’s war-making ability and render it paralyzed. The likelihood of this actually happening is nearly nil.

There will be those who will dispute the authenticity of this document. I’m convinced it is what my source claims, based on his prior track record and the level of specificity offered in the document. It references cities by name and the facilities they contain. It names new weapons systems including one Israel supposedly hasn’t even shared with the U.S.

No, it’s real. Or I should say that while it’s real, it is the product of the Israeli dream factory which manufactures threats and then creates fabulist military strategies to address them. The dream factory always breaks the hearts of the families of those whose members fall victim to it. It never produces the result it promises, nor will it do so here.

Remember Bush-era Shock and Awe? Remember those promises of precision-guided cruise missiles raining death upon Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Remember Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” ceremony on the deck of the USS Lincoln, only six or seven years premature? Remember the promises of decisive victory? Remember 4,000 U.S. dead, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?

Now, think of what an Israeli war against Iran could turn into. Think about how this sanitized version of 21st century war could turn into a protracted, bloody conflict closer to the nine-year Iran-Iraq War:

The Israeli attack will open with a coordinated strike, including an unprecedented cyber-attack which will totally paralyze the Iranian regime and its ability to know what is happening within its borders. The internet, telephones, radio and television, communications satellites, and fiber optic cables leading to and from critical installations—including underground missile bases at Khorramabad and Isfahan—will be taken out of action. The electrical grid throughout Iran will be paralyzed and transformer stations will absorb severe damage from carbon fiber munitions which are finer than a human hair, causing electrical short circuits whose repair requires their complete removal. This would be a Sisyphean task in light of cluster munitions which would be dropped, some time-delayed and some remote-activated through the use of a satellite signal.

A barrage of tens of ballistic missiles would be launched from Israel toward Iran. 300km ballistic missiles [R.S.-this might be a reference to the Popeye Turbo] would be launched from Israeli submarines in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf. The missiles would not be armed with unconventional warheads [WMD], but rather with high-explosive ordnance equipped with reinforced tips designed specially to penetrate hardened targets.

The missiles will strike their targets—some exploding above ground like those striking the nuclear reactor at Arak–which is intended to produce plutonium and tritium—and the nearby heavy water production facility; the nuclear fuel production facilities at Isfahan and facilities for enriching uranium-hexaflouride. Others would explode under-ground, as at the Fordo facility.

A barrage of hundreds of cruise missiles will pound command and control systems, research and development facilities, and the residences of senior personnel in the nuclear and missile development apparatus. Intelligence gathered over years will be utilized to completely decapitate Iran’s professional and command ranks in these fields.

After the first wave of attacks, which will be timed to the second, the “Blue and White” radar satellite, whose systems enable us to perform an evaluation of the level of damage done to the various targets, will pass over Iran. Only after rapidly decrypting the satellite’s data, will the information be transferred directly to war planes making their way covertly toward Iran. These IAF planes will be armed with electronic warfare gear previously unknown to the wider public, not even revealed to our U.S. ally. This equipment will render Israeli aircraft invisible. Those Israeli war planes which participate in the attack will damage a short-list of targets which require further assault.

Among the targets approved for attack—Shihab 3 and Sejil ballistic missile silos, storage tanks for chemical components of rocket fuel, industrial facilities for producing missile control systems, centrifuge production plants and more.

While the level of specificity in this document is, in some senses, impressive, in one critical aspect it is deficient. Muhammad Sahimi points out that the current chief of the Revolutionary Guards, when he assumed his position in 2007, deliberately addressed the issue of over-centralization of command and control by dividing the nation into 31 districts. Each of these has its own independent command and control facilities and mechanisms. So Israel wouldn’t be able to knock out a single facility and paralyze the IRG. They’d need to knock out 31 separate sets of facilities–a much harder task.

There seems also to be an assumption that Iran’s leaders and nuclear specialists live nice domestic lives and that Israeli intelligence knows where they all live and can easily target them. In truth, the most senior Iranian military and scientific figures live clandestine lives and it’s hard for me to believe even the Mossad knows where they are and how to target them.

So it appears that Netanyahu believes he’s fighting Saddam circa 2003. During that war, the Iraqi Revolutionary Guards were centralized and knocking out one C&C center could decapitate the entire military apparatus. But Iran has learned from Saddam’s mistakes. It isn’t fighting the last war as Bibi appears to be. It is preparing for the next one. While Israel may have new tricks up its sleeve that no one in the world has yet seen, if it doesn’t understand the nature of the enemy, its defenses, its structure, etc. then it can’t win.

News Alert: I’ve just been interviewed by BBC Newshour’s Julian Marshall and anticipate they will air a segment about this story at 1:30PM UK time and at 9:30AM east coast time (6:30AM west coast). I’m not sure which time it will air in Israel, but I believe it would be 3:30PM. If your NPR station airs BBC World Service you should hear it. I don’t know if it will be repeated any other times during the day. You can tell me that if you hear it.

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun ... -war-plan/

 

[ramonmercado]

Maybe theres something to it.

Israel 'prepared for 30-day war with Iran'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19274866

Iran has the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East

Iran nuclear crisis

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

Israel's outgoing home front defence minister says an attack on Iran would likely trigger a month-long conflict that would leave 500 Israelis dead.

Matan Vilnai told the Maariv newspaper that the fighting would be "on several fronts", with hundreds of missiles fired at Israeli towns and cities.

Israel was prepared, he said, though strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities had to be co-ordinated with the US.

Meanwhile, a US blogger has published what he says are Israel's attack plans.

Richard Silverstein told the BBC he had been given an internal briefing memo for Israel's eight-member security cabinet, which outlined what the Israeli military would do to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons.

Continue reading the main story
Analysis


Jonathan Marcus
BBC Diplomatic Correspondent
The text of the purported Israeli cabinet memo is just that, text. There is no document as such and thus it is impossible to verify if it is indeed an Israeli cabinet paper of some kind. But its purpose for Richard Silverstein is clear. He believes it was passed by a serving officer to the politician and then leaked by him precisely to alert the outside world to the scale of Israel's military plan to strike at Iran and thus to reduce the chances of it ever happening.

An unprecedented public debate is under way in Israel on the wisdom of launching an attack against Iran. And this leaked document, whatever its source, and whatever its original purpose, has become an element in that debate.

The document itself is striking in both the scale and scope of the military operation that it proposes. It also employs a range of technologies, many of which we have known that the Israelis are developing, but this document suggests that they are battle-ready and fully operational.

Leaked memo: propaganda or war plan?
Tehran insists its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful.

'Israel prepared'
The purported leaked Israeli memo suggests that the military operation would begin with a massive cyber-attack against Iran's infrastructure, followed by a barrage of ballistic missiles launched at its nuclear facilities.

Military command-and-control systems, research and development facilities, and the homes of senior figures in nuclear and missile development would also be targeted.

Only then would manned aircraft be sent in to attack "a short-list of those targets which require further assault".

BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says it is not possible to verify the authenticity of the document, but the proposed mission would be huge and have potentially far-reaching consequences.

Iran's government and military have made it clear that if it is attacked either by Israel or the US, it will respond in kind, either directly or through proxies.

In his interview with Maariv, Mr Vilnai said Israel had "prepared as never before".

"There is no room for hysteria," said the former general, who is stepping down at the end of August to become Israel's ambassador to China.


He echoed an assessment by Defence Minister Ehud Barak, who said that it was believed that some 500 people in Israel might be killed.

"There might be fewer dead, or more, perhaps... but this is the scenario for which we are preparing, in accordance with the best expert advice."

"The assessments are for a war that will last 30 days on several fronts," he added, alluding to the possibility of attacks by the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shia Islamist movement, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamist militants in the Gaza Strip.

Mr Vilnai also declined to comment on US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's assertion on Tuesday that Washington did not believe Israel had yet made a decision on whether or not to launch a strike on Iran.

"I don't want to be dragged into the debate," he added. "But the United States is our greatest friend and we will always have to co-ordinate such moves with it."

On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Mr Vilnai would be succeeded by Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel's internal security agency, Shin Bet.

 

[rynner2]

From the Comments on Silverstein's blog:

vova August 15, 2012 at 7:49 AM

loooool!
here’s the “original top secret” document:
http://www.fresh.co.il/vBulletin/showth ... ost4282787

for those who cannot read hebrew, this is an imaginary post in an israeli forum posted in 2002(!!) describing word by word what richard wrote. once again, richard “high level” source made him look like a fool. lol!

But that link gives me a blank page! Perhaps I need a Hebrew font to see it... :?

 

[Yithian]

It loads.... slowly.

It's solid Hebrew, so I've no way of knowing. BBC are running with it to some extent:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19272737
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19274866

edit: Author has replied to comment:

Richard Silverstein August 15, 2012 at 10:05 AM

That’s actually a false statement which indicates how sloppy you are. Portions of the document I published are contained in the Fresh [Website name - Yith] posting of 2002. Of course the IDF uses portions of its briefing memos for presentations and updates them as they develop new weapons systems. That’s what all militaries do. In 2002, they produced a document which was leaked to Fresh. The document I published contains other information that is not in the Fresh posting and the Fresh posting contains highly fictionalized scenarios which are not in the document I posted.

 

[ramonmercado]

WoW as a WMD?

Blizzard cuts off Iranian access to World of Warcraft
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19399375

Millions still regularly play venerable online game World of Warcraft

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US trade sanctions have led game maker Blizzard to cut off access to World of Warcraft (Wow) in Iran.

Blizzard posted a statement to its player-forum site after hundreds of Iranian players said they had lost access to the game.

Access was lost recently, it said, because it had "tightened up its procedures" to comply with sanctions.

This also meant, said Blizzard, that it could not give refunds to players or transfer their accounts.

Broader block

The problem for Iranians came to light late last week as hundreds of players in the country posted messages to Blizzard's European Battle.net forums complaining they could no longer access the game.

Many of those posting messages said they could not connect directly to World of Warcraft but could get access when they used a proxy server outside Iran.

The outpouring of complaints led Blizzard to post a statement explaining what had happened.

The statement said US economic sanctions and trade restrictions meant it could not do business with people living in certain nations. One of which was Iran.

"This week, Blizzard tightened up its procedures to ensure compliance with these laws, and players connecting from the affected nations are restricted from access to Blizzard games and services," read the statement.

Unfortunately, said Blizzard, the same sanctions meant it could not give refunds to players in Iran or help them move their account elsewhere.

"We apologise for any inconvenience this causes and will happily lift these restrictions as soon as US law allows," it added.

Although the block on Wow has been imposed by Blizzard, other reports suggest a wider government ban might have been imposed.

Players of Wow and other games, including Guild Wars, said when they had tried to log in they had been redirected to a page saying the connection had been blocked because the games promoted "superstition and mythology".

Blizzard said it had no information about Iranian government action against online games.

 

[ramonmercado]

We're back in James Bond territory.

Spy rock explodes near secret Iranian nuclear compound - report
http://rt.com/news/iran-spy-rock-nuclear-777/
Published: 23 September, 2012, 14:09

Iranian troops patrolling the perimeter of a secret uranium enrichment site have reportedly found a monitoring device disguised as a rock. The spy gadget exploded when disturbed, probably on a self-destruct trigger.

The incident happened last month, although no link to espionage operations was known before The Sunday Times newspaper broke the news.
At the time Iranian Revolutionary Guards were checking terminals connecting communication links at Fordo, an underground site near Qom in northern Iran, the British newspaper reported Sunday citing intelligence sources.

Iranian experts who examined the scene after the explosion believe that the spy device was capable in intercepting data from computers at the plant.

Tehran did not report discovering the device. But last week Iranian Vice-President Fereydoun Abbasi, who heads the national atomic energy agency, said the explosion on August 17 damaged power lines at Fordo.

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who visited Fordo the day after the explosion, did not mention any disruption in their report.

The newspaper’s sources did not indicate which country’s intelligence service planted the rock at the Iranian nuclear facility. Israeli, British and American agents are reportedly actively operating in the country, monitoring its military and nuclear programs. Some Western countries say Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon under the guise of its civilian nuclear energy projects, an allegation Tehran firmly denies.

Disguising spy equipment as elements of landscape is far from unusual. In 2006 a major scandal erupted in Russia, after a controversial documentary said British secret services used a transmitter disguised as a rock to communicate with some non-governmental organizations working in Moscow.

This year British officials admitted that they did use such a device disguised as a rock for monitoring and secret communication with intelligence informants.

 

[GNC]

It'll be an Ace Ventura style rhino next. What do you mean there are no rhinos in Iran?

 

[ramonmercado]

Full text at link.

Iran Tribunal: ‘Impossible to continue support’

Norman Paech, a prominent member of the German left party, Die Linke, has joined others in withdrawing his support for the Iran Tribunal after approaches from supporters of Hands Off the People of Iran, reports Tina Becker. This is an edited version of an article recently published on the website of the German magazine Hintergrund1

The Iran Tribunal continues to divide the Iranian left. Yassamine Mather’s articles in the Weekly Worker have been hotly debated in Iran, across Europe and the United States. Since she started to expose the links of the organisers to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a number of organisations and individuals have withdrawn their support. Other groups and parties have split over the issue.

It is therefore timely to take a closer look at the tribunal, its gestation, its corruption - and the fallout from Hopi’s scathing criticism.
Supportable aims

During the 1980s, tens of thousands of political activists in Iran were arrested, tortured and sentenced to death. Many leftwingers fled abroad and around 20,000 dissidents were murdered. The worst massacre was in the summer of 1988, when between 5,000 and 7,000 political prisoners were systematically executed in a matter of weeks, their bodies dumped in anonymous mass graves.

Since then, the relatives and former comrades of those killed have fought for justice. But how to do that in today’s world? That is the question that has sparked heated debates amongst the Iranian left. They are united in the view that a first, important step should be the publication of the details of the massacre. After all, the government in Teheran has never admitted these crimes and continues its cover-up. Many of those responsible remain in power.

“For many years, we have been fighting for an independent commission to examine the horrific murders and name the guilty parties. Our model is the Russell Tribunal, which was established by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1967 and which exposed very effectively the crimes committed by the US military in Vietnam.” says Yassamine Mather, who has been living in exile in London for almost 30 years and today is chair of Hands Off the People of Iran. After dozens of her comrades were executed in the early 80s, comrade Mather and other members of her organisation - Fedayeen (minority) - fled to Kurdistan to continue their struggle. From exile, she watched in horror as many more of her comrades and political friends were murdered.

Like other exiled Iranians, she initially supported the preparations for the Iran Tribunal. She even supplied it with evidence. An impressive range of international politicians and lawyers were won to the project - for example, from Germany Norman Paech, a prominent member of the leftwing party, Die Linke, and respected professor of law.

http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-trib ... t%E2%80%99

 

[ramonmercado]

How the sanctions are hitting ordinary people in Iran.

Iran: Sanctions mean war on the people

Hands Off the People of Iran remains true to its slogan, ‘No to imperialism, no to the Islamic regime’. Yassamine Mather describes the devastation and hunger inflicted on Iranians

If you want to find out what economic chaos looks like, forget about Athens or Madrid: Tehran is the capital to study.

In 2009-10 there were already signs of a serious economic crisis in Iran - low wages, mass unemployment, spiralling inflation, all helped along by privatisation. That was when we saw mass protests against fraudulent elections results, dictatorship and repression. Those demonstrations were suppressed and a number of factors, including the threat of war and the reformism of the self-appointed leaders of the green movement, contributed to the defeat of the protests.

Since then Iran has not been much in the news - until the protests of early October, when angry crowds took to the streets of Tehran. Sanctions have crippled the country to such an extent that for most Iranians day-to-day life is becoming impossible. It is true that not a single shot has been fired, but sanctions are indeed a form of warfare, imposing hunger and destitution on the population. And if the US presidential race remains close in these last days before the poll, the Obama administration could yet consider a military strike.

Of course, Iran’s economy is not crippled just because of sanctions. Decades of obedience to the International Monetary Fund have left the country with a privatised, corruption-riven economy. The gap between rich and poor is wider than at any time in living memory. Food and fuel subsidies have been abolished by Islamic clerics - to the applause of the IMF and World Bank. In other words, even without sanctions Iran would have had all the features of a third-world capitalist country suffering from the effects of the global economic crisis. But sanctions have made life so intolerable that people will tell you that hunger and poverty, combined with this constant fear of military conflict, is worse than war itself. ...
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-sanc ... war-people

 

[Zilch5]

9 Big Myths We're Being Peddled to Scare Us About Iran
The truth about Iran's nuclear designs is almost nowhere to be found in the corporate media.


1. Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program is alleged by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to be a stealth nuclear weapons program. But there is no evidence at all for this allegation, and it was contradicted by Netanyahu’s own Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, who admitted that Iran has not decided to initiate a nuclear weapons program. Israel’s chief of staff, Benny Gantz, has also admitted that Iran has not decided to build a bomb .

2. It is often argued that Iran does not need nuclear power. But it uses some petroleum for power generation, and Iranians are driving more and more. There is every prospect that what happened to Indonesia, which now uses all its own oil in addition to importing some, will happen to Iran. Iran’s energy exports provide a crucial financial cushion, allowing the country to remain independent. Other oil giants, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are also building nuclear power plants. There is nothing illogical or unusual about Iran going in this direction.

3. It is alleged that Iran has threatened to annihilate Israel. It has done no such thing. Iran has a ‘no first strike’ policy, repeatedly enunciated by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has expressed the hope that the ‘Zionist regime over Jerusalem” would ‘vanish from the page of time.’ But he didn’t threaten to roll tanks or missiles against Israel, and compared his hopes for the collapse of Zionism to the collapse of Communism in Russia. Iran has not launched a conventional war of aggression against another state in all of modern history. Israel aggressively invaded Egypt in 1956 and 1967 and Lebanon in 1982 and 2006. The list of aggressive wars fought by the US, including the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, is too long to detail. So why is Iran being configured as the aggressor?

4. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has given a formal ruling or fatwa against nuclear weapons, saying

“The Iranian nation has never pursued and will never pursue nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that the decision makers in the countries opposing us know well that Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous.”

5. Some have alleged that Khamenei is lying in his fatwa, in accordance with a Shiite doctrine that allows pious dissimulation. The permission to lie about religion does not apply where there is a Shiite state able to protect Shiites .

6. No, the International Atomic Energy Agency, on inspecting Iran, did not alleged evidence for bomb-making. It certified that no uranium has been diverted to a weapons program.

7. It is often argued that Iran’s nuclear program might spur an arms race in the Middle East. But it is Israel’s arsenal of 400 nuclear warheads that has spurred the arms races. Iraq’s experiments with enrichment in the late 1980s until 1991 were a direct result of knowledge that Israel was given the bomb by France, Britain and the US. If a non-nuclear Iran is so important, why won’t Israel respond to repeated requests by Middle Eastern countries for a nuclear-free zone in that region?

8. Iran has actually reduced its stockpile of low-enriched uranium at 19.75% , turning it into plates to fuel its medical reactor (which is what Iran has all along said it was doing with that uranium). Iran lost its source of uranium fuel for the medical reactor when Argentina ceased producing and supplying it. (Note that no one put sanctions on Argentina or threatened to bomb it when *it* was enriching uranium to that level).

Source: http://www.alternet.org/world/9-big-myt ... 13446&t=16

 

[Sergeant_Pluck]

Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program is alleged by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to be a stealth nuclear weapons program. But there is no evidence at all for this allegation,

Wouldn't be much of a stealth programme if there was, would it?!

 

[ramonmercado]

Iran coup: Tudeh’s inglorious role

Torab Saleth reviews: Ervand Abrahamian, 'The coup: 1953, the CIA and the roots of modern US-Iranian relations', New Press, 2013, pp304, £16.84

With the continuing efforts made by the self-proclaimed global imperial power, the USA, to achieve ‘regime change’ in Iran, it is timely that a book about the 1953 coup - in which the US, with the help of the British government, carried out exactly such regime change - has been published. The coup was aimed against Mohammad Mosaddegh’s National Front1 government, which had nationalised the British-controlled Iranian oil industries.

If Los Angeles-based Iranian TV stations or Facebook campaigns have given the imperialists a false impression that a nation is waiting to be liberated by the US and its allies, this book should remind them why there is in fact still a deep and widespread hostility in Iran towards the USA and Britain: precisely because of this event.

The historical irony is that the forefathers of the current dictators in Tehran were indeed part of the very same ‘pro-democracy’ coalition of forces that helped the US in its 1953 coup. The Shi’ite hierarchy was instrumental in it. Indeed the coup succeeded at the second attempt because of the help accorded by Shi’ite rent-a-crowd mullahs. The same rabble-rousers who were instrumental in helping the CIA save the shah in 1953 organised riots two decades later in support of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Indeed, the whole calamity called the ‘Islamic Republic of Iran’ would not have come into existence if it had not been for that coup. ...
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-coup ... rious-role

 

[ramonmercado]

Full text at link.

Iran tribunal: What a legalistic shambles.

In the good old days of the Moscow trials it was customary for fallen members of the Soviet leadership to disappear from group photographs, their image wiped out of history, as they fell out of favour with Stalin. How ironic that the 21st century unholy alliance between Iran’s soft left and neo-conservatives in what is known as the Iran Tribunal seems to have adopted the same method in dealing with the embarrassing outcome of its second phase.

The Farsi version of the long-awaited final resolution never made it to the IT website and the English version1 has been either removed or hidden away somewhere where it is difficult to find.2 As the embarrassing clauses were translated into Farsi, the organisers were confronted with a barrage of criticism. The soft left has attempted to justify the disappearance of the final statement with the claim that the ‘findings’ were temporary resolutions - although the ‘prosecutor’, Payam Akhavan, and his allies consider the job done and deny the ‘temporary’ nature of the findings.

...When we warned the Iranian left about the dangers, we were not acting in a sectarian manner. We were saying that, contrary to their claims, they are not part of the ‘third force’ confronting both the Iranian regime and imperialist forces. Once we give free rein to the likes of Akhavan and so accept the hegemony of bourgeois forces, including those who are proud of their association with the National Endowment for Democracy, we are no longer defending the Iranian working class. On the contrary, such forces are allies of the ‘first force’ - the imperialist powers and world capitalism - irrespective of whether this betrayal is carried out consciously or not. In the same manner, apologists of one or other faction of the Islamic regime, those who refuse to call for its overthrow, should be counted within the ranks of the ‘second force’.

Far from being sectarian, Hopi was acting in a responsible way, trying to stop comrades from falling into a dangerous trap.
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-trib ... c-shambles

 

[ramonmercado]

HOPI: We stand by our principles

Hands off the People of Iran re-iterates its core principles

Hands Off the People of Iran has been accused by some forces in the orbit of the Iran Tribunal of abandoning its central political slogans and effectively becoming an apologist for the Tehran regime. Hopi categorically rejects these accusations. Our opposition to the IT flows precisely from the principles embodied in our founding statement - principles that uphold implacable opposition to both imperialism and the theocratic regime. At the same time we were - and remain - crystal-clear about where change must come from: the struggles of the working class and the social movements.

Our criticism of the Iran Tribunal and the left organisations that have collaborated with it flows from this. The refusal of this body to stand against sanctions and the threat of war against Iran makes its condemnation of the regime's crimes - accurate though they are in the abstract - an aid to imperialism's plans and manoeuvres in the region. Quite apart from murky questions to do with the tainting of the IT through funding or indirect support, its silence on US threats and the possibility of an Israeli attack provide a damning indictment of the whole initiative.

Despite protestations to the contrary, some of those on the `left' who have cooperated with the IT have effectively given up on the ability of the working class to win fundamental change in Iran. Their political decay and disorientation is illustrated by the agency they now look to in order to defeat the theocratic regime: the stance of the IT proves that, for these people, that force is now imperialism. Others who have given their support in hope of raising awareness of the crimes committed by the theocratic regime have done so at a political cost that is too high. Whatever media interest has been gained has been placed within the framework of strengthening the imperialist arguments for deeper sanctions and the possibility of a military strike.

In stark contrast, Hopi stands proudly by the founding principles we adopted at our first conference in 2007:

No to any imperialist intervention. The immediate and unconditional end to sanctions on Iran.
No to the theocratic regime.
Opposition to Israeli expansionism and aggression.
Support to all working class and progressive struggles in Iran against poverty and repression.
Support for socialism and democracy in Iran and therefore solidarity with all democratic, working class, socialist and secular movements in that country.
Opposition to Israeli, British and American nuclear weapons. For a Middle East free of nuclear weapons as a step towards worldwide nuclear disarmament.

http://www.hopi-ireland.org/

http://hopoi.org

 

[ramonmercado]

US general warns over Iranian cyber-soldiers
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21075781

Iran's nuclear programme has been hit by viruses that targeted industrial machinery

Cyber-attacks on Iran are turning it into a "force to be reckoned with" America's top cyber-soldier has warned.

Since 2010, Iran has come under attack many times by malicious viruses written specifically to target key industrial installations in the country.

The repeated attacks have provoked Iran to improve its cyber-capabilities, said Gen William Shelton who oversees US cyber-operations.

It meant Iran was becoming a growing force in web-based attacks, he said.

Gen Shelton issued the warning during a briefing given to reporters about the US Air Force division he heads that includes America's cyber-troops.

He said the 2010 Stuxnet virus attack on Iran's Natanz uranium processing plant had generated a "reaction" by Iran that had led it to rapidly improve its defensive and offensive cyber-capabilities. Since then Iran has been hit again and again by viruses. In December 2012, the Stuxnet virus returned and hit companies in the southern Hormozgan region.

That improved capability had helped it protect itself against subsequent attacks on oil terminals and other manufacturing plants. Its capability might well be turned against Iran's enemies in the coming years, he said.

"They are going to be a force to be reckoned with," said Gen Shelton, "with the potential capabilities that they will develop over the years and the potential threat that will represent to the United States."

Web war
Gen Shelton's comments come soon after a senior Iranian commander said it had growing "electronic warfare" capabilities that it planned to use to disrupt what it called enemy communication systems. The nation is known to have carried out web-based military exercises at the same time as other troops were on manoeuvres.

Currently, said Gen Shelton US cyber-forces were about 6,000 strong but would add another 1,000 people in the next 12 months. These workers were successfully fending off the vast majority of the millions of attacks aimed at military networks every day, he added.

In addition, he said, the cyber-forces could gather intelligence and were developing the ability to carry out hack attacks in support of more traditional military operations.

 

[ramonmercado]

...There is no doubt that sanctions are hitting hard and a recent poll showed 70% of Iranians blamed the US, Israel, the European Union and the United Nations. This could be misleading, of course - perhaps Iranians are too scared of their government to express their true feelings, even when they respond to anonymous polls. But, whatever the case, the results have certainly given Khamenei a boost. In a defiant response to the latest US offer of ‘negotiations’ the supreme leader said: “The Americans point the gun at Iran and say, either negotiations or we pull the trigger! You should know that pressure and negotiations don’t go together, and the Iranian nation will not be intimidated by such things.” Borrowing a phrase from the left, Khamenei also commented on the USA’s decline as a world power.4

Of course, there are those on the left who still defend the first ‘anti-imperialist’ Islamic state and even encourage voting for similar forces in the Arab world. However, for millions of Iranians who have to suffer in the hell on earth created by Shia clerics, Islamic capitalism has nothing to commend it.

As Iranians try to get by with their valueless currency, expensive food and shortage of medicine, they are adopting desperate measures in order to survive. It is no longer just prescription drugs and kidneys that are for sale: adverts are appearing from “healthy” young Iranians offering any part of their anatomy for sale, while unscrupulous Islamist bazaaris, those staunch supporters of Islamic fundamentalism, have found new ways of making a profit - through buying and selling human organs. ...
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-towards-barbarism

 

[ramonmercado]

Close shave: How the US almost gunned down Iran’s president
http://rt.com/news/us-almost-shoot-ahmedinejad-579/

A US agent accidentally fired his gun at a UN assembly in 2006, narrowly missing Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a new book reveals. The incident was kept under wraps for fears Iran would accuse the US of attempted assassination.

A Secret Service agent readjusting a shotgun mounted on a vehicle in former President George W. Bush’s motorcade discharged the weapon by accident as President Ahmadinejad left the InterContinental Hotel in New York.

A new book entitled ‘Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry’ by Marc Ambinder and DB Grady has lifted the lid on the Secret Service blunder and the reasons it was covered up.

“A US Secret Service agent, in an apparent accident, discharged his shotgun as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was loading his motorcade at the InterContinental Hotel yesterday,” wrote Bush’s daily intelligence brief the day after the incident according to an official cited in the book.

U.S. President George W. Bush speaks at the 61st U.N. General Assembly in New York, September 19, 2006 (Reuters / Mike Segar)

“Everyone just stopped,” the official said.

“The Iranians looked at us and we looked at the Iranians. The agent began to apologize. Ahmadinejad just turned his head and got into his car.” The book proposes that some Washington officials interpreted the Iranians’ silence as evidence that Tehran was acting cautiously and strategically.

The incident was quickly swept under the rug by the Bush administration which was, at that time, discussing how to deal with Tehran’s alleged atomic weapons program. The gunshot issue had the potential to spark a major international scandal, but was confined to an item in one of the president’s daily intelligence briefs.

Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program has been a significant obstacle to US-Iranian relations over recent years. The Obama administration has sought to curtail Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by ratcheting up economic sanctions on Iran, while US ally Israel has made numerous calls for a preemptive strike on its nuclear facilities.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (L) meets United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan before addressing the 61st General Assembly of the United Nations at the U.N. Headquarters in New York, September 19, 2006 (Reuters / Jeff Zelevansky)

Ahmadinejad has repeatedly insisted to the international community that Tehran’s nuclear program is purely for civilian purposes. In February, he signaled his readiness to sit down and negotiate with the US regarding the issue and urged the world to cooperate with Iran.

“[Israel] wants to attack Iran, but we’re not preparing any attack against them because the purpose of our program is purely defense,” he said in an interview with Al-Ahram newspaper.

 

[ramonmercado]

Talks, but looks as if the US are on top. Full text at link.

Iran: Edging towards a settlement

US sanctions appear to have produced results for imperialism, writes Yassamine Mather

As Iranian president Hassan Rowhani addressed the UN general assembly on September 25, there seemed to be no end to the charm offensive unleashed by the new government in Tehran. Following a number of conciliatory articles in US papers1 and a TV interview during which he emphasised Iran’s commitment to “peaceful nuclear development”, the Iranian president arrived in New York, accompanied by Iran’s only Jewish MP - apparently a supporter of the new government.

Two days into the UN’s 68th general assembly, Iran’s foreign minister had already met William Hague, Rowhani had shaken hands with French president François Hollande and it was announced that Iran will take part in negotiations with the ‘five plus one’ countries on September 26, along with US foreign secretary John Kerry. The proposed meeting between Kerry and Iran’s new foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, will be the highest-level US-Iran contact for more than 30 years and, according to media reports,2 the UN was buzzing with rumours that there might be a Rowhani-Obama handshake in the corridors of the United Nations.

The ‘accidental’ meeting would not have been the first time the US administration had used the general assembly for communicating with moderate Iranians. According to Bruce Riedel, who was a senior director at the National Security Council and adviser to Bill Clinton on Iran, in September 2000 Clinton instructed aides to arrange a face-to-face encounter with Iran’s president, Mohammad Khatami. At the secretary general’s lunch, the two presidents were supposed to be seated not too far from each other so that an ‘accidental’ meeting could be arranged. Thirteen years later, the Americans apparently made very similar efforts.
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-edgi ... settlement

 

[ramonmercado]

More analysis. Full text at link.

Telephone diplomacy riles Israeli hawks and Iranian conservatives
Immediate results from the thaw in US-Iran relations will be few and far between, warns Yassamine Mather

Last week’s phone conversation between the presidents of the United States and Iran, the first direct talks between the two heads of state in more than 30 years, has been the cause of major controversy amongst conservatives both in the US and the Islamic Republic.

Although both countries have declared a willingness to work together to “break the deadlock” over Iran’s nuclear programme, in hindsight it is easy to understand why Hassan Rowhani avoided a handshake or a ‘casual meeting’ in the corridors of the UN with Barack Obama. He did not have permission for a face-to-face meeting and there is some dispute as to whether or not he had the supreme leader’s blessing even for the now (in)famous phone call. According to Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, supreme leader Ali Khamenei approved of everything he and Rowhani did, and Hossein Naghavi, a ‘reformist’ spokesperson on foreign policy in the majles (parliament), claimed the president had received “the necessary permission from the system” for his telephone diplomacy with Obama. “System” is considered by most commentators to be code for ‘supreme leader’.

Khamenei’s foreign affairs representative was at the airport to welcome back Rowhani - another sign that overall the supreme leader was happy with the outcome. State TV only showed pro-Rowhani demonstrators at the airport, so the Iranian people only found out about the eggs and shoes thrown at the presidential vehicle from the western press and media. Having said that, Khamenei is a complicated character and it is possible that those voicing opposition to Rowhani might also have been prompted by the supreme leader’s office.

Khamenei is making sure that, whatever happens, he will not be blamed if things go wrong. That is why general Mohammad Ali Jafarione, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and a close ally of Khamenei, said on September 30 that the telephone diplomacy was “a tactical mistake”. Probably the same can be said about Hossein Shariatmadari, a notorious rightwinger and editor of the Tehran daily Kayhan. He was derisive: “Mr Rowhani has not achieved anything in New York ... the telephone conversation with Mr Obama was the most regretful part and the biggest advantage Iran … gave to the rival.”1 ...
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/telephone ... servatives

 

[ramonmercado]

...If Iran’s apparent agreement to scale down its nuclear programme was predictable, there is a lot of speculation about the reasons for what looks like a softening of the US position. A comrade in Hands Off the People of Iran has offered a possible explanation. Having traditionally relied on Saudi Arabia, Qatar and their Sunni allies, the US might be concerned that these countries have no control over Islamic military groups they finance in the region, Libya and Syria being obvious example of this phenomenon. So the US might be pursuing a twin-track policy of establishing better relations with Shia Iran (a country that has firm control of the Islamist groups associated with it), while maintaining its links with the Sunni states.

In Iran speculation about US inconsistencies dominate sections of the media. The state TV network, Jaam-e-Jam, has gone so far as to quote this writer on its website, when it reproduced part of what I had said on the weekly news/analysis programme of the BBC Persian service.5 (Incidentally it describes the Persian service as a den of spies, part of a Zionist conspiracy and paid for by MI5 on other pages of its website). Inevitably only those sections of the programme where I referred to the US and the effect of sanctions are reported: the rest of the discussion, when I talked about Iran’s ambitions in the region and the regime’s need for crises in order to survive, did not make it onto Jaam-e-Jam’s web pages. This in itself shows the desperation of the Iranian regime - it is not as though it is unaware of my life-long opposition.

And the battle between conservatives and ‘reformists’ has moved up a gear, with foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif claiming that false reporting of his comments about president Hassan Rowhani’s visit to New York has caused him so much stress that he was almost paralysed on the eve of the Geneva talks. To prove it, Zarif tweeted a picture of himself lying in bed with backache. But our Twitter-using foreign minister is a firm believer in secrecy. No details of Iran’s presentation in Geneva have been made available to the Iranian people. ...
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-step-solidarity

 

[ramonmercado]

Solidarity with the Iranian working class

Increasingly, the political landscape of the Middle East is an extremely complicated place. In this podcast, Yassamine Mather of Hands Off the People of Iran looks at the conflicting interests that have driven the United States and Iranian governments to seek some form of modus vivendi with each other and the implications this may have both for the wider politics of the region and the respective domestic balance of class forces in these countries. ...

http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/solidarit ... king-class

 

[ramonmercado]

Khamenei urges hardliners not to undermine nuclear talks, warns of ‘smiling enemy’
http://rt.com/news/khamenei-approve-nuclear-talks-159/
Published time: November 03, 2013 15:26
Edited time: November 03, 2013 17:10

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (AFP Photo)A handout picture released by the official website of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (AFP Photo)

Iran's Supreme Leader warned hardliners in the country not to undermine upcoming nuclear negotiations in the West. He remained critical of Washington’s two-pronged approach to the Islamic Republic, however, warning "We should not trust a smiling enemy."

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's comments were meant to bolster moderate President Hassan Rouhani ahead of a new round of nuclear talks with the so-called P5+1 group of world powers scheduled for November 7-8 in Geneva; the group is made up of five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany.

“[Diplomats] are on a difficult mission and nobody should weaken those who are on assignment,” the official IRNA news agency quoted Khamenei, who is the head of state and highest ranking political and religious authority in the country, as saying.

“Nobody should consider our negotiators as compromise-seekers,” he said.

Hardliners have accused diplomats of being overly optimistic and for not being forthcoming about the results of previous talks. They have also criticized Rouhani for pursuing broader rapprochement with the United States, having been especially riled by a brief but historic phone call between him and President Barack Obama in September.

In a thinly veiled reference to the call, the first of its kind since 1979, Khamenei himself described it as being “not appropriate.”

Khamenei said talks with the P5+1 group, would be limited to the nuclear issue, although he reiterated previous statements that a positive outcome remained doubtful.

"I am not optimistic about the negotiations but, with the grace of God, we will not suffer losses either," his official website Khamenei.ir quotes him as saying.

"All the better if the negotiations bear fruit but if there are no results, the country should rely on itself," he told a crowd of students at his residence.

Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Reza Najafi (L) and the IAEA chief inspector Tero Varjoranta attend a press statement after their meeting at the United Nations headquaters in Vienna on October 29, 2013 for another round of expert talks between the UN nuclear watchdog and Iran. (AFP Photo / Dieter Nagl)Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Reza Najafi (L) and the IAEA chief inspector Tero Varjoranta attend a press statement after their meeting at the United Nations headquaters in Vienna on October 29, 2013 for another round of expert talks between the UN nuclear watchdog and Iran. (AFP Photo / Dieter Nagl)

Khamenei was also critical of the United States dual policy of pressuring Iran with sanctions, while making diplomatic overtures to resolve the nuclear standoff.

“The Americans smile and express desire for negotiation; on the other hand, they immediately say that all options are on the table," he said, referring to US and Israeli threats to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.

"We should not trust a smiling enemy," Khamenei warned, as the students chanted "Death to America".
Following talks with world powers later this week, Iranian officials will meet with the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) in Tehran on November.

Thursday’s meeting will be the second since Rouhani assumed office in August. The talks are aimed at curbing the Islamic Republic’s uranium enrichment program in exchange for ending international sanctions that have battered the country’s flagging economy.

The West has accused Iran of clandestinely developing nuclear weapons technology, a claim the country has denied.

In September, Obama vowed the United States would "take no options off the table, including military options, in terms of making sure that we do not have nuclear weapons in Iran."

Meanwhile, Khamenei who delivered his comments on the eve of the anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran – a crucial turning point in US-Iranian relations – praised the militant students who stormed America’s diplomatic mission several decades prior.

"Thirty years ago, our young people called the US Embassy a 'den of spies'... It means our young people were 30 years ahead of their time," he said in reference to recent revelations that the US has spied on 35 foreign leaders, including allies.

Hardline factions have pledged to stage a major anti-US rally on Monday: the anniversary of the takeover. The date is marked each year by gatherings outside the former US embassy, which is covered in anti-American murals. Support for such rallies, however, have waned in recent years, with authorities bussing in students to fill out the crowds.

Hardliners have viewed the November 4 rally as an opportunity to further pressure Rouhani in the run-up to the talks.

 

[ramonmercado]

Full text at link.

A region in flux
Tue, 24/12/2013 - 07:34 | Brendan
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/region-flux


Yassamine Mather of Hands off the People of Iran examines the failure of political Islam and imperialism’s attempts to adjust its alliances Irrespective of what happens in 2014, the year 2013 will be remembered as a year of historic changes in Iran-US relations.

For the first time in 34 years, a US president has spoken to his Iranian equivalent, and the two countries’ foreign ministers have held face-to-face negotiations as well as a number of phone conversations. Contrary to what the supporters of the reformist movement in Iran claim, the dramatic changes in Iran-US relations are not simply a consequence of the June 2013 elections and the coming to office of a ‘moderate’ president in Iran.

We now know that secret meetings between US and Iranian officials took place in Oman last year, during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency. According to a senior US official quoted by Associated Press, US foreign secretary John Kerry visited Oman in May 2013, “ostensibly to push a military deal with the sultanate but secretly focused on maintaining that country’s key mediation role”.

Above all, the initially secret and latterly open meetings that have led to the current negotiations mark a radical change in US policy towards the region. For most of the last three and a half decades, in fact since the coming to power of the Islamic Republic in Iran, US foreign policy in the Middle East has been to keep its two main allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, at loggerheads with the Islamic Republic.

This post-1979 policy has had one strategic focus: preventing a repetition of Iran’s Islamic revolution in another Muslim country. Ironically it was the Arab spring, the rise and subsequent failure of political Islam in the Arab world, that alleviated this fear, and the US is now prepared to move towards rapprochement with Iran.

In this article I will look at some of the factors that paved the way for these changes, and the possible consequences that might follow.

1. Shia supreme religious leaders in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei, had promised their people and the world that future revolutions in the region will be Islamic in character and will seek to imitate Iran’s 1979 revolution. Indeed, at first glance events in Egypt and Tunisia in 2012-13 seemed to confirm this prediction. Yet even as the Muslim Brotherhood was gaining support in Egypt, and later as it came to power, it became quite apparent that the Shia-Sunni divide meant they were unlikely to be allies of Iran’s Islamic Republic. In fact, Tehran’s antagonistic attitude towards the pro-Saudi MB government in Cairo was as pronounced as it had been towards Egypt under Mubarak. US strategists had to accept that even if political Islam came to power in another Middle Eastern country, it was their allies in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf who would control the purse strings and dictate how events unfolded – not Iran. Even if an Islamic revolution succeeded in the Arab world, the Iranian model would not be repeated.

 

[ramonmercado]

Full text at link.

End all sanctions, free the prisoners

Now is the time to step up the pressure, writes Yassamine Mather

Striking Iranian steelworkers

Catherine Ashton’s first visit to Iran’s Islamic Republic as European Union representative marked the beginning of the second phase of Iran’s negotiations with the P5+1 powers, which, according to both sides, will be far more “difficult and challenging” than the initial phase.

There is still confusion about the results of the interim deal, as well as ambiguity about aspects of it. Over the last few months International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have been granted access to nuclear plants and on January 20 the IAEA reported that Iran has disconnected centrifuge cascades used to enrich uranium to 20% and destroyed its already enriched stockpile of uranium. It has also stopped installing any additional centrifuges, and ended work on the Arak heavy water reactor. However, as far as the future of Iran’s nuclear programme is concerned, there are two interpretations of the initial agreement. Iran’s foreign minister insists that the Geneva agreement of November 2013 accepts Iran’s right to enrich uranium up to 5%, but the Americans deny this.

Nevertheless, in return for these Iranian moves there has been a limited lifting of economic sanctions, including allowing access to $4.2 billion of Iranian cash frozen in foreign banks. In addition sanctions targeting petrochemical industries, precious metals, the auto industry, passenger plane parts and services have been lifted over the last few months. However, most Iranians have yet to see any improvement in their daily lives.

Over the last year of ‘targeted’ sanctions oil exports fell by 60% - equivalent to a loss of around $80 billion. Iran’s currency, the rial, plummeted in value. Inflation increased to 45% and, according to the central bank, the economy contracted by 5.8% last year, to a level not seen since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. But now a number of countries, including Japan and India, have finally paid for oil imported at the height of the sanctions in 2011 and 2012.

The Tehran stock exchange rose by 130% in 2013, following the new government’s promises of negotiations regarding the nuclear issue. But this hardly showed confidence in the Iranian economy - Iranian capitalists have not been investing in property, or dollar and gold markets, which have been doing poorly, which leaves nowhere else but the stock exchange. While in December 2013 there was record trading, things have fallen back since mid-February mainly due to uncertainty about a long-term deal with the west.

In the last couple of weeks, as events have unfolded in Ukraine, president Hassan Rowhani has come under pressure from Islamic hard-liners, who accuse his government of selling out. Some clerics have gone so far as to say that, had Iran resisted US pressure, Russia would have stepped in to support it, as it did in the Crimea. Others have argued that because Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons it was subsequently invaded.

During Ashton’s visit to Tehran, Benyamin Netanyahu said that she should ask the Iranians about a merchant ship Israel seized last week, which was said to be carrying what Israel described as an Iranian shipment of weapons intended for Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. In late February Israeli commandos boarded and seized a merchant ship in the Red Sea allegedly carrying a shipment of “advanced weapons destined for Palestinian militant groups in Gaza”.

This gave Israel the opportunity to claim that the nature of the Iranian regime had not changed. Israel claimed that rockets with a range of between 90 and 160 km had been shipped into Iran from Syria. Netanyahu claimed: “We are revealing the truth behind the deceiving smiles of Iran.” He claimed that the “international community” wants to “ignore Iran’s ongoing aggression and its part in the massacre in Syria”.

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, responded in the form of a tweet: “An Iranian ship carrying arms for Gaza. Captured just in time for annual AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] anti-Iran campaign. Amazing coincidence! Or same failed lies.” Whatever the truth, this was by no means an Israeli coup. The ship had been under US surveillance throughout its journey from Iran and it was the US airforce that supplied the Israeli navy with details of the ship’s cargo and its whereabouts. ...
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-work ... -prisoners

 

[ramonmercado]

Will the deal bring peace?
Yassamine Mather examines the prospects following the Lausanne agreement

Finally, after eight days of intensive negotiations, on April 2 Iran and the P5+1 powers agreed a statement of intent, which will become the framework for the final deal to be signed in June 2015.

This does not mean the US administration has decided on a strategy of rapprochement with Iran - the proposed ‘framework’ does not address any issues beyond the immediate subject of the country’s nuclear installations. However, if the final deal is reached, it will herald a new era in the two countries’ bilateral relations and for Iran’s economic and trade relations with the European Union. Sections of Iran’s industry, paralysed by sanctions, will resume operation, the rate of inflation might fall if the price of the rial rises, and the price of basic goods might come down if the internal mafia of black marketeers can be controlled.

It is too early to speculate how all this will play out in detail, but we can safely, I think, predict four things. Firstly, European companies will return in the hope of securing new markets and large profits. Secondly, the Islamic Republic will persevere with its neoliberal economic policies. Thirdly, in any ensuing economic upturn, the gap between the rich and the poor will get wider, non-payment of workers’ wages will continue. Fourthly, the ‘reformist’ faction of the Islamic regime will maintain power for longer than one presidential election. ...

http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1053/will-the-deal-bring-peace/

 

[Schwadevivre]

Will the deal bring peace?

Not if the Republican party has anything to do with it. As Senator John McCain said a good few years ago to the tune of Barbara Ann
"Bomb,bomb, bomb,
Bomb, Bomb Iran ..."