June 29, 2009
by Con Coughlin

The removal of America as the focal point of Iran’s anti-Western rhetoric makes Britain, which remains America’s closest ally in Europe, a ready-made replacement. And whereas the hostility between Iran and the US only goes back three decades – to Khomeini’s revolution, to be precise – the climate of mutual suspicion, recrimination and antipathy that exists between London and Tehran dates back centuries.

Britain established trading ties with the kingdom of Persia in the early 17th century, but relations between London and Tehran encountered their first set-back in the early 19th century, when the Persians were forced to concede territory to Russia under the terms of the Treaty of Gulistan, negotiated by the British diplomat Sir Gore Ouseley. This was regarded as a humiliation by many Iranians, and the perception of Britain as a “wily fox” quickly took root within the country’s political classes.

Relations further soured when Britain arbitrarily set Iran’s borders with India in the 1860s, but matters came to a head in 1872 when the then shah awarded Baron Paul Julius von Reuter, the founder of Reuters news agency, a monopoly over virtually all of Iran’s economic and financial resources. Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary at the time, described the “Reuter Concession”, as it became known, as “the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamt of, much less accomplished, in history”.

Public outrage at the deal ultimately led to the constitutional revolution at the turn of the 20th century, which resulted in Iran adapting the principles of democratic government. But Britain’s reputation for deviousness was further enhanced in the 1950s when British intelligence officers helped Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA station chief in Tehran, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953.

Mossadeq, in common with many Iranians, wanted a more equitable distribution of Iran’s new oil wealth, which was still overseen by the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. But when Mossadeq attempted to nationalise the oil business and depose the shah, the British and American governments authorised a counter-coup that restored the shah to power.

Of all the acts of imperial perfidy conducted by the British, it is the overthrow of Mossadeq’s government that remains most deeply embedded in the Iranian psyche, to the extent that, in accusing Britain of stirring unrest over the recent presidential elections, the Iranian regime has no difficulty convincing its people of British complicity.

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July 16, 2009
by Timothy Snyder

The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people. …

The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.

Auschwitz is only an introduction to the Holocaust, the Holocaust only a suggestion of Hitler’s final aims. Grossman’s novels Forever Flowing and Life and Fate daringly recount both Nazi and Soviet terror, and remind us that even a full characterization of German policies of mass killing is incomplete as a history of atrocity in mid-century Europe. It omits the state that Hitler was chiefly concerned to destroy, the other state that killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans. Thus when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state. As a general rule, the German regime killed civilians who were not German citizens, whereas the Soviet regime chiefly killed civilians who were Soviet citizens. …

The emphasis on Auschwitz and the Gulag understates the numbers of Europeans killed, and shifts the geographical focus of the killing to the German Reich and the Russian East. Like Auschwitz, which draws our attention to the Western European victims of the Nazi empire, the Gulag, with its notorious Siberian camps, also distracts us from the geographical center of Soviet killing policies. If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. More generally, when we contemplate Auschwitz and the Gulag, we tend to think of the states that built them as systems, as modern tyrannies, or totalitarian states. Yet such considerations of thought and politics in Berlin and Moscow tend to overlook the fact that mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.

The geographic, moral, and political center of the Europe of mass killing is the Europe of the East, above all Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States, lands that were subject to sustained policies of atrocity by both regimes. The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.

Israel Aims to Deport Rights Activists They Forced to Israel in the First Place. US Gov’t Remains Mute.

July 3rd, 2009
by Richard Silverstein

The Israeli government is attempting to compel the 23 abducted human rights workers who were sailing to Gaza as part of a humanitarian effort to break the Israeli blockade, to sign a deporation order that would prohibit them from visiting Israel for the next ten years. If they do not sign, Israel will continue to illegally imprison them. If they do sign, they have admitted violating Israel’s blockade and entering Israeli territorial waters without permission. That will bar them from the country for 10 years. …

The Free Gaza Movement activists have not taken the bait and remain in prison. The U.S. government has not made the case a high profile one feeling it has bigger fish to fry regarding the settlement freeze issue. But the Obama folks are going to eventually face facts that having an ostensible U.S. ally holding four of our citizens for the crime of sailing a former ferry filled with medicine and other humanitarian aid to Gaza via international waters, is intolerable.

Someone will also have to explain to me how Gaza’s territorial waters have become Israel’s if the latter has truly withdrawn from Gaza as it likes to claim. The answer is the same as the one the White Rabbit gave: “a word means what I want it to mean, nothing more, nothing less.” So Israel conveniently abuses international maritime law and appropriates Gaza’s territorial waters when it suits; and when it doesn’t it claims it washed its hands of Gaza long ago and has no interest in it.

Also, can someone explain to me why Fox News has been providing the most extensive coverage of this incident in all the U.S. media. Not a word in the N.Y. Times, whose correspondent, Ethan Bronner apparently can’t be bothered to cover such an ‘insignificant’ story.

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July 4, 2009

Adie Mormech, one of over 21 human rights workers and crew taken prisoner on Tuesday 30th June when their boat was forcibly boarded by the Israeli navy, has spoken by mobile phone from his prison cell at Givon jail, Ramle, near Tel Aviv.

Amongst the other prisoners from the Free Gaza Movement boat, Spirit of Humanity, are Nobel Peace prize winner, Mairead Maguire, and former US Congresswoman, Cythnia McKinney. A message from McKinney on 2nd July condemned Israel for its “illegal” action in “dismantl[ing] our navigation equipment” and confiscating both the ship and its cargo of medical aid, childrens’ toys and olive trees.

McKinney went on to say that “State Department and White House officials have not effected our release or taken a strong public stance to condemn the illegal actions of the Israeli Navy of enforcing a blockade of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians of Gaza, a blockade that has been condemned by President Obama.”

The Free Gaza campaign succeeded in entering Gaza by sea on several occasions in 2008, carrying humanitarian aid, medical personnel, journalists and human rights workers. However, later attempts have been met with aggression by the Israeli navy, with one boat, the Dignity, having to seek refuge and repairs in Lebanon after being rammed three times by an Israeli warship.

In a brief interview with Andy Bowman of Manchester’s Mule newspaper (http//www.themule.info), Mr Mormech gave the following account:

How are you being treated?

It’s bad, but the conditions are OK for me, I’ve not been beaten up, they’re a bit nasty sometimes and when they boarded the boat we had our faces slammed against the floor. It was bad for the older women like Mairead.

The four other UK nationals are in the cell with me. There’s 14 of us in the 7 by 7 meter cell which includes the toilet and shower, so very crowded. It’s very hot and there’s only a tiny window. We get awakened at 6 in the morning for an inspection and have to stand to attention, and then they repeat that at 9 am, and we are only allowed out of the cells for a few hours each day. They keep giving us forms to sign but they are in Hebrew so we don’t. Although I’m able to cope here, other people are less comfortable than me in the situation. If we’re here for a long time - like some of the other people in here have been - then it will be tough.

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July 2, 2009
by Mohammed J. Herzallah

Dayton’s security coordination program has weakened the Palestinian presidency, discredited it in the eyes of its people and rendered it critically dependent on American and Israeli support for political survival. It has forced Hamas to seek support from regional powers to counter the US-sponsored scheme against it, and therefore allowed further external meddling in Palestinian affairs. But perhaps the most important negative consequence is that by building direct ties with first- and second-tier commanders in the PA’s security establishment and “young guard” elements in Fatah, the US has created new vested interests with a stake in continuing outside intervention. With the power, money and prestige that comes with US support, these new political cleavages start developing their own agendas and hence become a source of further disharmony in the Palestinian polity.

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Ayatollah Jannati Urges Protesters to ‘Repent’

July 3, 2009
by Jason Ditz

Addressing the weekend arrest of several local employees of the British Embassy in Tehran in his weekly sermon, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati today claimed the staffers had ‘made confessions’ with regards to their activities, and would be put on trial, though he did not say what the charges would be.

Ayatollah Jannati

The European Union also supported the British position and labeled the arrests an attempt at “harassment or intimidation” of staff working at embassies. Iran has accused the British government, among others, of backing the massive protests the nation saw in the wake of its disputed election.

In his sermon, Jannati claimed the British government had been plotting the protests since March, and calls on those involved in the protests “to repent and ask God to forgive them.” He also cited Ayatollah Khomeini’s comment that anyone who disrupts national unity “has committed treason against the Islamic Republic.”

US Diplomats Aim to Block G8 Summit Sanctions

July 3, 2009
by Jason Ditz

Among the major topics of discussion at next week’s G8 summit in the central Italian college town of L’Aquila will be new sanctions against the Iranian government. Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi predicted earlier in the week that such sanctions would pass.

But in an almost unfathomable change in directions from the nation that has generally spearheaded the pro-sanctions position, diplomats say that the United States is opposed to the new sanctions, which would punish oil companies that do business in Iran.

Advocates are seeking to punish Iran for its crackdown on protesters against last month’s disputed election, but US officials are reportedly concerned that sanctions on the basis of the election could actually harm the opposition’s position and might also keep them from negotiations on their nuclear program.

The Iranian government and the state media have repeatedly accused the opposition of being organized by foreign governments, and would likely spin the sanctions as an attempt by the international community to force their candidate of choice into office, despite investigations by the Guardian Council insisting no evidence of massive voter fraud exists.

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July 3, 2009
by Nancy Hamm and Suresh Bhalla

Our country has long been recognized as a global leader in human rights and commitment to international law, wielding moral authority much larger than its size.  But our government’s unreserved support for the conduct of Israel’s recent military actions in Gaza has eroded Canada’s hard-won credibility and moral standing.

In its statements about the conflict, the Canadian government focused exclusively on Israel’s right to defend itself, disregarding its serious violations of international humanitarian law. After a mortar attack that killed close to 40 civilians near a United Nations-operated school in the Jabalya refugee camp, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Peter Kent was quick to react. “Hamas has a terrible responsibility for this,” he said, while admitting that he didn’t know the details of the attack.

Human Rights Watch has documented serious violations of the laws of war on both sides.

The laws of war require parties to a conflict to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians. But Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups fired hundreds of rockets into towns in southern Israel. These rockets are so inaccurate that it is not possible to aim them to discriminate between military targets and civilians. Human Rights Watch also documented cases in which Hamas fired rockets from densely populated areas, thus making civilians in the vicinity vulnerable to counterattacks.

But violations by Hamas do not justify violations by Israel. During the conflict, Israel repeatedly fired 155mm high-explosive artillery munitions into heavily populated areas of Gaza. It also exploded white phosphorus munitions in the air over densely populated areas, killing and wounding civilians and damaging civilian structures.

Israel also has a blockade preventing the movement of essential goods and people into and out of the Gaza Strip, amounting to unlawful collective punishment of the civilian population. The blockade began when Hamas took control of Gaza in June 2007 and continues to this day.

The Israel Defense Forces used an unjustifiably expansive definition of military targets during the operation.  It attacked a range of presumptively civilian facilities on the basis that they provided at least indirect support to Hamas’s military wing, violating the crucial distinction between civilians and combatants that lies at the heart of the laws of war. The Israeli military’s logic would entitle Hamas to target virtually any government building in Israel on the grounds that its officials and workers indirectly supported the military.

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July 3, 2009
by Juan Cole

In what may be a major development, it is being alleged that Iranian opposition leader Mir Hosain Mousavi and his wife Zahra Rahnavard are calling for a general strike next week. Such a strike would be harder for the regime to forestall than crowds coming into the streets, and whether it has a big effect or not would be a way of measuring the support for the reformists in the country.

Predictably, hard liners in the Iranian parliament are calling for Mousavi to be arrested. As it is, seven members of what the regime calls “anti-government groups” from Tehran and Qazvin were arrested yesterday.

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The US should follow the Northern Ireland and South African models – which had principles, not preconditions.

June 24, 2009
by Helena Cobban

Hamas has been on the State Department’s “terrorism list” since its founding in 1987. It has steadfastly refused to recognize Israel. But it has also won – and kept – considerable popular support among Palestinians.

In 2006 it won parliamentary elections held in the West Bank and Gaza. More recently it survived the military onslaught Israel launched against Gaza last December – and in the wake of that war, Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians increased.

Meanwhile, Washington’s ongoing campaign to strengthen the rival Fatah party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has backfired badly. Rather than strengthening Fatah, the aid that Washington and its allies have sent to Mr. Abbas has further fueled the nepotism and corruption within Fatah and hastened its internal decline.

Clearly, if there is to be a Palestinian team at any peace negotiations, its work must be supported by Hamas as well as Fatah. But can Hamas, whose 1988 Charter still rejects participation in peace conferences and calls for an end to the State of Israel, really be judged a valid party to the peacemaking?

The history of numerous other peace efforts indicates it can. Consider the examples of South Africa and Northern Ireland. Nationalist parties there that were once denounced as “terrorist” and hunted down ended up as valued – indeed, essential – participants in the peacemaking.

In both those earlier cases, parties invited to the table were required to verifiably set aside their arms (though not, in the first instance, to disarm completely). They were also required to agree to principles of nonviolent, democratic decisionmaking. It worked.

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July 2, 2009
by Stephanie Nebehay

A U.N. human rights investigator on Thursday called Israel’s seizure of a ship carrying relief aid for the Gaza Strip “unlawful” and said its blockade of the territory constituted a “continuing crime against humanity”.

Israeli authorities on Tuesday intercepted the vessel, which was also carrying 21 pro-Palestinian activists, and said it would not be permitted to enter Gaza coastal waters because of security risks in the area and its existing naval blockade.

Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said the move was part of Israel’s “cruel blockade of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza” in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting any form of collective punishment against “an occupied people”.

Falk, an American expert on international law, said Israel’s two-year blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza restricted vital supplies such as food, medicine and fuel to “bare subsistence levels”.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a report this week that Israel was also halting entry to Gaza of building materials and spare parts needed to repair damage from its 22-day invasion late last December.

“Such a pattern of continuing blockade under these conditions amounts to such a serious violation of the Geneva Conventions as to constitute a continuing crime against humanity,” Falk said in a statement released in Geneva.

Prior to leaving Cyprus, the ship was inspected by Cypriot authorities in response to Israeli demands to determine whether it carried any weapons, according to the U.N. investigator. “None were found and Israeli authorities were so informed.”

“Nonetheless, the 21 peace activists on the boat were arrested, held in captivity and have been charged with ‘illegal entry’ to Israel even though they had no intention of going to Israel,” Falk added.

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US Avoids Comment as Former Congresswoman Remains in Israeli Prison

July 2, 2009
by Jason Ditz

According to former US Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney, she and the other passengers aboard an aid ship captured by the Israeli Navy off the coast of the Gaza Strip remain in an Israeli prison. A spokesman for the Israeli embassy says that McKinney and the others will likely be released by Sunday, but complained that McKinney “is not cooperating with the authorities.” Israel is reportedly demanded that McKinney sign a document admitting to illegally entering Israeli territory.

The ship was captured Tuesday by the Israeli Navy, the humanitarian aid seized and the activists aboard taken to Israel, where they are being held by immigration officials pending deportation. The ship was attempting to circumvent a naval blockade of the strip, which is facing shortages of medicine and other key humanitarian goods.

UN human rights investigator Richard Falk today criticized the Israeli action as unlawful, noting that it made no sense for the military to capture people, force them into Israel, then charge them with “illegal entry” even though they never had any intention of going there. The Israeli government condemned Falk for his criticism, and insisted that the ship was engaged in anti-Israel propaganda.

Members of Britain’s consulate in Israel have visited detainees from that nation, while the Irish Foreign Ministry has demanded the release of the activists who hold Irish citizenship. So far the US has declined to publicly comment on the detention of Americans, including McKinney, by the Israeli government and appears to have made no effort to secure their release.

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July 2, 2009
by Glenn Greenwald

Back in February, The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage — who won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing Bush’s use of signing statements to break the law — wrote an article reporting that, after a first-week Executive Order from Obama banning torture, “the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting Al Qaeda,” which is “prompting growing worry among civil liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush-era policies.”  About Savage’s February article, I wrote:

While believing that Savage’s article is of great value in sounding the right alarm bells, I think that he paints a slightly more pessimistic picture on the civil liberties front than is warranted by the evidence thus far (though only slightly).

In retrospect, Savage was right and I was wrong about that:  his February article was far more prescient than premature.

Today, in the NYT, Savage has another article examining the same topic, headlined:  ”To Critics, New Policy on Terror Looks Old.”  In it, he explores this question:  ”Has [Obama], on issues related to fighting terrorism, turned out to be little different from his predecessor?”  A key point from Savage’s article — which I’ve tried to emphasize several times — is that whereas these policies were supported by roughly half the population (Republicans) in the Bush era but vehemently opposed by the other half (at least ostensibly), Obama’s embrace of them is now causing a large part of the other half of the population (Democrats) to support them as well, thus entrenching them as bipartisan consensus:

In any case, Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor, said Mr. Obama’s ratification of the basic outlines of the surveillance and detention policies he inherited would reverberate for generations. By bestowing bipartisan acceptance on them, Mr. Balkin said, Mr. Obama is consolidating them as entrenched features of government.

“What we are watching,” Mr. Balkin said, “is a liberal, centrist, Democratic version of the construction of these same governing practices.”

That was the point former Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith made when arguing last month that Obama is actually strengthening (rather than “changing”) the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism even more effectively than Bush did by entrenching those policies in law and causing unprincipled Democrats to switch from pretending to oppose them to supporting them, thus transforming them into bipartisan dogma.

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July 3, 2009
by Patrick Seale

This is good news for Syria’s President Bashar al-Asad. His early years in power, and especially the years 2002 to 2006, were a period of great anxiety, which he managed to survive against great odds. He survived the U.S. neo-cons’ aggressive determination to reshape the Middle East to Israel’s benefit. He survived the American occupation of Iraq which, had it been successful, would undoubtedly have brought down his own regime. And he survived the forced withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, after the February 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

Throughout all these trials, Syrian diplomacy managed to defend the country’s vital interests. It prevented Lebanon — Syria’s “near abroad” — from falling under the influence of a hostile power, thus protecting Syria’s own sphere of influence in the Levant; it resisted U.S.-Israeli hegemony by forging its own regional alliance, notably the Tehran-Damascus-Hizbullah axis; and it remained steadfast in its backing of Palestinians of all stripes, including Mahmud Abbas’ Fatah and Khaled Mish‘al’s Hamas.

The regime’s legitimacy rests essentially on its steadfast refusal to compromise its Arab nationalist credentials. With the population at large, it also rests on the fact that it has managed to provide Syria with reasonable protection in a highly turbulent region. Several other Arab societies have been shattered by U.S. invasions, Israeli assaults, civil wars, Islamic insurgencies or other disturbances, but Syria has remained relatively unscathed.

This has come, however, at considerable cost. Powerful security services have not been held in check. The rule of law has not always been observed. Syria’s human rights record leaves much to be desired. Freedom of expression is limited. Civil rights activists and other critics have languished in jail. The fact that other states in the region — Israel, Arab countries, the United States itself — have behaved with cruel disregard for basic human values does not absolve Syria from blame for its own misdeeds. The country’s image has suffered accordingly.

President Bashar al-Asad is well aware that regional peace is essential if he is to achieve his ambition of building a modern state. He has called repeatedly for negotiations with Israel. Not surprisingly, he is anxious to recover the Golan, seized by Israel in 1967. But Syria has no time for a peace which will give Israel further strategic advantage or allow it to continue to oppress the Palestinians.

Living nose-to-nose in the Levant with an aggressive and expansionist Israel, backed by the United States, has not been comfortable for Syria. Its enduring goal has been to find a way to contain Israel. It has therefore sought to acquire a certain deterrent capability, if not by military means — not an easy task in view of the IDF’s overwhelming power — then by expanding its network of allies and friends.

July 2, 2009
by Gareth Porter

The Barack Obama administration has given new prominence to a Bush administration charge that Iran is providing military training and assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, for which no evidence has ever been produced, and which has been discredited by data obtained by IPS from the Pentagon itself.

The new twist in the charge is that it is being made in the context of serious talks between NATO officials and Iran involving possible Iranian cooperation in NATO’s logistical support for the war against the insurgents in Afghanistan.

Since the early to mid-1990s, Iranian policy in Afghanistan has been more consistently and firmly opposed to the Taliban than that of the United States.

The Obama administration thus appears to be pressing that charge as a means of increasing the political-diplomatic pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme, despite NATO’s need for Iranian help on Afghanistan.

CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus declared in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Apr. 1, “In Afghanistan, Iran appears to have hedged its longstanding public support for the Karzai government by providing opportunistic support to the Taliban.”

Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Brussels Jun. 12, “Iran is playing a double game” in Afghanistan by “sending in a relatively modest level of weapons and capabilities to attack ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) and coalition forces.”

The State Department’s annual report on terrorism, published Apr. 30, 2009, claimed that the Iranian Qods Force had “provided training to the Taliban on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives and indirect fire weapons.” It also charged that Iran had “arranged arms shipments including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives to select Taliban members.”

The report offered no evidence in support of those charges, however, and Rhonda Shore, public affairs officer in the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, refused to answer questions from IPS about those charges in the report.

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July 2, 2009
by Juan Cole

Reuters reports that Iranian opposition leader Mir Hosain Mousavi is continuing to assert that the newly formed second-term government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is illegitimate. He called for a lifting of censorship and the release of the some one thousand Iranians arrested by security forces for participating in demonstrations against the allegedly stolen election. He was joined joined in this continued defiance of Supreme Leader Khamenei by his rival, Mehdi Karroubi and others in the reform camp. My guess is that they aren’t far from a jail cell.

The regime is already conducting Stalinist show-trials, as in the case of Maziar Bahari, who recently appeared with me on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS Sunday interview show. …

Another ayatollah, Jalaoddin Taheri, has issued a fatwa calling Ahmadinejad’s election illegitimate and fraudulent. In 2002, Taheri, long a critic of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, resigned after thirty years as Friday prayer leader of the major city of Isfahan (sort of like being archbishop of Boston). More significant senior ayatollahs, such as Yousuf Sanei, have also shown discomfort with the way the elections were conducted.

Ali Reza Eshraghi explains why most clerical authorities in Iran are afraid of rocking the boat to much, and have more or less acquiesced in Khamenei’s decision.

One fall-out of the widespread questioning of the probity of the election process is that Ahmadinejad has had to cancel a trip to Libya to appear at the conference of the African Union, since his being on the roster there had become controversial. Khamenei may win his battle to move the Iranian state further to the repressive Right for the moment, but it may well be a pyrrhic victory since it is likely to isolate Iran further from the international community and to set the stage for further unrest in the future.

Hard as it is to watch all this repression unfold, I agree with Eric Margolis that there is little the US can or should do at this point. Countries have their own developmental history, class structures, and political cultures, and foreign military or covert interventions on behalf of state-building and democratization have very seldom succeeded in modern history.(See Elizabeth Thompson’s new study on democratization in the Middle East for USIP– the pdf is here.) Not to mention that Bush-Cheney and the Neocons tied up the US military and intelligence apparatuses in another illegal war of aggression, which rather weakened US international legitimacy for such purposes. As with post-Tiananmen Square China, the US will just have to deal with the Iran that exists.

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July 2, 2009
by Juan Cole

A new poll by worldpublicopinion.org has found that the Pakistani public has turned against the Taliban in a big way, with 81% now seeing the Taliban in the Northwest of Pakistan as a critical threat to the country. This is up from 34% in September, 2007. And some two-thirds of Pakistanis view all religious militant groups in the country as a whole as a critical threat to it. This proportion is up from 38% in September of 2007, and it is a significant shift, since a lot of Pakistanis had view the religious militants as freedom fighters for the cause of Kashmir or the liberation of Afghanistan from Western occupation.

The bad news for President Obama is that the Pakistani public’s souring on the Taliban has not resulted in higher favorability ratings for the United States. A majority does not trust Obama to do the right thing. Overwhelming majorities believe the US wants to divide and weaken the Muslim world, and 82% reject Obama’s predator drone strikes on Pakistani soil. Some 79% want the war in Afghanistan ended now.

In other words, as religious nationalism appears to have declined in Pakistan (something visible in the parliamentary elections of 2008), other forms of secular nationalism have taken its place, no less anti-imperialist in character. Pakistan was born in a struggle to throw off two centuries of British rule in South Asia, and once you go through a thing like that, having Western troops actively intervening in a Muslim neighbor is just not welcome.

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July 2, 2009
by Mel Frykberg

Internal Palestinian upheaval has often been reduced to a West Bank PA vs Gaza Strip Hamas political and military struggle. The reality on the ground, however, is not as black. Within both organisations there are power struggles, differing agendas, and contradictory ideologies.

At present Fatah and the PA command little respect either in the West Bank or in Gaza due to continuing accusations of corruption, nepotism and cronyism. The popularity of Hamas, renowned for being austere and more honest, has surged since the Islamic group won free and fair elections in January 2006.

Fatah is fragmented along several lines. Bickering between the ‘old guard’ and the ‘younger guard’ remains one of several contentious points.

The older guard, many of them over 65, comprises founding members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Among them, the late Yasser Arafat was one of the main architects of the PLO. Fatah is the largest faction of the PLO; Hamas is not part of the group.

The younger guard was formed by young Palestinian men from the Palestinian territories who cut their political teeth during the first Palestinian Intifadah, or uprising, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This membership was joined by Palestinian activists during the second Intifadah which broke out in October 2000, following former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Islam’s third holiest shrine, the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, despite warnings from Israel’s security services.

Both uprisings came without any direction from the PLO leadership, catching it by surprise.

Following the 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the PLO, some of the old guard returned to the Palestinian territories, and kept up a hedonistic lifestyle at the expense of a Palestinian society wracked by poverty.

This alienated the younger guard who were also angered at the older guard’s refusal to share power with them or open up Fatah’s leadership to new blood.

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