Iranian democracy

S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
fish in a barrel

this is from the 3rd of February, 2007, BTW

hundredmillionlifetimes said:
[
The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men: -Plato




Perhaps many imagine that the widespread public passivity and indifference to the long-planned invasion of Iran might have something to do with its semblematic cry-wolf "announcement" repeated every few months over the past five years (indeed, in 2002, after the failure to catch Bin Laden in Afghanistan and the subsequent decision to continue with the bloody mayhem in that country, a number of us were convinced that the next target would be Iran, not Iraq, until we realised that the latter was such a soft, easy target, not requiring the use of nuclear weapons).

People couldn't get their "head round Bush actually trying to pull" off the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but unlike THEN (Feb 2003), there's no millions this time out protesting on the streets, no shock or surprise, just a perfectly predictable fatalistic impotence ...

But what's happening right now is much more ominous.

Now. Let's see, then:


Iran: The War Begins

By John Pilger

As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.

The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran.
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'US poised to attack,' claims Bulgarian agency:

The United States "could be using its two air force bases in Bulgaria and one at Romania's Black Sea coast to launch an attack on Iran in April," the Bulgarian news agency Novinite claimed.

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The War on Iran

By Stephen Gowans

The war has already begun and it has nothing to do with nuclear weapons and threats against Israel and everything to do with who rules America.

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U.S. Delays Report on Iranian Role in Iraq

By Paul Richter

The Bush administration has postponed plans to offer public details of its charges of Iranian meddling inside Iraq amid internal divisions over the strength of the evidence, U.S. officials said.

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Report: US plans strike against Iran:

The Pentagon was reported to be considering ways for the US to destroy nuclear facilities such as Iran's main centrifuge plant at Natanz, despite the fact that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney hoped that diplomatic efforts to restrain Iran would succeed.


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Francis Fukuyama: The neocons have learned nothing from five years of catastrophe :

Their zealous advocacy of the invasion of Iraq may have been a disaster, but now they want to do it all over again - in Iran
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Dave Lindorff: This is like Hitler's Suicide Order from the Bunker:

I wrote last September that Bush was gearing up for war with Iran, as evidenced by the moving up of the deployment date of the carrier group headed by the recently re-fueled and re-armed USS Eisenhower, some of whose crewmembers had leaked that its mission was to attack Iran.


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Bush's Trash Talk About Iran
By Robert Dreyfuss

The Bush administration's charges against Iran are, for the most part, scare talk and nothing more. Iran has virtually nothing to do with the Iraqi resistance movement, which is commanded and staffed by Sunni Arab military officers and Baathists.


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Manufacturing consent for war with Iran:

Raid In Iraq Found Evidence Of Iranian Aid To Militias-TV : During a recent raid in the Iraqi city of Irbil in which Iranians were detained, the U.S. found what some officials claim is evidence Iran is providing aid to insurgents and militias, NBC News reported Tuesday.

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Bush 'spoiling for a fight' with Iran:

US officials in Baghdad and Washington are expected to unveil a secret intelligence "dossier" this week detailing evidence of Iran's alleged complicity in attacks on American troops in Iraq. The move, uncomfortably echoing Downing Street's dossier debacle in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, is one more sign that the Bush administration is building a case for war.

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A Powerful Iran not Tolerated by US :

Tehran's Ambassador to Damascus Mohammad Hassan Akhtari said that Americans have now resorted to a plot which has long been used by the British, and that is none but sowing discord among Muslim Shiites and Sunnites to divide them and to discredit the Shiite Iran.

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Sen. Robert Byrd: Bush Wants War with Iran:

Top Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd is warning that the Bush administration is preparing to go to war with Iran.

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The Danger of Bush's Anti-Iran Fatwa

By Juan Cole

The president's decision to use force against Iranian "agents" inside Iraq could snare innocent pilgrims, and raises the risk of open warfare.
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Iran, Israel, The Big Lie and The Real Threat

By Frank Scott

"Attempting to portray Iran as a nuclear menace to Israel and the world, in that order, even though it has no nuclear weapons and Israel has hundreds, is not merely a sign of dementia. It is indication of near idiocy in a society that can be repeatedly manipulated into believing such totally crackpot notions that have no foundation in the material world but exist only in a world of superstitious psycho-fantasy."
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Hillary Clinton calls Iran a threat to U.S., Israel:

Calling Iran a danger to the U.S. and one of Israel's greatest threats, U.S. senator and presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said "no option can be taken off the table" when dealing with that nation
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US strike group transits Suez Canal:

A US Navy strike group led by the assault ship USS Bataan steamed through the Suez Canal on Tuesday on its way to join the buildup of American forces in the Middle East.

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Europeans fear US attack on Iran as nuclear row intensifies:

Senior European policy-makers are increasingly worried that the US administration will resort to air strikes against Iran to try to destroy its suspect nuclear programme.

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the only surprise is i can't see any Hersh reference who - Ollie is right - on this sort of issue can often let himself down very, very badly.
Pilger!

quelle surprise.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
but it's easier to romanticize from afar. it's also easier to do it to a noble (& likely doomed) resistance.
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Well, it's not exactly a "resistance" as such; also, I suspect the "romance" is more palpable and real (as the danger and energy is) on the streets of Tehran than it is in my house in Vauxhall, London.

Tell you what I can't stand, though, the cynical, distanced, fence-sitting of Western democrats and realists. There was some ex-State Dept guy on Newsnight about an hour ago speaking on the Obama "position", and he was so awful, it was very depressing.

It's not as if this has come out of the blue either: there have been significant strikes and demonstrations going on (and being opressed and broken up) since 1999, and they've been getting larger and more frequent by the year.

It's amazing, in many ways, that this didn't happen in 2005, when circumstances were far more favourable.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
@Scott - that stuff also sounded crazy back in 2007.

craner said:
...(as the danger...is)...
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there you go.

re: cynical Westerners - what do you expect tho, exactly? not that cynicism is appealing, but - look, it's nearly impossible to get people to care about things that directly impact their day to day lives, let alone mass uprisings in other countries.

vimothy said:
More like a welcome to the 21st century kind of thing.
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yeah, alright that makes sense.

I guess I'm just skeptical whenever post-everything concepts like "Twitter revolution" (or whatever you want to call it) come up. what regime has Twitter etc actually toppled...? the flow of information may well trump batons & tear gas (& bullets) & men willing to use them someday but I don't see it happening yet.
 
F

four_five_one

Infinition
scottdisco said:
@four_five_one, nice to see someone correctly call a spade a spade re PAD-aligned thugs in Thailand and their appalling assault on the democratic process! (though you are, of course, also right to say Thaksin ran death squads etc. as a matter of fact i mean to put up a fair-sized piece on some of Thaksin's crimes and excesses on one of my blogs soon.)
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Haha, sounds like you might know more about it than me... can you link your blog(s) here, Scott?

I'm going back to Thailand next week, it'll be interesting to see what's happened in the last six months or so. I might well be promoted into further reflections then. The main problem is that Thailand doesn't have a left alternative - and by left alternative, I don't mean communist or anything like that, just social democratic - Thaksin was a right-wing populist, perhaps similar to Ahmadinejad, yet with an inverse relation to the establishment. I'm hopeful that at least some of the red shirted faction will realize they need to carve out their own political policies and form their own party, and leave Thaksin where he should be left: for dead. Hopefully the protests are a catalyst for a wider political project, which is much the same as I hope of the Iranian protests.

My other particular interests wrt Thailand are the role of the King, and what neutralizing anti-emancipatory role he might play, the Muslim insurgency in the south of Thailand and the war on drugs (specifically yaa baa/methamphetamine).
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
I also find the vague talk of a U.S. military intervention to be highly dubious. where's the calls for invasion or even bombing? nowhere in mainstream debate so far as I can see. logistical questions aside. the possibility of the Israelis going for a rogue (or semi-rogue, unofficially U.S. endorsed) surgical strike of some kind is higher but still, I think, very unlikely.
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Thought it pretty obvious Josef was joking. I certainly was.
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
craner said:
Weak stuff.
Click to expand...

So one the one side, we have
Mr Obama's reticence may have in fact strengthened the hand of the reformers and improved the chances of fundamental change.
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on the other
The charge levelled against President Bush was that he was too simplistic, that there was no nuance in his foreign policy, that he only saw the world in black and white.

But if he were in charge now, we would at least know his verdict on these elections.
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are you really suggesting the latter is more important?
 
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