Persians

Roger Cohen continues to write some of the most intelligent and thoughtful columns on the events in Iran.

The protest intensifies

Roger Cohen is doing some excellent reporting and analysis from Tehran.

The third question — the strategic goal of the uprising — is increasingly fraught. Khamenei said, “The dispute is not between the revolution and the counterrevolution,” and that all four electoral candidates “belong to the system.” He was right, if his words had been spoken the day after the vote.

Ten days on, however, the brutal use of force and his own polarizing speech have drawn many more Iranians toward an absolutist stance. Having wanted their votes counted, they now want wholesale change. If Moussavi wants to prevail, he must keep his followers tactically focused on securing a new election. That’s essential because it’s the one position the opposition within the clerical establishment will go along with.

Whatever happens now, all is changed utterly in Iran. Opacity, a force of the Islamic Republic, has yielded to a riveting transparency in which one side confronts another. The online youth of Iran will not be reconciled to a regime that touts global “ethics” and “justice” while trampling on them at home.

I received this from an anonymous Iranian student: “I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to be killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow!”

And she concludes: “I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so that they know we were not just emotional under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mogols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children.”

Are factions opening up? Were they always there, waiting to fracture behind a guise of unanimity?

Neda's killing

Repressive regimes need to better coordinate their various and vast internal security forces. In Iran, the police seem to be wavering while the Revolutionary Guard and the Basiji seem to be doubling down despite new evidence of fraud. This kind of thing is not wise if the regime's hope is for things to calm down and the protesters to simply go home.

But in Time, Robin Wright says this may be the calm before the storm, partly thanks to the widely circulated video of a woman known as "Neda" being gunned down on Saturday:

Although it is not yet clear who shot "Neda" (a soldier? pro-government militant? an accidental misfiring?), her death may have changed everything. For the cycles of mourning in Shiite Islam actually provide a schedule for political combat — a way to generate or revive momentum. Shiite Muslims mourn their dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, and these commemorations are a pivotal part of Iran's rich history.

....Shiite mourning is not simply a time to react with sadness. Particularly in times of conflict, it is also an opportunity for renewal. The commemorations for "Neda" and the others killed this weekend are still to come. And the 40th day events are usually the largest and most important.

If Wright is correct, Tuesday could be a pivotal day. Stay tuned.

Tin soldiers, indeed.

Rooting for Ahmadinejad

U.S. and European diplomats are doing everything they can to avoid being seen as supporting the reform candidate in Iran, lest said candidate be seen as a puppet of the West. They go even farther, though, saying Ahmadinejad's victory -- whether he or the religious leadership stole it or not -- is actually the best case scenario.

"We even had a nightmare scenario yesterday," a senior European diplomat said the day after the meeting with Burns and Ross in March. If a moderate were elected and negotiations with Iran still went nowhere, how would the U.S. and Europe stop Iran from going nuclear? With its centrifuges spinning, Iran could continue to amass enriched uranium while presenting to the outside world an openness to compromise, the diplomat explained. When it came time to confront a stalling Iran by dropping the carrots and applying the sticks, said the senior European diplomat, "Try to imagine how difficult it would be to say 'I stop, I don't negotiate anymore,' " if a moderate were in charge in Tehran. (See TIME's photos of the Iranian elections and protests.)

In the days since Iran's troubled election, hard-liners in Israel and neoconservatives in America have made no secret of their glee at still having Ahmadinejad as an antagonistic foil to help build support for taking a tougher line on Tehran's nuclear ambitions. But there is also widespread relief in the Administration, as well as among some moderates on Capitol Hill and in Europe, at the result. Despite all the attention paid to the office of the Iranian presidency, nuclear policy is set by the religious leaders of the country, and they have shown a determination to amass enriched uranium regardless of whether hard-liners or moderates have been President. (See TIME's photos: "The Long Shadow of Ayatullah Khomeini.")

Still, in addition to his power over domestic and economic policy, the Iranian President is the face for the country abroad. And in that respect, a victory by Mir-Hossein Mousavi would have presented a worst-case scenario for Western efforts to curtail Iran's nuclear program, senior Administration officials said Sunday. He would have presented a softer, less confrontational face to the outside world. And he would have been able to stall even before he entered into negotiations with the excuse of taking all summer to get a new Cabinet and negotiating team in place.

While that sounds pretty realpolitik in the face of disappointed reformers in Iran, it makes logical sense. And it raises the question, if the religious leaders did steal the election, why? A moderate reformer would have eased their people's real economic complaints at least for a while and would have softened the regime's image around the world while doing nothing to diminish their power or stopping the centrifuges.

Iran's culture war

Juan Cole says it was stolen.

Mir Hosain Mousavi was a plausible candidate for the reformists. They were electing people like him with 70 and 80 percent margins just a few years ago. We have not been had by the business families of north Tehran. We've much more likely been had by a hard line constituency of at most 20% of the country, who claim to be the only true heirs of the Iranian revolution, and who control which ballots see the light of day.

Engaging Iran and Israel

Richard Cohen is making sense. And although he doesn't explicitly say it, Obama's address to the Iranian people in commemoration of Nowruz had another intended audience: Israeli leadership.

One of the people involved in the review told me he had been bombarded by warnings from Israel and Sunni Arab states that engagement with Iran would lead nowhere. Of course they would say that; any Iran breakthrough will shake up current cozy U.S. relationships from Jerusalem to Riyadh.

Obama’s overture represented a victory not only over such lobbying but also over officials’ favoring tightened sanctions or delaying any American initiative until after Iran’s June presidential election.

The hard part has just begun.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, responded to Obama with a scathing speech at the country’s holiest shrine in Mashad, recalling every past U.S. misdeed, describing prerevolutionary Iran as “a field for the Americans to graze in,” and demanding concrete steps — like a lifting of sanctions — rather than words.

View all that as an opening gambit. Khamenei also quieted the crowd when it began its ritual “Death to America” chant and he said this: “We’re not emotional when it comes to our important matters. We make decisions by calculation.”

That’s right: the mullahs are anything but mad. Calculation will demand that Iran take Obama seriously.

The country’s oil revenue has plunged, its economy is in a mess, its oil and gas installations are aging. It has deepening interests in a stable Iraq and an Afghanistan free of Taliban rule. Its nuclear program involves a measure of brinkmanship that must be carefully managed. Khamenei’s essential role is conservative — the preservation of the revolution. He can only be radical up to a point.

Iran’s apparent inclination to take up a U.S. invitation to attend a conference on Afghanistan later this month may be more significant than Khamenei’s words. In any event, overcoming a 30-year impasse will take time and consistency.

The clock is ticking — and Obama’s will not be the same as that of Israel’s prime minister designate, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Already divergent U.S. and Israeli approaches to Iran were evident in Israeli President Shimon Peres’s coupling of his own Nowruz address to the Iranian people (not its leaders) with a statement predicting that they would rise up and topple “a handful of religious fanatics.”

A senior Israeli official told me Iran has 1,000 kilos of low-enriched uranium and will have 500 more within six months, enough to make a bomb. It could then opt for one of three courses.

Rush for a bomb by shredding the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, adapting its centrifuges and producing enough highly enriched uranium within a year.

Move the process to a secret site, in which case getting a bomb would take longer, perhaps two years.

Or continue making low-enriched uranium so that “it would have enough for 10 bombs if it decides to rush at a later stage.”

And where, I asked, is Israel’s red line? “Once they get to 1,500 kilos, nonproliferation is dead,” he said. And so? “It’s established that when a country that does not accept Israel’s existence has such a program, we will intervene.”

I think there’s some bluster in this. Israel does not want Obama to talk, talk, talk, so it’s suggesting military action could happen in 2009, within nine months.

Still, this much is clear to me: Obama’s new Middle Eastern diplomacy and engagement will involve reining in Israeli bellicosity and a probable cooling of U.S.-Israeli relations. It’s about time. America’s Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy has been disastrous, not least for Israel’s long-term security.

Calling the mullahs' bluff

Not the least frustrating aspect of the last eight years has been the Bush/Cheney foreign policy which made our "enemies" stronger simply by dint of their being labeled "enemies." Tim Fernholz notes that, even with the prospect of a President Obama, the Iranian leadership's bluff may very well have been called.

Who's in charge?

Despite our firepower and our puppets in the Green Zone, the events of the past week are surely signs that the U.S. no longer controls events in Iraq (that's assuming, of course, that we ever did). Iran, on the other hand, does control what's going on. In a surprisingly big way.

It's long past time to leave.

Those damned Iranians

Yesterday's news.

Some 190,000 assault rifles and pistols supplied by the US to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005 have gone missing, according to a report issued here yesterday, and may have fallen into the possession of insurgents.

The embarrassing disclosure, by the watchdog Government Accountability office (GAO), means that the Pentagon does not know what happened to roughly a third of the arms it has provided to train and equip Iraqi forces - an effort whose success is crucial to restoring some semblance of order in the country.

The "lost" arms include 80,000 pistols as well as an estimated 110,000 of the Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles, many of them originating in eastern Europe, especially the former Yugoslavia. A recent Amnesty International report claims that, in 2004 and 2005, more than 350,000 AK-47s and similar weapons were removed from Bosnia and Serbia by private contractors working for the Pentagon and sent to Iraq, with the approval of local Nato and European commanders.

In addition, some 135,000 pieces of body armour and 115,000 helmets have also vanished, again perhaps to end up in the hands of insurgents. So far, the US has spent more than $19bn (£9.3bn) on developing Iraqi security forces, including almost $3bn on weapons.

According to the GAO, the distribution of the weaponry was "haphazard and rushed," and failed to follow established procedures - accusations the Pentagon does not dispute.

But the affair could be even more problematic for the White House, given that, during the two years under scrutiny, the programme was headed by General David Petraeus, now the top US commander in Iraq, in charge of the current troop "surge". President George Bush now lauds his talents on an almost daily basis, as the man who will finally give the US the upper hand against the insurgents.

Right on cue, Michael Gordon comes to the rescue in today's Times.

BAGHDAD, Aug. 7 — Attacks on American-led forces using a lethal type of roadside bomb said to be supplied by Iran reached a new high in July, according to the American military.

The devices, known as explosively formed penetrators, were used to carry out 99 attacks last month and accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by the American-led forces, according to American military officials.

“July was an all-time high,” Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, said in an interview, referring to strikes with such devices.

Such bombs, which fire a semi-molten copper slug that can penetrate the armor on a Humvee and are among the deadliest weapons used against American forces, are used almost exclusively by Shiite militants. American intelligence officials have presented evidence that the weapons come from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran, although Tehran has repeatedly denied providing lethal assistance to Iraqi groups.

In recent weeks, the American military has focused on mounting operations in sanctuaries used by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni group that is predominately made up of Iraqis but has foreign leadership. But, as the information provided by General Odierno shows, Shiite militias remain a major long-term worry.

In focusing on Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the American goal is to reduce the number of car bombings and spectacular suicide attacks that have aggravated sectarian tensions, encouraged Shiite retaliation and undermined efforts at political reconciliation.

While the group is seen by the American military as the most serious near-term threat, there are other signs that Shiite militias remain active. According to General Odierno, the day-to-day commander of American troops in Iraq, Shiite militants carried out 73 percent of the attacks that killed or wounded American troops in Baghdad in July.

Though explosively formed penetrators account for a small fraction of roadside bomb attacks in Iraq, they cause a disproportionately large number of casualties.

Look, I don't dispute Gordon's reporting, or stenography, or whatever it is. I have no reason to dispute the army's findings that these more sophisticated weapons are causing a disproportionate number of American casualties. But when he writes that they have "presented evidence" that Iran is the source of the weaponry, it would be helpful to know what evidence was presented and to whom. And it would be nice if Gordon would, you know, actually do some skeptical reporting when "cigar-chewing" General Odierno makes these claims a day after the GAO reports that hundreds of thousands of U.S. weapons supplied to Iraqi security forces that were being trained by Odierno's current boss have gone missing.

The bigger question, of course, is what is the point of this latest missive from Pravda on the Hudson? Should we expand the theater of war into Iran because of 50 attacks last month? Hell, why not? Should we continue to be pinned down in Iraq to the benefit of Iran? Gordon would surely not editorialize so, and his Pentagon sources apparently didn't tell him what to conclude.