| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 8:14 am Post subject: |
| Just heard Zionist Jew (JINSA/PNAC/AEI) operative Richard Perle warhawking against Iran (for Israel) on the BBC World Service about the following article :
Pentagon claims progress in Iraq
US forces have achieved "significant progress" in Iraq over the last three months but the handover to Iraqis is lagging, the Pentagon has said.
Iraq is becoming safer and the economy is growing at more than 6%, according to a new quarterly report for Congress.
But it said that although Iraqi forces have grown in size, they still depend on the US for logistics and training.
The report also warned that Iranian training and funding of Shia militias in Iraq has continued.
'Tribal awakening'
The Pentagon echoed its last report on Iraq in September.
The latest document said there had been "significant security progress, momentum in reconciliation at the local and provincial levels and economic progress".
High-profile attacks had dropped by half since March, the report said
It cited a "tribal awakening" of local Sunni and Shia leaders turning against al-Qaeda.
It also noted that more Iraqi battalions were conducting operations and taking a lead in counter-insurgency efforts.
Challenges
But the Pentagon warned that sustained progress would depend on political and economic reforms, and listed a number of problems.
Among these was the fact that key legislation to govern oil revenues and Sunni representation in government has still not been passed.
Police forces are afflicted by corruption and sectarian divisions, while Iraq's army is losing up to 17% of its troops a year because of high casualty rates and desertion, the report said.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon said Iranian support for militants in Iraq had not decreased, and that Syria was not doing enough to keep foreign fighters out of Iraq.
Tehran denies any links with militants groups in Iraq.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/7151157.stm
Published: 2007/12/19 02:09:05 GMT | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 3:22 am Post subject: Is Bush stopped in his tracks on Iran? |
| Is Bush stopped in his tracks on Iran?
Chris Hedges
> is a former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times and is now senior fellow at the Nation Institute and author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America"
> The release of the National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iran's nuclear status marks the latest in a series of assaults by the Pentagon and the intelligence community against the war posturing of the Bush administration.
> President Bush, seven years after assuming power, may finally be halted in his tracks - not by a resurgent Democratic opposition, sagging opinion polls, or an organized antiwar movement, but by the entrenched power structure in Washington he set out to emasculate. The tug-of-war between those within the administration who advocate as many as 1,000 air strikes on suspected Iranian nuclear facilities and those who oppose an attack will be the most dramatic battle of the final Bush years.
> Director of Central Intelligence Gen. Michael V. Hayden and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have turned out to be formidable foes to the Bush agenda of preemptive war in the Middle East. Gates, along with Adm. William Fallon, commander of U.S. Central Command, and Gen. George Casey, the Army's new chief of staff, are openly opposed to a war with Iran. And they will not, unlike their predecessors, permit the Bush White House to use cooked and fabricated intelligence to whip the country into war frenzy.
> The effort by the vice president's office to change or suppress the NIE report, which was ready during the summer and stated that Iran had halted its attempt to develop nuclear weapons four years ago, has consumed the internal mechanisms of government for the last few weeks. The existence of the report did nothing to prevent either Bush or Vice President Cheney from asserting before it was made public that Iran was working to develop a nuclear weapon and could trigger, in the president's words, "World War III."
> Bush called on Iran on Tuesday to explain why it had a secretive nuclear-weapons program, and he warned that "for the sake of world peace," no such efforts should be allowed to flourish.
> "Iran is dangerous," Bush said after an Oval Office meeting with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. "We believe Iran had a secret military-weapons program, and Iran must explain to the world why they had such a program."
> Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is also determined to prevent Iran from developing facilities that could produce a nuclear weapon. And Olmert insists Bush is on board, even if top U.S. generals and intelligence officials are not.
> Repeatedly during Bush's presidency, the Israeli government, with strong backing from the White House, has turned to force rather than diplomacy to further Israeli interests in the Middle East. Israel unleashed a disastrous bombing campaign against Lebanon last year. This Sept. 6 it carried out air strikes against a Syrian facility that it said was meant to develop nuclear material. Israel has quarantined the 1.4 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and imposed draconian cuts in electricity and fuel. During the Bush years, the effort to negotiate a solution to the Palestinian conflict has never gone beyond the photo opportunities that characterized the charade in Annapolis, Md. Israel, like Washington, prefers to speak to its adversaries in the language of violence. A strike on Iran fits neatly into this pattern.
> "At the beginning of the month, as you know, the National Intelligence Council of the United States published its updated estimation of Iran's intentions and capabilities in the nuclear field," Olmert told the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies on Tuesday. "I attribute great importance to the declaration by the president of the United States, George Bush, that nothing has changed; Iran was and remains dangerous, and we must continue the international pressure with full force to dissuade Iran from its nuclear tendencies. I trust and am confident that the United States will continue to lead the international campaign to stop the development of a nuclear Iran."
> White House lawyers conceivably could use the 2001 congressional authorization to use military force against Afghanistan and the 2002 authorization to use force against Iraq to justify an attack on Iran without going back to Congress for approval. The 2001 resolution gave the president the right to use force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and anyone who "harbored such organizations or persons." The 2002 resolution handed the president the power to defend the country against "the continuing threat posed by Iraq."
> The allegations that Iran is involved in supporting and arming insurgents in Iraq, along with the designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, could be twisted by White House lawyers to legitimize air strikes against Iran.
> "This unexpected bump in the road has, in my opinion, stimulated the Bush administration to develop its own new rationale to justify what will in effect be a full-speed-ahead continuation of past and present policy toward Iran, almost as if the NIE issue had never intervened," said Ray Close, a retired Middle East specialist for the CIA.
> The Bush White House has tried to use the report to assert that Iran remains intent on acquiring nuclear weapons and is a threat.
> "Convinced that they have been viciously sabotaged by a partisan anti-Bush intelligence community, and desperate to justify the basic philosophy and doctrine that underlies their specific policies, these people are painfully wounded and thus in a dangerous frame of mind," Close said. "With hopes for a strengthened international sanctions regime fading, and no reasonable excuse available for launching an early preventive military attack, but with their pride deeply injured and their nerves sandpapered raw, I would not be surprised at all to see a heightened level of provocative and threatening rhetoric emanating from the White House in the months ahead."
> The covert operations taking place in Iran, if they are stepped up, could provoke retaliatory acts by Iran against U.S. personnel or facilities in Iraq or the Gulf. Any action by Iran deemed by the Bush White House to be hostile to the United States or Israel could, Close argues, be instantly seized upon by the president to carry out air strikes against Iran. This could ignite a deadly chain reaction.
> "I think the publication of this NIE, rather than cooling the atmosphere, as many analysts predict," Close warned, "is actually going to lead to a more dangerous and unstable situation in the region in the months and years ahead."
Chris Hedges is preparing a forthcoming book titled "I Don't Believe in Atheists."
Find this article at:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/12543476.html | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2007 4:10 am Post subject: |
| Regime-change fears drive Iran's vice crackdown (Christian Science Monitor)
By Scott Peterson Thu Dec 20, 3:00 AM ET
It is no secret in Iran: Authorities have gone out of their way to publicize a crackdown against thugs and smugglers that has also enveloped academics and women whose dress is deemed "un-Islamic."
Masked police dressed like black-clad storm-troopers have been arresting, humiliating, and parading criminals. Cameras follow cops on nighttime raids against drug dealers that net hundreds in a single night.
But analysts say that what appeared to be just another cleanup when it began last spring is proving to be a strategic effort to protect the regime from "vulnerabilities" that could be exploited by archenemies such as the United States. Picking up criminals and intimidating all potential opponents of clerical rule, they say, aims to prevent a repeat of history by preempting violence that could spin out of control.
"The girls are not the target," says an Iranian journalist, noting that many women still deliberately flout the rules. "The core reason is dealing harshly with thugs. Now they are preempting – they are keeping a potential threat from growing," says the journalist. "They are looking at modern history [and] going onto the Internet."
That history shows how the CIA in 1953 staged a coup against Iran's popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. A crucial factor in its success were mobs organized by CIA-paid agents to rampage and take over the streets; others soon joined the rioters.
And on the Internet, Iran's security services have become familiar with American regime-change neoconservatives such as Michael Ledeen, who has argued that with US support, "we could liberate Iran in less than a year."
The Iranian journalist paraphrases those ideas – and the threat perceived from them – this way: "In the war with Iran, the US will not be the foot soldiers," but will "just provide the trigger" for Iranians to rise and topple the government.
In Iran, anticriminal measures against those called "knife-pullers" in Farsi are widely lauded. Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, has told police that they "must strongly continue with the 'social security plan' … so that its goals are institutionalized in society."
But in one of the most far-reaching drives since the 1979 Islamic revolution, enforcement has spread far beyond criminal offenders to young women showing too much hair and Western-educated academics accused of being "agents" for US-inspired regime change.
This past weekend, 24 Internet cafes and coffeehouses were shut down in a sweep of 435 such locales, Reuters reported. Police said they were shut for "using immoral computer games [and] storing obscene photos." A fresh "winter" crackdown was announced last week on un-Islamic dress, which includes women's high boots.
"Their vulnerable spot is these 'Westoxicated' Iranians – the threat is not military attack, but Iranians who 'live differently from us,' who listen to the West," says a veteran analyst who asked not to be named. "Many would follow those [thugs] who are willing to attack."
Iran's new Revolutionary Guard commander, Mohammad Ali Jafari, said in late September that the "main responsibility" of his forces is to counter "internal threats." One vigilante newspaper has railed against the risks of "freedom."
The morality enforcement is a reversal in some ways. For years, conventional wisdom held that conservatives would not risk a serious social crackdown, fearing a popular backlash that could threaten their grip on power. But women and labor activists have been arrested as well as students who have staged protests against the president and government policies in the past year. Three who have been in prison for eight months – their fate sparking a number of demonstrations – are to be released Saturday, acquitted of "insulting religious values" and other charges.
Amnesty International notes that the number of executions has risen from 177 in 2006 to more than 210 so far this year. The UN General Assembly Tuesday approved a draft resolution noting "very serious concern" with human rights violations in Iran, including cases of "torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including flogging and amputations."
The steps being taken hark back to the earliest years of the revolution, when "securing the system" was deemed the highest obligation, like prayer. Experts note, however, that unlike in both 1979 and 1953, the regime now has many loyal security forces and vigilante groups whose job is to protect the system and ensure, in the words of one Farsi slogan often applied by critics, "victory through creating fear."
"The US planned two wars against us, a hard war and a soft war," says Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Abolhasan Navvab, an influential cleric. "The hard war, it is only intimidation and slogans. But the soft war, it goes more toward reality [by provoking] social, cultural, ethnic, and religious conflicts."
"It is not a flood, but this is a very slight rain that is continuous, and when it washes away it has a ruinous effect," says Mr. Navvab. "If you take it seriously, the level of danger drops. If you don't take it seriously, the danger is there and it is firm."
Noting the months-long arrests of several dual US-Iran citizens earlier this year, Navvab charged that some academics "turned out to be agents of foreigners." The impact of such beliefs has been widely felt.
"I have never seen Iran like this in 28 years," says one political analyst, who has been warned about contact with Westerners. "Early in the revolution, there was mass jubilation, and repression was very targeted against [armed opposition]. If you were not a member, you had no reason to fear. Now it's a systematic intimidation, and they are very good at it."
US expenditures of $75 million on "pro-democracy" efforts, most of it on broadcasts into Iran from outside, has helped provide a pretext. "The whole security environment is intended to really suffocate or torpedo any possible change from within. They believe this mass conspiracy [of regime change]," says the analyst. The result is a "sense of fear, and making engagement in politics at any level a high-risk endeavor."
Last week, parliamentarians angry about the book crackdown called for moderation. "A Muslim woman wearing high boots with a coat and other coverings does not contradict Islam," said Mohammad Taghi Rahbar, a member of parliament and cleric who was quoted in the Iranian press, according to Agence France-Presse.
One focus has been "Westoxicated" youths, and women showing too much hair or wearing tight manteaus that by law must hide the shape of the body. Morality police park at malls and take photos for criminal files of "bad hijab" violators. Some women have been warned that a third infraction will cause banishment from Tehran.
Presidential aide Mehdi Kalhor, who famously called for much greater social openness in 2005, has also asked for limits on police zeal. "I wrote a letter to the head of law enforcement and asked him to refrain from extremism, [to] execute the [minimum] level of the law," he said in an interview. "It's the right of each citizen to have an ordinary life, without being disturbed and agitated."
Iranian academics have received directives to halt all contacts with foreigners. Civil society efforts – even cultural events hosted by Western embassies in Tehran have dried up, since attendees were harassed, sometimes physically. "There is a genuine concern in the regime that we in the West would like the regime to change, and they are right, for some people," says a European diplomat. "Some think we are not going to do it with bombs and missiles, but through a velvet revolution."
That means special attention paid to civil-society activists. At a recent meeting to express solidarity with Emadedin Baghi, the founder of Society for Protecting Prisoners' Rights who was arrested in October, some spoke out. "A regime that can't respect such a soft-spoken, moderate person is a cause for concern," says Ezatollah Sahabi, a reformist editor who has done prison time. "No reformist wants to go beyond [limits] – just respect the rights of the citizens. We don't want to push the regime into a critical situation." | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
