Why Obama Should Highlight Iran's Human Rights Abuses. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the United States has vacillated between engagement and confrontation with the Islamic Republic, with sanctions filling the gap. As Iran has moved closer to achieving its nuclear ambitions in recent years, tensions are rising once again. The latest round of U.S. sanctions, signed into law in 2010, has hurt the Iranian government by restricting finance for oil refineries and discouraging foreign companies from conducting business with it. Yet sanctions have not delayed Iran’s nuclear drive, foiled its support for terrorism abroad, or kept it from meddling in its neighbors’ affairs.
In the wake of revelations about an Iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Abdel al-Jubeir, some in Congress are making the case for another round of sanctions, ostensibly to ramp up the pressure even more. Washington will only neutralize Iran by exploiting the regime's main vulnerability: its false claim to legitimacy. Don't have an account? Juan Cole, The Iran Conundrum. Understanding Iran's diplomatic strategy. Washington, DC - In January 2009, just before Gary Samore left his position as Vice-President for Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, he summed up his rather cynical view of how Iran would conduct negotiations.
"The logical position the Iranians are bound to take," he wrote in a post on the Council's website, "is: 'We're happy to talk forever, as long as we can keep building centrifuges.'" A few days later, Samore was named President Barack Obama's top adviser on nuclear proliferation, making him one of the most influential figures in the administration with regards to diplomacy toward Iran. The strategy he attributed to Tehran of using negotiations to "play for time" while advancing to the goal of enough enriched uranium for nuclear weapons has been clearly expressed in recent statements by Obama and other senior administration officials in anticipation of new nuclear talks with Tehran. 'Coercive diplomacy' Increased bargaining power Ultimate aims Failed diplomatic triumph.
"Iran’s Last Chance?" by Javier Solana. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space MADRID – The latest round of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program between Iran and the so-called “5+1” group (the United Nations Security Council’s five permanent members – the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China – plus Germany) has now begun. Following more than a year of deadlock, after negotiations in January 2011 led nowhere, this dialogue is for many the last chance to find a peaceful solution to a nearly decade-long conflict (in which I participated closely from 2006 to 2009 as the West’s main negotiator with Iran). The objective of the talks, chaired by the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and Iran’s chief negotiator, Saeed Jalili, is still to persuade Iran to halt uranium enrichment and to comply with Security Council resolutions and its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
But several factors heighten the current negotiations’ strategic importance. Exclusive: Iranian Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee on War, Peace and Nukes. Author: Barbara Slavin Posted July 11, 2012 Iranian Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee’s spoke with Al-Monitor correspondents Barbara Slavin and Laura Rozen on July 10 2012. Read excerpts from the wide-ranging conversation. Summary⎙ Print Iranian Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee’s spoke with Al-Monitor correspondents Barbara Slavin and Laura Rozen on July 10 2012. Read excerpts from the wide-ranging conversation. On the request of the P5+1 for Iran to take ‘the first step’ toward resolving the nuclear dispute: The first step is the issuing of the fatwa by the leader of Iran [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei]… That’s a very important announcement… In response, we would like to hear from the other side that they recognize the right of Iran for peaceful nuclear activity according to the NPT.
On the request of the P5+1 for a ‘concrete’ step on the issue of 20% enrichment: The issue of the 20% enrichment is the first proposal of the 5+1 and the third proposal of Iran. I do not confirm that poll at all. Iran: Quash Death Sentences for Drinking Alcohol. (New York) – Iranian authorities should immediately suspend all use of the death penalty after reports that two death sentences for drinking alcohol issued by a lower court had been upheld. Iran should abolish the death sentence completely for crimes that are not considered serious and exceptional under treaties that bind it, and provide further public information regarding the case against these individuals. On June 25, 2012, the official Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) reported that the prosecutor general of Khorasan Razavi province, Hojjatoleslam Hasan Shariati, had confirmed that the Supreme Court had affirmed death sentences issued by a lower court against two people convicted of drinking alcohol.
He was quoted as saying that the two “had consumed alcoholic drinks for the third time” and officials were “in the process of making the necessary arrangements for the implementation of the execution order.” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not yet signed the new bill into law. Escape from Iran: One Man's Journey From Riches to the Torture Chamber to Freedom - Sohrab Ahmari - International. The story of how an Iranian businessman helped his country develop the world's largest natural gas field, got involved with the president's depraved son, and ended up fighting for his life. A guard stands watch in Tehran's Evin Prison / Reuters Older Iranian homes usually have traditional squat toilets, porcelain holes in the ground with overhead flush tanks. So do the torture chambers in Tehran's Evin prison, as Houshang Bouzari discovered on a sweltering summer night in 1993.
His interrogator pulled Bouzari out of his six-by-four-foot cell and forced him to crawl down the bloodstained stairs that lead to the basement of Section 209 -- the cell block reserved for political detainees. Bouzari was forced onto his chest and the officer's boot pressed against the back of his neck, plunging his head into the porcelain hole. Ablutions and daily prayers were the last things on Bouzari's mind as he passed out. Houshang Bouzari was born in 1952 to a respected clerical family. Houshang Bouzari. Ahmadinejad's Impotence - By Geneive Abdo. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meant to kick off his annual visit to the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York with the grand gesture of releasing two U.S. hikers held captive for over a year. Instead, he was humiliated in public by Iran's powerful judiciary, which stated on Wednesday that the president could not fulfill that promise.
Nothing could more clearly symbolize Ahmadinejad's fading fortunes. Gone is the self-confident rhetorician of revolutionary outrage and nationalist fervor. In his place stands a broken man. Even before the judiciary embarrassed Ahmadinejad, many in Tehran doubted that the president would be allowed to travel to the U.N. In recent days, as if to run victory laps around the president, key regime figures have all made it clear that the president's political faction -- labeled by his foes as the "deviant faction" -- will not be permitted to run candidates in parliamentary elections in March.
But his usefulness has come to an end. Taxing Iran | The Majalla. Are Ahmadinejad’s tax reforms putting him on a collision course with clerics? In Iran, as in Greece, dodging tax is a national sport. As Ahmadinejad seeks to revamp Iran’s tax systems, Iran’s clerical class face a dilemma: should they support Ahmadinejad’s reforms and prioritise the government’s interests, or do they protect their own support base and prioritise their financial (and political) independence? President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has presented the clerical establishment with a taxing dillema Reforming the economy has been a key objective of Iran’s government since President Ahmadinejad’s troubled reelection in 2009. For example, despite widespread objections, Ahmadinejad took the bold step of reducing state subsidies in an attempt to simultaneously rationalise the economy and disenfranchise his middle-class critics, and promising more targeted subsidies for the lower classes that support his government.
More importantly though, there is a cultural factor at play. Nima Khorrami Assl. Iran’s Parliamentary Elections Preview | The Majalla. Iran’s Elections: An elite split down the middle? Tomorrow’s elections in Iran will be seen as another round in the struggle between Ahmedinejad and Khamenei. Ayatollah Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad will have much at stake in tomorrow's elections Iran goes to the polls tomorrow in the first national election since the bloodshed and chaos that followed the presidential elections of 2009 and the subsequent suppression of the Green Movement. This time, although Iranians are electing members of parliament, the elections have exposed a damaging split at the top of the country’s conservative establishment.
The last year has seen a public rift emerge between supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. As a result, the election is widely seen as a contest between two factions within the same camp, one loyal to the president and the other to the Supreme Leader. The Majalla: The Leading Arab Magazine. Epic or Farce: Preliminary Assessment of Iran's Parliamentary Elections (Part One) The 2nd of March marked Iran’s first nationwide elections since the widely disputed presidential race in June 2009 and its turbulent aftermath.
They also hastened the decline of a “president” who owed his second term in office to a “miraculous hand,” a “hand” that, on 2 March, sought to curb Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s influence over the country’s affairs. The embattled head of the executive of branch, whose protégés have dominated Iranian politics for the past seven years, is slowly but surely coming to terms with the realities of Iran’s power structure, namely the will of the Supreme Leader ‘Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards.
Prior to the election, and for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a near unanimous consensus had been reached within the opposition forces in the country to boycott the vote. While there was widespread belief that the elections would be nothing short of a sham, the vote was far from inconsequential: an electoral “farce, but an important one.” Epic or Farce: Preliminary Assessment of Iran's Parliamentary Elections (Part Two)
[Read Part One here.] "Epic" Turnout After the 2 March polls closed, Khamenei said that the turnout had been “one of the highest” throughout the history of the Islamic Revolution. “These elections were a firm and clear answer” to the naysayers, he argued. Yet even without a thorough inspection of the results, it is quite difficult not to question claims about “one of the highest” turnouts in the past thirty-three years. The staggering inflation, high prices, a surge in unemployment, the poor state of the national currency, regular reports of monumental embezzlement scandals and the authorities’ inability to prosecute the culprits, the growing constraints on political activity, the widespread crackdown on any form of dissent, and the continued stifling of civil liberties seem to have had little negative impact on the ordinary Iranian’s view of the political establishment.
In the weeks and days ahead of elections, the Islamic Republic tends to open up to the world. Beginning of the End. Iranian Elections and Ambiguities. Official figures show a high turn-out for Iranian legislative elections, but opposition voices claim the numbers are much lower than stated. The failure of prominent clerics to vote suggests the controversial elections have not silenced critics of the government. An Iranian woman votes at Hosseinieh Jamaran polling station for the 9th parliamentary elections in Tehran, Iran, on March 2, 2012. (© Mohammad Mehdi Moazzen - IRNA) Early vote counts from Friday’s Majlis elections in Iran show that more than 64 percent of some 48 million eligible voters cast their ballots in its 9th parliamentary elections, according to official sources.
However, since no independent observers were present, there is no way to verify the outcome. State TV broadcasts showed long cues of people in the streets and young people are said to have turned out in large numbers. The Majalla: The Leading Arab Magazine. Tehran Politics: Are the Mullahs Losing Their Grip? “You are not a wise man, you tyrant,” raps the Iranian female singer Bahar. “Why do your clothes smell like blood? . . . Why do you crush this cry for justice? The people don’t deserve such disdain.” Her chiding words against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei go to the heart of the problem that the Islamic Republic faces: the growing illegitimacy of a cruel and inaccessible theocracy whose control over Iran might well be slipping. Throughout Iran’s history, political power has clustered around strongmen—often shahs or kings until the Islamic revolution of 1979—rather than institutions.
As the executive center’s authority has grown, the president and his supporters have come to believe that the “period of religious politics will soon be over” (in the words of Ahmadinejad’s controversial and secularist chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei), leading them to hazard acts of increasing independence from the theocrats in both domestic and foreign affairs. Related Essay Jamsheed K. Don't Throw Iran's Democrats Under the Bus - By Patrick Clawson. You wouldn't know it from following the news, but the nuclear impasse is not the only issue dividing Iran and the United States. In his latest message to the Iranian people on the occasion of their festival Nowruz in March, U.S. President Barack Obama emphasized another: human rights. After describing at length how "the Iranian people are denied the basic freedom to access the information that they want," he announced measures to penetrate "the electronic curtain that is cutting the Iranian people off from the world.
" It's difficult, by contrast, to find any mention of Iran's human rights record in the many background briefings and on-the-record comments by officials of the P5+1 - Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States -- ahead of Saturday's negotiations with Iran in Istanbul. Indeed, Iranian dissidents chafe at the attention the West gives to the nuclear impasse, and Iranian reformers have long feared that their interests will come second to a nuclear deal.
Crisis Guide: Iran. Iran Plays Nuclear Waiting Game | The Majalla. IAEA report does not reveal substantial new information, but political gamesmanship continues The release this week of the International Atomic Agency’s latest report on Iran has given rise to a flurry of rhetoric. Despite no damning evidence of Iran’s ambition to manufacture nuclear weapons, relations remain tense.
Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, tours a nuclear facility The UN’s nuclear energy watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has once again found itself caught in a storm of rhetoric following yesterday’s release of a report detailing the extent to which Iran has been abiding by its commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
As the report focusses mainly upon Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear program, it reveals very little that has not already been made public by the IAEA. This delicate mixture of realism with rhetorical posturing suits Iran well, but it must also be seen as a relief to its chief adversary, the US. The Majalla: The Leading Arab Magazine. Ayatollah for a Day - By Karim Sadjadpour. Briefing: Iran's nuclear ambitions - science-in-society - 10 November 2011. Iran: false nuclear fears cloud the west's judgment | John Mueller. Iran on the Warpath - Joschka Fischer. Iran's Navy Threatens the Security of the Persian Gulf. Iran’s Rattling Saber - Mehdi Khalaji. Is Iran's threat to close the Strait of Hormuz really just huffing and puffing? Iran and Saudi Arabia Square Off.
Iran delivers major blow to the CIA. Al Qaeda in Iran. Iran and al Qaeda’s Shadowy Relationship Could Firm Up This Spring. Owen Bennett-Jones reviews ‘Terror Tagging of an Iranian Dissident Organisation’ by Raymond Tanter · LRB 7 June 2012. Costs of killing Iran's nuclear scientists - opinion - 12 January 2012. Why Iran Assassinations Are Backfiring, Aiding Nuclear Program. Iran's nuclear scientists are not being assassinated. They are being murdered | Mehdi Hasan. Sanctions Against Iran Are Overrated. Obama's Counterproductive New Iran Sanctions. Hooman Majd on Iranian Sanctions & Society. Sanctions Won't End Iran's Nuclear Program. The European Union's Counterproductive Iran Sanctions.
Sanctions Are Only a Stop-Gap. "The Iranian Nuclear Threat Goes Global" by Itamar Rabinovich. Nuclear proliferation: Bombing Iran. So What If Iran Has The Bomb? No Nuclear Compromise. Diplomatic Dead End. "The Nixon Option for Iran?" by William H. Luers and Thomas R. Pickering. International negotiators to offer detailed confidence-building proposal to Iran. "The Persian Knot" by Joschka Fischer. Introduction to Roundtable on Iran Crisis. Iran talks resume in Baghdad after “difficult” first day. In-Fighting at the Iran Nuclear Talks. 'Intense' Iran Nuclear Talks End With Agreement to Meet Again. "Iran’s Nuclear Grass Eaters" by Shlomo Ben-Ami. How Close Is Iran to Exploding Its First Nuclear Bomb? Iran's nuclear question: a wider lens. Should we give Iran the bomb. Sanctioning Iran | The Majalla. Game Over | The Majalla. Red lines. Sanctions Against Iran: A Duplicitous "Alternative" to War.
Playing With Fire | The Majalla. Saving Face and Peace in the Gulf - Anne-Marie Slaughter. How to Engage Iran. Tahrir is playing into the hands of the regime. "The Ayatollah Contemplates Compromise" by Mehdi Khalaji. Backed Into a Corner - By Hossein Mousavian. Holding Hormuz Hostage | The Majalla. Do We Even Need the Strait of Hormuz? - Hamed Aleaziz & Robin Mills - International. Not Time to Attack Iran. The Case For Regime Change in Iran. Answering Iran - Richard N. Haass. The Iran Debate: To Strike or Not to Strike. Is regime change in Iran the only solution? - By Alireza Nader. Misreading Tehran - By Jason Rezaian. All Silk Roads Lead to Tehran - By Neil Padukone. Testing the Waters. Choke Point. Iran’s Changing Calculus: Will it Strike Inside the United States?
"Disarmament Wars" by Jonathan Schell. A View Inside Iran - Alan Taylor - In Focus. Iran Government Suspected in Cutting Off Internet to Quell Protests. Why Iranian Public Opinion Is Turning Against the Nuclear Program - Dina Esfandiary - International. Iran Watch: What's with all the wheat? How Iran's revenge bomb plot over nuclear programme took shape | World news. Pankaj Mishra reviews ‘Patriot of Persia’ by Christopher de Bellaigue · LRB 21 June 2012. Christmas is No Time for an Iranian Revolution. Supreme Loser - By Ali Vaez. Supremely Irrelevant - By Colin Kahl. Bad at chess. Love me, Love me Not | The Majalla. Myths about Iran. The Iran-Turkey Showdown. Iran Pledges Aid to Lebanon In Recent Diplomatic Visit.
Covering Iran's Ninjas. Iran's Spymaster Soleimani Counters U.S. Moves in the Mideast. The Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets) - By Karim Sadjadpour. Q/A with David Albright: Iran should come clean about past research.