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EXCERPTS:
BOOK REVIEW
A flawed study of ‘rogue' Iran
The Secret War with Iran by Ronen Bergman
Reviewed by Mahan Abedin
The geopolitical rise of Iran and the undoubted successes of its clerical leadership in countering American influence and interests in the Middle East have sparked an intense interest in the institutions and personalities that underpin Iranian success on the international stage.
Specifically, there has been a concerted interest in the study of the Iranian intelligence services, both from academic and journalistic points of view. The Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman's The Secret War with Iran: The 30-year Covert Struggle for Control of a 'Rogue' State falls neatly into the latter category. This politically-charged and ideological title, with its emphasis on
"rogue" state, is a fitting description of the contents of the book. It is often said that a book should not be judged by its cover, but in Bergman's case, the cover sets the stage for the many assumptions and presuppositions that inform his narrative.
Bergman sets out to "situate" a collection of anecdotal evidence and sources (that are not referenced properly) into a meta-narrative that fits neatly into a right-wing Israeli and American view of post-revolutionary Iran. Bergman's work is less a serious study into the covert intelligence wars between Iran and the West than an ideologically-driven exercise to frame Iran and its leadership as a "terrorist" state bent on undermining the international system.
At the center of it all is Israeli security and Bergman's unstated belief that this security (or a right-wing conception of it) should inform the considerations and priorities of the leaders of the Western world. Bergman may be a talented investigative journalist and a credible student of intelligence studies, but he falls into the trap that bedevils Israeli researchers and commentators of all political stripes; namely the simplistic narrative that divides the world between "us" and "them" from the vantage point of Israeli legitimacy and impunity.
First and foremost, Bergman clearly knows very little about Iran, its history, cultures and people. He seems to be inspired by the writings of the sensational (and widely discredited) Iranian journalist Amir Taheri. Indeed, the first two chapters of the book (the Twilight of the Iranian Monarchy and Death to the Infidels) are suffused with the journalistic hyperbole that is the mainstay of Taheri's books on Iran and the Middle East.
More embarrassingly for Bergman he makes costly mistakes. For instance, he identifies the forerunners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as the "Revolutionary Organization of the Masses of the Islamic Republic"; no such awkward-sounding organization existed and the IRGC itself was formally established in May 1979, a fact that seems to have escaped Bergman's research.
An even costlier mistake is Bergman's description of the SAVAK acronym as the "Royal Organization for Security and Intelligence"; in fact it was the "National Intelligence and Security Organization". These mistakes may be dismissed as minor and insignificant, but given Bergman's role as a serious student of intelligence and security services (he claims to have completed a PhD on Mossad under the tutelage of Cambridge University's Christopher Andrew, the leading scholar on intelligence history) these mistakes cast a shadow of doubt on his knowledge and the thoroughness of his research.EXCERPTS:
BOOK REVIEW
A flawed study of ‘rogue' Iran
The Secret War... more
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Excerpts:
"Obama Calls on World to ‘Stand Up to’ North Korea" read the headline. The United States, Obama said, was determined to protect "the peace and security of the world."
North Korea is a small place. China alone could snuff it out in a few minutes. Yet the president of the U.S. thinks that nothing less than the entire world is a match for North Korea.
We are witnessing the Washington gangsters construct yet another threat like Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, John Walker Lindh, Yaser Hamdi, José Padilla, Sami al-Arian, Hamas, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the hapless detainees demonized by former secretary of defense Rumsfeld as "the 700 most dangerous terrorists on the face of the earth," who were tortured for six years at Gitmo only to be quietly released. Just another mistake, sorry.
The military/security complex that rules America, together with the Israel Lobby and the banksters, needs a long list of dangerous enemies to keep the taxpayers’ money flowing into its coffers.
The Homeland Security lobby is dependent on endless threats to convince Americans that they must forgo civil liberty in order to be safe and secure.
The real question: who is going to stand up to the American and Israeli governments?
Who is going to protect Americans’ and Israelis’ civil liberties, especially those of Israeli dissenters and Israel’s Arab citizens?
Who is going to protect Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, Lebanese, Iranians, and Syrians from Americans and Israelis?
Not Obama, and not the right-wing brownshirts who today rule Israel.
Obama’s notion that it takes the entire world to stand up to North Korea is mind-boggling, but this mind-boggling idea pales in comparison to Obama’s guarantee that America will protect "the peace and security of the world."
Is this the same America that bombed Serbia, including Chinese diplomatic offices and civilian passenger trains, and pried Kosovo loose from Serbia and gave it to a gang of Muslim drug lords, lending them NATO troops to protect their operation?
Is this the same America that is responsible for approximately 1 million dead Iraqis, leaving orphans and widows everywhere and making refugees out of one-fifth of the Iraqi population?
Is this the same America that blocked the rest of the world from condemning Israel for its murderous attack on Lebanese civilians in 2006 and on Gazans most recently, the same America that has covered up for Israel’s theft of Palestine over the past 60 years, a theft that has produced 4 million Palestinian refugees driven by Israeli violence and terror from their homes and villages?
Is this the same America that is conducting military exercises in former constituent parts of Russia and ringing Russia with missile bases?
Is this the same America that has bombed Afghanistan into rubble with massive civilian casualties?
Is this the same America that has started a horrific new war in Pakistan, a war that in its first few days has produced 1 million refugees?
"The peace and security of the world"? Whose world?
On his return from his consultation with Obama in Washington, the brownshirted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that it was Israel’s responsibility to "eliminate" the "nuclear threat" from Iran.
What nuclear threat? The U.S. intelligence agencies are unanimous in their conclusion that Iran has had no nuclear weapons program since 2003. The inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency report that there is no sign of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
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Nations define their relationships based on a number of interactions, but when it comes to going to war there should be only one standard: whether a nation’s very existence or a vital national interest at stake. Nothing else justifies the unintended consequences that inevitably result from warfare, and nothing less merits sending one’s sons and daughters to their possible deaths. In this age of nation-building and regime-change, that fundamental principle has been blurred, but it remains as true now as it did when Machiavelli first examined war’s place in the art of statecraft. War opens the gates of hell, releasing a Pandora’s box of evils. It should be the last option, only resorted to when all else fails.
The past eight years have seen several wars that have been unnecessary if judged by the national interest standard. Iraq posed no threat to the United States or to any of its neighbors. Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest and most backward countries, was a threat to its neighbors and to the world only because it gave shelter to an international terrorist group. That al-Qaeda should have been attacked and removed from Afghan soil would be considered a proportionate and appropriate use of force by most observers, but nobody could have foreseen a completely bungled military operation that actually let the perpetrators of 9/11 go free and move to neighboring Pakistan. There followed a seven-year occupation of Afghanistan in support of an unpopular and corrupt puppet government that has culminated in an imploding security environment that has also spilled over into Pakistan.
The United States has apparently not learned from its mistakes as new President Barack Obama seems dedicated to continuing the occupation of Iraq while waging an expanding war in Af-Pak, as it is now being called. As if that were not enough, Obama is also being drawn somewhat reluctantly into a hot war with Iran, something that neoconservatives and Blue Dog Democrats alike seem to favor. Iran would seem to be an unlikely enemy, with virtually no industrial base and an economy less than 5 percent the size of the U.S. economy. Its military spending amounts to only about 1 percent of the U.S. defense budget. Nevertheless, Obama has repeated the Bush administration mantra that "all options are on the table" regarding Iran. He has stressed his willingness to talk with Tehran, but he has unwisely allowed himself to be locked into a timetable by visiting Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. If the negotiations route does not show solid results by the end of the year, Washington will be committed to moving toward a punishing sanctions regime. Netanyahu wants the U.S. to do his fighting for him against Iran, and he wants to shift the narrative away from his avoidance of negotiations with the Palestinians, so a focus on a short timetable centered on Iran suits him very well.
Obama is clearly uneasy with the prospect of war with Iran. Admittedly, sanctions are not war, but they create an environment where armed conflict is just one small step away. If a resolution moving through Congress is any indication, sanctions could include blocking the import of refined petroleum products. As Iran, a major petroleum exporter, has only limited refining capacity, the country’s economy would grind to a halt, resulting in catastrophic hardship for most of the Iranian people. Many would consider the sanctioning of Iranian energy imports to be an act of war. It would also reopen old wounds and pit the United States against most Europeans, who are rightly wary of yet another war in the Middle East.EXCERPTS:
Nations define their relationships based on a number of interactions, but... more
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I don't want to get overconfident, but there were glimmerings of sanity on the subject of Iran from not one, but two leading Israeli politicians this week.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak: "We are not the Jews of Europe. The State of Israel is the strong one here. I don't see anyone annihilating it."
Opposition leader Tzipi Livni: "(T)he connection to the Holocaust... is wrong, both with regards to the Holocaust itself, and also with regards to the correct ethos of our nation, from the perspective of its strength."
What should we make of this? It might be that Barak and Livni were just getting in a dig at their rival, Prime Minister Binyamin ("It's 1938 and Iran is Germany") Netanyahu, but maybe they meant what they were saying. Maybe they really think the balance of power between Iran and Israel is more than a little different from what it was between Nazi Germany and European Jewry. They may even think Iran's leaders actually aren't looking forward to dooming their ancient civilization to nuclear extinction at the hands of Zionists.
Taking Barak and Livni at their word, those are some pretty daring statements to be making in 21st-century Israel. To suggest that we are living through anything but a reprise of the European '30s is considered either fatally naïve or subversive. It's considered our patriotic duty to be scared to death of Iran, and it's our leaders' responsibility to keep themselves and us at the end of our wits. And we're all doing a great job. We've come up with all sorts of doomsday scenarios that don't even require the Iranians to use nuclear weapons against us; they can destroy Israel just by having them, we're convinced.
"THE FIRST-STAGE Iranian goal, in the understanding of Netanyahu and his advisers, is to frighten Israel's most talented citizens into leaving the country," wrote The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg after an interview with the prime minister. Michael Oren, just before being named ambassador to the US, wrote in Commentary that if Iran goes nuclear, "Israel will swiftly find itself in a profoundly unstable nuclear neighborhood prone to violent revolutions and miscalculations leading to war. As former Labor Party minister Efraim Sneh says, under such circumstances, all Israelis who can leave the country will."
What? Where do they get this idea? There are tens of thousands of enemy missiles pointed at Israel at this moment; the Iranians, the Syrians and who knows which other Muslim countries have chemical weapons and maybe biological weapons as well - and is any Israeli running away?
Did any Americans flee the US during the Red Scare? Did any Reds flee Russia? Has India become depopulated in the decade since Pakistan got The Bomb? Are the Pakistanis emigrating en masse in fear of nuclear-armed India?
What is this craziness? Israelis are going to leave the country if Iran builds nuclear weapons? Actually, they might, if people keep telling them that Hitler's back and this time he's got nukes and he's going to turn the country into one big Auschwitz. With that sort of message dripping into our brains day after day, maybe this place really would empty out if Iran got nukes.
MORE LIKELY, of course, this brainwashing by popular demand will cause us to attack Iran - unless Barack Obama stops us, which I think he will. But then who knows? If you take Netanyahu at his word - a dicey proposition, I know - he's going to do whatever's necessary to keep The Bomb out of Iran's hands, no matter what price he or Israel has to pay. What is Obama, what is America, what is anything when you're convinced your country is on the brink of destruction?
And again, destruction wouldn't have to come from falling Iranian nukes - according to leading-edge opinion around here, Iran's mere possession of nuclear weapons would cause not only mass emigration but a flight of foreign capital, too. The economy would dry up!EXCERPTS:
I don't want to get overconfident, but there were glimmerings of... more
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There is no viable military option for dealing the Iranian nuclear threat, and efforts by the Israeli government and its supporters to link that threat to progress in peace with the Palestinians and Syria are "nonsense" and an obstacle to the Arab-Israeli and international cooperation essential to changing Iranian behavior.
That's the conclusion of Keith Weissman, the Iran expert formerly at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), speaking publicly for the first time since the government dropped espionage charges against him and his colleague, Steve Rosen, earlier this month.
There's no assurance an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities - even if all of them could be located - would be anything more than a temporary setback, Weissman told me. Instead, a military strike would unify Iranians behind an unpopular regime, ignite a wave of retaliation that would leave thousands dead from Teheran to Tel Aviv, block oil exports from the Persian Gulf and probably necessitate a ground war, he said.
"The only viable solution is dialogue. You don't deal with Iran with threats or preaching regime change," said Weissman, who has lived in Iran, knows Farsi (as well as Arabic, Turkish and French) and wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago on Iranian history. That's where the Bush administration went wrong, in his view.
"President Bush's demand that Iran halt all nuclear enrichment before we would talk with the regime was an excuse not to talk at all," Weissman said. "And the administration's preaching of regime change only made the Iranians more paranoid and told them there was no real desire to engage them, only demonize them. The thing they fear most is American meddling in their internal politics."
HE SAID PRESIDENT Barack Obama is right to make it clear that regime change is not our goal. "Without that assurance we can't begin any dialogue or hope to be able to do anything about their nuclear program. Without a doubt, talking with Iran will be very difficult and frustrating, but there are no other viable options."
AIPAC has been the driving force on Capitol Hill for a get-tough policy, pushing through Congress a series of sanction bills, and Weissman was the lobby's expert on the topic.
"All along the idea was that sanctions were a bargaining chip to be traded for something tangible," he said. "We never opposed America and Iran talking to each other about these issues. However, the US strategy should have been directed at the supreme leader; he's the guy at the top and the one who makes the important decisions, not politicians like presidents Khatami or Ahmadinejad."
Weissman said Israel's worries about Iran getting a nuclear weapon are understandable, but despite some of the rhetoric coming out of Teheran, the Iranian leaders "are not fanatics and they're not suicidal. They know that Israel could make Iran glow for many years." He was referring to reports that Israel may have 200 or more nuclear weapons as well as the missiles and aircraft for devastating retaliation.
He believes Iran has the know-how to build a nuclear device, but he doubts it's made the final decision to go ahead with it. Iran may be "a few years or more" away from having an actual weapon and the means for accurate delivery.
"However, they would be crazy to test a weapon," he said. "That would essentially unite the world against them. Right now we can't get Russia and China to seriously help us deal with Iran, but if the Iranians tested a weapon, that would change in a flash. I don't think the Iranians are that stupid."
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There is no viable military option for dealing the Iranian nuclear threat,... more
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The adventures of Dangerous Biting Blue. See the Blue Himmy preening himself before the camera. http://all4thefurry1.comThe adventures of Dangerous Biting Blue. See the Blue Himmy preening himself before... more
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US and Iran begin the diplomatic tango to peace
Tehran and Washington have a common interest in a Iraqi and Afghan stability, writes TONY KINSELLA .
THE DIPLOMATIC dance has begun, but since it has been over 30 years since the partners managed a public tango, they need to avoid treading on each others’ toes. A week ago, US President Barack Obama told a Washington press conference that his administration was “looking at areas where we can have constructive dialogue” with Iran. A day later Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad responded, telling crowds celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Iranian revolution: “Our nation is ready to hold talks based on mutual respect and in a fair atmosphere.”
Since President Obama travelled by train to his inauguration, he could do worse than bone up on the Trans-Iranian railway story before honing his Tehran pitch for its story remains central to the Iranian psyche. When the first Pahlavi Shah, Reza Khan, came to power in a British-facilitated military coup in 1921, he set out to modernise Iran. The Trans-Iranian railway was his premier project. London had long sought to prevent its construction, viewing it as a potential threat to the sacrosanct passage to India.
Construction of the 1,400 kilometre line lasted 12 years from 1927. It is a spectacular feat of engineering and it climbs 1,200 metres from the Persian Gulf to reach Tehran, before descending to the Caspian Sea.US and Iran begin the diplomatic tango to peace
Tehran and Washington have a... more
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'Prince of Persia' follows Iranian born, but London raised hip-hop artist REVEAL as he goes through a musical and personal metamorphosis to find out who he is; a rebel with a cause.
Having been a mainstay of the UK hip-hop MC 'battle' scene (think '8 Mile') and an undefeated champion, REVEAL is transforming. He has always held within himself two conflicting identities, British and Iranian, now he his fusing his UK hip hop style with Persian rhythms, and has teamed up with the top Iranian hip hop artists to create a new sound that has helped to kick-start the burgeoning but underground Iranian hip hop movement known as '0-21' which refers to the Tehran phone code.'Prince of Persia' follows Iranian born, but London raised hip-hop artist... more
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Iranians have always been known for their appreciation of beauty and their artistic taste in creating masterpieces from elements. A brilliant example of such artistry is Persian calligraphy. Iranians have always been known for their appreciation of beauty and their artistic... more
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Will the U.S. finally be coming into the 21st Century regarding ending the barbaric practice of the lethal injection? Hopefully it will be a step towards abolishing the death penalty in total in this country. But then, since we torture not only in prisons abroad and condone rendition, it is no surprise that we like torture and death in our own prisons. There is a constitutional and moral way to deal with crime. Europe knows that already, so hopefully we will see the light. This isn't about revenge, but justice.Will the U.S. finally be coming into the 21st Century regarding ending the barbaric... more
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