Tag: iran

Iranian wargames

A new Iranian game simulates an attack on a US warship:

TEHRAN (Reuters) – A new Iranian computer game sets players the task of blowing up a U.S. tanker in the Gulf to block the sea route for much of the world’s oil supplies, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

The game, “Counter Strike”, invites players to plant two bombs on the oil tanker to sink it and make the strait of Hormuz impassable, the Jomhouri-ye Eslami daily reported. About two-fifths of globally traded oil passes through the channel.

The game illustrates a warning by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said in June that oil exports in the Gulf region could be seriously endangered if the United States made a wrong move on Iran.

Considering that there are zillions of computer games that simulate US attacks on Iran and other countries, it’s hardly worth making a big deal out of it.

New Pentagon outfit wants more agitprop in Iran

Not being satisfied with the fact that Voice of America/Radio Farda broadcasts to Iran are already the most popular in the country, the Bush administration would like to see lies and disinformation inserted just as they do in Iraq:

WASHINGTON – In another indication that some in the Bush administration are pushing for a more confrontational policy toward Iran, a Pentagon unit has drafted a report charging that U.S. international broadcasts into Iran aren’t tough enough on the Islamic regime.

The report appears to be a gambit by some officials in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere to gain sway over television and radio broadcasts into Iran, one of the few direct tools the United States has to reach the Iranian people.

McClatchy Newspapers obtained a copy of the report this week, and it also has circulated on Capitol Hill. It accuses the Voice of America’s Persian TV service and Radio Farda, a U.S. government Farsi-language broadcast, of taking a soft line toward Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime and not giving adequate time to government critics.

U.S. broadcasting officials and others who’ve read the report said it’s riddled with errors.

They also see it as a thinly veiled attack on the independence of U.S. international broadcasting, which by law is supposed to represent a balanced view of the United States and provide objective news.

“The author of this report is as qualified to write a report on programming to Iran as I would be to write a report covering the operations of the 101st Airborne Division,” Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Larry Hart, a spokesman for the board, which oversees U.S. non-military international broadcasting, said that the radio and TV operations have covered Iran’s human rights abuses extensively and have featured appearances by dissidents – who sometimes telephoned from Iranian jails.

Surveys have shown that Radio Farda is the most-listened-to international radio broadcast into Iran, Hart said.

Three U.S. government officials identified the author of the report as Ladan Archin, a civilian Iran specialist who works for Rumsfeld.

Archin was out of town this week and unavailable for comment. She works in a recently established Pentagon unit known as the Iran directorate.

Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a Pentagon spokesman, said last week that the unit was established this spring as part of a government-wide reorganization aimed at better promoting democracy in Iran. He confirmed Tuesday night that Archin had been asked to prepare the report. “It was meant to be a look at how the program was working and to determine if it was an effective use of taxpayer dollars,” Ballesteros said.

Critics charge that the unit resembles the pre-Iraq-war Office of Special Plans, which received intelligence reports directly from Iraqi exile groups, bypassing U.S. intelligence agencies, which distrusted the exiles. Many of the reports proved to be fabricated or exaggerated. Some of the directorate’s staff members worked in the now-defunct Office of Special Plans, and some intelligence officials fear that directorate also is maintaining unofficial ties to questionable exiles and groups.

That is so 2002! Ladan Archin, by the way, was a Wolfowitz protégé from SAIS (surely by now one of the most discredited academic institution that does international relations, considering its alumni) involved in the Iraq war run-up and a connection with Ahmed Chalabi.

Bombed again

According to a reader familiar with New Yorker magazine, Seymour Hersh and his nameless friends are at it again this month.

If what Hersh reports being told by “a Middle East expert with knowledge� is correct, we have further evidence (like we needed it) of the crowded confusion that occupies Bush Jr.’s oval cuckoo’s nest. According to this expert, the invasion of Lebanon was a plan cooked up collaboratively with the White House, and one of the goals was to make the Lebanese government stronger.

The best laugh, however, comes from a “U.S. consultant with close ties to Israel� who says “The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits … It would be a demo for [an American strike on] Iran.�

Back in April Hersh wheeled the same anonymous cast on stage to assert that Cheney et al are forging ahead with plans bomb Iran back to the stone age, with nukes if at all possible. Hard to know what any of it’s worth when you don’t know who’s saying it, but a pleasant bit of echo-chamber reading for the pessimistic.

Ahmadinejad blogging!!!

Unbelievable!

Iranian president talks about his childhood and the Iranian revolution in his new blog
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
08-13-2006 19:35

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) _ Iran’s hardline president has started blogging, recounting childhood memories, the country’s Islamic Revolution and Tehran’s war with Iraq in his first entry.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Web log also requests that readers participate in an online poll asking if they think the United States and Israel are “pulling the trigger for another world war.”
State-run television announced the blog’s launch Sunday, urging the public to send written messages to the president through the blog’s Web site www.ahmadinejad.ir.
The blog is an unusual move by the conservative president, whose government has censored Internet sites it deems inappropriate and cracked down on bloggers who have posted anti-government messages since he was elected a year ago. Many of the clerics who support Ahmadinejad also have shunned the use of advance technology, though other hard-liners have sent cell phone campaign messages to the public in the past.
But Keivan Mehrgan, a Tehran-based blogger, said Ahmadinejad’s blog _ which is translated into English, French and Arabic _ is nothing more than a publicity stunt.
“It’s nothing but for publicity. Why Ahmadinejad used to have nothing to do with Internet and even talked against journalists and bloggers before he became president,” Mehrgan said.
In his blog, the president writes that he grew up in a poor family in a village 90 kilometers (56 miles) east of Tehran. But his father, a “hard-bitten” and “pious” blacksmith, moved the family to Tehran when Ahmadinejad was 1 years old to try to make a better life for his family, he wrote.
Ahmadinejad said the Islamic Revolution patriarch Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini began to appeal to him when the ayatollah was in exile in the 1960s and 70s.
“The more I became familiar with his thought and philosophy, the more affection I had for that divine leader and his separation and absence was intolerable for me,” he wrote, as translated into English.
Because his father’s “sledgehammer and anvil” could not cover the family’s expenses, Ahmadinejad said he started working as a high school student in a shop that made cooling system parts. He continued with his studies even when “certain activities against the illegitimate regime of the monarch in Iran,” kept him busy, he wrote.
Ahmadinejad also used his blog entry to bash the United States and give his musings about the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the 1980-88 war with Iraq, when he served in the elite Revolutionary Guards.
“The global arrogance had determine to defeat the Islamic Revolution of the Iran at all costs,” he wrote. “The reason was that they were afraid that this revolution will become a model and ideal path for other nations in the region and in the world.”
He called former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein the “aggressor” in the war and wrote that international organizations tried to “distort and hide the facts that Saddam was the aggressor and that the arrogant powers had fully supported him.”
At the end of the blog, which is dated Friday and is more than 2,000 words in English, Ahmadinejad promised to keep it shorter in his next entry.
“From now onwards, I will try to make it shorter and simpler,” he wrote.

Bernard Lewis: Armegeddon in two weeks

Darling of neo-cons Bernard Lewis, writing in the Wall Street Journal, pinpoints the precise date of the Iranian destruction of Israel and the end of times:

In Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time — Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon, and for Shiite Muslims, the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil, however these may be defined. Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22. This was at first reported as “by the end of August,” but Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statement was more precise.

What is the significance of Aug. 22? This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to “the farthest mosque,” usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

It really seems that while dealing with a complex and multi-dimensioned foreign policy issues, all the neo-cons want to do is what they did with Iraq: clutch at straws, invent bogeymen and fabricate lies. That Bernard Lewis, a man still appreciated even by his political enemies as a scholar of some note, has sunk to scare-mongering in lieu of policy advocacy is sad and scary.

A message from Shirin Ebadi

This is going around, from the well-known Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi:

There is a very important matter I would like to discuss with you. I conduct my human rights activities through the Defender of Human Rights Center (DHRC). I am the president of this center and we have three important responsibilities:

a. We report the violations of human rights that take place in Iran.

b. We defend political prisoners pro bono — about 70% of the political prisoners in Iran are clients of our center and we do not charge them for our services.

c. We support the families of these prisoners both financially — if they require financial aid — and spiritually.

This center is a member of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and has been registered there. It has also been awarded a human rights prize by the Human Rights National Commission in France. This center is very well known and credible in Iran. Two days ago the government of Iran announced that this center is illegal and provided we continue our activities, they shall arrest us. Of course me and the other members of the center do not intend to shut down the center and we shall continue our activities. However, there is a high possibility that that they will arrest us. The government’s action in this regard is illegal.

Therefore, I kindly request that you broadcast this message by all mean and gather spiritual support for our center. This center has been established and working for more than four years now. I believe this decision of the government has been triggered by my memoir being published. In any case, I am happy that my memoir has been published, for the truth must be told.

Many thanks,

Shirin Ebadi

Al Hayat interview with Bashar Assad

In which he discusses (with editor Ghassan Charbel and Damascus bureau chief Ibrahim Hamidi)Syria’s relationship with Jordan, Egypt’s negotiation of behalf of mini-Hariri, Arab fears of Iran’s growing regional role, growing sectarianism in Lebanon, his willingness to deal with anyone in Lebanon (Aoun, mini-Hariri, Seniora, etc.) except Walid Jumblatt and maybe Jacques Chirac. Although the interview doesn’t make earth-shattering revelations, Bashar handles it pretty well overall.

This is part one, and in part two (not yet online) he apparently says there’s a growing Al Qaeda presence in Lebanon.

MERIP on Iran, twice

MERIP has published two interesting articles on Iran in the last week. The first looked at the strategic Iran-Israel rivalry, arguing that posturing in both countries had to do with their self-image as the region’s only real powers and their need to be counted as a player by the region’s superpower, the US. The article contains some interesting info on the Iranian position on Palestine, for instance, where despite much posturing there has been relatively little real help (an anecdote of a 1979 meeting between Khomeini and Arafat is quite enlightening in this regard.) Continue reading MERIP on Iran, twice